Peters – younger children

For the zero to four year old children, we did not find any lasting effects. The zero to four year-old children, there is no such equivalent of the public school system for children zero to four. If we had a high quality universally accessible well-funded early childhood education program, then the additional beginnings provided may have much more of an impact. That is if you have a system where all children or virtually all children participate in that system anyway, then programs like Better Beginnings can sort of add value to that. So the universal platform of the primary school was what the older child programs built around and took advantage of.  

The zero to four, it’s much more difficult to recruit parents to get them to come out to programs, to do home visiting, because you don’t know who all the children are, you don’t know who all the parents are, and often times it’s just difficult to access them. So it wasn’t really a fair test of is younger better, it was really a comparison between two kinds of systems and until and unless we have in Canada a publicly funded universal early childhood system, programs like Better Beginnings will probably be better served by working in and around the school; taking advantage of the school platform.