Comparing childcare arrangements, a trapped exercise

The arrangement depends on local supply, income, working hours and preferences. Comparing children by arrangement therefore compares families that differ on many other dimensions. A family using a crèche in a large city and a family entrusting its child to a grandparent in a rural area differ in more than the care arrangement alone.

Analyses adjusting for observable characteristics reduce part of the problem, without addressing what is unmeasured, notably educational preferences and the availability of family networks.

The most solid evaluations exploit openings of places or rule changes that alter access without depending on families' choices. Quebec and Norway have provided the most studied cases.

That work finds contrasting effects: positive effects on attainment at school entry, especially for children from low-income families, and more disputed results on behavioural indicators, with a lively debate around the Quebec evaluations. That debate concerns in particular the measurement of behaviour, often reported by parents, and the quality of places created in a short time, two points the various evaluations do not weight in the same way.

The measured effect depends on what formal care substitutes for. Replacing an unstimulating or isolated arrangement does not have the same effect as replacing attentive family care. The same crèche place can therefore produce very different effects depending on whether it replaces an available parent, shifting informal care or a stopgap solution.

That is the main reason effects are larger for disadvantaged families in several studies: the comparison is not against the same alternative across social groups.

Syntheses regularly conclude that quality gaps within a single type of care are larger than average gaps between types.

The quality indicators used, staff ratios, staff qualifications, stability of adults, observed interactions, are unevenly associated with measured outcomes, observed interactions being the most predictive and the most costly to measure. That mismatch weighs on evaluations: the criteria easiest to regulate are not those that predict best, and those that predict best require on-site observation.

France combines collective care, individual care by accredited childminders and early schooling, with substantial territorial disparities documented in public reports. Early schooling adds an option that most of the countries compared do not have in this form.

Those disparities are the main obstacle to national evaluation: better-provided areas differ from the rest, and the measured gap in outcomes mixes the effect of care with that of the area.