Abstract: Targeted early years programmes can have significant benefits for children’s development; however, there are many examples of early interventions that have failed to live up to their promise, particularly when delivered at scale. Understanding the inputs into a successful early years programme is therefore essential to reform existing interventions and to guide future investments. In this paper, we study the role of a crucial input: workforce effectiveness. We evaluate the degree of heterogeneity in workforce effectiveness in the context of the highly trained workforce of family nurses employed by a successful, scaled-up home visiting programme in England. Using unique matched worker-client data, and exploiting the quasi-random assignment of family nurses to families for identification, we estimate each worker's value-added in promoting children’s physical, cognitive and socio-emotional development. We find evidence of substantial heterogeneity in workforce effectiveness; for example, a one-standard deviation increase in effectiveness leads to a 0.24SD increase in cognitive performance at age 2, and to a 0.29SD increase in socio-emotional development. However, despite having access to unusually detailed data on workers characteristics and on process quality, we are only able to explain around 15% of the variation in family nurse effectiveness. Overall, our results show that there is substantial heterogeneity in effectiveness even among highly skilled workers, but we are only starting to understand its determinants.

for further information contact patrizia.pellizzari@unibocconi.it