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Impact of Funding Targeted Pre-school Interventions on School Readiness: Evidence from the Netherlands

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Abstract

We analyze the effectiveness of the early childhood programme (ECP) in the Netherlands. The programme is designed for 2.5–4 year olds from disadvantaged backgrounds. 37 municipalities received an additional subsidy to expand ECP programmes, which allows us to analyze the effects of the programme within a difference-in-difference-in-differences framework. Most children first enroll in primary schools at age 4 in the Netherlands, but pupils begin to learn reading and mathematics in grade 3 at age 6. We use grade repetition constructed from school registry data from 2008 to 2015 in the first two grades as an indicator of school readiness. Our results show significantly lower grade repetition rates for targeted boys who are in regions that receive the subsidy. Grade repetition drops by 0.8–1.8 percentage points from a mean of 10.5% for the disadvantaged group targeted by the programme.

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Notes

  1. The exact formula is 1.2 times the number of highly disadvantaged pupils plus 0.3 times the number of moderately disadvantaged pupils minus the total number of pupils times 0.06.

  2. Although schools and municipalities both collect information on parents’ education level for the ECP programme and the school weight scores, it is very likely that not all children who qualify are identified.

  3. We exclude the 4 largest cities from the figure to make the amounts more visible.

  4. Grade retention is generally high in the Netherlands. The Inspectorate of Education raised concerns about the high rates in a 2012 report but the focus was largely on secondary schools. There does not appear to be any concrete policies taken to reduce grade repetition in grades 1 and 2 during the treatment period (Inspectorate of Education 2012).

  5. Their inclusion makes the estimated effects slightly smaller. The absolute value of the coefficients for the subsidy variables become smaller by around 0.00015 in the main model, which makes the coefficient insignificant at the 10% level. The effects remain statistically significant for boys and the restricted sample of municipalities.

  6. While the national policy is to target children with weight status and the budget determined based on the number of children with weight status, most municipalities officially target more children than just those with weight status (Beekhoven et al. 2012). The most common additional criterium used for targeting is language spoken at home. When we exclude pupils with two non-Dutch parents and no weight status from the sample, the coefficient estimate in the full sample model is around 0.005 larger.

  7. 2013 subsidy amounts differ very little from 2012 as seen in Fig. 2.

  8. If we drop 3 more of the remaining treated municipalities with highest municipal weight scores from model 4 in Table 4, the DDD coefficient for 2013 (− 0.0194) remains statistically significant at the 10% level. Dropping a further 4th municipality results in statistically insignificant effects but the point estimate remains negative at − 0.0179 for 2013. At that point, the number of treated children seems too small to find statistically significant effects.

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Correspondence to Suzanne Heijnen.

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We would like to thank Karen van der Wiel, Daniel van Vuuren, Bas ter Weel, Wolter Hassink, Marc van der Steeg, Sander Gerritsen, Dinand Webbink, Magne Mogstad, Egbert Jongen and Thomas van Huizen for their comments and suggestions on previous versions of this paper.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14.

Table 10 Summary statistics of the restricted sample sample
Table 11 DD estimates of the effect of 2012–2013 subsidies on all pupils
Table 12 Interaction effects in the DD model
Table 13 Placebo treatments in the DD model
Table 14 Extended DDD estimates of the effects of 2012–2013 subsidies

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Akgündüz, Y.E., Heijnen, S. Impact of Funding Targeted Pre-school Interventions on School Readiness: Evidence from the Netherlands. De Economist 166, 155–178 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10645-018-9314-2

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