Abstract
Targeted early years programmes can have significant benefits for children's development; however, there are many examples of early interventions that have failed to live up to their promise, particularly when delivered at scale. Understanding the inputs into a successful early years programme is therefore essential to reform existing interventions and guide investment into the most promising programmes. In this paper, we consider the role of a crucial input: workforce effectiveness. We evaluate the degree of heterogeneity in workforce effectiveness in the context of the highly trained workforce employed by a successful, scaled home visiting programme in England. Using the quasi-random assignment of workers to families for identification, we estimate each worker's value-added in promoting children's physical, cognitive and socio-emotional development. We find evidence of substantial heterogeneity in workforce effectiveness; for example, a one-standard deviation increase in effectiveness leads to a 0.24SD increase in cognitive performance at age 2, and a 0.29SD increase in socio-emotional development.
However, despite having access to unusually detailed data on worker characteristics and on process quality, we are only able to explain around 15\% of the variation in worker effectiveness. Overall, our results show that there is substantial heterogeneity in effectiveness even among highly skilled workers, but we are only starting to understand its determinants.
The paper is joint with: Sarah Cattan [IFS] and Christine Farquharson [IFS]
Invited by: Davide Dragone
Local Organizer: Stefania Bortolotti