people and planet

11
Access and participation..................................................................................................... 206
Quality........................................................................................................................................... 210
Child development outcomes.............................................................................................213
Target 4.2 reaffirms the focus of the international
community on ensuring that all children receive a
strong foundation through early childhood care and
education. In fact, compared with the first Education
for All (EFA) goal, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable
Development goes beyond care and education as a
means of meeting children’s learning needs, and
includes early childhood development as an outcome.
This is expressed in the concept of school readiness,
which covers physical, social/emotional and language/
cognitive domains.
This chapter identifies three monitoring challenges
in relation to the concepts in target 4.2. The first, in
regard to access and participation, is that no available
source provides enough information on how many
children benefit from pre-primary education – and
organized learning programmes more generally – for
at least one year. Two complementary participationrelated
indicators have been proposed, drawing on
administrative and survey data, to address this.
under the education Sustainable Development Goal
(SDG) for which the Inter-agency and Expert Group on
Sustainable Development Goal Indicators put forward
two global indicators, complementing the outcome
measure with a participation measure.
ACCESS AND PARTICIPATION
Comparing pre-primary education participation rates
across countries is more difficult than comparing
participation measures in primary and secondary
education, for several reasons. First, the age groups
and starting ages are less standardized in pre-primary
education than at other levels. Almost half the world’s
countries have a three-year pre-primary education age
group, with children expected to first enrol at the age
of 3. However, many other combinations of duration
and starting age are common (Table 11.1). Calculating
participation rates over such varied groups of children
may lead to misleading conclusions.
Second, none of the proposed indicators capture the
quality of provision. This chapter discusses proposed
approaches for assessing the quality of early childhood
education settings and systems.
Finally, the feasibility of introducing a monitoring
mechanism for early childhood development is uncertain.
That uncertainty is partly why this is the only target
Second, relatively few countries have free and/or
compulsory pre-primary education. Among the 207
countries and territories, pre-primary education was
compulsory in 50, and free and compulsory for at least
one year in 38.
Third, pre-primary education takes diverse forms. Nongovernment
provision is common (accounting for 42%
“
Of 207 countries and territories, pre-primary education was
compulsory in 50, and free and compulsory for at least one year in 38
”
206
CHAPTER 11 | TARGET 4.2 – EARLY CHILDHOOD