Early childhood education and care (ECEC) at a crossroads? A comparative analysis of ECEC in five countries
Early childhood education and care (ECEC) has moved up policy agendas across countries worldwide. This reflects a growing body of evidence on the benefits of high quality ECEC services in the pursuit of a range of priority policy objectives, including supporting children’s development, reducing socio-economic inequalities and promoting the reconciliation of care responsibilities with participation in paid work.
Despite the growing agreement on the benefits of high quality ECEC, this policy field continues to be characterised by significant gaps in access to services, policy fragmentation and lively debate on what constitutes good quality ECEC.
Drawing on the experience of five European countries – England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain – this Fondazione Agnelli research project aims to contribute to the policy debate and learning on options for taking the ECEC agenda forward. With a focus on three key dimensions of ECEC – service access, quality, and cost, financing and affordability – the five national papers provide an analysis of the main trends and policy initiatives across the case study countries.
The comparative analysis identifies ten common ECEC policy “dilemmas” or tensions that arise from a combination of ECEC institutional configuration and wider demographic and labour market shifts underway. It asks whether policy responses across the experience reviewed display some degree of convergence or, conversely, differences, and finds similarities across some dimensions but also persistent fundamental differences across others, such as in the degree of continuity in ECEC services and in pedagogical approaches.
The analysis underscores how progress in terms of overall ECEC provision over the last two decades has been achieved by leaving some key challenges unresolved and possibly by exacerbating them. Two, in particular, stand out: socio-economic inequalities in access to ECEC services and service quality remain major challenges to the development of inclusive, sustainable and effective ECEC systems. If these two issues remain unaddressed, the ECEC reform agenda of the past two decades risks remaining incomplete and its transformative potential unfulfilled.
· ECEC in England: Increasing affordability – but at what cost?, by Kitty Stewart (Department of Social Policy and Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, London School of Economics and Political Science)
· The French ECEC paradox: universal ambitions, unequal realities, by Laudine Carbuccia and Lidia Panico (Centre for research on social inequalities, CRIS, Sciences Po/CNRS, and Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Evaluation of Public Policies LIEPP, Sciences Po, Paris)
· ECEC in Germany: the well-designed expansion running out of steam?, by Ludovica Gambaro (Independent Researcher)
· ECEC in Italy: towards an integrated 0-6 years system?, by Stefano Neri (Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Milan) and Stefania Sabatinelli (Department of Architecture and Urban Studies, Polytechnic of Milan)
· ECEC in Spain: so close to, so far away from, the Nordic model, by David Palomera (Southern Denmark University) and Llorenç Soler-Buades (European University Institute)
· ECEC at a crossroads? A comparative analysis of Early Childhood Education and Care in five countries, by Francesca Bastagli (Fondazione Agnelli) and Emmanuele Pavolini (University of Milan)