Could toddler tech help to get more children school ready?

Executive summary

In the UK, children from low-income backgrounds are less likely to be ‘school ready,’ with lower average scores for their development in language skills, maths and literacy when they start formal education. Nesta has set out on a 10-year mission to close this school readiness gap. 

What role could digital technologies play in achieving this? To find out, we investigated trends in parents’ and children’s tech use in the early years. Children under the age of five use screens for around three hours a day on average (Kidscreen, 2021) and usage is higher among children from low-income backgrounds (DfE, 2019, Hendry et al., 2022), so we wanted to explore if this presents a potential opportunity to use digital technology to support early childhood development.

We analysed the Google Play Store to learn more about the market of apps aimed at parents and children in the early years. Of the 896 apps designed for children aged 0–5 that we found on the UK Play Store, some explicitly offer learning content while more than a quarter (249) offer general play with no explicit educational benefit advertised. Our analysis also showed that the toddler apps market is growing fast, with around 100 new apps released every year since 2016. Analysis of app reviews (as a proxy for app usage) indicates that usage of toddler apps increased substantially during the Covid-19 pandemic and has remained high.

Taking into account this growing trend of toddler tech, this report makes the case that the UK early years sector should consider the potential role of children’s screen time in helping to narrow the school readiness gap. We identify four key opportunities:

• Improving the quality of toddler tech so that it has greater benefit for children’s social, emotional and cognitive development
• Helping parents to navigate a crowded market so that it is easier to identify apps worth their children’s time
• Making high-quality content freely available to low-income families
• Developing the evidence base for how toddler tech can be used most effectively in the home environment to boost children’s outcomes.

Closing the school readiness gap

In England, around 43% of children who claim free school meals are not reaching a good level of development in their reception year of primary school, compared with only 26% of their peers (DfE, 2019). By the time they reach the age of five, children from low-income backgrounds are less likely to have reached expected levels of development in their language and communication skills, their literacy and their numeracy.

At Nesta we have set out to find solutions that can help to close this school readiness gap. In this report we explore the role that toddler tech might play in widening or narrowing the impact of social disadvantage on children’s outcomes.

The current state of (digital) play

During the Covid-19 pandemic, many parents relied on screens to keep their children occupied while schools and nurseries were closed (Guardian, 2021). Children under the age of five now watch an average of three hours of video content every day; an increase of nearly half an hour from 2019 (Kidscreen, 2021).

Technology use among UK pre-schoolers is now widespread (Ofcom, 2022). Among three- and four-year-olds:

• 78% use a tablet to go online
• 17% have their own mobile phone
• 89% use video sharing platforms like YouTube
• 21% use social media
• 18% play games online.

Parents give children aged 0–4 digital devices for a variety of reasons; to support their child’s learning (67%), to encourage play or creativity (49%), or to keep their child quiet (45%) (DfE, 2019). This research also found that young children in lower income households used technology more frequently. Nearly a third (32%) of children in households earning under £10,000 were using a digital device on a daily basis, compared with 13% of children in households earning £45,000 or more (DfE, 2019). This reflects a growing body of evidence showing that babies and toddlers from lower income backgrounds tend to have higher screen use (Hendry et al., 2022).  

Risks and benefits of screen time

Should we be concerned about the rise of toddler tech? Not necessarily. Research indicates that viewing high quality educational programmes can benefit children’s cognitive development, including literacy, numeracy (Mares & Pan, 2013) and language development (Linebarger & Walker, 2005). A recent meta-analysis of 36 intervention studies found that educational apps have a positive effect on children's literacy and numeracy outcomes that is comparable to the effects of tutoring (Kim et al., 2021). 

Screen time is more likely to be beneficial if:

• The child is aged two or older (American Academy of Paediatrics)
• Exposure is limited to short bursts eg, less than an hour per day (Ponti et al., 2017)
• Caregivers co-view with their children to help them interpret and discuss what they're viewing (Madigan et al, 2020)
• Children are watching high quality content that is age appropriate (Linebarger et al., 2017).

The Department for Education’s guidance for parents on early learning apps has also suggested that apps are more likely to be beneficial if they help children to learn something new; they encourage play and creativity; or they encourage interactions with others (DfE, 2019). Research also suggests that children aged 4 and older are more likely to benefit from educational apps, compared with younger children (Herodotou, 2018; Outhwaite et al., 2022).

However, screen time may pose a risk to young children’s development if it is in excessive quantities (Lin et al., 2015), it is not appropriate for their age group (Barr et al., 2010), they are not spending enough time interacting with caregivers (Meyer et al., 2021), they are not getting enough physical activity (Wen et al., 2014) or they’re using screens too close to bedtime (Garrison & Christakis, 2012). 

So what digital tools are young children using? To learn more about current trends in toddler tech, we used data analytics to map the range of digital tools available to families with young children. Our analysis focused on mobile apps on the Google Play Store that were either targeted at parents, or at children aged 0–5. Our focus on the Play Store was motivated by research from the US showing that lower-income smartphone users tend to have an Android phone, and Apple products are more associated with high income (Bertrand and Kamenica, 2018). 

A diverse market of mobile apps for toddlers and parents

Our first observation was the striking number of mobile apps. In the journey from preconception to preschool, parents and their children can choose between at least 1,200 different apps on the Play Store.

To characterise this landscape of apps, we used an automated clustering approach to group together similar apps based on their text descriptions. This yielded 14 categories which are more detailed than the default categories on the Play Store. The landscape of different types of apps is visualised in the graphic below. 

We found nearly three times as many apps aimed at children as we did for parents (896 and 303 apps, respectively). The children’s apps support entertainment, learning and playing, while the parents’ apps provide advice, allow parents to track babies’ activities and developmental milestones, and help put babies to sleep.

The number of new app releases for children has tended to grow faster compared to parenting apps. We find that about 100 new children’s apps have been released every year since 2016. This could be the case because more developers create apps for toddlers and each developer tends to produce a larger number of different apps, whereas those creating apps for parents are more likely to have a single offer.

In the remainder of this article, we will characterise the apps aimed at children. A companion article looks more closely at the apps directly supporting parents.

Most toddler apps are for play, but some help with learning

The majority of the 896 apps aimed at children are oriented around games. There are two broad groups of such play-oriented apps: those that are “just” for play (and are, perhaps, more geared towards distracting children) and those that claim to include some aspect of learning.  The apps for general play without an explicitly described objective to support child’s learning make up over a quarter of all apps (249).

A third of the children’s apps are intended to explicitly support children’s literacy and numeracy. Apps supporting early learning of phonics and letters are most numerous (more than 160 apps), followed by apps to develop numeracy (around 80 apps) and more general apps for reading stories (around 40 apps).

The figure below shows the most popular apps in terms of installations. Each of these apps has been installed at least one million times.

Among the educational apps is buddy.ai which uses voice technology to help children learn English. It’s part of a broader, rising trend of applying machine learning algorithms to recognise speech and support learning. Other emerging apps like Ello and bookbot act as reading coaches that listen to a child reading a story and can help them pronounce difficult words. While child speech recognition has been historically challenging to program, there are claims that it is now reaching a satisfactory level of accuracy, and companies specialising in this technology are attracting venture capital investment.

Parents may struggle to access high-quality apps

We know that parents mainly find apps for their children by searching an app store or by word-of-mouth (DfE, 2019). Given the crowded marketplace, it is likely that parents are finding it hard to navigate towards the apps that are most likely to benefit their children’s development. 

A recent analysis of commercially available apps for young children found that the majority (58%) had low educational value. Apps that were free to download ranked among the lowest (Meyer et al., 2021). This is concerning, as free apps are (unsurprisingly) popular with parents: a survey by the Department for Education found that 78% of parents whose children used apps had never spent money on one (DfE, 2019). Children in lower-income families are also less likely to have access to paid-for apps (Marsh et al., 2015).

To help parents choose higher quality apps, the DfE has issued guidance to parents around what makes a good early years app. Based on this guidance, DfE endorsed six apps in 2020 as particularly suitable for creating a positive home learning environment. However, out of these DfE-endorsed apps, only two have more than 500,000 installations and are rated four stars or more (out of five). The third most popular DfE-endorsed app has 10,000 installations but a relatively low score of 2.6, while the three remaining apps have 1,000 installations or fewer and not enough ratings for the Play Store to report a score. 

Although these apps may be available in channels other than the Play Store, it seems that they are yet to hit the same scale as others in the market – for example, there are at least 360 other apps with over a million installations.

This suggests that issuing official guidance is not sufficient; we need more effective ways to direct parents towards the higher quality apps that are more likely to benefit their children’s development.

Parents are frustrated by ads and in-app purchases

While the vast majority (88%) of toddler apps in our sample are free to download, most of them also include advertisements or in-app purchases that either unlock certain features or remove the adverts. Overall, about 70% of apps for children have in-app purchases, with some variation depending on the app category. About 60% of apps in the ‘reading and stories’ category have in-app purchases, whereas this is 90% for apps in the ‘simple puzzles’ category. 

The ‘simple puzzles’ category also has the highest number of apps with ads (73% of the apps), followed by the ‘drawing and colouring’ category (50%).

By analysing more closely the content of app reviews, we found that parents’ dislike of in-app purchases and adverts is a prominent topic. Ads are particularly frustrating in toddlers’ apps, where the child might accidentally click on the ad and get taken away from the activity. This suggests that free content that removes the distraction of adverts is particularly valuable to families.

Are early years apps here to stay?

The global ‘app economy’ appears to be doing well, with people installing more apps than ever before, and consumer spending in apps reaching record amounts.

As a proxy of toddler app performance over time, we looked at the number of reviews posted on the Play Store. We found a large spike in Play Store reviews in April 2020 at the time of the Covid-19 pandemic. By the end of 2021, the number of reviews was still 100% higher compared to pre-pandemic levels. This echoes other observations of increased children’s screen time during the pandemic (Ribner et al., 2021).

When breaking down the rapid growth of user reviews between 2019 to 2020 we found that play-oriented apps showed the most substantial growth, and particularly apps for ‘learning play’ received 370% more reviews in 2020 compared to 2019. Apps for reading stories while modest in absolute numbers also showed a large relative growth (190%). These trends suggest that there might be a higher demand for educational games (which may be more entertaining for children) rather than apps strictly for learning.