High-quality pre-school education provides measurable and sustained benefits to children in deprived areas, a new report on improving schools in Northern Ireland has concluded.
The report, published by the Northern Ireland Economic Council, covers schooling from early childhood to second level. However, its most shocking findings are in four studies of nursery schools in very deprived areas of Belfast.
The authors, Dr Tony Gallagher, Mr Ian Shuttleworth and Ms Colette Gray, write that these "provided an insight into the actual nature of social and educational disadvantage that we suspect will be alien to many of those reading this report".
"On our visits to the schools, and in our conversations with the principals, we were told of children who had arrived in nursery school having never held a book, never had a story read to them or who had never held a conversation with an adult."
A common theme was the large number of children who had language, speech and hearing problems. In one nursery school in a Catholic housing estate - with almost all the children coming from homes with unemployed parents and a third from single-parent homes - almost half had been referred to the local health centre for hearing tests.
A large number of the mothers in the estate suffered from some degree of depression. A lot of the children were on medication, "sometimes because this is seen as a panacea for every little problem".
In a second nursery school in a Catholic area, the principal attributed "the increase in speech problems to a lack of communication and discussion, that is to say conversation between children and parents".
She felt that a large number of mothers appeared to have very poor parenting skills. The main effect of this was "the lack of a disciplinary framework to order the children's lives".
The third school studied, in a Protestant inner city area, was the most depressing. Here, most of the unemployed fathers viewed education as "a female thing" and were "therefore loath to attend talks or interviews about their children's progress".
The principal felt that most speech and behavioural problems were a result of poor parenting skills. Many parents were young single mothers in their early 20s and she felt some of them "expressed contempt for staff in the school". This attitude was picked up by the children, who were generally "unruly and difficult".
"More generally, she felt that within the local community there is a general disregard for education so that even when a child does pass the 11-plus, they almost never go to a grammar school."
The fourth principal, also in a nursery school in a disadvantaged inner city Protestant area, said the main gains of pre-school education were improved self-esteem, self-confidence and language development, and the development of pre-writing and reading skills.
On listening skills, she said "many of the children at the start just shout at one another because that's the main form of communication they have heard".