The Early Years Service was a two year service for preschool children, with integrated health care, wrap-around supports and professional development elements. The programme sought to strengthen children’s positive dispositions to learning through enjoyable, challenging and enriching opportunities within the family, education and care facilities and community to enhance their well-being, identity and participation. Specifically, it sought to make pre-school children more ready for the transition to school by achieving moderate improvements in relation to the following: All domains of the child’s development, including physical well-being, social and emotional development, approaches to learning, language development and emergent literacy; Parent psychological health, as well as the quality of parents’ relationships with the child and their parenting skills; and The child’s environment – social relations in the home, school and community, improving outcomes for the child, through a focus on the child’s family and environment. The programme was evaluated between 2008 and 2011 by the CDI Evaluation team at the Centre for Social and Educational Research at the Dublin Institute of Technology and the Institute of Education at the University of London. The programme was evaluated using a two-pronged approach, and included (1) a quantitative assessment of the programme (this data is being archived with ISSDA) and (2) a qualitative assessment of the implementation ‘process’. The evaluation sought to answer the following questions: To what extent did participation in the programme result in better outcomes in terms of child development (cognitive, language and social)? Did parental participation in the programme result in better outcomes (parental stress, parent estimation of child social skills and behaviour, home-learning environment)? Did service participation in the implementation of the programme result in better outcomes in terms of environmental quality (curricular, process and structural)?
Probability: Cluster. Early Years services in Tallaght West applied to deliver the CDI Early Years Programme through the submission of an Expression of Interest form. Applicants were informed that delivery of the programme would be subject to a randomisation process, an experimental method whereby clusters or groups (in this case, Early Years services) are randomly allocated to intervention or control groups after being matched in pairs to balance important prognostic factors (Early Years practitioner qualifications; setting capacity; staff:child ratio) at baseline. The level of inference was not simply the unit of randomisation (i.e. the Early Years service), rather analysis focused both on service-level outcomes and child-level outcomes, with the child outcomes being used to make inferences about the service. Services that were assigned to the control condition delivered their Early Years programmes as usual, but practitioners in these services were offered the opportunity to receive the same, or equal, level of training as those in intervention services once programme evaluation was complete and some received funding towards the provision of extra child spaces. Allocation to intervention and control groups was completed by CDI rather than by the research team. Matching criteria, such as service capacity and staff qualifications, were drawn up by CDI and services were matched accordingly into pairs. An independent candidate was identified by CDI and, at an appointed time and date, the candidate was responsible for the allocation of one service from each pair to the intervention condition, meaning that the matched service automatically belonged to the control condition from then on. This randomisation process took place in the CDI offices."
Face-to-face interview: PAPI
Self-administered questionnaire: Paper, Field observation
