The present article investigates the effects of individual and contextual variables on children's early learning in French nursery schools and German kindergartens. Our study of 552 children at preschools in France (299 children from French nursery schools) and Germany (253 children from German kindergartens) measured skills that facilitate the learning of reading, writing and arithmetic at primary school. We also evaluated educational family practices and parents' expectations of their children's pre-school education. In order to take into account the hierarchical structure of our data, multilevel models were used in the analysis, which was carried out using MLwiN software version 2.02 (Rasbash et al. 2005). Although French nursery schools emphasise academic learning, we did not find any significant differences in overall performances between the French and German samples. However, significant differences were obtained for some subscale results. In addition, our results indicate that individual and contextual variables have an impact on the differences observed between children from the two countries.