I was inspired to write this by Kellie Lauth's recent piece for Fast Company. She argues that the workforce crisis corporate America spends so much time lamenting begins in kindergarten, not in college or in the workplace. She is right. The case for investing in early childhood, though, is far wider than the corporate version of it, and more uncomfortable than the supply-chain analogy she uses lets on.
The investment case for early childhood is among the strongest in modern social and economic policy, and among the most consistently ignored. The science is settled. The economic returns are well documented. The political, fiscal and corporate response remains chronically inadequate to what the evidence demands. That is the gap this article is about.
Up to ninety per cent of a child's brain development takes place between birth and the age of five. The architecture of attention, language, executive function, social understanding and the regulation of stress is laid down in those years, in a window that does not reopen.
The economic case has been made with comparable clarity. James Heckman has spent decades documenting the returns on investment from quality early childhood, with data that won him a Nobel in economics and that should, by any rational standard, have moved budgets and strategies long ago. The Global Business Coalition for Education's 2023 report, The Business Case for Investment in the Early Years, sets out the same case at the level of system-wide data. More than 175 million children globally, almost half of all preschool-age children, do not have a place in preschool education. The childcare crisis in the United States alone costs around 122 billion dollars a year in lost earnings, productivity and tax revenue. Expanded childcare access could add three trillion dollars to global GDP. Expanding the childcare workforce to meet existing need would create 43 million jobs. By 2030, 85 million jobs worldwide may go unfilled because there are not enough people with the skills to take them. These are the same kind of numbers business and government use to justify every other long-term investment they make. The case has been made on the evidence, and it has, in practice, mostly been ignored.
Lauth's supply-chain analogy captures the case neatly. You would never ignore the earliest stages of your supply chain, she observes, so why ignore the earliest stages of your talent chain. The logic is right, and it deserves to be followed further than she takes it. Push the chain back past kindergarten and you arrive at parental leave, at the affordability and quality of childcare, at home visiting programmes, at housing stability and food security, at whether a child's first thousand days contained enough safety, stimulation and consistent human connection for their brain architecture to develop well. That is where the conversation about investment has to go.
The skills employers most often say they cannot find, problem-solving, confidence, agency, the ability to work across difference, the belief that one has something worth contributing, are developed in the early years of life, not in the classroom. They are built through responsive caregiving, through play, through language-rich environments, and through the secure attachments that allow children to learn without fear.
Inside the business community, the inconsistency between the rhetoric on talent and the action on its conditions is now glaring. The same companies that lament the workforce crisis are often silent on the structural conditions that would transform the pipeline at its source, and in some cases active in lobbying against the labour-market and fiscal policies that would fund them. Parental leave that mothers and fathers can use without losing income or position. Subsidised childcare that allows women to remain in or return to the workforce. Wages and conditions for the early years workforce that reflect the importance of the work. These are not benevolent additions to a sustainability report. They are the upstream interventions that determine whether the workforce of the 2030s and 2040s exists at all.
There is a structural point that runs underneath all of this. Across much of the world the early childhood workforce is women, often untrained, very often badly underpaid, and in many low-income contexts effectively unpaid altogether. The care, teaching and developmental work that the first years of life depend on is being done at the lowest end of the wage distribution, by people whose contribution is among the most important and the least valued. A serious commitment to investing in the early years has to mean training, supporting and properly paying that workforce, because nothing else in this picture changes without that.
Governments have begun to move on the investment side. The Biden administration set a goal of universal preschool for the two years before kindergarten. The Trudeau government announced a thirty billion Canadian dollar national plan to subsidise childcare. The United Kingdom is expanding free childcare coverage with the explicit aim of allowing parents to return to work. These are partial steps and not all of them are secure, but the policy frame is shifting in the right direction. What is still missing, almost everywhere, is the scale of investment the evidence actually calls for.
Business organising on this is happening in places. Alongside the Global Business Coalition for Education, cited above, the Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood's Business Taskforce, convened by The Princess of Wales, has done similar work in the UK, bringing together companies including Aviva, IKEA, LEGO, NatWest and Unilever and putting the UK economic opportunity at around £45.5 billion a year. More of this kind of organised, sector-wide business engagement, at scale, is what the moment calls for.
Philanthropy is the part of this conversation where I now spend most of my own time, advising foundations and senior leaders on strategy, narrative and external engagement. Before founding KW Strategy, I spent three years leading advocacy, partner engagement and external communications at the LEGO Foundation, where I directed substantial funding into the early years agenda and started and co-led the global campaign with the LEGO Group that secured United Nations recognition for the International Day of Play. I would have told you, before that role, that the argument for early years investment had been won on the evidence. After it, I would tell you that winning the evidence and winning the resources are very different things.
A relatively small but committed group of grant-making foundations has made early childhood a central bet. To take a couple of examples: the Federer Foundation has recently placed early and foundational learning at the centre of its new strategy across southern Africa, building on more than two decades of work in the region. The Van Leer Foundation has spent decades on the first thousand days and continues to lead the global conversation on what the science of that period actually requires of policy. Many others are doing equally patient and serious work in the space, often without the recognition it deserves.
The funding side of the equation is only half the picture. The other half is the operating organisations doing the long, patient implementation work the evidence calls for. To take two examples: the Indaba Foundation in South Africa has spent fifteen years building a Montessori-informed certification programme that trains the women who teach the youngest children in low-resource settings, with verified, measurable gains in school readiness, and a model that is now deploying beyond South Africa. aeioTU, working across Colombia, Mexico and the wider Latin American region, has spent more than fifteen years building early childhood environments at scale, with a model rooted in treating young children as rights-holders with their own identity, voice and capacity to learn through exploration and play. Many other operating organisations of similar quality are doing this work elsewhere. They are exactly what serious public, philanthropic and impact-investment capital should be queuing to back.
The political dynamics around early years investment are well understood. The constituency it serves is not yet old enough to vote. The returns mature on a timescale longer than most electoral or quarterly cycles. Neither of those is going to change. What can change is the willingness of the actors who do operate on long horizons, governments planning national infrastructure, companies planning capital and research over twenty and thirty years, foundations operating without need of short-term returns, to apply that horizon to the workforce, the citizens and the society of the future.
The skills our economies say they need cannot be retro-fitted at twenty-two through bootcamps and short courses, however well-designed. They are the cumulative product of conditions that begin before a child is born and continue through the first years of life. Investment in early childhood is the most evidenced and most under-funded long-term investment our economies could be making. Matching the rhetoric about upstream investment with resources commensurate to what the evidence demands is where this conversation has to go. The case is already made. The work that remains is to do it.