The 2024 Global Report on Early Childhood Care and Education emphasises quality policy and investment in early education as essential to addressing the global learning crisis, Ella Doyle writes.
IEU members understand that quality and inclusive early childhood education and care (ECEC) influences school readiness, foundational learning and lifelong wellbeing.
Unfortunately, only 40 per cent of children in low-income countries have access to this level of ECEC.
The 2024 Global Report on Early Childhood Care and Education by the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) explores how children learn, the issues affecting access to ECEC and how research can be leveraged to improve access, investment and quality of service.
Essential investment
UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Education Stefania Gianni said transforming ECEC is essential in addressing life-long issues.
“Investing in our youngest children brings the greatest returns, both socially and economically,” Gianni said.
“It is the best investment a country can make.”
While many countries have emphasised the importance of ECEC in recent years, this support hasn’t translated into meaningful advances in the sector.
If improvements are not made, 37 per cent of the world’s children will not reach minimum proficiency in reading by 2030.
While this disproportionately affects lower-middle and low-income countries, this is a global fight to ensure all children have access to early education.
Policy and investment lagging
To reach the 2030 target for reading proficiency, 2.4 million children must be enrolled in ECEC each year.
To achieve this goal, governments must address global shortcomings in ECEC policy and investment.
Early childhood education teachers and assistants, along with the sector, are being severely undervalued. Poor funding to the sector has created a global shortage of ECEC teachers and assistants and subsequently driven preschool educator-to-child ratios up to 1:60 in low-income areas.
This is compounded by an increased shortage of trained educators with only 57 per cent of educators in low-income countries having qualifications.
With proper investments, countries could expand ECEC programmes, increase qualified practitioners and improve curricula.
Parental role
Globally, there is also limited assistance given to parents to support their children.
Parents play an equally important role as ECEC educators in teaching children during their first five years.
Without mandated provisions like parental leave, child cash grants and secure housing, vulnerable children will continue to be left behind.
The report establishes guidelines to measure the quality of ECEC.
To achieve a high standard, centres must:
- create a supportive learning environment
- facilitate learning by connecting lessons to other experiences, and
- promote the development of social and emotional skills.
Recommendations
The report offers nine recommendations to address these gaps in policy and investments:
- promote ECEC
- prioritise vulnerable children
- support parents and caregivers
- value ECEC personnel
- invest in data and reporting
- harness research to improve policy
- increase government investment
- enhance international efforts and partnerships, and
- expand the right to education to include ECEC.
Access the full report, and its recommendations at:unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000390215