Page 2335 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 1 November 1989
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with no preschool education, 21 attended.
Employment findings showed that, for every 100 with preschool education, when the study was done 48 were currently employed; for every 100 with no preschool education, it was 29. For every 100 with preschool education, 45 supported themselves completely by their own or their spouses' earnings, and for every 100 with no preschool education it was 24.
So, whilst the psychologists were looking at IQ with the headstart program, had they studied some of the other effects on our society, they would have found a very, very different situation. To come back to Dr Kinloch's speech, the problem was not with the headstart program; it was with how people looked at it and how the study was carried out.
I am arguing that we have very, very good studies, very long and detailed studies - and they are called longitudinal studies - over a long time that give us a great deal of evidence that there is a considerable contribution that preschools can make to our society. That is what we should be supporting and not constantly putting under some form of attack.
I go back to referring to Competence and Coping in Children by Dr Kathy Sylva who is from the University of Oxford. She talked about research on the high scope, which is what I have referred to, and she said:
The High/Scope message is simple but powerful: Pre-school education for disadvantaged children is a wise financial investment. Weikart and his colleagues have prepared a cost-benefit analysis.
Then she went to some of the things about which I have spoken, and she summarised it as follows:
On the basis of these painstaking studies we must relinquish once and for all blind optimism about the mystical effects of early experience; even the best programmes did little to raise IQs over the long run or indeed to make startling difference in reading or maths scores. What they did do is to demonstrate that early education can have lasting impact on raising functional competence. Although pre-school experience cannot turn all disadvantaged children into university scholars, it can prevent school failures, improve job chances, and decrease delinquency and need for support from social services.
I had intended to talk about the Oxford study but, because of time, I shall not do that. The Australian Bureau of Statistics projections for the year 2006 put Canberra's
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