from EVIDENCE to POLICY Learning what works for better programs and policies May 2020 CAMBODIA: Can new and improved preschools improve child development in rural communities? EARLY CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT Early childhood is a critical period for growth and develop- preschool, the research team also looked at whether provid- ment. Research shows that giving young children enough ing parents information about preschool services led to higher nurturing and stimulating experiences during these early years participation rates and, ultimately, to larger developmental not only improves their chances of success in school but can impacts. Overall, the evaluation found that the upgrades were also help them succeed and be more productive later in life. successful in increasing enrollment rates, and many families Although access to preschool has increased substantially in re- moved their children from pre-existing schools to the im- cent years, in many low-income communities children don’t proved ones. The impacts on cognitive development, however, receive any educational services before they start primary school. In some cases, parents aren’t aware of the value of early education and might not take advantage of opportuni- ties to enroll their children in preschool, even when services are available. Furthermore, policymakers face the challenge of ensuring early childhood education is of high quality. While a number of carefully implemented, small-scale programs have produced large improvements in children’s cognitive and social-emotional development, it is unclear if programs implemented on a large scale in resource-constrained settings can do the same, particularly if the preschool environment pro- vides lower levels of stimulation and care than what the children receive at home. Source: Jan Berkes To help answer these questions, researchers conducted an were uneven: children from wealthier families benefitted, while impact evaluation in the context of a national effort to increase children from poorer families experienced little improvement. preschool coverage and improve its quality in Cambodia. The Contrary to expectations, the awareness campaigns didn’t aug- evaluation, which was supported by the World Bank’s Strate- ment the impacts of school construction. These results suggest gic Impact Evaluation Fund, measured how the construction that school construction in rural communities can increase ac- of new and improved preschools affected school participation cess to early childhood education programs, but that pedagogi- and child development. Since providing infrastructure alone cal methods and processes may need to be improved to support may not be enough to get families to send their children to the development of disadvantaged children. This policy note is based on “Improving Preschool Provision and Encouraging Demand: Heterogeneous Impacts of a Large-Scale Program,” Jan Berkes, Adrien Bouguen, Deon Filmer and Tsuyoshi Fukao, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper, December 2019. Context Although Cambodia has experienced two decades of robust lished 500 new community preschools nationwide and created economic growth, it remains one of the least developed coun- an information campaign about the returns to education to tries in Southeast Asia, and the country faces many challenges help spur demand for these services. The government decided in the education sector. to scale up these community preschools as a strategy that was Before this project started, two types of public preschools feasible in the short run and as a less costly alternative to scal- existed in Cambodia: state preschools and informal preschools ing up the state preschools. Some of the new preschools were (in Cambodia these were also called community preschools; built in villages that previously had no preschool, had an infor- EARLY CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT for expositional clarity they are referred to here as informal pre- mal preschool, or were too large to be served by one preschool schools). State preschools were and still are financed by Cam- alone. Apart from the structural improvements, the commu- bodia’s Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport. The ministry nity preschool teachers received a package of teaching materials provides teachers with two years of formal training in a teacher and 35 days of training, which included lessons in pedagogical training center. After being placed in a school, teachers receive strategies, curriculum content, testing, as well as basics of child a monthly salary of roughly $250 to teach for three hours a development, child rights and parental education. day, five days a week. Classrooms are equipped with teaching and play materials, and school buildings and facilities are of Did you know… good quality. Informal preschools, on the other hand, were in- In low-income countries, only 1 in 5 preschool-aged children is ferior in terms of infrastructure and teacher training, quality enrolled in school. was inconsistent, and teachers received irregular and relatively In Cambodia, preschool enrollment of five-year-olds has greatly low pay. increased in recent years: In an earlier evaluation, researchers worked with the Gov- From 40 percent in 2009 to ernment of Cambodia to evaluate the impact of three pilot 56 percent in 2012 early childhood development programs that were being scaled 66 percent in 2016 up with assistance from the World Bank.* The scale up faced But there are skill gaps between poor and more affluentchildren implementation challenges related to delays in building schools that widen during the preschool years. Analysis of a (non-national- and problems paying teachers. Another challenge was parents’ ly representative) sample of households revealed that: low use of the preschool services. • At age 3, the score gap between the top and bottom wealth Building on the lessons learned from this evaluation, the quintiles is 0.09 standard deviations in early numeracy and government of Cambodia revised its approach to strengthen 0.3 standard deviations in language. • By age 5, the score gap reaches 0.92 standard deviations in the quality of preschools and increase demand for these ser- early numeracy and 1.18 standard deviations in language. vices. As part of this effort, the Cambodian government estab- (Sources: UNICEF, GPE, Berkes et al (World Bank working paper, 2019), and Berkes et al (Developmental Science, 2019) Evaluation Researchers used a randomized controlled trial to evaluate the about preschool education, and in turn their demand for, pre- impacts of this community preschool upgrading and expansion school services. effort on school participation and children’s social-emotional The study took place in 305 villages in 13 provinces in and cognitive development. The research team assessed the south and northeast Cambodia. The villages qualified for the impact of school construction with and without an awareness program if they desired a community preschool, had a high campaign. Two levels of intensity were tested for the awareness poverty rate, and had a large number of children five years old campaign, though both aimed to increase parents’ awareness or younger. *Adrien Bouguen, Deon Filmer, Karen Macours and Sophie Naudeau, “Preschool and Parental Response in a Second Best World: Evidence from a School Construction Experiment,” J. Human Resources (2018) vol. 53 no. 2 474-512 and Adrien Bouguen, Deon Filmer, Karen Macours and Sophie Naudeau, “Impact Evaluation of Three Types of Early Childhood Development Interventions in Cambodia,” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper; No. 6540 Before baseline data collection began, villages were ran- such child rights, pre- and postnatal care of mothers, hygiene, domly assigned to a control group or one of three treatment nutrition, disease prevention, developmentally appropriate groups: i) a group that received a community preschool, ii) a activities for children, school readiness, disabilities, health ser- group that received a community preschool and a door-to-door vices, and child protection. These volunteers were responsible awareness visit by a village leader and field staff, or iii) a com- for promoting preschool enrollment of children aged three to munity preschool with both the door-to-door awareness visit five years and for leading monthly informational meetings with and counselling on early stimulation and nutrition based on parents of children up to age six. Cambodia’s existing home-based program. Researchers collected and analyzed three main waves of The door-to-door awareness program aimed to stimulate data collection: a baseline survey from May-July 2016, a mid- demand for early childhood development and education pro- line survey from April-June 2017, and an endline survey from grams by speaking directly to individual caregivers. The goal May-July 2018. Through detailed classroom observations, they was to sensitize them to the value of preschool education and were able to measure both structural and process quality. In guide them through the enrollment of their children at a com- addition, a brief monitoring survey conducted in late 2016 munity preschool. The information was provided in a leaflet helped confirm that the school construction was proceeding and distributed by the local village head and members of the as scheduled. evaluation field staff. To measure cognitive development, the research team used The home-based program was a more intensive approach a child assessment which took about 45 minutes to administer that was implemented by local volunteer parents. These par- to each child and which aimed to measure children’s skills re- ents underwent a 35-day long training from Ministry of Edu- lated to executive function, language, and early numeracy, as cation and Youth Services that covered a wide range subjects well as their fine and gross motor development. Findings The construction of the community preschools For the average child, the construction of the commu- increased preschool participation overall and induced nity preschools led to slight improvements in cogni- school switching. tive and social-emotional development at first, but these small impacts faded out over time. Children in villages with a newly built school were 11 per- centage points more likely to have ever attended a preschool One year after the program started, children’s cognitive de- by the time they were between four and six years old (70 per- velopment improved by a small amount as a result of con- cent in the program group compared to 59 percent in the struction of the new schools, but for the average child this control group). This impact translates to about one more improvement faded out completely by the two-year mark. month of preschool for children in areas that received the More specifically, children in treatment villages scored a sig- new preschools, relative to children in the control group (who nificant but negligible 0.04 standard deviations higher on an were enrolled for an average of about 5.4 months). index of cognitive development (made up of measures of early In community preschools specifically, enrollment in- literacy and numeracy along with executive function). After creased by 41 percent after one year, largely because many two years, however, these impacts were even smaller and no families moved their children from informal preschools to the longer statistically significant. improved community preschools (since in many cases the lat- Similarly, children’s social-emotional development also ter replaced the former). improved modestly after one year as a result of the new school construction. Children in the villages with the new preschools scored 0.09 standard deviations lower on an index of social-emotional problems. These impacts, however, also The awareness campaigns, even the more intensive faded out by year two. home-based program, had no additional impact on school enrollment rates, parental involvement, or Beyond average effects, the program widened the child development. cognitive development gap between children from wealthy families and children from poorer families Children in villages where the awareness campaigns were de- between year one and year two. ployed were not more likely to enroll in the new schools (or any type of preschool). This was despite the fact that care- Impacts on cognitive development for children from the givers in those villages were more likely to recall receiving a wealthiest households were larger and statistically significant. leaflet promoting preschool enrollment (8 percentage points Children in the highest wealth quartile showed gains of 0.09 more likely) and participating in home-based program ses- standard deviations compared to their counterparts in con- sions (10 percentage points more likely). The findings sug- trol villages after one year of the program and gains of 0.13 gest that the awareness campaigns, which were designed to standard deviations after two years. These results suggest that increase demand for preschool, did not heighten the effects wealthier families benefitted more from the preschools. of preschool construction alone. The lack of impact from the awareness programs–even These uneven and limited impacts on child the most intensive version––could be due to inadequate in- development point to a need to focus on formation or support. Researchers cannot rule out the pos- pedagogical practices and the quality of teacher- sibility that even providing both the door-to-door and home- child interactions. based program together did not have the intensity required to make a large enough difference and that a more intensive While the construction of the community preschools led to program (e.g., more frequent household visits) might have substantial increases in infrastructure and the availability of had larger impacts. materials, this improvement in structural quality was not ac- companied by a concomitant improvement in the quality of Community preschools cost much less to build and run educational content. than state preschools, but knowing which is actually Classroom observations show that the new community more cost-effective would require more research. schools were substantially better than the informal schools and about the same as state preschools in structural quality. Estimating cost-efficiency is quite straightforward as it only For example, teacher characteristics and classroom setup were requires an estimation of the annual unit cost to deliver the similar. Classroom equipment was even better in community program. The estimated average cost per child per year was preschools than in the state preschools. However, the ob- between $331 and $669 for state preschools and between servations also show that curriculum content and the quality $156 and $443 for community preschools.** To understand of pedagogy, as well as the frequency and quality of teacher- if the extra cost of state preschools is worth the extra invest- child interactions, were only slightly better in the commu- ment, further study would be needed on whether and to what nity schools than in the old informal schools—while those extent the state preschools better promote child development. in the state schools were substantially better. The results are While this study suggests that the new community preschools consistent with research showing that pedagogical practices do not substantially promote child development over and and the quality of teacher-child interactions are key to child above the mix of services that children in the control group development. receive (a mix of state preschools, informal preschools, and stimulation in the home) and that pedagogical quality ap- pears to be higher in the state preschools, there is currently no estimate of the value-added of the state preschools on child development. **Jan Berkes, Adrien Bouguen, Deon Filmer, Tsuyoshi Fukao, “Combining Supply and Demand-side Interventions: Evidence from a Large Preschool Program in Cambodia,” Impact Evaluation Final Report, June 2019 Conclusion Overall, the evaluation found that constructing the commu- on the job. Teachers in community preschools earned only nity preschools increased enrollment and moved children a quarter of what their counterparts in state schools earned who had been attending informal schools into structurally per month. better schools, as intended. However, the information cam- The findings also suggest that further research should paigns–even the most intensive one– didn’t further increase explore the drivers of preschool demand and quality. The EARLY CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT demand, and researchers didn’t find much improvement in demand-side approaches tested in this evaluation were not children’s cognitive or social-emotional development. These enough to mobilize much additional enrollment over and findings are consistent with other studies that show that it is above simply building preschools, suggesting that other fac- hard to implement large-scale preschool programs that im- tors inform parents’ decision to send children to preschool. prove child development. Direct or indirect costs may play a role, so approaches to These findings have implications for both intervention reduce those costs—for example, cash transfers or even fur- design and research. On the program side, it is likely that ther reductions in travel distances—might be necessary to the focus of policy should shift to improving the quality of induce higher participation rates. community preschools, now that preschool coverage is rela- In addition, if the quantity and quality of preschool tively high. A key place to start would be the training of the services fail to meet families’ needs, households might have community preschool teachers––which was much shorter low demand for them. Therefore, increasing the time spent (35 days, compared to two years) and less intensive than the in preschool per day or the quality of preschools may in- training the state preschool teachers received. The training crease families’ demand for them. Further investigation of gap likely contributed to the low levels of pedagogical skills the factors that enabled children from wealthier families to and poor teacher-child interactions measured through class- reap higher benefits from the schools is also critical, as this room observations. Similarly, there was a large pay-differ- understanding will be key to designing programs that help ential between the two types of teachers, which might have young children in resource-constrained homes reach their affected both the composition of teachers that applied for full potential. positions in community schools as well as their motivation The Strategic Impact Evaluation Fund, part of the World Bank Group, supports and disseminates research evaluating the impact of development projects to help alleviate poverty. The goal is to collect and build empirical evidence that can help governments and development organizations design and implement the most appropriate and effective policies for better educational, health, and job opportunities for people in low and middle income countries. For more information about who we are and what we do, go to: http://www.worldbank.org/sief. The Evidence to Policy note series is produced by SIEF with generous support from the British government’s Department for International Development and the London-based Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF). THE WORLD BANK, STRATEGIC IMPACT EVALUATION FUND 1818 H STREET, NW, WASHINGTON, DC 20433