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This article analyses UK Early Years policy in terms of service expansion and service transformation since the Labour Government's election in 1997. Childcare is now a matter of public policy, driven largely by concerns about child poverty and inequalities in children's life chances. The evidence is considered, first, on service expansion, increased take‐up and increased employment by parents with young children, and, second, on service transformation and child outcomes: to what extent have changes benefited disadvantaged children, families and neighbourhoods? The Effective Provision of Preschool Education (EPPE) research shows that pre‐school can boost disadvantaged children's intellectual development in particular, and the article concludes that programmes such as Sure Start and Neighbourhood Nurseries have been successfully targeted at the most disadvantaged areas, although better‐off families and neighbourhoods may have benefited even more, and that problems of cost and sustainability remain. It is too early to judge whether better integrated services now being developed will be successful in transforming the lives of the most disadvantaged children.

Children from disadvantaged families often already show developmental deficits at the time of school entry. The goal of Schritt:weise, a preventive, easy-access early education program for children ages one to five is to avoid such deficits through a combination of home visits by semi-professionals as well as center-based group activities. The program has been translated and adapted from the Dutch program Opstapje and is now being implemented in different regions in Switzerland. To offer the program more readily in rural areas, four adapted models were developed. This paper aims to provide a mixed-method, combined process and outcome evaluation of these newly developed models.

For this combined process and outcome evaluation, standardized testing for child development outcomes and interviews with different stakeholders were conducted.

The evaluation found that implementation of all four models was feasible and children developed along the norm in all four of the models. This finding was confirmed one year after program completion.

Building an evidence-base to better understand success of early intervention programs is key to effectively supporting children from disadvantaged families in their development.

This early education program using home-visitation with semi-professionals is feasible and successful in reaching children from disadvantaged families.

It is possible to support children from disadvantaged families through the program Schritt:weise and prevent developmental deficits at school entry.

The finding that children developed along the norm in all four models means that the key program goal was achieved and that the specific implementation model can be chosen based on the specifics of the implementation context.

This study aims to establish the perspectives of community providers on challenges and enablers in developing child mental health capacity in disadvantaged communities in South Africa.

The authors involved 29 community providers operating in a large urban-deprived area in the Gauteng Province, east of Johannesburg. Community providers had educational, social and health care backgrounds. Their perspectives were captured through three focus groups, two participatory workshops and reflective diaries. Data were integrated and subjected to inductive thematic analysis.

Three interlinked themes were identified. Community mobilization was viewed as pre-requisite through mental health awareness and strategies to engage children, youth and parents. Service provision should take into consideration contextual factors, predominantly inequalities, lack of basic needs and gender-based issues (domestic violence, teenage pregnancy and single motherhood). Participants referred to severe mental health needs, and related to physical health conditions, disabilities and impairments, rather than to common mental health problems or wellbeing. They proposed that capacity building should tap into existing resources and integrate with support systems through collaborative working.

Child mental health policy and service design in Majority World Countries (MWCs), should involve all informal and structural support systems and stakeholders. Contextual factors require consideration, especially in disadvantaged communities and low-resource settings, and should be addressed through joined up working.

Children’s mental health needs are largely unmet in MWC-disadvantaged communities. These findings capture the experiences and perspectives of various community providers on how to enhance mental health provision by mobilizing communities and resources.

Most social scientists believe that schools serving the disadvantaged provide considerably poorer learning environments than schools serving advantaged students. As a result, schools are thought to be an important source of social problems like inequality. However, an important subset of research employing seasonal comparisons (observing how achievement gaps change when school is in versus out) disputes this position. These studies note that socioeconomic-based gaps in skills grow faster when school is out versus in, suggesting that achievement gaps would be larger if not for schools. I discuss the advantages of seasonal comparison studies and how they provide a more contextual perspective for understanding several important questions, such as: (1) What is the distribution of school quality? (2) How does inequality outside of school condition the way schools matter? and (3) Which policies, school or non-school, most effectively reduce achievement gaps? I conclude that our understanding of how schools influence inequality would be improved by employing the more contextual perspective offered by seasonal comparisons. Seasonal comparison studies have not played a meaningful role in public discussions and so the public lacks a proper understanding of the extent to which social context shapes achievement gaps. This is unfortunate because we continue to try and address achievement gaps primarily through school reform when the real source of the problem lies in the inequalities outside of schools.

Poor mental health and well-being disproportionately affects vulnerable and disadvantaged children and young people. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The focus of this paper is socioeconomic inequalities in perinatal, child and adolescent mental health.

Children and young people in the poorest British households are up to three times more likely to develop mental health problems than their more advantaged peers (Green et al., 2005). The pattern can also be observed in the opposite direction, with poor mental health known to contribute to socioeconomic and other health problems (McCulloch and Goldie, 2010, Parckar, 2008). At a larger scale, the higher the level of inequality within developed countries, the higher the rate of child and adolescent mental health problems (Pickett et al., 2006).

Mechanisms posited as underlying such inequalities include family investment and stress processes. These factors have been taken into account when developing the economic case for investing in perinatal, child and adolescent mental health.

Illustrative examples of progressive universal strategies and policies to help reduce socioeconomic inequalities in mental health, include: action to address the inequality gap in the UK; early intervention to improve mental health; investing in sustainable and evidence-based mental health services; ensuring parity of esteem, and; using appropriately designed social media and online sources to support children’s mental health.

This paper examines the effects of immigration, urban residency, poverty, and race/ethnicity on the education of students in K-12 school. Findings of this study critiques the gaps between NCLB policy and its implementations as well as the outcomes, and makes several recommendations. This chapter recommends multiple standards and assessment approaches for accountability. The author believes that accountability must be addressed along with, equality, and fiscal adequacy. Accountability can work in a pluralistic nation only when diversity is taken into serious consideration. Recognizing this diversity is critical in developing successful strategies and effective approaches for working with immigrant families and students. Education policy for disadvantaged families and communities should not be limited to conventional education policy alone. Socioeconomic policies that benefit lower-income families and communities also should be recognized as educational policies on behalf of children.

Behavioural parent training (PT) interventions partially mediate risk factors for the development of child behavioural problems. Mindfulness skills could have benefit in alleviating the impact of these risk factors for parents who are socio-economically disadvantaged. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A pre-post single group comparison of disadvantaged mothers attending the Mindfulness-Based Wellbeing for Parents (MBW-P) programme.

Changes were observed in facets of parental stress (Parenting Stress Index-Short Form; Abidin, 1995), depression (Beck Depression Inventory-II; Beck et al., 1996) and brooding (Ruminative Responses Scale; Nolen-Hoeksema and Morrow, 1991), with moderate to large effect sizes and incidences of clinical change.

The research design, although pragmatic, includes a small sample and no control or long-term comparison group.

Mothers considered as the “hardest to reach” group in terms of vulnerability, risk factors and being likely to gain from intervention demonstrated positive shifts post-intervention. A targeted mindfulness-based intervention, delivered pragmatically within a health service context, may have benefit in reducing the impact of risk factors on parental wellbeing.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first evaluation of a targeted mindfulness group delivered within routine health care settings, in identified “high risk” areas, by routine staff.

The authors aim to analyze the inequality in accessing distance learning during COVID-19 school closures.

The authors use the Household Pulse Survey, which is an effort by the United States (US) government to measure the well-being of American families during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors employ a regression analysis to estimate the inequality in accessing distance learning by race and household income.

Disadvantaged children from nonwhite and low-income families have much less access to distance learning, including less access to online classes, digital devices and the Internet. Schools are critical providers of the Internet and digital devices to children from disadvantaged households. Schools and parents devote more attention to these nonwhite children by spending extra time on their learning activities.

This paper estimates the inequality in accessing distance learning during the COVID-19 crisis. Also, the authors analyze the responses of schools and parents toward this inequality.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the willingness of households to pay for academic and deprivation-compensating components of the Contextual Value Added (CVA) indicator of school quality used in England in order to locate themselves in the catchment area of state schools. Deprivation-compensating school performance, defined as the difference in the disadvantaged intake between two schools with the same academic performance.

The empirical analysis, based on data drawn from three independent UK data sources, used parametric and non-parametric analysis approaches. The analysis conducted separately for primary and secondary schools, because household behaviour can differ between these two levels of education.

Consumers are willing to pay for houses in the catchment area of primary and secondary schools with high academic achievement, as measured by the mean score; whereas, the component of the CVA indicating deprivation-compensating aspects of school performance is found to have a positive effect only on the price of houses in the catchment area of primary schools in London; its impact on the price of houses elsewhere is mostly negative.

The analysis in this study suggested that the recently adopted practice of using CVA as a measure of school quality in England can encourage government and Local Authorities to pay more attention to raising the deprivation-compensating aspects of school performance of their schools.

This is the first study to explore the value which households attach to deprivation-compensating outcomes, at a given level of academic performance using the CVA indicator.

The existence of disadvantaged sub-populations whose talents are under-leveraged is a problem faced by developing and developed countries alike. Life history data revealed that a large proportion of elite business leaders in the Caribbean emerged from childhood poverty (families subsisting on US$1-2 a day, 40 percent). The purpose of this paper is to examine the key factors supporting the career development of elite leaders from a broad socioeconomic spectrum and both genders in order to build a model of career development for elite leadership.

Data were collected via in-depth interviews from a deliberately gender-balanced sample of 39 male and 39 female elite business leaders. Thematic analysis identified consistencies across independent interviews and resulted in a model identifying factors supporting pre-career development as key to eventual attainment of elite leadership.

Findings indicated that in childhood and youth, proactivity plus talent recognition and mentoring by adults enhanced access to early developmental opportunities. Early career mentoring guided talented youth to build personal drive, self-esteem, altruism, and integrity, which created a foundation for developing career capital through values-based action. Altogether, these findings indicate the importance of pre-career relational capital to attainment of elite career success.

Difficult-to-access elite leaders provided rich information emphasizing the importance of pre-career development in childhood and youth to eventual elite leadership attainment. Virtually all of the elites in the sample remember being identified as talented early in life and consider early messages about drive to achieve as well as support received from parents, teachers, and other interested adults to be critical to their success. Hence, a process of talent recognition and encouragement to excel appear to be crucial for connecting young people to important relational capital allowing them to eventually achieve elite status, particularly those individuals hailing from disadvantaged backgrounds.