Introduction

This chapter reports some findings from the first three surveys of the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) on the nature and extent of ethnic differences in early childhood environment and outcomes up to age 5. Due to the lack of suitable data, it has not been possible to consider these issues in the UK before – the MCS is one of the first longitudinal surveys in the UK that has the ability to look at this important issue, particularly as the MCS design involved over-sampling individuals from minority ethnic groups and individuals living in disadvantaged areas of the country.

In this chapter we examine ethnic differences in child outcomes, together with background and mediating factors that are likely to have impacted on these outcomes. This draws on earlier work using the MCS looking at ethnic differences in birth outcomes (see Dearden et al, 2006). Our results suggest that in explaining ethnic differences in child outcomes, it is important not only to consider differences in socioeconomic and family characteristics, such as parental education and socioeconomic status (SES), but also family background, family structure and child demographics. It is also important to consider other mediating factors such as family interactions, family health and well-being, the early home learning environment (HLE) and parenting styles and rules. It turns out that these other mediating factors point to possible policy responses to reducing ethnic differences in child outcomes.

The rest of the chapter is organised as follows. First, we outline how we define our ethnic groups used in the rest of the chapter. We then show how our outcomes of interest vary by ethnic groups. This shows that ethnic gaps in childhood development start early in life. Following that, we examine how some possible explanatory factors of this gap vary by ethnic group, namely selected family background characteristics and selected measures of the early childhood environment. We present the multivariate analysis we carried out to see the extent to which family background characteristics and the early childhood environment can act as mediating factors – in some sense ‘explaining’ the ethnic divide in early child development. This analysis is purely descriptive, but provides some clues to policy makers where interventions may be fruitful to lessen the ethnic differences.