Caring for Children in a Welfare State.

The dissertation consists of four articles, of which two are included in this report, namely articles two and three. The purpose of article two is to examine the effect of an intervention launched in Oslo in 1998. In the intervention, children with a non-Norwegian ethnic background were offered free daycare for four hours a day. The motive for the intervention was to improve these children’s opportunities by providing better conditions for the development of good language skills and to create closer ties between their families and the local community. The purpose of article three is to examine the effect of the Norwegian “1997” reform in which the school-starting age was lowered from seven to six years of age. The objective of the reform was to level out differences between children's’ learning outcomes, regardless of their socio-economic background.

The results from article two show that the average grade of girls increased significantly by a whole grade in the intervention districts compared with the control districts. There were no significant effects for the boys. The results in article three show that, despite the fact that many of the children included in the study come from families with low income and little education, expanding a compulsory learning programme for children does not level out the differences in learning results for children from different socio-economic backgrounds. The researchers conclude that the results are solid and that the reason for the lack of positive results may be that the programme was not nearly intensive and structured enough.

Article two: The data material consists of register data from Statistics Norway and the database “Forløpsdatabasen Tryg”, also from Statistics Norway. All children from families with a non-Norwegian ethnic background, born in 1992 and resident in a specific district in Oslo, were included in the study. The study does not state precisely how many children were included. Article three: The researchers base their work on the Norwegian 1997 reform, which made it mandatory for six-year-olds to start school by attending a programme similar to daycare, in which focus is on learning through play. The cohort consists of 111,397 children, and data was obtained from Statistics Norway. Because the majority of the children in the study were already attending a preschool programme at either a daycare facility or at a primary school and therefore did not feel any significant effects of the reform, the researchers focused on the small group of children who were not attending a preschool programme before 1997. The effects of lowering the school-starting age are measured by assessing the children when they leave compulsory school, i.e. when they are approximately 15-16 years old.

Drange, N. (2012). Caring for Children in a Welfare State. Ph.d.-afhandling. Universitetet i Stavanger.