Early Childhood Care and Education

Inclusion should be a principal commitment from early childhood. According to the latest estimates from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, the number of children not enrolled in pre-school in the year before primary school has decreased over the past decade, from 52.1 million in 2009 to 47.2 million in 2018. Despite this progress, the large number of children still excluded from pre-school is a major concern, given the strong evidence linking access to inclusive early childhood care and education (ECCE) with school success, overall development, and well-being.

Early childhood education has the potential to expand opportunities for disadvantaged children, provided that programmes use inclusion as a guiding principle. While the international community has committed to inclusive education, countries vary in their efforts to extend this goal to early childhood. Universal access is the basis of inclusion, and countries must address barriers related to socio-economic status, ethnicity, gender, language, disability and remoteness.

The Latin American Campaign for the Right to Education (CLADE, by its Spanish acronym) is a pluralistic network of civil society organizations with a presence in 18 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, which promotes social mobilization and political advocacy to defend the human right to education. This collection of articles, essays and statements reflect on the vital role of public education in the region and the fault lines exposed by the pandemic, considering both the challenges public education in Latin America faces and possible solutions, alternatives and ways forward.

This UNESCO study provides a global overview and an analysis of the adoption of legal provisions for free and compulsory pre-primary education at national level. The analysis, prepared by UNESCO in cooperation with the ‘Right to Education Initiative’, is based on research carried out on qualitative data for 193 UNESCO Member States conducted by UNESCO, and complemented by in-depth research on 17 countries carried out by the ‘Right to Education Initiative’.

This book is part of UNESCO’s Education on the Move series created to provide policy-makers, educators and other stakeholders with state-of- the-art analyses of topical issues. The book is divided into three main chapters each including vigorous research papers that critically analyse ECCE-related themes. The first part discusses ‘understanding ECCE as a right and development imperative’.

El primer informe mundial de UNICEF sobre la educación preescolar presenta un análisis exhaustivo de la situación de la educación en la primera infancia en todo el mundo. También proporciona un conjunto de recomendaciones prácticas para que los gobiernos y los asociados consigan que la educación preescolar de calidad sea universal y sistemática.

UNICEF’s first global report on pre-primary education presents a comprehensive analysis of the status of early childhood education worldwide. It also outlines a set of practical recommendations for governments and partners to make quality pre-primary education universal and routine. Noting that at least 175 million children – 50 per cent of the world’s pre-primary-age population – are not enrolled in pre-primary programmes, the report urges governments to commit at least 10 per cent of their national education budgets to scale them up.