Understanding the Early Years - Community Impacts on Child Development - August 1999

1. Introduction

Understanding the Early Years Community is one component of a national initiative developed to increase understanding of the first six years of child development and learning. The Community component is designed to assist communities across Canada in achieving their goal of improving child development by providing them with the necessary information to enhance community resources and services. The Understanding the Early Years (UEY) Community component will work with community organisations by providing research and information in support of the community's own activities to improve community capacity.

The city of North York has launched an innovative initiative called the Early Years Action Group (EYAG) to ensure that all its children will enter school ready to learn. Because of the congruence of the goals of the EYAG and UEY, North York will serve as a prototype project before UEY is expanded to other communities.

The research support provided to the community consists of information drawn from three components: a School Readiness to Learn Questionnaire, the comprehensive National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY) and a Community Mapping Study.

The School Readiness to Learn Questionnaire has been designed to measure children's readiness to learn when they start school. Kindergarten teachers rated different aspects of development for each child in their class. All children aged 5 and 6 years old were assessed. This questionnaire was administered in April 1999 to all teachers of kindergarten children within the English Public School System in the former North York School Board of Education (now amalgamated and part of the Greater Toronto District School Board). Data were collected on 5009 preschoolers in North York.

The NLSCY is a national longitudinal survey, which has collected information on almost 24,000 children across Canada. The NLSCY is a child-focused instrument that collects information from parents, teachers, principals, and children. The results provide national data for comparison. A modified version of the NLSCY was used in the UEY Community initiative to collect comprehensive data on a random sample of 1260 preschool children (the NLSCY Teacher and Principal Questionnaires were not used in this collection). The data will be used to conduct analyses to provide explanations regarding the link among children and family characteristics, community resources, and children's outcomes. Three additions were made to the NLSCY. These include, adding some objective direct assessments of the child's development, information on community characteristics and resources, and questions on the child's use of non-parental care in the early years. Direct assessments of the child were administered at home. Perception of community characteristics and use of community resources were collected from parental responses. The non-parental care questionnaire was administered to care providers of all children in the sample who are receiving some form of non-parental care (estimated to be about 40%, see "Impacts of Non-Parental Care on Child Development, HRDC Working Paper, 1999") and whose parents gave permission. The NLSCY data collection took place during May and June of 1999.

In addition, the Community Mapping Study was designed to complement the NLSCY and provide additional information about the resources available within the community. It will result in a series of detailed maps indicating the distribution, intensity and range of programs and services available within North York. The Community Mapping Study is underway and is expected to be completed by October of 1999.

Since the North York study was a prototype, that will later be expanded to other communities across the country, the aim was to develop and test a model of instruments and procedures that can be used by other participating communities across Canada. This paper provides the background for the NLSCY and the Community Mapping Study, based on an annotated bibliography, issues for studying community impacts, and the framework for guiding the research and policy strategy for the Applied Research Branch.

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