Publications in early childhood development
Peer-reviewed publications are available from the publications sites provided.
2024
Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Education and Care. IntechOpen; 2024.
The comprehensive mapping of the South African early childhood development (ECD) system necessitates extensive statistical analysis to identify and quantify key factors within the country’s unique context. This study employs statistical techniques to analyze data from the 2022 General Household Survey, focusing on children aged newborn to 6 years. Factor analysis, multilevel regression, and structural equation modeling were used to identify five person-level factors (i.e., child health, ECD quality, family structure, welfare income, ECD attendance) and four household-level factors (i.e., food insecurity, home assets, home utilities, housing quality). The final structural equation model demonstrates an excellent fit and explains substantial variance in key outcomes. The findings reveal strong associations between child health and ECD attendance with attendance positively influencing ECD quality. Family structure showed a significant positive association with home assets while welfare income emerged as a significant predictor of multiple outcomes. This nuanced understanding of the South African ECD system highlights the interconnected nature of individual and contextual factors, underscoring the need for holistic approaches to ECD that address both educational and socioeconomic aspects.
This paper presents a system dynamics simulation model to describe the causal linkages between improved early childhood and preschool learning practices on the education system as a whole. The paper investigates the difference in performance between rich and poor communities. Three interventions explore the research question of whether it is the number of enrolments into early childhood development programs that increases a cohort’s school readiness, or rather the quality of the early childhood development programs into which they were enrolled. The results answer the research question for the Western Cape province by showing that increasing the quality of the formal ECD programs leads to a greater percentage of school-ready five year olds than increasing the percentage of enrolled children, but that decreasing community poverty leads to better results than either intervention. The results show the simulation model to be a powerful tool to assist with policy setting and intervention testing for any other province or country by simply changing the input data and calibration.
Working papers in early childhood development
The working papers, research projects, theses and dissertations listed are being prepared for publication.
2022
The life of an average South African can be divided into multiple phases and at the end of each phase a child is expected to have reached specific milestones. The Early Childhood Development Model (ECDM) simulates the early childhood phase of children aged two-to-six-years-old by means of the systems dynamics simulation paradigm. By the end of this phase a child expected to have obtained a level of cognitive development and readiness for enrolment into primary school. However, this is not the reality for all South African children. South Africa has one of the largest socio-economic gaps in the world as well as one of the worst education systems in the world. In addition COVID-19 pandemic has altered the reality of millions but affected these young children differently. Some children were born during the pandemic while others experienced life-altering changes at critical development ages of between rwo and six.
In this report the environments of two-to-six-year-old children from different socio-economic backgrounds and how well those environments prepare them for school is analysed. The existing ECDM that will simulate the average South African child’s progress throughout the ages of two-to-six-years-old is expanded to include the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and specifically pandemic control measures from 2020 to 2021 on the output of the South African ECD system. The Early Childhood Development Model for COVID-19 Impact Analysis simulates the environments of children from different socio-economic backgrounds by capturing their experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent results of the pandemic controls implemented by the government that will manifest later in life.
Measures for family poverty, ECD quality, family support, child hunger, child health, later academic success, ECD attendance, and school readiness are analysed to determine their strength pre- and post-pandemic controls, and their impact on the cognitive development of the children in the system. The systems of the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal are selected to enable a comparative study. The Western Cape shows an ECD system that is more robust to endure the additional pressures of pandemic controls while the already weak KwaZulu-Natal system further
deteriorates. Simulation results show that both poorer and richer communities in the Western Cape benefit more from financial interventions. Poorer communities in KwaZulu-Natal benefit more from health interventions while the richer communities benefit more from interventions to increase ECD attendance. Both communities in both provinces benefit most from a combination of all types of intervention.
2019
South Africa's basic education system is in a critical condition. The World Economic Forum's competitiveness index ranked it 114th out of 137 countries for 2018. The Department of Basic Education released an action plan in 2019 with 27 goals for the realization of an improved education system by 2030. Goal 11 is to increase the enrolments of children under the age of six to quality Early Childhood Development (ECD) programmes. The early years of a child's life is important, as this is the period when the brain develops the quickest and has a high capacity for change. A discrepancy exists between the ECD quality that children receive in different socio-economic groups. Quintile 1 to 4 being the poorer socio-economic group and Quintile 5 the richest. The focus of this research is to determine the relationship between improved ECD on learner readiness for later school years, in both Quintile 1 to 4 and Quintile 5 compared. The research question is whether an increase in enrolments into ECD programmes or an improvement of social circumstances will increase a child's level of school readiness for primary school enrolment. For the purposes of the study the social circumstances that are considered are a child's health status as well as their family structure.
Agent-based simulation modelling is used to model the impact of factors on a childs school readiness and three scenarios are applied to answer the research question. It was concluded, that subject to the model assumptions, an improvement of social circumstances and an increase of enrolments into ECD programmes, increased a child's level of school readiness to a greater extent than only an increase in enrolments into ECD programmes. An intervention at maximum formal ECD programme enrolment causes a greater improvement than when there is an intervention for ideal health status and family structure. However, the greatest impact is when all these interventions are applied continuously and in combinatation. When all these interventions are applied, the gap in academic achievement between the two socio-economic groups is closed.
