Early childhood education and care (ECEC) is changing across Europe, reflecting multiple-policy intentions and assumptions about education in early years, and the role of the state in supporting, funding and regulating its institutions. In this article, we examine the evolution of ECEC comparatively in Finland and Sweden, and we explore the shifts…

Mother tongue-based education has been central to the promotion of early literacy skills in many multilingual contexts of the Global South. However, learners in such environments may face significant linguistic challenges when changing language of instruction during schooling. In particular, the linguistic distance between mother tongue and…

This collection summarises reflections from a group of Department for International Development (DFID) education advisers, spanning a number of different contexts and aspects of the topic of education projects that are working at scale to improve learning outcomes. In the first contribution, Gibbs shares a case study of an approach used to track…

A growing evidence base highlights the value of high-quality early childhood education (ECE) to children's cognitive and social development. However, far less is known about how families and children, especially in developing countries, participate in ECE or how these participation patterns reflect families' thinking and decision-making. This…

Recognition of young children as citizens is relatively new in sociology, with translation emerging into education. Discourses of children and childhood shape ideas of young children as citizens and national discourses of citizenship frame what civic participation can be. The authors analysed national early childhood education curricula frameworks…

This study examined the degrees of congruence between two early childhood evaluation systems on various quality concepts: the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale-Revised (ECERS-R) and Zhejiang's Kindergarten Quality Rating System (KQRS). Analysis of variance and post hoc least significant difference tests were employed to show the extent to…

While the importance of attending early learning programmes is increasingly evident, the provision of early learning programmes in developing countries has not grown in parallel. In this paper we examine how attendance in early learning programmes for children aged 3-6 years, the recommended period, differs within and across 52 developing…