Starting Strong III : A Quality Toolbox for Early Childhood Education and Care Early childhood education and care (ECEC) can bring a wide range of benefits – for children parents and society at large. However these benefits are conditional on “quality”. Expanding access to services without attention to quality will not deliver good outcomes for children or long term productivity benefits for society. This new publication focuses on quality issues: it aims to define quality and outlines five policy levers that can enhance it in ECEC. In addition it provides busy policy makers with practical tools such as research briefs international comparisons country examples self reflection sheets etc. in order to successfully implement these policy levers.