Promoting Equity in Access to Quality Early Childhood Education in China.

This paper reviews the Chinese government's efforts and progress towards ensuring equitable access to quality early childhood education (ECE). It begins with an overview of the Chinese context and analysing the reasons for a policy focus on ECE in recent decades. Thereafter, from a historical perspective, it critically reviews policies pertaining to enhancing access to and the quality of ECE in China since 2010. Nationally representative data are used to document policy implementation. Our analyses of national policies and representative data suggest that the state considers ECE a public good. This is evident from policy changes, efforts to bridge urban-rural disparities, fiscal allocations to the most economically disadvantaged groups, and strategies to enhance the quality of ECE.A significant focus on policy implementation with improved regulation and monitoring of services provided by both state and non-state actors was found. However, it is evident that gaps persist between urban and rural areas regarding infrastructure and resourcing, gross enrolment rates, and teacher-child ratios. That stated, the momentum that has driven policy change and the dramatic gains demonstrates the priority accorded to ECE.

Global tracking of access and quality in early childhood care and education.

Investments in early childhood care and education (ECCE) have contributed to a growing demand for internationally comparable data. Yet data on access to quality ECCE are not routinely collected in many countries, leading to limited information on equitable access to ECCE, quality of provision, and the impact on learning and wellbeing outcomes. This paper outlines the current status of global measurement of access to quality ECCE and identifies issues with definitions, availability, and accuracy of ECCE data across countries and outlines paths forward. We argue that estimates of access to ECCE should be based on children's participation in quality ECCE across multiple program types, rather than enrollment or attendance alone, given the critical importance of dosage and participation for ensuring positive benefits from ECCE. Governments, international organizations, and researchers all have roles to play in setting standards to define and monitor ECCE, generating workable tools for measuring nationally, and globally investing in national monitoring systems and routine household surveys to obtain accurate estimates of access to quality ECCE.

Measuring and forecasting progress in education: what about early childhood?

A recent Nature article modelled within-country inequalities in primary, secondary, and tertiary education and forecast progress towards Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets related to education (SDG 4). However, their paper entirely overlooks inequalities in achieving Target 4.2, which aims to achieve universal access to quality early childhood development, care and preschool education by 2030. This is an important omission because of the substantial brain, cognitive and socioemotional developments that occur in early life and because of increasing evidence of early-life learning's large impacts on subsequent education and lifetime wellbeing. We provide an overview of this evidence and use new analyses to illustrate medium- and long-term implications of early learning, first by presenting associations between pre-primary programme participation and adolescent mathematics and science test scores in 73 countries and secondly, by estimating the costs of inaction (not making pre-primary programmes universal) in terms of forgone lifetime earnings in 134 countries. We find considerable losses, comparable to or greater than current governmental expenditures on all education (as percentages of GDP), particularly in low- and lower-middle-income countries. In addition to improving primary, secondary and tertiary schooling, we conclude that to attain SDG 4 and reduce inequalities in a post-COVID era, it is essential to prioritize quality early childhood care and education, including adopting policies that support families to promote early learning and their children's education.

Early child development in low- and middle-income countries: Is it what mothers have or what they do that makes a difference to child outcomes?

Child developmental theories and a large body of literature underscore the importance of both home and preschool influences on early childhood outcomes. We leveraged data from UNICEF'S Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys, a nationally representative international household survey that has collected cohort comparable information on children's early development in over 118 low- and middle-income countries since 1995. We focused on data from 216,052 3- to 4-year-olds (106,037 girls) from 28 countries that had undertaken at least two surveys from 2010 to 2018. We considered the impact of maternal education and household wealth (what mothers/caregivers have) on home learning activities and sending children to early childhood programs (what mothers/caregivers do), on early child development. Our results indicated that maternal education, household wealth, home learning activities, participation in early childhood education (ECE) and scores on the early childhood development index (ECDI) generally increased over time and were significantly related to each other. Multilevel structural equation modeling revealed the mechanism through which maternal education and household wealth were associated with child outcomes. More wealthy and more educated mothers were more likely to send their child to an ECE program, which was in turn, associated with a higher ECDI score. Caregiver-reported participation in ECE had a large effect on the ECDI score while maternal education had a small effect on it. In comparison the effects of the home learning environment were much smaller. Taken together, findings suggest that education and wealth (what parents have) influence what they do (providing opportunities for learning), which in turn influences early child development. Furthermore, exposure to ECE services was particularly important for children's development. We conclude by discussing the policy implications of our findings and providing suggestions for future research.