Accessibility of early childhood education and care: a state of affairs

Abstract

We analyse both academic literature and practice reports to discover the main causes for unequal accessibility of high quality early childhood care and education (ECEC). In order to understand and to remedy this inequality we need to consider the interplay between elements of governance, of the management of services and elements on the level of parents. From this analysis as well as from reports on successful inclusive practises, we arrive at five quality criteria and make 13 recommendations for policy and practice

The Role of Early Childhood Education in Developing Social Competence of Roma Children / Uloga ranog i predškolskog odgoja i obrazovanja u razvoju socijalne kompetencije romske djece

“…Despite the research (Vandenbroeck & Lazzari, 2014) that dealt with the importance of involving Roma children in early childhood and preschool education institutions, there is a lack of systematic research into the development of Roma children in an inclusive environment. The disadvantage of this research is that teachers evaluated the frequency of behaviours that can determine social competence.…”

Supporting (Super)Diversity in Early Childhood Settings

“…A first generation of this research has concentrated on parental choice, somewhat neglecting the notion that differences in behaviour are, to a large extent, moulded by environmental constraints, rather than the result of choices (Vandenbroeck & Lazzari, 2014). Second-generation studies focused, therefore, more on accessibility, availability and affordability and unveiled how policies have profound effects on differential use, showing, for instance, that universal services reach more underprivileged parents than targeted services and that markets are quite inefficient when it comes to fairness (e.g.…”

Perceived accessibility of childcare in Europe: a cross-country multilevel study

“…Although research on parental perception is essential, it is rarely investigated in both earlier and later stages of education (Anderson and Minke 2007;Cleveland et al 2013). In particular, perceptions of disadvantaged families on early childhood education have not attracted much interest with the exception of a few studies (Fram and Kim 2008;Fuller et al 1996;Henly and Lyons 2000;Vandenbroeck and Lazzari 2014), whose results are variant in terms of the dimensions of ECEC that they focus on such as preference motivations for home-based versus centre-based child care (Kim and Fram 2009;Li-Grining and Coley 2006), childcare arrangements (Henly and Lyons 2000), family processes (Fuller et al 1996) and access to information about ECEC and enrolment procedures (Vandenbroeck and Lazzari 2014).…”