From The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone (Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett):
Early childhood education programmes can foster physical and cognitive development. They can alter the long-term trajectories of children's lives, and cost-benefit analyses show that they are high-yield investments. In experiments, disadvantaged children who have received high-quality early childhood education are less likely to need remedial education, less likely to become involved in crime, and they earn more as adults. All of this adds up to a substantial return on government investment in such programmes.And meanwhile, our government is cutting funding and reducing the quality of ECE. They see it as babysitting, not education, and as a cost, rather than an investment. We will be paying for their short-sightedness for decades to come.
