Frenchparents Blog: For Parents with an interest in the French Culture

Attitudes to education are deeply embedded in country contexts, values and beliefs, and the 20 countries reviewed – Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Korea, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States – all have diverse strategies in this field. Their variations reflect differing attitudes and cultural and social beliefs about young children, the roles of families and government and the purposes of early childhood education and care.

Starting Strong II provides a comparative analysis of policy developments and issues, highlighting innovative approaches and proposing policy options that can be adapted to different national contexts. Among other things, it notes:

• a growing consensus – based on research from a wide range of countries covering demographics, social change and cost-benefit analyses – that governments must invest in and regulate early childhood education and care;
• a trend towards integrating early childhood policy and administration under one ministry, often education;
• moves towards greater contact between early childhood centres and schools, and growing use of national curricular frameworks in the early childhood sector;
• the provision of at least two years of kindergarten before children enter compulsory schooling;
  growing, but still insufficient, government investment in services;
• more participatory approaches to quality improvement, based on wide consultation of stakeholders and the engagement of professional staff in documentation and research;
• clearer ideas at government level of the qualifications needed by staff to engage with rapidly changing social and family conditions;
• an increase in university chairs in early childhood education and care policy;
• and a recognition of the need for more country research and data collection in the field.