Socio-economic inequalities emerge early in a child's life, with far-reaching and lasting consequences. In this paper, the authors offer a comprehensive blueprint for creating an ideal system for all children growing up in England, irrespective of their family’s financial circumstances. They detail the changes in policy and delivery necessary to narrow the gap in outcomes at school entry between children in low-income families and their better-off peers.

The authors provide a detailed discussion of current state provisions for children under five – reflecting on the evidence of what has benefitted children from low-income backgrounds and what has not. They then move to setting out nine recommendations to narrow the gap in school readiness between children in low-income families and their better off peers.

Key recommendations:

• Improve pay, working conditions and career structure for the early years workforce.
• Improve workforce training, building collaboration between universities, further education colleges and providers to ensure a ladder of qualifications.
• Build on, or establish new children’s campuses providing a range of family support services for parents and early education and care for children.

Weighing up all the evidence, the single most important action to bridge the gap is to provide high-quality, teacher-led early education, ideally starting from two years of age for children from low-income families. Parallel efforts to reduce child poverty itself should be part of the longer-term road map.