On Thursday 23 January, the European Education and Culture Executive Agency published the third edition of its report on ‘Key Data on Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC)’ in Europe.
This overview of care for children under six in the European Union, the European Economic Area and the candidate countries is built around five dimensions agreed by the EU27: access, workforce, curriculum, monitoring and evaluation, and governance and funding.
The review shows that systems where policies are fully integrated - with a single ministry or high-level authority responsible for all ECEC services - achieve the highest scores.
Only seven European countries - Denmark, Germany, Estonia, Slovenia, Finland, Sweden and Norway - meet all the criteria: integrated governance under a lead authority, the right to a place from the earliest age for every child, staff with a licence in education working with each group of children and consistent educational guidelines throughout the ECEC phase.
All the other European countries have one or more areas for improvement.
According to the foreword by the Executive Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for Social Rights and Skills, Quality Jobs and Preparedness, Roxana Mînzatu, “the results are both encouraging and sobering”.
And for good reason: despite the reforms introduced in European countries over the last decade and a relative increase in average total spending on ECEC - from 0.67% of gross domestic product in 2014 to 0.71% in 2021 in the EU - “staff shortages, the need for better professional development and improved working conditions” remain pressing challenges.
While there is no comparable international data to confirm the low salaries of staff working with young children, information on pre-primary teachers shows that, in a third of European countries, their pay is lower than that of their primary school colleagues, for the same level of qualification.
Major reforms to improve staff qualifications have only been introduced in Italy and Finland, and the study calls for “substantial investment”.
To see the report: https://aeur.eu/f/f6b (Original version in French by Nithya Paquiry)