UNICEF
Innocenti Research Centre
Report Card 8

The child caretransition
A league table of early childhood educationand care in economically advanced countries

This Innocenti Report Card was written by Peter Adamson drawing on
research, data and background papers provided by John Bennett. The
project was coordinated by UNICEF’s Innocenti Research Centre andassisted by an international panel of advisors (see page 36). Research
for Report Card 8 was completed at the end of April 2008.
Full text and supporting documentation, including two background
papers to this report, can be downloaded from the UNICEF Innocenti
Research Centre website: www.unicef-irc.org
Any part of the Innocenti Report Card may be freely reproduced using
the following reference:
UNICEF, The child care transition, Innocenti Report Card 8, 2008
UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, Florence.
© The United Nations Children’s Fund, 2008
The support of the German Committee for UNICEF in the developmentof Report Card 8 is gratefully acknowledged. Additional support wasprovided by the United Kingdom Committee for UNICEF, and by the
Andorran National Committee for UNICEF.

The Innocenti Report Card series is designed to monitor and compare
the performance of the OECD countries in securing the rights of theirchildren.
The UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre in Florence, Italy, wasestablished in 1988 to strengthen the research capability of the United
Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and to support its advocacy forchildren worldwide.
The Centre (formally known as the International Child Development
Centre) generates research into current and future areas of UNICEF’s
work. Its prime objectives are to improve international understandingof issues relating to children’s rights and to help facilitate the full
implementation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of theChild in both industrialized and developing countries.
The Centre’s publications are contributions to a global debate on childrights issues and include a wide range of opinions. For that reason, theCentre may produce publications that do not necessarily reflect
UNICEF policies or approaches on some topics.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarilyreflect the policy or views of UNICEF.
UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre
Piazza SS. Annunziata, 1250122 Florence, Italy
Tel: (+39) 055 20 330
Fax: (+39) 055 2033 220
florence@unicef.org
www.unicef-irc.org

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UNICEF
Innocenti Research Centre

A great change is coming over childhood in the world’s
richest countries.
Today’s rising generation is the first in which a majority are
spending a large part of early childhood in some form of
out-of-home child care.
At the same time, neuroscientific research is demonstratingthat loving, stable, secure, and stimulating relationships
with caregivers in the earliest months and years of life are
critical for every aspect of a child’s development.
Taken together, these two developments confront public
and policymakers in OECD countries with urgent questions.
Whether the child care transition will represent an advanceor a setback – for today’s children and tomorrow’s world –will depend on the response.

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8Fig. 1 Early childhood services – a league table
This Report Card discusses the opportunities and risks involved in the child care transition, and proposesinternationally applicable benchmarks for early childhood care and education – a set of minimum standards forprotecting the rights of children in their most vulnerable and formative years.
The table below shows which countries are currently meeting the suggested standards, and summarizes this firstattempt to evaluate and compare early childhood services in the 25 OECD countries in which data have been collected.
10

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6

¸

¸

¸

¸

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6

¸

New Zealand

6

¸

¸

Slovenia6¸¸Austria5¸

Netherlands

5

¸

¸

United Kingdom*

5

¸

¸

Germany

4

¸

¸

Italy

4

¸

¸

¸

Japan

4

¸

¸

¸

Portugal

4

¸

¸

¸

¸

Republic of Korea

4

¸

¸

¸

Mexico

3

¸

¸

¸

Spain

3

¸

¸

Switzerland

3

United States

3

¸

¸

Australia2¸¸Canada1¸

Ireland1¸

Total benchmarks met

126

Number of benchmarks achieved

Near-universal outreach of
essential child health services

9Child poverty rate less than 10%81.0% of GDP spent on earlychildhood services

7
Minimum staff-to-children ratio of
1:15 in pre-school education

6
50% of staff in accredited earlyeducation services tertiary
educated with relevant qualification

580% of all child care staff trained

4

Subsidized and accredited
early education services
for 80% of 4 year-olds

3

Subsidized and regulatedchild care services for 25%
of children under 3

2

A national plan with priority fordisadvantaged children

1

Parental leave of 1 year at
50% of salary

BenchmarkSweden10

Iceland9

Denmark8¸

Finland

8

France8

Norway8

Belgium (Flanders)
Hungary

¸

¸
¸

¸
¸
¸

¸

¸

¸

¸

¸

¸

¸

¸

¸

¸

¸
¸

¸

¸
¸

¸

¸
¸

*Data for the United Kingdom refer to England only.

19

13

15

17

¸
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6

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20

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12

6

10

8

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care

A great change is occurring in the way
in which children are being brought
up in the world’s economicallyadvanced countries. After centuries ofbeing a predominantly private, family
affair, the care of very young children
is now becoming, in significant degree,
an out-of-home activity in whichgovernments and private enterprise are
increasingly involved. Today’s rising
generation in the countries of the
OECD* is the first in which a majority
are spending a large part of their earlychildhoods not in their own homes
with their own families but in someform of child care.
The change is far from complete andits pattern varies from country tocountry. But there is no doubting theoverall scale and direction of thetransition. Approximately 80 per centof the rich world’s three-to-six yearolds are now in some form of earlychildhood education and care. For
those under the age of three, theproportion using child care is now
approximately 25 per cent for theOECD as a whole and more than
50 per cent in individual countries(Fig. 2). Across the industrialized
nations, out-of-home child care is afact of life for ever more children
at ever earlier ages and for everlonger hours.
* The Organisation for Economic Co-operation andDevelopment, the international organization of the industrialized
market-economy countries.

T ransition

In the last decade many OECD
countries have also begun to see sharp
rises in the numbers of infants – thoseunder the age of one year – being
cared for outside the home. Statistics
for this age group are few. But in the
United Kingdom,** for example, amajority of mothers are now
returning to full or part time workwithin 12 months of giving birth.i
Similarly in the United States, morethan 50 per cent of under-ones are insome form of child care – threequarters of them from the age of fourmonths or earlier and for an averageof 28 hours per week.ii In Flemish
Belgium, more than a third of infants
are entering some form of child carewithin the first year of life.
Fig. 2 provides the best available
nation-by-nation snapshot of thecurrent picture. For four-year-olds, 16
out of the 24 countries for which data
are available have passed the 75 percent mark for pre-school enrolment.
In Belgium, France, Italy, and Spain,
enrolment of four-year-olds is now
virtually 100 per cent. For children
under the age of three, Denmark and
Iceland have the highest rates ofenrolment (around 60 per cent).
These data should be interpreted withcare. The percentages given reflect** Unless otherwise stated, data for the United Kingdom refer
to England only.

neither the quality nor the availabilityof the services offered. The figure for
the United Kingdom, for example,
refers to children using free earlychildhood education centres for two
and a half hours per day (available fornine months of the year); the figure
for Sweden, by contrast, refers to fullworking-day services (available, shouldparents wish, for 11 months of theyear). It should also be emphasizedthat these data freeze what is in fact a
rapidly changing picture.

Driving change
The forces driving the child caretransition are as evident as thechange itself.
First, more than two thirds of all
women of working age in the OECD
countries are today employed outside
the home. Many are postponing
childbearing by a decade or morecompared with mothers of previous
generations and many have wellestablished careers to take into
consideration. In as much as thisreflects progress towards equality ofopportunity for women, it is cause forcelebration. But in as much as it
represents mounting economic
pressures, it is cause for concern. Evenamong the well-paid, two incomes areoften necessary if housing and otherexpenses are to be met. Among the
low-paid, a family of two adults andtwo children will usually need aFig. 2

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8Fig. 2a Enrolment of 0-3 year-olds in child care

The child care transition, an overview

DenmarkFigs. 2a, 2b, and 2c provide the best
current picture of the transition to childcare in those OECD countries for whichdata are available. Unfortunately, nointernationally comparable data are
available for enrolment under the age of
one year.

Iceland
NorwaySwedenUnited States
Finland
Belgium
New Zealand
Netherlands
Australia
FranceUnited Kingdom
Slovenia
OECD Average
Portugal
Spain
Republic of Korea
CanadaJapan
IrelandGermany
Hungary
Austria
Italy
Mexico
0

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

Source: OECD Family database and OECD Education database (2004).
Date: Text to be confirmed

minimum of one full-time and one
part-time job (at the minimum wage)
just to stay above national poverty
lines. Most single parents need a fulltime job plus benefits. And the poorer
the family, the greater the pressure to
return to work as soon as possible
after a birth – often to unskilled, lowpaid jobs. For many millions ofmothers, therefore, rising employmentpressures reflect not new opportunities
but new necessities.
Second, this great change inchildhood is being driven by
economic pressures on governments;
more women in the workforce boosts
GDP, increases income from taxes, andreduces welfare costs.
Third, an increasingly competitive,knowledge-based global economy ishelping to convince both governments
and parents that pre-school education
is an investment in future academic
success and employment prospects(Box 2).

Fourth, some OECD countries havecome to see child care services as aprop to falling birth rates. “If Europe isto reverse its demographic decline,” noted
the European Commission in 2005,“families must be further encouraged bypublic policies that allow men and women
to reconcile family life with work.”
For all of these inter-related reasons,the child care transition is everywhere
being facilitated by public policy. All
countries in the European Union, forexample, now guarantee at least two or
three years of pre-school. European
Union leaders have agreed that by2010 they should be providing free orsubsidized full day-care for at least 33
per cent of children under the age ofthree and for 90 per cent of those aged
three-to-six.* In the United States
there is at the moment no statutory
right to pre-school education before
the age of five, but in practice morethan 60 per cent of America’s 10* Targets already met by Belgium (Flanders), Denmark, Finland,
Iceland, Norway, and Sweden.

million pre-school children are in someform of early childhood programme.
“Pre-school enrolments,” says the US
National Research Council, “are large,
growing, and here to stay.”
These, in brief, are some of the forcespressing both governments and families
in OECD countries towards radicallynew patterns of child care. And despite
significant differences in policy andpractice, it is clear that theindustrialized nations as a whole aremoving not only towards out-of-homecare for a significant percentage of
infants and toddlers but also towards
systems of universal education thatbegin not with formal schooling at theage of five or six but with earlychildhood education beginning at theage of three.
Given such pressures, there is a clear
danger that the child care transition
may follow a course that is determinedby the needs and pressures of the
moment, uninfluenced by long term

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Fig. 2b Enrolment of 4 year-olds in early education
Italy
FranceBelgium
Spain
Iceland* New ZealandJapan
Denmark
United Kingdom
Hungary
SwedenNorwayGermany
Portugal
Austria
OECD Average
Slovenia
Netherlands* Mexico* Republic of Korea

United States* Australia

Finland
Ireland
Switzerland
0

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

120%

Source: EUROSTAT (2005).
Source: Eurostat 2005 Note: * = data from OECD Family database (2004)* Data from OECD Family database (2004).

Fig. 2c Enrolment of 3-6 year-olds in early education
Francevision or choice. This Report Card
therefore attempts a broad view of thechanges coming over child care in theindustrial world and highlights some of
the longer-term opportunities and risks
inherent in changing, on such a scale,the way in which a majority of ourchildren are being cared for in theirmost formative years.
In particular, it looks at this greatchange from the one point of view thatis in danger of being neglected and thatis so clearly set out in article
3 of the Convention on the Rights of
the Child – that in all actions
concerning children “the best interestsof the child shall be a primaryconsideration.”

A parallel revolution
At the same time as this great change
in childhood has been stealing acrossthe industrialized world, a parallel
revolution in understanding theimportance of early childhood has been
quietly unfolding in the less publicarena of neuroscientific research.

Italy
Belgium
Spain
Iceland
New Zealand
Denmark
Hungary
SwedenJapan
NorwayUnited Kingdom
Germany
PortugalSlovenia
Austria
Australia
Netherlands
Ireland
OECD Average
MexicoUnited States
Republic of Korea
Finland
Switzerland
0

20%

40%

60%

Source: OECD Family database and OECD Education database (2004).
Date: Text to be confirmed

80%

100%

120%

Box 1 summarizes some of the key
concepts to emerge from this research.
They include: the sequence of ‘sensitive
periods’ in brain development; theimportance of ‘serve and return’relationships with carers; the role oflove as a foundation for intellectual aswell as emotional development; thefostering of the child’s growing sense ofagency; the ways in which thearchitecture of the developing brain
can be disrupted by stress; and thecritical importance of early interactions
with family members and carers in thedevelopment of stress management
systems. New technologies and new
research tools are beginning toilluminate these processes in moredetail, and have led to a widespreadconviction that what is now known to
the neuroscientific community should
be made more widely known topoliticians, press and public.

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For present purposes, the chief importof such findings is that it is the child’s
early interactions with others, andparticularly with family and caregivers,
that establishes the patterns of neuralconnections and chemical balances
which profoundly influence what wewill become, what we will be capableof, and how we will respond to theworld around us. Working within thepotential of genetic inheritance, it isearly experience that is the architectof the human brain, putting in place
both the foundations and scaffolding

for future development. “All aspects ofadult human capital, from workforce skills
to cooperative and lawful behavior, build on
capacities that are developed duringchildhood, beginning at birth,” concludes a
recent report by the US National
Scientific Council. iii
In other words, neuroscience is
beginning to confirm and explain the
inner workings of what social scienceand common experience have long
maintained – that loving, stable, secure,stimulating and rewarding relationships

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8with family and caregivers in the earliest
months and years of life are critical foralmost all aspects of a child’sdevelopment.
In relation to the change currently
coming across childhood in theeconomically developed world, thesignificance of these findings canhardly be overestimated. This reportwill argue that it is the coming
together of these two different
developments – the mass movement
towards out-of-home child care andBox 1 Neuroscience: serve and return

At the heart of recent research into the development of
the human brain is something that seems about as far
away from hard science as it is possible to get. The waythat most parents respond to babies – the baby-talk, theback-and-forth smiling and gurgling, the repeating ofsounds, words, gestures, the besotted rejoicing over every
small step in the infant’s progress – all this does not lend
itself easily to scientific analysis. Yet it is exactly this kindof intimate, loving one-to-one interaction that, along withadequate nutrition, constitutes the essential input to thechild’s emotional, physical and cognitive development.
In an attempt to describe this process in more scientificterms, researchers have developed terms such as‘maternal/paternal sensitivity/responsivity’, ‘mutuality’ and‘reciprocity’. They also frequently employ analogies suchas ‘the dance of mutual responsiveness’ or ‘the serve andreturn process’. This last, for example, is described in The
Science of Early Childhood Development by the Center on
the Developing Child at Harvard University:“ ‘Serve and return’ happens when young children naturally
reach out for interaction through babbling, facial
expressions, words, gestures, and cries, and adults
respond by getting in sync and doing the same kind of
vocalising and gesturing back at them, and the processcontinues back and forth. Another important aspect of the‘serve and return’ notion of interaction is that it works bestwhen it is embedded in an ongoing relationship betweena child and an adult who is responsive to the child’s own
unique individuality. Decades of research tell us thatmutually rewarding interactions are essential prerequisites
for the development of healthy brain circuits andincreasingly complex skills.” 1

A second core concept is the identification of ‘sensitive
periods’ in the sequential development of the humanbrain. Each of these periods is associated with specificareas of neurological circuitry and with specific humanabilities. And each builds on the circuits and skills laid
down in the previous period. It is this process that sets
the stage for all future cognitive and emotional
development – a stage that is either sturdy or shaky
depending on the kind and quality of interactions withprimary caregivers in the earliest months and years of life.
Related to this is the finding that care and education are
not separate processes. The close emotional interaction
between parent and child is as essential for intellectual as
for emotional development. Purely didactic efforts – aimed
at developing a child’s cognitive abilities – are likely toundermine what they seek to promote if emotional needs
are neglected. The study Eager to Learn,2 for example,
concludes that “Care and education cannot be thoughtof as separate entities in dealing with young children.
…Neither loving children nor teaching them is, in andof itself, sufficient for optimal development.”
Research has also drawn attention to the importance ofstress levels in the early months and years of life.
According to Professor Jack Shonkoff, Director of Harvard
University’s Center on the Developing Child, excessive
levels of stress hormones “literally disrupt brainarchitecture.”
Too much or too prolonged stress at this time – and thelack of a familiar, trusted adult to provide the prompt,
intimate reassurance that helps bring stress hormonesback to baseline levels – can result in a mis-setting of theI nnocenti

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today’s greater understanding ofwhat is happening to the humanbrain in the early months and yearsof life – that now present public andpolicymakers with large and urgent
questions. Whether the child caretransition will represent an advanceor a setback – both for today’schildren and tomorrow’s world –will depend on the wisdom of the
response. That response must begin
with increased concern for, andcloser monitoring of, this greatchange as it gathers momentum8

and begins to spread to other parts of
the world.*

Benchmarks
As a contribution to this process, thisReport Card advances the idea of aninternationally applicable set ofminimum standards by which therights of young children might beprotected as the transition to childcare gathers momentum.
* It should be noted that the former centrally-planned
economies of Eastern and Central Europe invested heavily inchild care facilities in the decades before 1990.

The 10 benchmarks suggested, drawn
up in consultation with government
officials and academic experts from
OECD countries in Asia, Europe,and North America, with additional
input from both UNICEF and theWorld Bank,** represent a firstattempt towards evaluating andcomparing early childhood services** The cooperation of governments in this initiative is muchappreciated. It is recognized that governments can accept no
responsibility for the interpretation of the information suppliedor for the selection of the benchmarks themselves. The
information provided by governments is complemented by
official data supplied to the OECD, and by further discussions
with academic experts at national level.

Core concepts“Four core concepts important to devising soundsocial policy toward early childhood have emerged
from decades of independent research in economics,
neuroscience, and developmental psychology. First,
the architecture of the brain and the process of skill
formation are influenced by an interaction between
genetics and individual experience. Second, themastery of skills that are essential for economic
success and the development of their underlying
neural pathways follow hierarchical rules. Laterattainments build on foundations that are laid down
earlier. Third, cognitive, linguistic, social, andemotional competencies are interdependent; all are
shaped powerfully by the experiences of thedeveloping child; and all contribute to success in thesociety at large. Fourth, although adaptation continues
throughout life, human abilities are formed in a
predictable sequence of sensitive periods, during which
the development of specific neural circuits and the
behaviors they mediate are most plastic and therefore
optimally receptive to environmental influences.”

brain’s stress levels. In particular, the persistent elevationof the stress hormone cortisol is known to be damaging to
the delicate architecture of the developing brain, and isrelated to stress-related illness in later life. Mental healthrequires stress management systems that boost the levelof the stress hormones in response to perceived threats
and reduce them again when the challenge has passed.
Beginning even before birth, it is in early childhood thatthese chemical balances are set.

continuing into later life – most commonly arise fromdisturbances in that relationship.3

Finally, research has also drawn attention to the child’s
emerging sense of ‘agency’ – the feeling of being able toinfluence events and situations. If this is encouraged byadult responses, then motivation, confidence andcompetence will tend to flourish. If it is not reinforced, or
if it is actively discouraged by negative reaction orpunishment, then these essential aspects of psychologicaldevelopment are likely to be compromised.
For all of these reasons, the relationship between infants
and parents or primary caregivers is critical to the child’s
emotional, psychological and cognitive development.
Developmental and behavioural problems – often

Heckman J. J, ‘Skill Formation and the Economics of Investingin Disadvantaged Children’, Science, vol. 312. no. 5782,
pp. 1900-1902, 30 June 2006.

All of this has clear implications for the care andupbringing of very young children. And in the transition
towards early childhood education and care, it is essentialthat findings such as those described here should become
part of political and public awareness.

1 National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, The Science of
Early Childhood Development: Closing the gap between what weknow and what we do, Center on the Developing Child at Harvard
University, Cambridge MA, 2007, p. 6.
2 National Research Council, Eager to Learn: Educating our preschoolers, Committee on Early Childhood Pedagogy, Bowman, B. T.,
M. S. Donovan and M. S. Burns (eds.); Commission on Behavioral andSocial Sciences and Education, National Academy Press, Washington,
D. C., 2001, p. 2.
3 National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, From Neurons
to Neighborhoods: The science of early childhood development,
Committee on Integrating the Science of Early Childhood Development,
Shonkoff, J. P. and D. A. Phillips (eds.), Board on Children, Youth andFamilies, Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences andEducation, National Academy Press, Washington, D.C., 2000, p. 28.

in the 25 countries in which data havebeen collected. The resulting
benchmarks table (Fig. 1) shows whichof those countries are currently
meeting the suggested standards andwhich are not.
Overall, Sweden tops the table bymeeting all 10 benchmarks, followed
closely by Iceland which meets 9, andby Denmark, Finland, France, andNorway which meet 8. Only three
countries – Australia, Canada, andIreland – meet fewer than 3.
At this stage, there is an inevitablecrudeness about such a table, born of
the fact that the selection of indicatorsand the evaluation of country
performance are circumscribed by theavailability of data. A number ofimportant caveats are therefore
necessary: The benchmarks represent basic
minimum standards rather than aguarantee of high quality earlychildhood services.
 They relate, for the most part, toout-of-home, centre-based childcare rather than to informal, homebased or neighbourhood day-care
centres.
 They take no account of othersignificant services such as social
welfare programmes, home visiting
programmes designed to reach out
to children at risk, or programmes
aimed at supporting goodparenting.
 They offer no measure of parental
involvement in early childhood
services.
 They are directed towards what
governments can do to ensure thatthe child care transition is managed
in the best interests of bothchildren and their societies’ futures.
This last point is particularly
important. It is parents who carry the

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main responsibility for the educationand care of their children, and in theOECD countries today parents aremaking use of a wide variety of
informal and often unrecorded childcare arrangements (Box 3). Thosearrangements are largely beyond thescope of this report – except to notethat that new knowledge about theimportance of the early childhood
period applies to all forms of earlychildhood education and care; today,care without education is not care.

Common standards
Despite these limitations, theproposed benchmarks represent an
initial step towards an OECD-widemonitoring of what is happening tochildren in the child care transition. If
this process can be continued, andrefined through better definition anddata collection, then there is much to
be gained.
First, the benchmarks begin theprocess of establishing a common
core of minimum standards for earlychildhood services. In fields such as
health care, employment law, and theeducation of older children, common
standards have stimulated andsupported sustained progress. Backed
by good data, cross national
monitoring can: highlight thestrengths and weaknesses of individual
countries; illustrate what can andshould be expected from advanced
economies; show what leading
countries have been able to achieve inpractice; and direct attention towards
the importance of managing the childcare transition rather than allowing its
course to be determined only by
short-term pressures.
Second, the establishing of
benchmarks is a step towards
monitoring the Convention on the
Rights of the Child as it applies tovery young children (Box 6). Childrights do not begin at the age of five;

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yet the rights of very young children
have often been overlooked andaccountability is not possible withouta clear set of minimum standards forearly childhood services.
Third, the proposed benchmarks may
increasingly become useful to nonOECD nations in which the childcare transition is already underway. The
indicators proposed are likely to be
relevant for most countries, although
the particular values attached to such
indicators might need to berecalibrated in order to reflect different
economic levels and different stages inthe development of early childhood
services.

The positive potential
Despite the concerns that will beraised in this report, it should be saidfrom the beginning that the movetowards early childhood education andcare brings with it an enormous
potential for good. Box 2 briefly
summarizes several of the studies that
demonstrate this potential.
For the children themselves, child carecan mean enjoying and benefitingfrom interaction with other children
and with child care professionals.
Cognitive, linguistic, emotional, andsocial development can be enhanced,
and the effects appear to be longlasting. For immigrant and ‘second
language’ children, good quality childcare can help with integration andlanguage skills and reduce disadvantage
on entry into the formal education
system (Box 5). For many millions of
women, child care can erode one of
the last great obstacles to equality ofopportunity. For many millions ofparents, child care can help reconcile
the competing demands and pleasuresof income-earning and family life. For
national economies, the availability ofchild care that allows parents to return
to work can increase GDP and public
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welfare budgets, and boost returns on
public investments in education.
Most important of all, early childhood
education and care also offers an
opportunity for societies to attempt afurther significant reduction in poverty,
inequality, and disadvantage.
As previous reports in this series haveshown, educational disadvantage isstrongly associated with homebackground and becomes measurable
even before formal schooling begins.
Three-year-old children of moreeducated parents, for example, often
have double the vocabulary of children
from poorer, less educated homes andare significantly more likely to achieve
higher qualifications by the age of 15.iv
Potentially, the transition to earlychildhood education and care could
help to break this cycle; it could help
to give all children, not just thewinners in the lottery of birth, astrong start in life. And in so doing, it
could help to reduce the educational,
developmental and behaviouralproblems that are so often faced by
disadvantaged children and theirsocieties.
Common sense – and a significant
body of research – supports the ideathat extending the benefits of goodquality early education and care to all
children tends to reduce disadvantage.
In a detailed review of the costs andbenefits in OECD countries, forexample, Canadian researchers
Cleveland and Krashinsky found that:“Although early childhood education andcare benefits all children, much of theevidence suggests that the largest benefits
flow to children from the mostdisadvantaged families…good childcare
can compensate, at least partially, for a
disadvantaged home life.” v
Similarly, a report by the US National
Research Council concludes that child8care can “protect children from familybased risk” and from “the detrimental
effects of both poverty and maternal
depression” as well as domestic conflict.
Carefully designed interventions, says
the report, “have been shown to
influence the developmental trajectories ofchildren whose life course is threatenedby socioeconomic disadvantage, family
disruption, and diagnosed disabilities.” vi
The same conclusion has been reachedby the 2006 review of early childhood
services by the OECD: “Research froma wide range of countries shows thatearly intervention contributes significantly
to putting children from low income
families on the path to development andsuccess in school.” vii
Disadvantaged children can be
identified by the accumulation of wellestablished warning signs. Individual ‘atrisk’ signals include: a home in which
there is persistent poverty andunemployment; or in which parents
have little education; or in which there
is a history of substance abuse, mental
illness or depression; or in whichfamilies are struggling to be integrated
into the prevailing language andculture. Identification of the at-riskchild is therefore not the primary
problem. And if the child caretransition is to narrow rather thanwiden inequalities of opportunity, thenit is at-risk children who must be
given priority in the planning of earlychildhood services. As a recent (2007)
report from the Center on theDeveloping Child at Harvard
University puts the case: “The need toaddress significant inequalities inopportunity, beginning in the earliest
years of life, is both a fundamental moral
responsibility and a critical investment in
our nation’s social and economic
future.” viii
The practical difficulties of realising
this potential are formidable. Home
background is and will continue to be

the single most powerful influence on achild’s development, and even highquality early childhood education andcare cannot be expected to compensate
fully for poverty or poor parenting. But
if disadvantaged children are given firstcall on early childhood services, if thoseservices are of sufficiently high quality,
and if services also reach out tocommunities with parenting support,then countries undergoing the childcare transition have a rare opportunity
to mitigate the effects of poverty anddisadvantage on the futures of many
millions of children.
In practice this will be a long anddifficult road. But no challenge makes amore legitimate claim on societies’
ingenuities and resources than the taskof using what is now known about earlychildhood development to ensure that
all children have the best possible startand the best possible chance to become
all that they are capable of.
Nor can it be convincingly argued thatit cannot be afforded. Cost-benefit
analyses of early childhood interventions
have shown, in different settings, thatthe returns on early childhood
education and care can be as high as $8
for every $1 invested. The conclusions
from such studies are perhaps bestsummed up by James Heckman in alandmark article in Science (2006):“Investing in disadvantaged young
children is a rare public policy initiativethat promotes fairness and social justice
and at the same time promotes productivity
in the economy and in society at large.
Early interventions targeted toward
disadvantaged children have much higher
returns than later interventions such as
reduced pupil-teacher ratios, public job
training, convict rehabilitation programs,
tuition subsidies, or expenditure on police.
At current levels of resources, society overinvests in remedial skill investments atlater ages and under invests in the earlyyears.” ix

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8

Box 2 Benefits: the evidence

Evidence for the advantages of high quality earlychildhood education and care is accumulating as longterm evaluations become available. Some examples:
SwedenOne of the first long-term studies of the effects of earlychildhood services was conducted in Sweden in the early
1990s. Based on an assessment of children in 128 low andmiddle income families in two of Sweden’s largest cities,
the study concluded that early childhood education andcare was associated with an improvement in academic
performance at the age of 13. Study director Bengt-Erik
Andersson concluded: “early entrance into day-care tends topredict a creative, socially confident, popular, open andindependent adolescent.”
FranceA study of more than 20,000 pre-school children found thatthe longer the child attended pre-school, the more positive
the results in all grades of elementary education. Positiveeffects were lasting – being greater in fifth grade than in
first – and the benefits were greatest for children fromdisadvantaged homes.
United States
A 2005 study of the effectiveness of the Early Head Start(EHS) programme in the United States, based on a random
sample of over 3,000 families in 17 EHS programmes, has
shown that participating children have better cognitive andlanguage development, are more capable of sustained
attention, and behave less aggressively towards others.
Surveying all of these and other long-term studies, Canadian
researchers Cleveland and Krashinsky conclude:“Overwhelmingly, these studies have found that good childcare can have very positive effects on these children andthat these advantages can be long-lasting. In particular, good
child care can compensate, at least partially, for a
disadvantaged home life.”
North Carolina, United States
A generation ago, the North Carolina Abecedarian Project
enrolled 112 disadvantaged children in a five year, full day,five days a week programme of child care beginning, insome cases, when the children were only three months old.

Those selected for the programme were judged to be at‘high risk of developmental problems’.
Researchers have since followed their progress throughschool and into adult life. Compared to similar children who
did not have the benefit of the programme, theAbecedarians showed higher levels of intelligence andschool achievement, higher earnings (an additional $143,000
when projected over a working lifetime), better health, andless dependence on welfare.
With staff-to-children ratios of 1:3 for infants, 2:7 for
toddlers, and 1:6 for four and five year-olds, the costs of the
project were high ($14,000 per child in 2002 dollars – higher
than the equivalent costs for secondary education).
Nonetheless, the experiment is estimated to have yielded a
return of $4 to every $1 of public money invested.
Ypsilanti, Michigan, United States
The Perry Pre-school Project ran from 1962 to 1967 andbrought pre-school education to African-American three andfour year-olds from poor backgrounds. Most of the children,
who were judged to be at high risk of school failure,participated in the project for one year, attending each
weekday morning for two and a half hours. Afternoon visitsby teachers to the homes of participating children were alsoa regular part of the programme.
Comparing 64 children who participated in the project with
64 similar children who did not, a long-term evaluation foundthat the Perry Project children had higher IQs, averaged
almost a year extra in education, had a 44 per cent higher
chance of graduating from high school, and spent an
average of 1.3 fewer years in special education services.
Followed up at age 27, they were found to have had a 50
per cent lower rate of teenage pregnancy and were almost
50 per cent less likely to have spent time in jail (with a one
third lower arrest rate for violent crime).
Monitored again at age 40, they were found to have amedian income that was 40 per cent higher than thecontrol group. They were also more likely to own theirown homes and 26 per cent less likely to have received
welfare payments.

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8

The Perry Pre-school Project was intensively managed
and well-resourced. Staff-to-children ratios averaged 1:6,
with all staff educated to degree level and trained as
public school teachers. Staff also made regular once-aweek home visits to support mothers and to invite theirinvolvement in reinforcing the pre-school curriculum athome. Overall, the cost was approximately $11,300 per
child per year (in 2007 dollars). A 1995 evaluationsuggested that the returns – mainly in the form of
reduced welfare and reduced costs for coping with crime– amounted to approximately $7 for every $1 invested in
the project. A further evaluation published in 2006
calculated the benefit-cost ratio (the ratio of theaggregate project benefits over the life of the child to the
input costs) at more than $8 for every $1 invested.
California, United States
The 2005 report The Economics of Investing in Universal
Preschool Education in California found that children who
attended pre-schools were more likely to graduate fromhigh school, earned higher salaries as adults, and wereless likely to become involved in crime. The authors
claim that even if only 25 per cent of California’s children
benefited from universal pre-school education, the state
could still expect a return of $2 for every $1 invested.

1 1

Summing up
In a presentation to the United States Congress in
2003, Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Professor of Child
Development at Columbia University, New York,summarized the benefits of early childhood education
as follows: High quality centre-based programmes enhance
the school-related achievement and behaviour ofyoung children.
 These effects are strongest for poor children andfor children whose parents have little education.
 Positive benefits continue into late elementary
school and high school years, although effects are
smaller than they were at the beginning ofelementary school.
 Programmes that are continued into primaryschool, and that offer intensive early intervention,
have the most sustained long-term effects.
 If properly linked to other services, early childhood
services can be expected to deliver additional
outcomes, such as enhanced maternal
employment, less family poverty, better parenting
skills and greater family and community cohesion.

New Zealand
The latest (2004) survey of the Competent Children
Project in New Zealand shows that 12 year-olds who
participated in high quality early childhood education
performed better in reading and math. The differences
remained even after family income and parental
education were taken into account.
United Kingdom
The Effective Provision of Pre-school Education (EPPE)
is a long-term study of young children’s development.
Based on a random sample of the UK’s child population,
the 2003 EPPE report concludes that pre-school
enhances children’s cognitive and social development
and that the effects are greatest for disadvantaged
children – especially if pre-schools bring together
children of mixed backgrounds. Benefits are positively
correlated with measures of programme quality andstaff qualifications.

These and other studies on the effectiveness of early childhood
education and care are summarized and referenced in chapter III of the
background paper to this report – Early Childhood Services in the OECDCountries, Innocenti Working Paper 2008-01 (www.unicef-irc.org).

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The potential for harm
Alongside the potential for good, it
will be equally evident that thetransition to child care also brings
with it the potential for harm.
Box 1 shows that, for babies andinfants, a lack of close interaction andcare with parents can result in themis-setting of the body’s stressmanagement systems in ways that canmake it more difficult for the child toregulate his or her responses to theworld. In some instances, and for somechildren, the long-term effects may
include depression, withdrawal,
inability to concentrate, and otherforms of mental ill health. In a larger
number of less obvious cases, theresult is likely to be less than optimal
cognitive and linguistic development
and underachievement in school.
Concern has also been expressed
about whether child care may weaken
the attachment between parent andchild, and whether it may not be
putting at risk the child’s developing
sense of security and trust in others.
Doubts have also been raised about
possible long-term effects on
psychological and social development,
and about whether the rise of childcare may be associated with a rise inbehavioural problems in school-age
children.
Today, a number of long-term studies
are beginning to clarify these issues.
The earliest of these – initiated in1991 by the US National Institute ofChild Health and Human
Development (NICHD) – hasmonitored the child care experiences
and later outcomes of over 1,300
children in the United States. Overall,
the study found that child care wasassociated with relatively small
differences, negative or positive, on
either abilities or behaviours. However,
it noted among its conclusions:

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8“The more time children spent in childcare from birth to age four-and-a-half,
the more adults tended to rate them…asless likely to get along with others, as
more assertive, as disobedient and as
aggressive.” x

Penelope Leach, child care specialist
for more than four decades and codirector of another large-scale UK
study – Families, Children and Child
Care – offers the following overview
of the evidence to date:This negative association appears to berelated to the length of time spent inchild care and holds good whatever
the quality of the care experienced;
but it is worth repeating that theeffects recorded were not large andthat the quality of parenting was foundto be a far more significant influencethan time spent in child care (indeed
negative effects were not found at all
in children who benefited from goodparenting).

“It is fairly clear from data from different
parts of the world that the less timechildren spend in group care before three
years, the better. Infants spending as little
as 12 hours a week in day nurseries…
showed slightly lower levels of social
development and emotional regulation(less enthusiastic cooperation,
concentration, social engagement andinitiative) as toddlers. …Somewhere after
two years, as the children begin to relate
more to each other than to the adult,
then high-quality, group-based carebecomes an unequivocal benefit.” xiiSome have argued that the effects
noted in the NICHD study are too
small to be significant. Others havecountered that even a small but
widespread rise in aggressive anddisruptive behaviours could havesignificant effects on classroom ethos,on the difficulties faced by teachers,
and on the learning environment for
all children.
Europe’s first major long-term study
was launched in 1997 in the United
Kingdom with the aim of tracking the
progress of over 3,000 children fromage 3 to age 7. In its final report –Effective Provision of Pre-school
Education – the study found that preschool education for three and four
year-olds improved both cognitive andsocial skills, but noted that “high levelsof ‘group care’ before the age of three(and particularly before the age of two)
were associated with higher levels of antisocial behaviour at age 3.” xi
The degree to which such findings are
relevant to countries other than the
United Kingdom and the UnitedStates is debated. But as yet, few othercountries have conducted long-term
studies on the effects of child care.

At present, therefore, the mostimportant generalization to be made isthat the younger the child and thelonger the hours spent in child care
the greater the risk. In particular, longhours of child care for those under theage of one year is widely regarded as
inappropriate. Inadequate care at thismost critical of all stages may result inweak foundations and shaky
scaffolding for future learning; andwhat is true of cognitive and linguistic
skills is also true of psychological andemotional development.
Overall, there is a broad consensus thatchild care that is ‘too early and for too
long’ can be damaging.

Responses of governments
In sum, the two-way potential of thelarge-scale movement to out-of-homechild care poses a challenge to allparents and to all countries currently
going through the child care transition.
Most OECD governments have
responded by formulating policy andinvesting public resources in theprovision of early childhood education

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and care. In almost every industrializedcountry, support for parents in thebringing up of children is now
regarded as a duty of governments andis explicitly recognized as such by theConvention on the Rights of the Child
which almost all OECD countries have
ratified (Box 6). Article 18 of theConvention states, for example, thatgovernments should “render appropriate
assistance to parents and legal guardiansin the performance of their child-rearing
responsibilities and shall ensure thedevelopment of institutions, facilities andservices for the care of children.” The
Convention also calls on all
governments to “take all appropriate
measures to ensure that children ofworking parents have the right to benefit
from child-care services and facilities forwhich they are eligible.”
The approach to the task, however,varies considerably from country tocountry. In some, early childhood
services are as well established and wellfunded as primary schools. In others,
they are often muddled in purpose,
uneven in access, patchy in quality, andlacking systematic monitoring of access,quality, staff-to-children ratios, or staff
training and qualification. According to
the 2006 OECD review Starting Strongfor example: “Much of the child caresector is private and unregulated, withstaff training and pedagogicalprogramming being particularly weak.
…Early childhood services are particularly
important for children with diverse
learning rights…however, programmes fortheir benefit are often irregular, underfunded and non-inclusive.”
From the point of view of the child,this is clearly unsatisfactory. And fromthe point of view of society as a whole,
the stakes are simply too high for themass movement towards out-of-homechild care to be seen as just anothershake of the kaleidoscope in the rapidlychanging lifestyles of advanced
industrial economies.

8

1 3

It is therefore a clear responsibility ofOECD governments to monitor thechild care transition. The results of thatmonitoring are an essential input tothe debate that should be taking placeon this issue among political leaders,child care professionals, press andpublic in all economically developed
societies.

The benchmarks are:

1. A minimum entitlement topaid parental leave
The minimum proposed standard
is that, on the birth of a child, one
parent be entitled to leave of atleast a year (to include pre-natal
leave) at 50 per cent of salary(subject to upper and lower

Action at the national level is the mostimportant part of this process. The
benchmarks proposed, discussed in
more detail below, seek to make acontribution to this process from across-national perspective.

limits). For parents who are

The benchmarks

specifically reserved for fathers.

The benchmarks set out in Fig. 1 havebeen selected to represent key
attributes of early childhood services.
Inevitably, the choice of such
indicators is influenced by the likely
availability of unambiguous,internationally comparable data. For
each indicator, a value has beenchosen as a minimum acceptable
standard for OECD countries. Whileattempting to keep the rights ofchildren front and centre, the values
selected attempt to recognize therealities facing both parents andgovernments.
Existing data were then used to partcomplete a questionnaire for 24
OECD countries plus Slovenia.* Thequestionnaire was then sent to therelevant departments of the 25
governments for review, feedback, andfurther analysis. The result of thisprocess is presented in Fig. 1.
The 10 benchmarks fall under thebroad headings of policy framework(1 and 2), access (3 and 4), quality(5, 6, 7 and 8), and supporting context(9 and 10).

unemployed or self-employed,
the income entitlement should
not be less than the minimum
wage or the level of social
assistance. At least two weeks
parental leave should be

2. A national plan withpriority for disadvantaged
childrenAll countries going through thechild care transition should haveundertaken extensive researchand evolved a coherent national
strategy to ensure that thebenefits of early childhood
education and care are fully
available, especially to
disadvantaged children (seediscussion below). Thisdimension of early childhood
services cannot currently beassessed and compared in asatisfactory way. Rather than omit
such a critical factor, benchmark
2 records, as a proxy measure,whether governments have atleast drawn up a national plan forthe organization and financing of
early childhood services.

3. A minimum level of childcare provision for underthrees
The minimum proposed is thatsubsidized and regulated childcare services should be available
for at least 25 per cent of children* Slovenia is not yet a member of the OECD. Along with Chile,
Estonia, Israel, and the Russian Federation, it has been given thegreen light for the accession talks to begin. Other references to‘25 OECD countries’ should also be interpreted as ‘24 OECD
countries plus Slovenia’.

under the age of three.

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4. A minimum level of accessfor four-year-olds

should not be less than 1 per centof GDP.

The minimum proposed is that atleast 80 per cent of four-year-olds
participate in publicly subsidized
and accredited early education
services for a minimum of 15hours per week.

5. A minimum level of training
for all staff

These eight proposed benchmarks aresupplemented by two further
indicators designed to acknowledge
and reflect wider social and economic
factors critical to the efficacy of earlychildhood services.

9. A low level of child poverty

The minimum proposed is that at

Specifically, a child poverty rate ofleast 80 per cent of staff having

less than 10 per cent. The

significant contact with young

definition of child poverty is thatchildren, including neighbourhood

used by the OECD – theand home-based child carers,

percentage of children growing up

should have relevant training. As ain families in which income,minimum, all staff should

adjusted for family size, is lesscomplete an induction course. A

than 50 per cent of median

move towards pay and working

income.

conditions in line with the wider
teaching or social care professions
should also be envisaged.

10. Universal outreachTo reinforce one of the central
tenets of this report – that early

6. A minimum proportion ofstaff with higher level
education and training

childhood services should also be

The minimum proposed is that atbenchmark attempts to measureleast 50 per cent of staff in earlyand compare demonstrated

education centres supported andnational commitment to that ideal.

accredited by governmental

As no direct measure is currently

agencies should have a minimum

possible, the suggested proxyof three years tertiary education

measure is the extent to whichwith a recognized qualification inbasic child health services haveearly childhood studies or abeen made available to the mostrelated field.

marginalized and difficult-to-reach

7. A minimum staff-tochildren ratio
The minimum proposed is thatthe ratio of pre-school children(four-to-five year-olds) to trained
staff (educators and assistants)
should not be greater than 15
to 1, and that group size should
not exceed 24.

8. A minimum level of publicfundingavailable to the children of
disadvantaged families – this last

families.
Specifically, the benchmark of‘universal outreach’ is considered
to have been met if a country has
fulfilled at least two of thefollowing three requirements: a)
the rate of infant mortality is lessthan 4 per 1,000 live births b) the
proportion of babies born with low
birthweight (below 2,500 grams) is
less than 6 per cent and c) the
immunization rate for 12 to 23

The suggested minimum is thatmonth-olds (averaged overthe level of public spending on

measles, polio and DPT3

early childhood education and carevaccination) is higher than(for children aged 0 to 6 years)

95 per cent.

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8Critical issues
The 10 benchmarks have beendrawn up with a core of criticalquestions in mind: At what age can out-of-homeeducation and care begin tobenefit children?
 If today’s knowledge suggests thatchildren under the age of one are
best cared for by parents, what
policies can best support today’s
parents in that task?
 What should be the underlying
aims and priorities of earlychildhood services?
 How is quality in early childhood
education and care to be definedand monitored?
 What systems can make available
high quality services to all andensure that disadvantaged andat-risk children are included?
 Is the wider social and economic
context supportive? Or are earlychildhood services being asked to
row upstream against powerfulcurrents of child poverty, persistentdisadvantage, and family-unfriendly
policies in the economy andworkplace?

Parental leave
The question of the appropriate age at
which early childhood education andcare can be of benefit to children is
one of the most controversial issues in
the child care debate. Many see
nothing wrong with out-of-homechild care beginning at three months– providing that the care is of an
acceptable quality. Others consider
that the critical developmental needsof the first year of life demandnothing less than the constant, loving,
one-to-one interaction of parental
care. And for millions of working
parents in OECD countries, this is aquestion that must be answered underpressure of career demands andI nnocenti

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household budgets. It is therefore aquestion that is almost inseparable fromthe issue of parental leave entitlement(Benchmark 1 and Box 3).
All but two OECD countries –Australia* and the United States –currently provide an entitlement tosome form of paid leave to employedparents following the birth of a child.
The average duration of that
entitlement in OECD countries, atvarying levels of pay, is now
approaching one year (including prenatal and maternity leave).
But within individual countries,
different views on the ‘age question’
have been one factor contributing tovery different policies and practices.
In the United Kingdom and theUnited States, for example, a majorityof children under the age of one year
are now in some form of child care fora substantial portion of each working
day. Australia also appears to be moving
in the same direction. By contrast, inFinland, Norway, and Sweden, out-ofhome care is now a rarity during thefirst year of a child’s life.
Where parents themselves have thechoice – and the support to make thatchoice real (Box 3) – they have tended
to vote with their feet. In the Swedenof 20 years ago, for example, infantcare was heavily subsidized and widelyused. But with the introduction of 12months parental leave at 80 per cent ofsalary,** the use of nurseries declined
steeply and child care is today rare for
Swedish children under the age of 18
months (fathers and mothers are each

* Under Australia’s Workplace Relations Act (1996), permanent
employees who have 12 months continuous service with an
employer have a minimum entitlement to 52 weeks of shared
unpaid parental leave following the birth or adoption of a child.
In practice, many employed parents in both Australia and theUnited States have the right to paid parental leave under theterms of their employment. In addition, all new parents inAustralia are entitled to a one-off birth payment which iscurrently the most generous in the OECD.
** The period of parental leave entitlement in Sweden qualifies
as employment in the calculation of retirement and pension
rights.

8

1 5

entitled to 60 days parental leave witha further 360 days available to either
parent.)Box 1 summarizes recent
neuroscientific support for extended
and well remunerated parental leave
entitlements. In brief, such
entitlements, in addition to supporting
breastfeeding, help to create theconditions for the constant, intimate,reliable, reassuring, one-to-one
interaction with parents that all infants
need. It may be argued that it is not
only parents who are able to meetsuch needs; but even if this point were
to be conceded in principle, there areclearly enormous practical andfinancial difficulties in recruiting,training, remunerating, retaining, andsupervising the large numbers ofskilled staff that would be needed toguarantee adequate care andstimulation for the under-ones. And incountries where out-of-home infantcare is becoming the norm, it is
impossible not to question whether
today’s knowledge of the criticaldevelopmental needs of the very young
child is being fully taken into account.
In the light of both neuroscientificadvances and recent experience, itwould therefore seem that the interestsof the very young are best served bypolicies that make it easier for at least
one parent to care for the child during
the first 12 months of life. Accordingly,
the value of the first benchmark –parental leave entitlement – has been
set at a level of one year’s leave at
50 per cent of earnings (subject to afloor for low-income parents and aceiling for the more affluent).
In line with the Convention on the
Rights of the Child, which states thatgovernments “shall use their best efforts
to ensure recognition of the principle thatboth parents have common responsibilities
for the upbringing and development of
the child”, several OECD countries

have brought in an additional ‘fathers
only’ entitlement to parental leave.
Usually short and paid at 100 per centof salary, such leave is available on a ‘use
it or lose it’ basis. In support of this,benchmark 1 is not considered to be
met unless at least two weeks ofpaternal leave is also specificallyprovided for.
As Fig. 1 shows, the parental leave
benchmark is currently met by 6 of
the 25 countries for which data are
available. Iceland is the only Nordic
country to fall short of the required
standard.
Box 3 offers a more detailed picture byattempting to compare effective parental
leave entitlements in OECD countries(weighting the length of leave by the
proportion of salary paid).
Unfortunately, even generous parental
leave entitlement may fail to benefit
many of the OECD’s most vulnerable
children. New parents on low incomesare usually under severe economic
pressure to return to work. And those
whose employment is informal andunregulated are of course ineligible forparental leave entitlement. In part, thisdeficiency is compensated for bybenchmark 9, which reflects efforts to
support low-income families.
Finally, generous parental leave
entitlements and return to work
guarantees need to go hand-in-handwith support for employers, andespecially for small businesses, which
may otherwise be reluctant to employ
or promote women of childbearing age.

Defining aims
Most experts and most long-term
studies agree that the effects of earlychildhood education and care, for mostchildren, become unequivocally
positive at some point between theages of two and three – providing thatthe hours are not too long and that the1 6

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Box 3 Effective parental leave: a league table

The table (right) presents a more detailed comparative
picture of parental leave entitlements for those in formal
employment. Its measure is the level of ‘effective
parental leave’ – calculated by weighting the duration ofleave by the percentage of salary offered.

Effective parental leave
Norway116

France103

Hungary

95

Slovenia

65

The resulting league table reveals striking differences
between countries, with the index running from a highof 116 in Norway to a low of 0 in Australia and theUnited States. Overall, the level of effective parental
leave entitlement in Norway and France, for example, ismore than five times higher than in Australia, Ireland,
Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Portugal, the Republic ofKorea, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States.
The weighting in the table takes into account thatcountries adopt different approaches. New mothers in
the United Kingdom, for example, are entitled to a year’smaternity leave at tapering rates of pay: the first six
weeks are paid at 90 per cent of salary (after which afurther 33 weeks are available at a flat rate of c133($202)* per week followed by an entitlement to 13
weeks of unpaid leave. In Iceland, by contrast, parental
leave entitlement is shorter (39 weeks)** but divided
equally between maternity leave, paternity leave andparental leave (available to either parent); each of these
13 week entitlement periods is paid at 80 per cent of
earnings up to a ceiling of c6,000 ($9,112) per monthwith a minimum of c630 ($957) per month (which is also
paid to women taking leave from part-time work).
Other countries offer even longer entitlements toparental leave at lower levels of pay. Finland, France,
Germany (paid for one year only), Hungary, Norway, andSpain (unpaid), for example, offer leave entitlements
until the child’s third birthday if parents choose not touse early childhood services (these leave entitlements
are included in the above table).
In sum, remuneration as well as duration is critical tothe impact of parental leave entitlements on thechildbearing and child caring decisions of parents.
Although in some ways a means and measure ofcontinued progress towards the goal of equality ofopportunity for women, leave that is ‘too long and too
maternal’ can undermine progress towards genderequality, as extended leave may make the return to work
more difficult for both mothers and employers.

Germany

58

Finland57

Denmark53

Sweden48

Austria

38

0

32

Italy

31

Iceland29

Netherlands

29

Canada27

Belgium

23

United Kingdom

20

Portugal

19

Spain

18

Ireland18

Republic of Korea

16

Switzerland

12

Mexico

8

Japan

7

New Zealand0Australia

0

United States
20

40

60

80

100

120

140

160

180

Entitlement to paid maternity leave (weeks)
Length of other leave (weeks)
Effective parental leave(duration of leave multiplied by per cent of salary paid)†
Source: Bennett (2008), updated from Moss & Wall (2007).
† Effective parental leave = duration of leave multiplied by per cent of salary paid.
For example, 40 weeks replaced by 100 per cent of earnings has a coefficient of 40;
at 50 per cent of earnings, a coefficient of 20.
Please note that the calculations are approximate as parental leave in some countries
can run concurrently with maternity leave. In addition, some countries offer apercentage of salary while others offer only a percentage of average or minimum wage.
These figures must be interpreted with caution. In Canada and the European Union, forexample, the figures reflect statutory rights to parental leave; in Australia and theUnited States (excepting California), on the other hand, there is no legal entitlement topaid parental leave and the ratings given are a reflection of what usually happens inpractice. In the case of the Republic of Korea, the figure reflects entitlements which, inpractice, are not taken up by the majority of mothers.

* Based on the c/$ exchange rate as at 4 March 2008.
** The extension of parental leave to one year is currently
under discussion in Iceland.

8I nnocenti

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quality of care can be assured. But
before looking at the critical issues ofaccess and quality, importantdifferences in the underlying aims ofearly childhood education and careshould be made explicit.
In most OECD countries it is now
widely accepted that the earliest yearsof life are a time of extraordinary
opportunity, a time when skill builds
on skill and the foundations are laid for
future cognitive and social development(Box 1). The older and narrower
concept of child care as a means ofliberating parents for employment istherefore giving way to a more childcentred approach and an emphasis on
the quality of care available.
Nonetheless, quality is being
interpreted in different ways.
In France, the United Kingdom, andthe United States, for example, earlychildhood education and care tends tobe seen primarily as preparation forsuccess in school. In countries such as
Denmark, Finland, Norway, andSweden, more ambitious aims arebeing embraced. The prevailing viewin the Nordic countries is that theearliest years of life are a critical
opportunity not only for thedevelopment of cognitive and linguistic
skills but also for the social skills of
self-regulation and a developing
awareness of the emotions, needs, andrights of others. The planning of earlychildhood services, including thetraining of staff and the developmentof curricula, reflects these concerns.
Early childhood education and care is
therefore conceived as an investment
not only in success at school but insociety and citizenship.
No clear correlation can yet beestablished between different systems ofearly childhood education and lateroutcomes. But it is worth noting that a
broader approach to early childhood8

1 7

education does not appear to
disadvantage the Nordic countries
when it comes to later academic
achievement. Finland and Sweden, forexample, despite rejecting the‘schoolification’ of the early years anddelaying the beginning of primaryschool education until the age ofseven,* regularly top international
league tables for academic
achievement at age 15. Finnish 15
year-olds outperform the students ofevery other industrialized country inaverage levels of proficiency in maths
and science and are outperformed inliteracy only by pupils in the Republicof Korea. It is also worth noting that
educational disadvantage – whether
measured by the proportion of
students who fail to reach a certain
minimum standard or by the gap
between the lowest achievers and theaverage – is lower in Finland than in
any other OECD country.xiii
These differences in fundamental
approach to early childhood educationand care do not easily lend themselves
to measurement. Benchmark 2
therefore adopts a less ambitious
approach. It asks whether countries
have researched and published anational plan for early childhood
services, and whether that plan
includes a strategy for ensuring thatthe benefits of early childhood
education and care are available todisadvantaged children. Perhaps
unsurprisingly, 19 of 25 OECD
countries are able to answer ‘yes’ tothis question, though not Australia,
Canada, Ireland, Spain, Switzerland, or
the United States.

Targeted services
Beyond these fundamental
considerations, OECD governments
are also faced with a wide choice ofstrategies and systems for financing* At age six, Finnish and Swedish children begin a ‘transition’ or
preparatory school-readiness year. Until then, early education
focuses primarily on social and emotional development andplay-based learning.

and delivering early childhood services
that are accessible to all at an affordable
cost. Should services be targeted oruniversally available? Free to all, or
subsidized according to family income?
Delivered by government agencies or
private providers? Financed directly byfunding providers or via vouchers or
cash benefits to enable parents topurchase child care in the market
place?
To promote equity while containing
costs, many OECD countries havedecided that public spending on earlychildhood education and care should
be concentrated, at least initially, on thepoorest families. Otherwise, it isargued, resources will be spread too
thinly and the benefits, instead ofpromoting equity, will accrue largely tothe better off. For these reasons, large
scale programmes such as Head Start in
the United States and Sure Start in the
United Kingdom are targeted towards
disadvantaged groups (and include
both centre-based care and parental
support programmes).
There are, however, arguments against
basing early childhood services only ontargeting particular groups of children.
First, universal early childhood services
have many of the same advantages asuniversally available education for older
pupils; in particular, universal services
tend to bring together children fromdifferent backgrounds rather thanreinforcing concentrations of
disadvantage. This is widely recognized
as being of significant benefit to all
children, and is regarded by many
governments as a means of preventingsocial exclusion.
Second, universally available services
usually command broader and moresustainable public support andengender greater public concern for
quality. Too often, services for the poor
have meant poor services.

1 8

Third, universal systems can still givepriority to disadvantaged children bychannelling additional funds to childcare centres that serve low income
children or children with special
educational needs. Incentives can also
be provided to help steer the mostcapable teachers to the mostdisadvantaged children.
Fourth, children at risk of developing
behavioural or learning problems areto be found in all socio-economic
groups rather than being confined tocertain geographical areas. Programmes
targeted only on the basis of income
or geography may fail to reach thesmaller proportion – but often larger
absolute number – of vulnerable
children who fall outside the target
area. It has been estimated, forexample, that the Head Start and Sure
Start programmes in the US and the
UK are currently reaching only abouta third to a half of their intended
target groups (though this is in part a
result of inadequate funding rather
than targeting strategies per se).
These arguments suggest that where
possible the way forward lies down theroad adopted by countries such as the
Netherlands – universal services, butwith flexible financing systems thatcan give priority to the disadvantaged
by increasing per capita expenditures
where need is greatest.

Private provision
Basic differences in approach are also
evident in the strategies by which
different OECD governments fundand deliver early childhood services,
whether targeted or universal.
A mix of private and public child careservices is available in most countries.
But some governments lean towards
free or subsidized services run directly
by government or government-funded
providers, while others favour private
provision of child care services

I nnocenti

subsidized either directly bygovernment or indirectly by vouchers
or tax breaks to enable parents topurchase child care from private
providers. In many OECD countries,
the not-for-profit sector is also a major
provider of early childhood services
and in many cases has led the way inpromoting community involvement
and investment. It is clearly importantthat such services meet the quality
standards laid down by governments;
but given that proviso, the not-forprofit sector will continue to be
critical in increasing availability,
affordability, choice, and quality in theprovision of early childhood services.
There are also strong arguments forpartnership with private enterprise in
the provision of early childhood
services: it can inject competition,encourage innovation, reducebureaucracy, widen parental choice,attract investment, and reduce the costto the taxpayer. Private providers also
tend to be quicker to launch services
and to respond to parents’ wishes. In
principle, private services can be madeaffordable to all via vouchers or otherforms of subsidy. Licensed private
providers of child care services canthen be monitored to ensurecompliance with standards of access,quality, training, and staff-to-children
ratios (for example requiring private
child care centres to accept all children
from a given geographical area,
including those with special needs).
Finally, it can also be argued thatparents are more likely to be able todecide what is best for their children
than governments.
For all of these reasons, the culture of
public-private partnership has become
established in many OECD countries,
and many private providers of childcare offer high quality services.
There are also arguments against theprivate provision of early childhood

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8services. Consistent monitoring andenforcement of standards can be both
expensive and fallible. Some private
providers are tempted to reduce lessvisible costs such as training, pay, andconditions of work. And staff turnoverin for-profit services tends to behigher (a factor which, from thechild’s point of view, translates into
instability of care).
Furthermore, what is offered byprivate providers of child care is not a
consumer product but a child’s oncein-a-lifetime opportunity to passsuccessfully through critical stages ofcognitive, emotional, and social
development. As UNICEF has argued
for many decades and in many
contexts, the child’s name is ‘today’.
This gives rise to two particular
problems, both of which have to dowith the information available to theconsumer. First, the quality of earlychildhood education and care being
provided may not always be evident toparents – either because they haveinsufficient knowledge of what
constitutes ‘quality’ or because
providers fail to communicate
adequately the quality of the services
they offer. This problem of ‘imperfect
information’, it may be argued, applies
to all transactions in the marketplace,it being the responsibility of
consumers to keep themselvesinformed and make correct decisions.
But here a second danger arises; poor
quality early childhood education andcare is not a product that can be
returned, repaired, exchanged, or
refunded. It may take years for thelack of quality to show its effects; thecause may never become apparent;
and the consequences are likely to fall
not only on the child but on society
as a whole.
No one delivery strategy can be
signposted as the ideal way forward.
The one clear and common

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8

1 9

Box 4 The critics: concerns about child care

Concerns about the child care transition have been
voiced by child psychologists and child rights activists inmany countries.
One of the most influential critics is Australian
psychologist Steve Biddulph, whose books on parenting
have sold more than 4 million copies worldwide.
Arguing that child care is inappropriate for under-threes,
Biddulph centres his attack on the gap between thetheory and practice of child care in the many different
day-care centres and nurseries he has visited:“The best nurseries struggled to meet the needs of very
young children in a group setting. The worst were
negligent, frightening and bleak: a nightmare of
bewildered loneliness that was heartbreaking to watch.
Children at this age – under three – will want one thing
only: the individual care of their own special person.
“It is a matter of balance, of getting the timing right. The
first three years of life are those when children are too
vulnerable, too much in need of intimate care and all it
can offer, to be left to group care by strangers.” 1
Oxford psychotherapist Susan Gerhardt, co-founder of
the Oxford Parent Infant Project, has also spoken out
against child care for the very young.
“What seems to be most crucial for the baby is theextent to which the parent or caregiver is emotionallyavailable and present for him, to notice his signals and to
regulate his states ….

Gerhardt also comments:“It is not popular these days to spell out how great the
responsibilities of parenthood are, since women havestruggled desperately to establish themselves as men’sequals in the workplace and do not want to feel guilty
about keeping their careers or pay cheques going
while someone else takes care of their babies.” 2
The same point has been supported by othercommentators, including the Australian human rights
lawyer Cathleen Sherry:“No one has an absolute right to a career – men or
women. If you choose to have children, your major
responsibility is to care for them properly, and if that
affects your career, it affects your career. But no one
wants to acknowledge this reality.
“Child care allows men to avoid responsibility for theirchildren. Women have to pay others to look after thechildren because men aren’t willing to cut back on
their work hours to do their share of the parenting. If
women go back to work, it should be men, notchildren, who alter their lives accordingly.
“In maternity hospitals, it is no longer the done thing tohave newborn babies lined up in a nursery with acouple of nurses looking after them. That is seen as
terrible. Mothers are strongly persuaded to have theirbabies with them 24 hours a day. Yet six weeks later it
is OK to put ten of them in a nursery with just two
carers. It doesn’t make sense.” 3“The baby’s mother is primed to do these things for herbaby by her own hormones, and is more likely to havethe intense identification with the baby’s feelings that isneeded, provided she has the inner resources to do so.
“Babies come into the world with the need for social
interaction to help develop and organise their brains. Ifthey don’t get enough empathetic, attuned attention – inother words, if they don’t have a parent who is interested
and reacting positively to them – then important parts of
their brain simply will not develop as well.”1 Biddulph, S., Raising Babies: Should under 3s go tonursery?, HarperThorsons, London, 2006.
2 Gerhardt, S., Why Love Matters: How affection shapes ababy’s brain, Brunner-Routledge, Scarborough (Canada) and
New York, 2004.
3 Biddulph, S., op. cit., pp. 32-34.

2 0requirement – whether services aretargeted or universal, state run or
privately provided – is that significant
public subsidy, supervision, and support
is necessary if services of the rightquality are to be made available to all,and if priority is to be given to
disadvantaged and at-risk children.
Overall there would seem to be strong
arguments for focusing public policy
and public funding on diversely
delivered but universally available earlychildhood services funded andsupervised by governmental agencies.
This is the broad strategy that has been
adopted by almost all OECDgovernments in response to theeducational needs of older children,and there is no reason in principle topursue a different strategy for earlychildhood services. “The evidence
suggests,” says the 2006 OECD Starting
Strong review of early childhood
services, “that direct public funding ofservices brings more effective governmental
steering of early childhood services,advantages of scale, better national
quality, more effective training for
educators and a higher degree of equity
in access.” xiv
Nonetheless, publicly funded anduniversal early childhood services are
not a panacea, and do not inthemselves guarantee either equitable
access or high quality services. Progress
towards these key goals needs to be
regularly assessed and monitored –regardless of the strategy being pursued.
The next group of benchmarks has
therefore been selected, within thelimits of the available data, to recordand compare progress in access andquality in early childhood services
across the countries of the OECD.

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In Europe, many governments provide
free and universal pre-school from theage of three (though with considerable
differences in hours per week). New
Zealand and the Republic of Korea arealso rapidly broadening access to earlychildhood services as, to a lesser extent,
are Australia and Japan. Mexico ismaking significant efforts and has
become the first OECD country to
make enrolment obligatory from theage of three.
In North America, Canada postpones
substantial public investment ineducation until children reach the ageof five. In the United States, where
early childhood services are theresponsibility of individual states, thepicture is changing rapidly. In response
to mounting evidence that high quality
early education and care can bringsignificant long-term benefits – from
improved school performance andhigher earnings to a reduced likelihoodof involvement in crime – many states
have decided that pre-school
programmes should be expanded. The
result has been increased funding
pressure on the federal government,
and a commitment to increased
support for pre-schools in 2008.

AccessFor children under the age of three, thedifferences between countries are evenmore marked. In Finland, Norway, andSweden, services are organized atcommunity level and are highly
subsidized, with parents usually paying
no more than 10 per cent to 15 percent of the costs (with fees waived
completely for very poor families). By
contrast, the English-speaking countries
have generally adopted more marketoriented approaches; parents in Ireland,
the United Kingdom, and the UnitedStates, often have to meet the full
financial cost for children under three.

As has already been seen, governmentsof OECD countries are approaching
the issue of access to early childhood
education and care in different ways.

It should again be stressed that while
this report is concerned withgovernmental responsibility for early

R eportC ard

8childhood services, the ‘child care gap’is also being bridged by a myriad of
informal and unrecorded
arrangements involving grandparents,
friends, neighbours, local childminders,and other forms of home-based orneighbourhood group care for young
children. Fig. 3 attempts, by anindirect method, to give some idea ofthe scale of such arrangements. It
shows, for example, that in Austria,
Canada, Germany, and Ireland about
60 per cent or more of women withyoung children are in work but thatthe level of enrolment of children
under three in licensed child care isless than 20 per cent.
Overall access to early childhood
education and care is therefore
difficult to measure and compare.
Should ‘access’ be defined only as
access to accredited child care centres?
Or should other forms of child caresuch as family day-care, playgroups,
and after-school services be included?
Should it mean ‘half day’, ‘full day’, ‘allyear’ or ‘school year’? And is accessfree and open to all or fee-paying andsubject to eligibility criteria?

The under-threes
For present purposes, these questions
are cut through rather than answeredby the extremely limited availability ofinternationally comparable data.
Under the heading of ‘access’,benchmark 3 suggests that publicly
subsidized and regulated child careservices should be available for asignificant proportion of children
under the age of three. The value
attached to this indicator has been set
at 25 per cent – a benchmark
currently met by just over half of theOECD countries for which data are
available. Austria, Canada, Germany,
Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico,
Portugal, the Republic of Korea,
Spain, and Switzerland all fail to meetthis standard (Fig. 1).

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8

2 1

Fig. 3 The child care gap
The table allows comparison between the proportion of women with young children who are in work and the proportion of children
under three who are enroled in licensed child care. The ‘child care gap’ revealed is an approximate indication of the use made of informalchild care arrangements.

Enrolment of children 0-3 years
in licensed child care, 2004

Employment rates for women with youngest
child under the age of 3, 2005

Denmark

Denmark

Iceland**Iceland

Norway**Norway

SwedenSwedenUnited States

United States

FinlandFinland

Belgium

Belgium

New Zealand

New Zealand

Netherlands

Netherlands

Australia**Australia

FranceFranceUnited Kingdom

United Kingdom

PortugalPortugal

Spain

Spain

Republic of Korea**Republic of Korea

CanadaCanada

Japan

Japan

Ireland**Ireland

Germany

Germany

Hungary

Hungary

Austria

Austria

Italy

Italy

Mexico**Mexico

Switzerland
70%

60%

Switzerland
50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

** No data available.
Source for enrolment of children 0-3 years in licensed child care: OECD Family database and OECD Education database.
Note: Data for Canada, and Germany, concern 2001; data for France reflect 2002; data for Iceland, Mexico, and Norway concern 2003; and data for Australia, Denmark, the Republic of Korea,
and the United States concern 2005.
Source for employment rates for mothers with youngest child 0-3 years:OECD (2007) Babies and Bosses – Reconciling Work and Family Life (Vol. 5); Babies and Bosses (Australia, Australian Bureau of Statistics(2005); 6224.0.55.001 FA2 Labour Force Status and Other Characteristics of Families; Statistics Canada (2001 data), Statistics Denmark (1999 data), Statistics Finland (2002 data), Statistics Iceland (2002 data for
women age 25-54), Japanese authorities (2001 data), Swiss LFS (2006 2nd quarter data), UK Office of National Statistics (2005 data), and the US current population survey (2005 data); all other EU-countries,
European Labour Force Survey (2005 data), except for Italy which concern 2003).

Many will consider the 25 per centlevel too low. First, because it is lessthan the proportion of under threes
currently in licensed child care in theOECD as a whole (if non-subsidized,
private child care services are taken
into account). Second, it is lower thanthe 33 per cent target already agreed
by leaders of the European Union.
But it is important to note that thesuggested 25 per cent accessbenchmark for children under the ageof three is not intended as a measureof gross enrolment levels (or as areflection of labour market needs) anddoes not include access to unlicensed
services, family day-care, or nonsubsidized private child care services.
It is proposed, rather, as an indicator ofgovernment commitment to publicly
subsidized, well-regulated, high quality
child care services that are accessible andaffordable to all. It recognizes that earlychildhood services for the underthrees are a necessity in countries
where a high proportion of women
are in work; but it also reflects a
respect for parental choice and arecognition that in many countries
parental leave entitlements are making
it increasingly possible for parents toexercise that choice.
Ideally, parental leave entitlements
would enable all children to be looked
after at home for at least the first 12
months of life, at which point there
would be the option of gradually

introducing children to subsidized,
high quality child care until the age
when formal schooling begins.* Thesuggested benchmark figure of 25 percent is intended to reflect government
commitment to this ideal.
While being a useful basis ofcomparison, benchmark 3 also has
clear limitations. The fact that services
are subsidized by the state does not in
itself guarantee quality, thoughexperience suggests that the quality ofcare is likely to be higher if
governments finance, monitor, andenforce basic standards of staff training,* This option is currently available in several of the Nordic
countries where children also have a legal entitlement to a place
in a local authority early childhood service when parental leave
ends.

2 2

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Box 5 Germany: the children of immigrants

In principle, the transition to out-of-home child care isan opportunity to reduce the disadvantages faced by
the children of immigrant families. By promoting
integration and the development of language skills,
early childhood education and care ought to be able toreduce the barriers that face many immigrant children
on entry into the formal education system.
No cross-national comparison of services for thechildren of immigrant families is yet possible. Even
within individual nations, there are wide differences
between different kinds of immigrants and between thekinds of disadvantage faced. Some OECD countries,
however, are attempting to monitor the progress ofchildren from immigrant families, and to evaluate thecontribution of early childhood education and care.
In Germany, for example, several recent studies haveattempted to define the issue more clearly.
Among the chief findings:

 Make less use of medical services.
 Are less likely than German children to be enrolled
in pre-school.
Studies of children from immigrant families who wereenrolled in pre-school have shown that: The longer immigrant children attend pre-school,
the narrower the gap between their German
language skills and those of non-immigrant children.
 Attending pre-school improved the school record ofimmigrant children to the point where they could beconsidered to have the same educational
opportunity as the children of low-income Germanfamilies (who, in the study concerned, were notfound to have benefited significantly from preschool education).
 Children of immigrants are less likely to be
proficient in German if they attend pre-school with ahigh proportion of children of the same ethnic
group.

On average, children of immigrant families: Are at higher risk of growing up in poverty (in one
study, the risk of poverty for immigrant children was
found to be approximately double that of children
with German citizenship).
 Have less knowledge of the German language – acritical factor for social integration and success at
school.
 Start school significantly later than German children.
 Obtain (on average) worse grades at primary school.
 Fall further behind in secondary school.
 Are twice as likely to face problems with otherchildren, for example being teased or bullied.
 Have less space and more people in the home andare less likely to have somewhere to study
undisturbed.1
 Are four times more likely to have to repeat grades
1 to 3 of primary school.
 Are more likely than children with German
citizenship to be recommended, at age 10, to the
Hauptschule and less likely to enter the Gymnasium
or Realschule.2
 Are less likely, on leaving school, to enter into
vocational training.
 Are more likely to be overweight.

A number of important caveats:
 Some of the studies drawn upon are small and may
not be nationally representative.
 School performance may reflect the poorer homes,poorer neighbourhoods, and less educated parentsof many immigrant families. Early childhood
services and the efforts of primary schools cannot,
acting alone, compensate fully for these structuralproblems.
 The kinds of schools attended by immigrantchildren may also reflect their socio-economic andresidential status.

Note: Information from: Clauss, S. and B. Nauck, 2008, The
Situation of Immigrant Children in Germany, a Literature Review,a report prepared for the UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre on
Children in Immigrant Families in Rich Countries, edited by
D. Hernandez (forthcoming).
1 When children in Germany were asked to rate their own housing
situation on a seven-point scale from ‘very bad’ to ‘very good’, theaverage score for immigrant children was 6.1, little short of the 6.5
average score recorded by non-immigrant children.
2 At the age of 10, children in the German education system are
selected for one of three different kinds of secondary school –Gymnasium, Realschule, or Hauptschule. The Gymnasium provides
the most academic education and has a near monopoly onuniversity entry. The Realschule traditionally leads to white-collar
training and jobs. The Hauptschule has the lowest status, yields
the fewest options for further education, and is the usual route toblue-collar work. Few children change track after the initial
selection is made.

8

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qualifications, group size, and staff-tochildren ratios. Informal child carearrangements, however well intended,
may not meet such standards; and theprobability is that unsubsidized private
services must either charge fees that
exclude poorer families or seek
economies in staff numbers andtraining.
Secondly, a 25 per cent accessbenchmark for the under-threes does
not reflect whether or not provision is
being made for disadvantaged andvulnerable children – children fromthe poorest homes, children from
immigrant and ‘second language’backgrounds (Box 5), children whoseparents face exceptional problems andpressures, and children who havediagnosed disabilities and special needs.
At present, very few countries havenational data for benchmarking orcomparing this critical factor. This lackof statistics, and of any agreed standard
by which access for the disadvantaged
might be monitored, therefore remains
a salient deficiency in this initialattempt to construct an internationallycomparable set of minimum standards
for early childhood services.

Older children
For older children, those aged four-tofive, the indicator chosen (benchmark
4) is the level of enrolment in publicly
subsidized and accredited pre-schools
for a minimum of 15 hours a week.
This is the age, the fifth year of life,
when the benefits of pre-school are
not in doubt. It is also an age at whichalmost all parents feel it is right that
their children should be in some kindof regular group learning activity thathelps prepare them for the beginningof formal schooling.
For these reasons, the value proposed
as a minimum standard is anenrolment rate of 80 per cent forchildren age four-to-five. As Fig. 1

82 3

shows, this benchmark is met by 15 of
the 25 OECD countries for which data
are available (though, surprisingly, notby Finland)
Most European governments alreadyguarantee a pre-school place to all four
year-olds, though the number of hours
per week is variable. Other OECD
countries are moving at different speedsin the same direction. Ideally,
enrolment of four year-olds would be
virtually 100 per cent, and there isagain a concern that an 80 per centbenchmark might disguise or sanction
the fact that the 20 per cent who may
not be served are likely to be children
from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Another obvious inadequacy of thebenchmark is that it does not reflect
the hours-per-day availability of theservices offered – a critical factor for
many millions of parents in full time
employment.
Benchmark 4 should therefore be readas a signpost rather than a destination.

Quality and staff
Access is of little merit without quality.
All OECD governments therefore facea difficult challenge in defining andmonitoring quality in early childhood
services. Ideally, this is a task that would
involve parents and communities aswell as child care professionals andacademic institutions.
The available research is consistent infinding that the quality of earlychildhood education and care depends
above all else on the ability of the
caregiver to build relationships withchildren, and to help provide a secure,consistent, sensitive, stimulating, andrewarding environment. In other words,
good child care is an extension of goodparenting. Or, as the already cited US
National Research Council report puts
it, “If there is a single critical componentof quality, it rests in the relationshipbetween the child and the teacher/caregiver, and in the ability of the adult
to be responsive to the child.” xv
This, then, is the essence of ‘quality’ –but it is an essence that is patently
difficult to measure.
It is, however, possible to measuresome known preconditions of quality– principally the availability ofsufficient numbers of well trained, wellsupervised, and well remunerated earlychildhood professionals. Benchmarks 5,
6, and 7 therefore set out minimum
standards for, and compare current
national performance against, three ofthe key, measurable aspects of quality
in early childhood education and care.
In general, the picture is notencouraging. The 2006 OECD review
Starting Strong concludes, for example,
that there is often “a wide pay gap
between child care staff and teachers, withchild care staff in most countries being
poorly trained and paid around minimum
wage levels. Not surprisingly, staff
turnover in the child care sector is high.”
In many countries, child care
professionals stand at the bottom of
the wages ladder and have little in theway of either job security oropportunity for career development.
In some, including Australia, theUnited Kingdom, and the UnitedStates, employment in nurseries andday-care centres is often seen as
suitable for those who are very young,unqualified, transient, or all three.
Where pay is low, staff turnover rates
tend to be high (30 per cent per year
among child care employees in the
United States, for example, compared
to under 7 per cent for school
teachers). “Such high staff turnoverrates,” comments the US National
Scientific Council, “currently
undermine the relationships that young
children have with the adults who
provide much of their daily care.”2 4

I nnocentiThis is child care on the cheap. And it
will not serve.
As a rule of thumb, approximately
three quarters of the costs of providing
early childhood services are accounted
for by salaries. As there is substantial
evidence that staff with higher levelsof education and more specialized
qualifications provide more stimulating
and supporting interaction withchildren, the scope for cost-cutting istherefore limited if quality is to be
maintained. Moreover, services thatfall short of the required quality will
not deliver benefits and may do harm;they are therefore a waste of money
no matter how inexpensive they may
be. Worse, from the point of view ofthe best interests of the child, theysquander an opportunity that will notcome again.
Benchmark 5 asks that all staff shouldhave at least initial training before
taking up employment in earlychildhood education and care. The
suggested 80 per cent value currently

R eportC ard

8

attached to this benchmark applies toall staff working regularly with young
children, including neighbourhoodand home-based caregivers. If
untrained staff have to be employed tocover short-term needs, then an
approved induction course in earlychild care and education should be a
statutory obligation. Benchmark 5 also
attempts to address the issue of staff
quality and turnover by stipulatingthat pay and conditions in line withthose of the teaching or social care
professions are at least envisaged.

Box 6 Child rights: in early childhood“The education of the child shall be directed to thedevelopment of the child’s personality, talents andmental and physical abilities to their fullest potential.”
Article 29, Convention on the Rights of the ChildThe Committee on the Rights of the Child is charged by
the United Nations with promoting and monitoring
progress towards world-wide implementation of the 1989
Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Since the Convention came into force in 1990, theCommittee has adopted eight General Comments to guide
governments in fulfilling their obligations under theConvention. One of these – General Comment No. 7 on
Implementing child rights in early childhood – is ofparticular relevance to early childhood education and care.
General Comment No. 7
General Comment No. 7 stresses that young children haverights from the beginning of their lives. It also
acknowledges the special vulnerability of the very young
to poverty, discrimination and other adversities that cancompromise their rights and undermine their capacities
and well-being.
Early childhood is therefore a critical period for children’s
rights. All governments are therefore encouraged to work
towards fulfilling the rights of the very young throughcomprehensive policies, laws, programmes, practices, andprofessional training and research. In particular, the rightto education during early childhood is interpreted as
beginning at birth.

General Comment No. 7 makes the following points:
 Young children in general must not be discriminatedagainst on any grounds, for example where laws fail tooffer equal protection against violence for all children,
including young children. Young children are especially atrisk of discrimination because they are relatively
powerless and depend on others for the realization of
their rights.
 Discrimination may take the form of reduced levels ofnutrition; inadequate care and attention; restricted
opportunities for play, learning and education; orinhibition of free expression of feelings and views.
Discrimination may also be expressed through harshtreatment and unreasonable expectations, which may be
exploitative or abusive.
 Potential discrimination in access to quality services foryoung children is a particular concern, especially where
health, education, welfare and other services are notuniversally available and are provided through a
combination of State, private and charitableorganizations.
 As a first step, the Committee encourages States parties
to monitor the availability of and access to quality
services that contribute to young children’s survival anddevelopment, including through systematic datacollection, disaggregated in terms of major variables
related to children’s and families’ background andcircumstances. As a second step, actions may berequired that guarantee that all children have an equal
opportunity to benefit from available services.

I nnocenti

R eportC ard

This benchmark too has obvious
weaknesses, being unable to capture
the extent or duration of the training
required, or the depth of in-service
training and support that personnel inearly childhood services need, or thedetermination of governments toimplement rather than ‘envisage’ an
upgrading of the child care profession.
Nonetheless, it is significant, anddisturbing, that only 17 of the 25
OECD countries surveyed were able
to measure up to this relatively

8

2 5

undemanding benchmark. It is also
surprising that Denmark and Norway,
with otherwise well-regarded earlychildhood services, fail to reach the
80 per cent minimum level for the
initial training of child care staff.
Benchmark 6 reinforces the training
dimension of ‘high quality care’ by
stipulating that a minimum of 50 per
cent of staff in early education centres,
including classroom assistants and alladvisers and teachers, should have aminimum of three years tertiary

education, with specialist qualifications
in early childhood studies or a related
field. As Fig. 1 shows, 20 out of 25
OECD countries were able to meetthis standard, the only exceptions
being Austria, Finland, Japan, Norway,
and Switzerland.
This benchmark, too, has obvious
limitations and has had to beinterpreted somewhat liberally inorder to admit a) countries in which
the qualification required is a two year
college diploma and b) countries such

 States parties should at all times aim to provide
programmes that complement the parents’ role and aredeveloped as far as possible in partnership withparents, including through active cooperation between
parents, professionals and others in developing “thechild’s personality, talents and mental and physicalabilities to their fullest potential” (article 29 of theConvention on the Rights of the Child).

by pointing to children’s relative immaturity and theirneed for socialization. Parents (and others) should be
encouraged to offer ‘direction and guidance’ in a childcentred way, through dialogue and example, in waysthat enhance young children’s capacities to exercise
their rights, including their right to participation (article
12) and their right to freedom of thought, conscienceand religion (article 14).

 Early childhood professionals – in both the State andnon-state sectors – should be provided with thoroughpreparation, ongoing training and adequate
remuneration. In this context, States parties are
responsible for service provision for early childhood
development. The role of civil society should becomplementary to – not a substitute for – the role of
the State. Where non-state services play a major role,
the Committee reminds States parties that they have an
obligation to monitor and regulate the quality ofprovision to ensure that children’s rights are protected
and their best interests served.

 In order to ensure that young children’s rights are fully
realized during this crucial phase of their lives (andbearing in mind the impact of early childhood
experiences on their long-term prospects), States
parties are urged to adopt comprehensive, strategic
and time-bound plans for early childhood within arights-based framework. This requires an increase in
human and financial resource allocations for earlychildhood services and programmes.

 Respecting young children’s evolving capacities is
crucial for the realization of their rights, and especiallysignificant during early childhood, because of the rapidtransformations in children’s physical, cognitive, socialand emotional functioning, from earliest infancy to thebeginnings of schooling.
 Evolving capacities should be seen as a positive andenabling process, not an excuse for authoritarianpractices that restrict children’s autonomy and selfexpression and which have traditionally been justified

 States parties are encouraged to develop strong andequitable partnerships between the government, public
services, non-governmental organizations, the private
sector and families to finance comprehensive services
in support of young children’s rights.

2 6

as France, Ireland, and the United
Kingdom where a primary school
teaching qualification, with no special
training in the developmental needs ofpre-school children, is all that isrequired.*
Benchmark 7 focuses on group sizeand staff-to-children ratios. Specifically,
it sets a minimum of one member ofstaff to every 15 four-to-five year-olds,
and a maximum group size of 24. As
Fig. 1 shows, only 12 out of 25
OECD countries currently meet thisstandard.
In many of the countries that fall shortof the standard set, significant increases
in funding will be required to bringstaff-to-children ratios up to 1:15 andgroup sizes down to a maximum of
24. Mexico, for example, has much to
do if it is to meet this benchmark as it
rapidly expands pre-school education
to its entire child population. But
significant increases in spending will
also be necessary in some wealthierOECD countries such as Ireland
where the youngest children are often
assigned to classes with the least
favourable staff-to-children ratios.
Acceptable staff-to-children ratios will,in practice, vary with circumstance,
including the number of hours per day
in child care. But the research shows
overwhelmingly that young children
need a great deal of one-to-one
attention and support – relationships
rather than group instruction. It is
widely acknowledged that infants andvery young children are not ready forgroup activities; but even in the caseof four and five year-olds, smallergroups make it possible to plan
activities that are more stimulating andmore attuned to each child’s interestsand stage of development.
* This is one reason why early childhood services in thesecountries lean towards the ‘schoolification’ of early childhood
education and care, which often means teaching in large groups
with little attention given to individual children and theirreadiness for particular kinds of learning.

I nnocenti

Overall, these three ‘quality’benchmarks (5, 6, and 7) represent nomore than a minimum ‘floor’ of inputs
that are known to be associated withthe kind of stimulating, supportive staffto-children relationships that are thecore of quality and good practice inearly childhood education and care.
Currently, only five OECD countries –Iceland, Hungary, the Netherlands, New
Zealand, and Sweden – measure up to
all three. Six countries – Australia,
Belgium (Flanders), Canada, Ireland,
Japan, and Norway – meet only one.
In the nations that fail to meet theminimum quality standard for earlychildhood services, it may be that a
prerequisite of rapid progress is achange in public attitudes. In somecountries, it is still widely assumed thatlittle or no training is required forlooking after infants and toddlers, thatslightly more training may be required
for those entrusted with three-to-fiveyear-olds, and that higher level
qualifications are necessary only forteachers of older children. Such views
are now dangerously out of date.
In practical terms, improvements in pay
and working conditions would be an
obvious step towards changing attitudes
and upgrading the profession, as would
integrating early childhood care into
the wider teaching and caring
professions (as is already happening in
Denmark, Finland, and Sweden wherechild care assistants have theopportunity for further training leading
to higher qualifications.) The availabilityof academic opportunities andqualifications in early childhood
education and care would also help toraise the status of the profession and toanchor practice in research andevidence-based policy making.
Finally, it should be noted that higher
levels of staff training, improved staffto-children ratios, and smaller groupsizes are of special importance in

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8centres serving at-risk children andchildren with special educational
needs. Without the extra resources that
this requires, it is much less likely thatearly childhood education and care
will make a significant difference tothe lives of disadvantaged children.

Budgets
Overall, the level of national
commitment to the quality andavailability of early childhood
education and care is also reflected in
the level of public investment in earlychildhood services.
Fig. 4 shows the current level of suchspending in the 23 OECD countries
for which data are available (notincluding family benefits or the costsof parental leave entitlements).
Once again, such figures need to betreated with caution; official statistics
are not always either clear or uniform
in recording what is and is notincluded under early childhood
services.** The figure of 1.3 per centof GDP given for Sweden, forexample, is almost certainly anunderestimate (given that pre-schools
in Sweden are of high quality andavailable for many hours per day
throughout the working year). An
additional concern is that in somecases state and local authority
expenditures may be excluded fromnational level figures. Fig. 4 also fails
to capture how quickly the child carepicture is changing; in the Republic ofKorea and in the United Kingdom,
for example, government expenditureson pre-school education, havequadrupled over the last decade.
Overall, Fig. 4 shows that the
governments of OECD countries are
currently spending an average of** For specific recommendations on what should be included ingovernment expenditure on early childhood services, under
different funding models, see Chapter III of ‘Benchmarks for
Early Childhood Services in OECD Countries’, Innocenti Working
Paper 2008-02, available at www.unicef-irc.org.

I nnocenti

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C ard

8

2 7

Fig. 4i

Public expenditure on child care and pre-school education services, per cent of GDP , 2003
Iceland
IcelandDenmark
Denmark

Child
Child
care
care
Pre-schoolPre-school
education
education

FinlandFinlandSwedenSwedenFranceFranceNorwayNorwayHungary
Hungary
PortugalPortugal
Belgium
Belgium
MexicoMexicoOECD
OECD
Average
Average
UnitedUnitedStatesStatesAustria
Austria

Source: OECD (2007), Social Expenditure database 1980-2003.
i Not including family benefits or the costs of parental leave
entitlements.
ii Germany’s low ranking reflects the fact that expenditures onchildren aged 0 to 3 years are listed at 0 per cent in the OECD
Family database from which the data is taken. Federal funds to
the Bundesländer are not earmarked for early childhood
services; investment is therefore at the discretion of each Land.
The new Bundesländer (former East Germany) attain among
Europe’s highest participation rates (37 per cent) for young
children in child care services. In the old Bundesländer (former
West Germany), there is significant public investment in childcare services, reaching over B10,000 per child per year in someof the larger cities.

UnitedUnitedKingdom
Kingdom
Italy
Italy
Spain
Spain
Netherlands
Netherlands
Australia
Australia
ii iiGermany
Germany

New
New
Zealand
ZealandJapan
Japan
Switzerland
Switzerland
Ireland
IrelandRepublic
Republicof Koreaof Korea
0.00.00.20.20.40.40.60.60.80.81.01.01.21.2

1.41.4

1.61.6

1.81.82.02.0

PerPercent
centof GDP
of GDP

0.7 per cent of GDP on earlychildhood services. More revealingly, itshows that the countries at the top of
the overall benchmarks table are
spending approximately double theOECD average. Only six OECD
countries meet eight or more of thebenchmarks (Fig. 1) and they are thesame six countries that top the tableof government expenditures on earlychildhood services (Iceland, Denmark,Finland, Sweden, France, andNorway).

experience in the United Statessuggests that the cost is in the region of$5,000 per child per year for half-day
school-year programmes, rising toapproximately $9,000 per year for fullday school-year programmes.xvi For
children younger than three years,
requiring higher staff-to-children ratios,
the costs will be greater still.

The broad conclusion to be drawn
from the available data is therefore
that many OECD countries need toalmost double current levels of
expenditure on early childhood
services if minimum acceptable
standards are to be met.

Such figures suggest that the costs per
child are likely to be more than is
typically spent on the early years ofcompulsory education. Nonetheless,the overall message of such studies isthat programmes that deliver
measurable benefits require high levelsof staff and training and that there will
be little or no benefit from earlychildhood services that fall below acertain threshold of cost and quality.

The same broad conclusion may also
be arrived at from the opposite
direction – by asking how much highquality early childhood education andcare is likely to cost per child.
Although few data are available,

There is therefore strong evidence fromboth macro and micro levels to support
the idea that many OECD countries
need to double current levels of
expenditure if minimum standards forearly childhood services are to be met.

In most countries, the extra investment
is needed in the critical areas ofoutreach to disadvantaged children,
more extensive staff training, andincreases in the hours-per-day
availability of early childhood services inorder to meet the needs of bothchildren and parents. In countries where
the private sector is the major providerof child care services, extra investment
will also be needed for setting andenforcing standards and for enablingparents – via subsidies, tax breaks, orvoucher schemes – to choose and pay
for accredited child care services.
Attempting to take current realities into
account, Benchmark 8 sets the required
level of government expenditure on
early childhood services at a minimumof 1 per cent of GDP. Only 6 of 25
OECD countries for which data are
available reach or surpass this mark.
Expenditures have not yet exceeded halfof this benchmark level in Australia,
Ireland, Japan, Netherlands, New
Zealand, the Republic of Korea, Spain,
and Switzerland.

2 8

The wider context
Finally, the adequacy of earlychildhood services must also be
evaluated in the context in whichthose services operate. However goodsuch services may be, they cannot be
expected, acting alone, to break thegrip of poverty and social exclusion.
Only long-term policies dealing with
employment, housing, skills,
discrimination, social transfers, andminimum wage levels can reduce
entrenched disadvantage. That is why
a report from the US National
Research Council on early childhood
development makes the striking
recommendation:“…Congress should assess the nation’stax, wage, and income support
policies…with regard to their adequacyin ensuring that no child who is
supported by the equivalent of a fulltime working adult lives in poverty, andthat no family suffers from deep andpersistent poverty, regardless of
employment status.” xvii
The precise mechanisms by which
low family income tends tocompromise children’s futures are notfully understood. In addition to thestrong associations between
disadvantage for children and parental
education and income, there are also
well established links between
economic stress and the incidence ofdepression, mental ill health, poor
self-image, and substance abuse (all ofwhich are themselves associated withinadequate, detached, and sometimes
harsh parenting). Overall, it is aconsistent finding of research, inmany different countries, that poverty
in childhood is associated withnegative outcomes in adolescence andadult life. More than any othervariable, it is low family income thatis the most reliable predictor of
educational, psychological, andbehavioural problems.

I nnocentiThis makes it impossible to ignore thewider issue of child poverty in any
attempt to suggest minimum standards
for early childhood services.
Benchmark 9 therefore suggests thatchild poverty rates need to be brought
to a low level if early childhood
services are to fulfil their potential.
The child poverty rate is here definedas the percentage of children growing
up in families whose income, when
adjusted for family size, is less than
50 per cent of the median income forthe country concerned.xviii
Specifically, it is suggested that thechild poverty rate should be lower
than 10 per cent. This is in line with
Report Card 6 in this series, which
advocated that levels of child poverty
in OECD countries should be
progressively brought down to below
10 per cent by means of time-boundtargets supported by a broad public
and political consensus (so that thecommitment can be maintained overthe long term rather then being
dependent on particular politicalparties).*Fig. 1 uses the latest data (2008) toshow which OECD countries
currently meet the proposedbenchmark of ‘fewer than 10 per centof children growing up in poverty’. Of
the 25 countries for which data are
available, only 10 meet the required
standard. Fig. 1 also shows that the‘low child poverty’ benchmark is met
by 8 of the 10 countries at the top of
the overall benchmark league table.**Inclusion
The transition to out-of-home childcare represents a major opportunity to* Innocenti Report Card 6 also suggested that countries whichhave already achieved the ‘less than 10 per cent’ child poverty
target should aim at a figure of 5 per cent or less.
** Unfortunately, data for children of different age groups is notavailable; the figures given therefore apply to all children andyoung people up to the age of 17. Further refinement of thebenchmarks would be assisted by the availability of data that is
specific to children under the age of six.

R eportC ard

8

weaken the links between poverty andpoor outcomes for children. Extending
the benefits of high quality earlychildhood education and care to all
could be and should be a manageable
ideal as the child care transition
unfolds.
The greater likelihood – and thecurrently prevailing pattern in many
OECD countries – is that thetransition to child care will sharpen
existing inequalities. In fact such an
outcome may be considered inevitable
if the transition is managed in such a
way that children from disadvantaged
backgrounds receive lower quality
early childhood education and care. Allother things being equal, low-income
families are under the greatest pressure
to make child care arrangements at theearliest possible time and at the lowest
possible cost. In the absence of specificand well resourced policies to bringhigh quality services to vulnerable
children, the movement towards outof-home child care is therefore likely
to add a new twist to the spiral ofdisadvantage. And if this possibility is
not to become a reality, governments
will need to plan, deliver, and monitor
early childhood services in such a way
as to guarantee the inclusion of thedisadvantaged. In most cases, this will
imply high quality, universally available
services subsidized by governmental
agencies with flexible budgets andgreater concentration of resources, staff
and skills in areas of greatest need.
No internationally comparable data are
available to measure progress towards
such a goal. But in order not to omit
this critical factor, benchmark 10
proposes a proxy ‘outreach’ measure.
As a guide to each OECD country’s
commitment to providing essential
services to all children, including thepoorest and most vulnerable, it looks
at the current outreach of basic healthcare services for children.

I nnocenti

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C ard

8

2 9

Fig. 5 Outreach of essential services (benchmark 10)
There is at present no direct way of measuring and comparing the commitment of OECD governments to providing high quality earlychildhood services for the most disadvantaged families. Benchmark 10 offers a proxy guide by measuring the outreach of essential
mother-and-child health services. Setting the bar deliberately high – an infant mortality rate of less than 4 per 1,000 live births, a lowbirthweight rate of less than 6 per cent, and an average immunization rate of more than 95 per cent – it reveals those OECD countries thatare succeeding in reaching even the families who are hardest-to-reach by virtue of poverty, cultural isolation and social exclusion.
Countries in blue meet at least 2 of the 3 outreach criteria.

Fig. 5aFig. 5bFig. 5c

Infant mortality rates (2005)

Low birthweight (2005)

Immunization coverage 12-23 months (per cent, 2005)

Deaths per 1,000 live births% of births below 2,500 grams

Measles

Polio 3DPT 3

average

Iceland

2.3

Iceland

3.9

Hungary

99

99

99

99.0

Sweden2.4

Finland

4.1

Japan

99

97

99

98.3

Japan

2.8

Swedenii

4.2

Mexico

96

98

98

97.3

Finland3.0

Republic of Korea

4.3

Netherlands

96

98

98

97.3

ii

3.0

Norway4.8

Sweden

94

99

99

97.3

Norway3.1

Denmark

4.9

Finland

97

97

97

97.0

Portugal

3.5

Irelandii

4.9

Republic of Korea

99

96

96

97.0

France

3.6

Canada ii

5.9

Belgium (Flanders) i

94

98

98

96.7

Sloveniaii

3.9

Slovenia

6.0

Spain

97

96

96

96.3

Germany

3.9

New Zealand ii

6.1

Slovenia

94

96

96

95.3

Ireland

4.0

Netherlands

6.2

France

87

98

98

94.3

Spain

4.1

Australia

6.4

Denmark

95

93

93

93.7

Austria

4.2

Italy ii

6.7

United States

93

92

96

93.7

Switzerland

4.2

Austria

6.8

Iceland

90

95

95

93.3

Denmark

4.4

Belgium (Flanders) iii

6.8

Italy

87

97

96

93.3

Italy

4.7

France

6.8

Portugal

93

93

93

93.0

Netherlands

4.9

Germany

6.8

Australia

94

92

92

92.7

Australia

5.0

Switzerland

7.0

Canada

94

89

94

92.3

New Zealand

5.1

Spain ii

7.1

Germany

93

94

90

92.3

United Kingdom

5.1

Portugal

7.5

Norway

90

91

91

90.7

Canada i

5.3

United Kingdom

7.5

Switzerland

82

95

93

90.0

6.0

United States

8.1

Ireland

84

90

90

88.0

Hungary

6.2

Hungary

8.2

United Kingdom

82

91

91

88.0

United States i

6.8

Mexico8.8

New Zealand

82

89

89

86.7

Mexico

18.8

Japan

9.5

Austria

75

86

86

82.3

Belgium (Flanders)

Republic of Korea

iii

ii

i

ii

ii

Source: 2005, OECD Health Data 2007 –Version: October 2007.

Source: 2005, OECD Health Data 2007 –Version: October 2007.

Source: UNICEF/WHO estimates 2005.

Note:

Note:

i

i

i

2004, OECD Health Data 2007.

Note:
2005, Kind en Gezin, Child in Flanders.

Transmonee 2007 Features.

ii 2005, World Health Statistics 2007.

ii 2004, OECD Health Data 2007.

iii 2005 Kind en Gezin, Child in Flanders.

iii 2005, Kind en Gezin, Child in Flanders.

In order to identify those countries
that have demonstrated sustained
determination to ensure that even thechildren of the most marginalizedfamilies are reached, benchmark 10
sets the bar high. Specifically, it
proposes an infant mortality rate ofless than 4 per 1,000 live births, a lowbirthweight rate of less than 6 per
cent, and an immunization rate ofmore than 95 per cent for 12 to 23

month-old children (for immunization
against the major vaccine-preventablediseases of childhood). Countries
fulfilling two of these three minimum
standards are considered to have metbenchmark 10. At present only 8 outof 25 countries do so (Fig. 5) –Finland and Sweden (which meet all
three outreach criteria), plus Belgium(Flanders), Iceland, Japan, Norway, theRepublic of Korea, and Slovenia.

Many wealthy countries haveexcellent child health services andextraordinary progress has been madein reducing infant mortality, lowbirthweight, and vaccine-preventabledisease to unprecedentedly low levels.
But for the purposes of benchmark
10, what counts is not progress inhealth services per se but thecommitment to reaching all children,and particularly those at most risk by

3 0

I nnocenti

Box 7
The data: a weakness for children

R eportC ard

8virtue of poverty, cultural isolation andsocial exclusion.

Reducing disparity
The 10 benchmarks proposed should
be regarded as a first step towards
establishing a common core ofminimum standards for earlychildhood services. Further refinement
will depend on commonly agreed
definitions, more sensitive indicators,
and better data.

Report Card 8 aims to address an important gap in Report Card 7 – Anoverview of child well-being in rich countries – which compared overalllevels of child well-being in 21 industrialized countries. Thoughdeploying a total of 40 separate indicators of well-being, the reportcarried almost no data on pre-school children and acknowledged that“a particularly important omission is the level of participation by threeand four year-olds in early childhood education.”
For the present report, a determined effort was therefore undertaken to
begin closing this ‘data gap’.
Nonetheless, difficulties continue, and the selection of benchmarks inthis report is heavily circumscribed by the availability of internationallycomparable data.
In part, the weakness of the data, even at national level, can be put
down to the often private and informal nature of out-of-home childcare, and of the decentralised and rapidly changing nature of earlychildhood services. But in part, also, it reflects a lack of recognition of
the importance of the early childhood period and of the need tomonitor the services on which millions of young children increasingly
depend.
At present, Ministries of Health and Social Affairs typically collect data
only on all children under 15, while Ministries of Education collect dataon children only when formal schooling begins. Data that relatespecifically to pre-school children is much less common.
More broadly, the available data reflect an assumption that children
younger than four or five need care as opposed to education – anunhelpful distinction which, institutionalised, tends to downgrade earlychildhood services. Staff qualifications and training, teaching methods
and curriculum, monitoring and evaluation – all are as important in earlychildhood education and care as they are in education systems serving
older children.

At present, no outcome indicators areproposed. Concern and controversy
surround currently available methodsof evaluating the progress andattainments of the very young, andmost authorities question the value ofintensive testing for children as young
as three.* Further down the line,
however, it would be valuable to havea widely agreed means of measuring
the extent of the disparities between
children’s abilities at the point of entry
into the formal education system. It
would then be possible, in principle,
to measure the overall efficacy of earlychildhood services by the extent towhich they succeed in reducing suchdisparities. This would be difficult, butthere is nothing impossible about it.
Disparities of this kind have beenmeasured in research projects and pilot
studies; xix and what can be measured
for the few can be monitored for the
many. In recent times, a great deal ofeffort has been devoted to themonitoring of educational inequalities
both within and between OECDnations; but the considerations raisedin this report would suggest that such
efforts have placed too much emphasison the finishing line and too little on
the starting line.
The question now is not whether
early childhood education and carecan reduce disadvantage and inequality* Sweden, with long experience of early childhood services,
rejects the testing of young children, preferring instead theregular evaluation of child care centres.

I nnocenti

R eportC ardof opportunity, it is whether countries
will apply what is known in order toachieve this. As the report From
Neurons to Neighbourhoods concludes:“The overarching question of whether we
can intervene successfully in young
children’s lives has been answered in theaffirmative and should be put to rest.
However, interventions that work arerarely simple, inexpensive, or easy to
implement. The critical agenda for earlychildhood intervention is to advanceunderstanding of what it takes toimprove the odds of positive outcomes forthe nation’s most vulnerable young
children and to determine the most costeffective strategies for achieving welldefined goals.” xxThis will not be easy. Seeking tosupport disadvantaged families, and tocounter the effects of poverty and riskin the home, is a formidable andexpensive task. Any progress will be
hard won. Nonetheless, improving thequality of early childhood educationand care remains the most potent of
all available opportunities for resisting
the entrenchment of disadvantage.
And without new ways to measureprogress towards this goal, theopportunity is likely to be missed. The
collection of basic data on such issues
as health, educational, and economic
trends has for some time been
harmonized across the countries of
the OECD. It is now time for essential
data on early childhood services to be
included in standardised data sets.
Without definitions there can be nomeasurement; without measurement
there can be no data; without data
there can be no monitoring; andwithout monitoring there can be no
evidence-based policy, effective
advocacy, or public accountability.

Generating commitment
It will be clear from this overview thatearly childhood services in many
OECD countries are falling short of8

3 1

what is needed. It is equally clear that if
the movement towards out-of-homechild care is to fulfil its potential forbenefit rather than harm, then the levelof debate and investment in availability,
quality, and equity will have to be
increased not marginally but
substantially. In many OECD countries,
as performance against benchmark 8
suggests, successfully managing thetransition to out-of-home child care
will require at least a doubling ofcurrent investment levels.
In many of those countries it may beargued that such a significant increasein public spending is not politicallyfeasible. But this may be too pessimistic.
First, there is already a large andgrowing public demand for highquality, subsidized early childhood
education and care.
Second, high quality care – and only
high quality care – offers long term
benefits to society in the form of
increased productivity and incomes andhigher returns on investments in
education (Box 2).
Third, there is widespread recognition
that many of the social, educational andbehavioural problems that affect thequality of life in economicallydeveloped nations have their origins inpoor parenting and disadvantaged
backgrounds. As several long-term
studies have demonstrated, high quality
early childhood education and care canhelp to prevent or mitigate suchproblems. The savings to be made forsociety as a whole – in remedial
education, in coping with social
exclusion, in responding to antisocialand criminal behaviour, and in thetreatment of long-term mental ill
health – are likely to be many times
greater than the amounts needed toincrease investment in high quality
early childhood service. In the costbenefit studies conducted so far,benefits have commonly been foundto outweigh costs by as much as eight
to one.
Fourth, there is today no convincing
reason for spending less on earlychildhood education and care than on
the educational needs of older
children. When children reach the ageof five or six, all countries accept highlevels of public expenditure on
education because the public benefits
clearly justify the public costs. Yet in
the light of today’s knowledge it isclear that the same case can be madeeven more convincingly forinvestments in younger children.
Indeed as understanding of earlychildhood development increases,
present patterns of educational
investment are coming to seem
increasingly anomalous and oldfashioned: where the impact could begreatest, investment is least.

Conclusion
What we are now witnessing acrossthe industrialized world can fairly bedescribed as a revolution in how the
majority of young children are beingbrought up. And to the extent that thischange is unplanned and unmonitored,
it could also be described as a highstakes gamble with today’s children
and tomorrow’s world.
The trend towards early childhood
education and care has enormous
potential for good – for giving
children the best possible start in life,
for limiting the early establishment of
disadvantage, for advancing progress
towards equality for women, forboosting educational achievement, andfor investing in citizenship. Poor
quality care, on the other hand, has thepotential for both immediate andlong-term harm.
Some OECD countries have engaged
closely with this issue and put in placepolicies and investments designed to3 2

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realize the potential benefits. In others,
the mass movement towards out-ofhome child care is proceeding in an
ad hoc way with minimal assurancesof quality. In such cases, it is thepotential for harm that is more likely
to be realized.

and large-scale action to give special
emphasis to high quality earlychildhood services for at-riskchildren, ‘double disadvantage’ is likely
to become the norm and the childcare transition will become a new andpotent source of inequality.

Ultimately the issue of whether
today’s children will benefit or sufferfrom these changes will come down
to the availability of effective parental
leave and to the availability,
affordability, and quality of earlychildhood services. At the heart of thequality question are child care staff
who are well trained, well motivated,
well remunerated and well respectedin their communities. The evidence
from OECD countries to datesuggests there are no short-cuts orbargain-basement options that do notcompromise children’s futures.

If this is allowed to happen, then an
historic opportunity will be lost.
Beginning more than a century ago,publicly financed primary andsecondary education brought
accelerated progress towards equalityof opportunity. But in more recent
decades, progress towards this ideal
appears to have stalled. And it is clearthat if further significant gains are to
be made then the theatre of action
must shift to early childhood. In otherwords, the rise of early childhood
education and care offers a chance tore-accelerate past progress towards aworld in which the opportunities oflife are not circumscribed by thecircumstances of birth. As it has
become clear that disadvantage
becomes established in the earliest
years of life, so it has become
necessary to focus our concern on
what happens in those early months
and years. It is here that action can betaken that will enable all children to
become all that they can be. And it ishere, if at all, that the selfperpetuating cycle of disadvantage
will be broken. In practice, there is a clear danger thatthe potential benefits of earlychildhood education will be reserved
for children from better off and better
educated families while the potential
for harm will be visited mainly onchildren from disadvantaged homes. It
is in the poorest families that thepressures for the earliest possible
return to work are felt most acutely
and in which resources for securinghigh quality child care are least likely
to be found. In the absence of specific

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notes

This Report Card is supported by two
background papers commissioned by the
UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre andwritten by John Bennett. The first ofthese – ‘Early Childhood Services in theOECD Countries’, Innocenti Working
Paper 2008-01 – provides backgroundand references to the arguments
presented and includes a literature
review. The second – ‘Benchmarks for
Early Childhood Services in OECDCountries’, Innocenti Working Paper
2008-02 – sets out a more detailed
commentary on the child carebenchmarks proposed. Both background
papers are available on the Innocenti
website at www.unicef-irc.org.
Sources and references are provided in
the background papers.

Additional references
i Belsky, J., ‘Developmental Risks (Still)
Associated with Early Child Care’,
Emanuel Miller Lecture, Journal of Child
Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied
Disciplines, vol. 42, no. 1, 2001,
pp. 845-859.
ii National Research Council and Instituteof Medicine, From Neurons to
Neighborhoods: The science of earlychildhood development, Committee on
Integrating the Science of Early
Childhood Development, Shonkoff, J. P.
and D. A. Phillips (eds.), Board on
Children, Youth and Families,
Commission on Behavioral and Social
Sciences and Education, National
Academy Press, Washington, D.C., 2000.
iii National Scientific Council on theDeveloping Child, The Science of Early
Childhood Development, Closing the Gap
Between What We Know and What We
Do, Center on the Developing Child at
Harvard University, Cambridge MA, 2007,
pp. 1 and 4.

iv Committee on the Prevention of
Reading Difficulties in Young Children,
Snow, C., M. S. Burns and P. Griffin (eds.),
Preventing Reading Difficulties in YoungChildren, National Academy Press,
Washington, D.C., 1998. See also Hart, B.,
and T. Risley, Meaningful Differences inthe Everyday Experiences of Young
American Children, Paul H. Brookes
Publishing. Co., Baltimore MD, 1995.
v Cleveland, G. and M. Krashinsky,
Financing ECEC Services in OECDCountries, University of Toronto,
Toronto, 2003.
vi National Research Council and Instituteof Medicine, From Neurons to
Neighborhoods, op. cit., pp. 309 and 11.

xiii UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre,
Report Card 4: A league table ofeducational disadvantage in rich nations,
UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre,
Florence, 2002.
xiv Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development, Starting
Strong II, op. cit, p. 14.
xv National Research Council, Eager toLearn: Educating our preschoolers,Committee on Early Childhood Pedagogy,
Bowman, B. T., M. S. Donovan and M. S.
Burns (eds.); Commission on Behavioral
and Social Sciences and Education,
National Academy Press, Washington,
D. C., 2001, p. 322.

vii Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Starting
Strong II, Early Childhood Education andCare, OECD, Paris, 2006, pp. 35-36.

xvi Bennett, J., Benchmarks for Early
Childhood Services in OECD Countries,
Innocenti Working Paper 2008-02, UNICEF
Innocenti Research Centre, Florence,p. 41.

viii National Scientific Council on theDeveloping Child, The Science of Early
Childhood Development, op. cit., p. 2.

xvii National Research Council andInstitute of Medicine, From Neurons to
Neighborhoods, op. cit., p. 396.

ix Heckman J. J, ‘’Skill Formation and theEconomics of Investing in Disadvantaged
Children’, Science, vol. 312. no. 5782,
30 June 2006, pp. 1900-1902.

xviii UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre,
Report Card 6: Child poverty in richcountries 2005, UNICEF Innocenti
Research Centre, Florence, 2006, p. 11.

x National Institute of Child Health andHuman Development, National Institutesof Health News Release, ‘Child Care
Linked To Assertive, Noncompliant, andAggressive Behaviors Vast Majority ofChildren Within Normal Range’,
16 July 2003.

xix Feinstein L., ‘Inequality in the Early
Cognitive Development of British Children
in the 1970 Cohort’, Economica, vol. 70,
no. 277, 2003, pp. 73-97.

xi Sylva K., et al., The Effective Provisionof Pre-school Education (EPPE) Project,
Findings from the Pre-school Period,
Institute of Education, London,
March 2003.
xii ‘Nursery Tales’, The Guardian,
July 8 2004.

xx National Research Council andInstitute of Medicine, From Neurons to
Neighborhoods, op. cit, p. 10.

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A cknow l edgements

Innocenti Report Card 8 was written byPeter Adamson drawing on research byJohn Bennett. The project wascoordinated by the UNICEF Innocenti
Research Centre assisted by aninternational panel of advisors. Twobackground papers to this report areavailable on the UNICEF website:www.unicef-irc.org.

Ms. Sachiko Kitano
Associate Professor
Fukuoka University of Education
Fukuoka, Japan

UNICEF Innocenti ResearchCentre advisors

Dr. Myunglim Chang
Research Fellow, Director
Korea Institute of Child Careand Education
Seoul, Republic of Korea

Marta Santos Pais
Director
David Parker
Deputy Director
Eva Jespersen
Chief, Social and Economic Policies Unit
Marco Kools
Programme Officer

External advisors
Ms. Bea Buysse
Senior Advisor
Kind & Gezin
Brussels, Belgium
Ms. Päivi Lindberg
Senior Planning Officer
STAKES
Helsinki, Finland
Mr. Hans Eirich
Director
Bavarian State Ministry for Labor andSocial Affairs, Family and Women
Munich, Germany
Ms. Marta Korintus
Research Director
National Institute for Family
and Social Policy
Budapest, Hungary

Ms. Mugyeong Moon
Research Fellow Director
Korea Institute of Child Care and
Education
Seoul, Republic of Korea

Mr. Lars Olof Mikaelsson
Deputy-Director
Education and Culture Department
Division for Schools
Stockholm, Sweden
Ms. Sandra Griffin
Executive Director
National Collaborating Centre for
Aboriginal Health
University of Northern British Columbia
Prince George, BC, Canada
Ms. Luísa Ucha
Director of School Education Service
Ministry of Education
Lisbon, Portugal
Prof. Hirokazu Yoshikawa
Harvard Graduate School of Education
Cambridge, MA, USA
Ms. Erika Bernacchi
Technical Coordination
ChildONEurope Secretariat
Florence, Italy

External reviewers
Dr. Simon Chapple
Economist, Child Well-Being Project
Organisation for Economic Co-operation
and Development
Paris, France
Prof. Patrice Engle
Department of Psychology and Child
Development
California Polytechnic State University
San Luis Obispo, CA, USA
Prof. Hirokazu Yoshikawa
Harvard Graduate School of Education
Cambridge, MA, USA
Dr. Joan Lombardi,
Chair, Birth to Five Policy Alliance
Washington D.C., USA
Mr. Mark Pearson
Head of Social Policy Division
Organisation for Economic Co-operation
and Development
Paris, France
Dr. Nurper Ulkuer
Senior Adviser, Early Childhood
Development
UNICEFNew York, NY, USA
Dr. Gerlinde Ziniel
Research Manager
European Foundation for the
Improvement of Living and Working
Conditions
Dublin, Ireland

Dr. Mary Eming YoungChild Development Knowledge
Lead Specialist
World Bank
Washington D.C., USA
Dr. Nurper Ulkuer
Senior Adviser, Early Childhood
Development
UNICEFNew York, NY, USA
Design and layout by Garry Peasleyand Angela Bartlett of mccdesign.

8

Previous issues in this series:
Innocenti Report Card 1
A league table of child poverty in rich nations
Innocenti Report Card 2
A league table of child deaths by injury in rich nations
Innocenti Report Card 3
A league table of teenage births in rich nations
Innocenti Report Card 4
A league table of educational disadvantage in rich nations
Innocenti Report Card 5
A league table of child maltreatment deaths in rich nations
Innocenti Report Card 6
Child Poverty in Rich Countries 2005
Innocenti Report Card 7
Child poverty in perspective: An overview of childwell-being in rich countries

Graphics: mccdesign.com
Printed by: ABC Tipografia, Florence, Italy

Innocenti Report Card 8, 2008
The child care transition
A league table of early childhood education andcare in economically advanced countries

UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre
Piazza SS. Annunziata, 1250122 Florence, Italy
Tel: (+39) 055 20 330
Fax: (+39) 055 2033 220
florence@unicef.org
www.unicef-irc.org
ISSN: 1605-7317
ISBN: 978-88-89129-70-8© The United Nations Childeren’s Fund (UNICEF)
December 2008