An Equal Start?: Providing Quality Early Education and Care for Disadvantaged Children

Early childhood education and care has become a central policy concern in many countries, and as services expand it is crucial to examine whether children from disadvantaged backgrounds receive equitable services. In An Equal Start? experts from eight countries—the United States, the United Kingdom, Norway, France, the Netherlands, Germany, New Zealand, and Australia—examine how early education and care is organized, funded, and regulated in their respective countries. They give up-to-date pictures of the access to services, providing rich insights into how policies play out in practice and the effects on the provision of services to disadvantaged children. Together they reveal a number of common tensions and complexities that many countries face in ensuring that early education and care is affordable, accessible, and of the highest possible quality.