Workforce Quality and Early Childhood Development at Scale

Sarah Cattan, Gabriella Conti and Christine Farquharson

No 12619, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Early childhood programmes frequently lose effectiveness at scale, yet the role of the workforce remains poorly understood. We document substantial heterogeneity in workforce effectiveness in England's national home-visiting programme for first-time teenage mothers, despite a highly-structured curriculum and well-qualified staff. Exploiting quasi-random assignment of mothers to family nurses, we estimate that a one standard deviation increase in workforce effectiveness raises children's cognitive and socio-emotional development by 0.20-0.23 SD. Structural quality — observable worker characteristics — does not predict effectiveness, but process quality — how visits are delivered — does. Greater effectiveness is linked with improvements in maternal mental health and risk behaviours.

Keywords: early childhood development; home visiting; workforce quality; process quality; scalings; family nurse partnership (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I18 I38 J13 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-neu
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp12619.pdf (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:ces:ceswps:_12619

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().