Abstract
This is the fourth colloquium for Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s International Early Learning and Child Well-being Study, and marks the recent publication by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development of reports on the first round of this study. In it, the authors discuss what the results tell us, what they do not and what might come next. They conclude by supporting the need for comparative studies of early childhood education, but argue that the International Early Learning and Child Well-being Study is not the way to go.
Highlights
After four years of development work, testing 7000 children and spending millions of dollars, pounds and euros, the results of the first round of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD’s) International Early Learning and Child Well-being Study (IELS) were published in March 2020 with three national reports – one for each participating country (England, Estonia and the USA) – a full report and a summary report (OECD, n.d. b)
The IELS is a cross-national assessment of five-year-olds on four ‘early learning domains’, based on ‘developmentally-appropriate, interactive stories and games delivered on a tablet device’ (OECD, 2020a: 96) and supplemented by information from staff and parents using questionnaires
This is the fourth report on the IELS that we have contributed to Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, with the aim of providing readers with information and a critical perspective on this highly consequential initiative by the OECD
Summary
The answer, in a nutshell, is very little that we did not know already – there is nothing new here. ‘What parents do is pivotal for their children’ (OECD, 2020a: 12), and ‘children from advantaged families, on average, have more learning opportunities’ – for example, children from ‘advantaged families’ are four times as likely to live in families with more than 100 children’s books (OECD, 2020c: 7). The OECD deals with criticism and questioning by ignoring it
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