The Right to A Strong Foundation
Executive summary
The world is not on track to achieve Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 and ensure inclusive and quality education and lifelong learning opportunities for all. Education, starting with early childhood education, is facing twin crises of equity and relevance. In response, the UN Secretary-General called for education to be transformed to meet twenty-first century needs and convened the Transforming Education Summit to mobilize leadership and political commitment to accelerate progress on SDG 4.
Supporting readiness for foundational learning must be an essential part of the response to the learning crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic aggravated the global learning crisis: an estimated 37% of the world’s children (more than 300 million) will not reach minimum proficiency levels in reading by 2030.
Access to quality early learning and care is a key way to help children develop the skills needed for foundational learning and to ensure that all girls and boys have access to quality early childhood development, care and pre-primary education by 2030 (SDG 4.2) so that they are ready for primary education. But real progress on supporting equitable access to quality early childhood care and education (ECCE) remains elusive. Commitments have not translated into action and at the current rate of progress, achieving SDG Target 4.2 by 2030 is off track.
Transforming education must begin with ECCE. However, ECCE policies and services are overly fragmented and data are lacking. The ECCE sector is grossly underfunded and greater investments are needed. Current levels of accessibility to learning opportunities in ECCE do not meet the demand for services. Non-state actors have become key players in most ECCE systems, driving a rapid increase in early childhood services, but testing governance and regulatory frameworks and potentially exacerbating inequalities.
Extending the right to education to include the right to early childhood care and education could accelerate progress on SDG Target 4.2. Evidence shows that adopting legal provisions for free or compulsory pre-primary education has positive effects on children’s early development, however, there is not yet an international legal framework that explicitly guarantees children’s right to early childhood care and education. Extending the right to education to include the right to ECCE could be an important policy lever to accelerate progress SDG Target 4.2.
This report is in response to a commitment in the Tashkent Declaration and Commitments to Action for Transforming Early Childhood Care and Education. Looking through the lens of the child at the core and adopting a whole-of-child developmental approach, the report explores how children learn and develop and how the key actors in children’s early environments – parents, families, educators and the community at large – can be leveraged through public policies and programmes to improve children’s learning and wellbeing. The report advocates for and gives evidence of the importance of ECCE to address the twin crisis of equity and relevance and support foundational learning.
How are children doing?
Inequalities start early, particularly affecting development outcomes for the most disadvantaged children. In countries with data, 30% of children are not developmentally on track. Children growing up in the poorest households and in rural areas are further behind. Only 55% of children aged 36 to 59 months growing up in the poorest households are developmentally on track, compared to 78% of children in the richest households.
The home and family environment play a critical role in early stimulation for learning. In countries with data, more than 7 out of 10 children living in the richest households receive early stimulation and responsive care compared to less than half of children living in the poorest households. On average in countries with data, about 25% of children are left without adequate supervision and 77% of young children experience violent discipline at home. Among countries with data, only 4% of the poorest children live in households with children’s books and only 46% of them have playthings at home.
Child care environments can promote early learning opportunities for social equity. Child care and pre-primary education programmes are in high demand, but few countries make services universally available and/or free to access, disproportionately impacting disadvantaged families, especially in low- and lower-middle-income countries. Children who attend early childhood education programmes are more likely to be on track for development. However, the enrolment rate for one year of organized learning before the start of primary school fell to 72% in 2022 from 75% in 2020.