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The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationships between the characteristics of the home learning environment (HLE) and students’ academic attainments in secondary school in England at age 14 and 16.

This research study uses multilevel statistical models to investigate the strength and significance of relationships between various measures of the HLE at ages three, six, 11 and 14, and students’ academic attainment in secondary school.

Multilevel models show that early years HLE and specific dimensions of later HLE are positive predictors of students’ later academic attainment at age 14 and 16, when the influence of various individual, family and neighbourhood characteristics are controlled.

The paper presents unique findings on the role of the HLE in shaping students’ academic success at secondary school, including a range of measures of the HLE obtained at different ages. The results show that the early years HLE measured at age three continues to show effects on later attainment, over and beyond the effects of later HLE and other significant influences such as family socio-economic status and parents’ qualification levels.

This article focuses on the design and application of an instrument, the Programme Variability Rating Scale (PVRS), to measure the effectiveness of a complex social intervention in the UK. Sure Start aimed to improve outcomes for children aged under four years living in disadvantaged areas on a wide range of health, educational and social indicators. The PVRS was devised for use in the National Evaluation of Sure Start (NESS) to measure programme proficiency. It consisted of 18 dimensions (eg. parental empowerment, user identification, flexibility of service delivery), each with seven levels of proficiency. It was applied to 150 Sure Start local programmes involved in a longitudinal study of the impact of the intervention on a range of child and parental outcomes. Ratings of more or less proficient processes were related, using discriminant‐function analysis, with the impact outcomes from the cross‐sectional study of almost 20,000 children. The 18 dimensions of proficiency of the PVRS made a significant differentiation between the most and least effective programmes.

This article reviews the contents of the previous year's editions of the Journal of Children's Services (Volume 2, 2007), as requested by the Journal's editorial board. It draws out some of the main messages for how high‐quality scientific research can help build good childhoods in western developed countries, focusing on: the need for epidemiology to understand how to match services to needs; how research can build evidence of the impact of prevention and intervention services on child well‐being; what the evidence says about how to implement proven programmes successfully; the economic case for proven programmes; the urgency of improving children's material living standards; how to help the most vulnerable children in society; and, lastly, the task of measuring child well‐being.

Tingting Qi's chapter titled, “Moving toward Decentralization? Changing Education Governance in China After 1985,” provides the historical and policy context for the volume. This chapter integrates the post-1978 Chinese educational reforms into the socioeconomic context of China. The special contribution of this chapter is that it explores the complexity of educational decentralization in China through an in-depth analysis of changes in education finance, administration, and curriculum. Qi reviews prior studies, government documents, laws, and regulations related to Chinese education reform since 1978 within the context of education decentralization in China. Qi also demonstrates that China's educational policy reforms are moving China toward “centralized decentralization” because decentralization is driven by a common, centralized national goal of economic modernization. The chapter presents evidence that “centralized decentralization” is a strategic maneuver that maintains centralized control while providing the reform legitimacy of decentralization. By focusing on decentralization as the core of Chinese educational policy reforms, this chapter situates the following chapters within the social, cultural, and political context of post-1978 China.

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.