ANU research cited in Prime Minister’s Closing the Gap Report

The Australian Prime Minister’s annual Closing the Gap report card features an ANU researcher’s study into preschool attendance by Indigenous children.

Deputy Director of the ANU Centre for Social Research and Methods and Fellow at the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, Dr Nicholas Biddle, found positive differences between Indigenous children who attended and those who didn’t.

“What was quite interesting was the measured effects appeared to be larger over the medium term as opposed to the short term, four to six years after pre-school compared to two years after attending,” he says.

Dr Biddle also found that preschool had a much larger positive association than childcare.

The childcare study is a snapshot of Dr Biddle’s larger argument: that policy makers in Australia should pay more attention to designing social policies which measure causality where possible, using controlled studies. There’s also a shortage of evidence to monitor the true effect of many education policies and programs.

“For many of our big policy initiatives, the schools or communities which were involved weren’t necessarily comparable to the schools and communities which were not involved, so we can’t really tell what was achieved,” he says.

The importance of causality was outlined by US-based academic, Dr Ben Castleman, who visited the ANU in late 2015 and gave a presentation to academics and public servants. He emphasised the benefits for policymakers when researchers focus on the causal effect of education interventions. Critically, Dr Castleman stressed how with access to the right administrative data, such trials need not be as expensive as is often assumed.

Even without such trials, longitudinal data can be helpful. Dr Biddle’s research projects include identifying specific aspects of early childhood education  which are associated with improved education levels among children.

His team used a longitudinal data set of Australian children with data from before they began preschool or long day-care.

The researchers identified 25 risk factors including being breastfed, parental warmth, and conflict within the family.

“What we found is that yes, there was a large difference in outcomes between those who attended preschool and those who didn’t,” Dr Biddle explains.

“But when you control for the risk factor characteristics, many of those differences disappear.”

This month, Dr Biddle summarised his research on Indigenous children in preschools in an article for The Conversation. The study had fewer background controls than the study for the total population, but found positive differences between Indigenous children who attended and those who didn’t.

Dr Biddle says researchers have a role in advocating to policymakers and the public to embrace policies which have causality built-in – where applicable, and conclusions justifiable – backing it up with evidence gained from longitudinal datasets.

“The reality is, in Australia, we don’t know whether the MySchool website has any effect,” he says.

“We don’t know whether the National Quality Framework with regards to children has any effect or not. We don’t know whether tying family welfare payments to school attendance has any effect or not, or small or large class sizes.”

But he understands why there is reluctance to build experimentation into policy design.

“Sometimes it just isn’t feasible due to quite legitimate concerns, but often it is risk aversion and fears that a trial’s negative result, or no result, may damage reputations.”