Education for All report on early childhood

UNESCO's Education for All Global Monitoring Report 2007 is published on October 26 on the theme of early childhood. The Bernard van Leer Foundation was delighted to have had the opportunity to provide input into this latest GMR. We believe the report will make 2007 the year of early childhood in EFA, and we consider that it sheds important light on our activities to raise early childhood issues on the international agenda.

Liana Gertsch, the foundation's programme manager for the issue area Successful transitions: The continuum from home to school, represented the foundation at the report's official launch. Peter Laugharn, the foundation's executive director, is taking the opportunity generated by publicity surrounding the GMR's launch to raise awareness of early childhood issues in the field: a briefing of print and broadcast journalists in St Lucia is to be followed by a similar event in Morocco. (Update: Link to article on 3rd November in Moroccan media).

As the report says, early childhood care and education receives "much less aid" than other levels of education - yet decades of experience on the part of the Bernard van Leer Foundation and others affirms that well-designed intervention in the early years of education pays larger social dividends, and spreads those dividends more widely through society, than intervention in the education of older age groups.

We believe the GMR provides important ammunition for our endeavours to leverage our own funding of early childhood interventions to encourage greater amounts of aid and state spending to be focused in this area. The report notes the impact the foundation's activities had in founding the ECCE sector in Jamaica, and affirms the wider leverage potential of interventions such as ours:

Partnerships with international organizations or aid agencies can generate seed money for projects that can then be taken to scale, and also provide technical assistance for national planning. A decade of investment and technical support (1972-1982) from the Bernard van Leer Foundation led to Kenya’s Preschool Education Project, which focused on quality issues and community-based programmes for 3- to 5-year olds. (p. 185)

The next edition of the Bernard van Leer Foundation's journal, Early Childhood Matters, will be on the issue of transitions from home to school. The two background papers that the foundation provided as input into the GMR - on the subjects of the impact of early investment on primary age outcomes, and the process of transition from home to daycare and primary school - will also be published in our working papers series in early 2007. The pdfs will, as usual, be posted on this website as soon as they are available.