The FT reports on the OECD's recent report that the right time to spend money on children is EARLY.  Depressingly for the UK:

The UK spends £10,000 more than the OECD average of £80,000 on each child from birth to 18. But in a table that constructs an overall measure of child well-being for 21 countries, the UK comes bottom alongside the US. The Netherlands and Sweden are at the top

The good news is that the UK “stands out as increasing early investment in recent years”.  This was a major justification for Tony Blair's excellent policy of imposing (deferred, heavily-subsidized, targetted) tuition fees on those students fortunate enough to gain sufficient qualifactions to be eligible for further education.  As it happens, tuition fees do not put off children from going to university, once you control for A level results (IFS data). And most of us understand anecdotally that children who go wrong by the age of six are a real challenge to turn around.  In a world with limited Budgets (i.e. the world we live in, rather than the one that student protesters imagine we live in when campaigning for more cash), an increased contribution from the success stories of our education system enables the government to expand its funding for early years education. 

CentreForum has understood this for a long time.  In "The surest route", we recommended extending the scope of the childcare tax credit which is currently available only to working parents.  We have long added our voice to those backing tuition fees, for example in "Open universities". This is why it is still so depressing that the Liberal Democrats retain their policy of opposing tuition fees - despite the fact that (as our research shows) most of the benefits of their policy would accrue to students from wealthy backgrounds.

Last January we took this argument directly to the Liberal Democrat activists, armed with further knowledge of the dire fiscal situation the next government was going to inherit (since then, it has got worse by about £300bn). I don't think we heard a decent argument in favour of the policy, although a lot was said about the difficulty of campaigning in university consistuencies. Fair enough: these are hardworking activists struggling against fairly ruthless local opposition.   But, ultimately, it is not sustainable to build a policy platform on what sells well in a Focus leaflet to a narrow special interest, when the actual policy would make Britain more unequal and generally worse off.

We're going to keep banging on about this one, until the sheer fiscal reality of the "decade of austerity" makes it obvious to everyone that the idea of subsidizing the students who do best in our schooling system at the expense of those doing worst is bad policy.