The Earlier, the Better? School Entry and Child Maltreatment

Adam A. Dzulkipli, Nicole Black, David W. Johnston and Leonie Segal

No 2026-11, Working Papers from Centre for Health Economics, Monash University

Abstract: Debate over the optimal school starting age has focused largely on children’s educa- tional and developmental outcomes, with little attention given to whether starting school earlier may protect vulnerable children from maltreatment. This paper examines that pos- sibility by exploiting a date-of-birth cut-off for school entry in Australia. We find that earlier school entry reduces the probability of a maltreatment notification from a non- education reporter by 4.3 percentage points or 50% relative to the mean. The reduction is driven largely by fewer police notifications and notifications involving emotional abuse. In contrast, notifications from education-sector reporters are unaffected overall, reflect- ing offsetting changes in notifications from preschool and school-based educators. The protective effects are concentrated among children without younger siblings and extend to older siblings, with the pattern of results suggesting that relaxed childcare constraints and increased maternal employment may be important mechanisms.

Keywords: school entry; child maltreatment; child protection; regression discontinuity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 I28 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-09-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://papertool-v2-storage.s3.amazonaws.com/RePE ... 788311805474_394.pdf Full-text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mhe:chemon:paper_1788311805474_394

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://www.monash.edu/business/che

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Centre for Health Economics, Monash University Centre for Health Economics, Monash University, 900 Dandenong Road, Caulfield East VIC 3145.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Johannes Kunz ().