Comparative report

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) can contribute significantly to children’s development by laying the foundation for future development and learning. The returns to education are highest for investment in ECEC, especially for disadvantaged children, and subsequently decrease with age. However, while the ‘skill begets skill’ theory argues for an early start in ECEC, research reveals that the impact of early enrolment is closely linked to the quality of provision. High-quality ECEC helps tackle underachievement in basic skills by allowing for an early identification of learning difficulties and a strong start towards future development. The lifetime benefits of high-quality ECEC include higher earnings, long-term individual wellbeing, lower risk of poverty and early school leaving, and better health. In addition, ECEC provision enables better labour market participation of mothers and single parents, thus reducing the risk of child poverty. Against this backdrop, this chapter looks at latest participation data and how to increase and maintain the quality of ECEC provision.

3.1. Broadening participation

The participation in ECEC of children between the age of three and the starting age for compulsory primary education continues to increase in the EU. The rate stood at 94.6% in 2023, 1.4 percentage points lower than the 2030 EU-level target. To date, eight EU countries have reached the 96% target set at EU level for this age group, while most top 90%. The best-performing countries are France (100%), Belgium (98%) and Spain (97.7%), whereas Romania (75.7%), Slovakia (80.8%) and Czechia (85.3%) are at the bottom (Figure 11). The EU average increased by 1.3 percentage points from the previous year, even though there was a decrease in five countries between 2022 and 2023.

Since 2015 participation across the EU has broadened by 2.7 percentage points and most countries have recorded growing rates in the last decade. This trend is part of a broader convergence process as increasing participation has been a priority in many EU countries. In the past few years alone, various national reforms have made participation mandatory – especially for older children – or have introduced legal entitlement to ECEC. At the same time, investment in infrastructure has increased the number of places available . Substantial improvements of more than 10 percentage points have been recorded in Ireland, Luxembourg, Croatia, Poland, Finland, Lithuania and Hungary, driven by a significant rise in the participation of 3-year-olds.

Progress has been made in almost all EU countries in terms of increasing participation among 3-year-olds and at European level, reaching 90.3% in 2023 (+4 percentage points since 2015). Yet in some countries, the challenge remains to increase participation among 3-year-olds with rates particularly low in Romania (68.1%) and Slovakia (68.9%).

Among children aged 0 to 2, attendance rates are still substantially lower. In 2024, an average of just 39.3% of children under the age of three were enrolled in formal childcare or education on average. As shown in Figure 12, there are significant differences between countries, with rates ranging from just 5.1% in Slovakia to 78.9% in the Netherlands. Although the average remains 5.7 percentage points below the 2030 EU-level target of at least 45%, it has risen by 1.9 percentage points since 2023 and by 9.3 points since 2015. Several countries have made notable progress between 2015 and 2024, with increases exceeding 15 percentage points in the Netherlands (32.6), Lithuania (27.2), Malta (25.1), Cyprus (21.1), Slovenia (20.4), Croatia (18.4), Finland (17.8), France (17.6), Greece (17.5), Portugal (16.4), Estonia (15.3), and Spain (15.3).

Promoting equitable access to ECEC is key to preventing the snowballing effects of socio-economic and migrant background (see Section 4.2 ). In almost all EU countries, children at risk of poverty or social exclusion are less likely to attend formal childcare or education than their more advantaged peers. In 2024, the participation rate for children below the age of 3 who are at risk of poverty or social exclusion was 24.4%, compared to 42.5% for those not at risk. This gap exceeds 25 percentage points in several countries — most notably in France (38.4 percentage points), the Netherlands (33.9), Malta (31.0), and Belgium (27.7). Between 2016 and 2024, most EU countries succeeded in increasing the participation among vulnerable children, but only a few managed to close the gap (Figure 14). In fact, the gap grew on average 4.5 percentage points between 2016 and 2024, reaching 18.1 percentage points in 2024. The gap increased by more than 10 percentage points in Croatia, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Cyprus, France, and Greece. Nonetheless, despite the persistent gap, the level of participation of disadvantaged children in 2024 exceeded 40% in seven EU countries.

3.2. Ensuring quality through monitoring and evaluation

Evaluation and monitoring systems offer the opportunity to achieve, maintain or develop high quality provision of ECEC. Such systems help identify strengths and weaknesses, which can then be built upon or remedied. Evaluation and monitoring in ECEC serves a number of purposes, such as increasing efficient resource allocation and informing actions for improvement, including in equity and inclusion. Monitoring systems can also provide information to help families make choices between a range of local ECEC services and address potential barriers to attendance. If ECEC is perceived as safe, nurturing and supportive, it may alleviate parental concerns about leaving their children, especially those very small.

External evaluation of ECEC settings is a quality-control process aimed at assessing the performance of individual settings, reporting on the quality of services provided and recommending improvements to practices. Two key dimensions of quality can be distinguished and evaluated: structural quality and process quality at the level of each setting. Structural quality focuses on the conditions of daily operations and is assessed by checking compliance with regulations and guidelines on factors such as staff qualifications, group sizes and health and safety standards. Process quality refers to how effectively the setting fosters children's holistic development, wellbeing and learning through interactions and experiences with staff and peers. This dimension includes the educational aspects, such as how the curriculum and pedagogy are implemented in practice. Process quality is a significant predictor of children's development and learning. Research indicates that children in ECEC settings with more positive staff-child interactions and higher-quality exposure to developmental and educational activities tend to have better emerging literacy and numeracy skills, as well as improved behavioural and social skills.

Figure 14 shows that in slightly over one-third of all EU education systems, external evaluations of the individual ECEC settings for younger children focus solely on structural quality, whereas those for older children’s settings tend to include process quality more commonly. Only in Croatia, Cyprus and Slovenia, does the regulation on evaluation address structural quality without taking into account the quality of educational processes or interactions for both age groups. In a few EU countries, however, there are no regulations on evaluation (Italy for the entire period, Bulgaria for younger children and Luxembourg for pre-primary schools). In others, local authorities (such as municipalities), non-governmental organisations or other private bodies have considerable freedom to establish the processes and procedures for evaluating their own ECEC provision. In these cases, aggregated information on external evaluations is limited.

Although quality can also be evaluated at the level of each individual setting, an overall picture can help identify strengths and weaknesses at the system level and, in turn, can affect practices at the level of individual settings. Such an overall picture can guide national policy developments like the continuing professional development of staff.

Figure 15 illustrates the extent to which countries conducted national evaluations of ECEC quality between 2018 and 2023 based on site visits. Fourteen education systems did not carry out any national evaluation during this period. In six systems, broad national analyses were conducted using data from sources other than external evaluations of individual settings. Just over a third of all EU education systems aggregated findings from individual setting evaluations into national-level reports. In several countries, while external evaluation of individual ECEC settings is carried out, there are no mechanisms to aggregate the results into a comprehensive national picture of quality. This might be hindered by the high autonomy of local evaluators, especially in those countries where ECEC services are organised based on age groups, with separate provisions for younger and older children, and by fragmented responsibilities across ministries and authorities. Such fragmentation leads to inconsistent evaluations and weak data structures, limiting the potential for improvements in ECEC coordinated at national level.