2 | Quality Early Learning
to have more limited access to early stimulation, early learning programs, and learning materials at home and in their communities (McCoy et al. 2018). These children enter school without the preparation they need to succeed, and enter classrooms that are often overcrowded and of low quality. The lack of school readiness locks many children into a cycle of underperformance, grade repetition, and, eventually, dropout. It also leads to substantial waste of education systems’ limited resources.2 Early childhood education (ECE) programs designed to meet the needs of young children are an essential component of a comprehensive package of interventions children need during early childhood.3 Quality ECE4 can help tackle learning poverty by building human capital and setting children on higher developmental trajectories. ECE programs are rapidly expanding around the world, presenting an opportunity to address early learning gaps that undermine children’s ability to thrive in school. But, as evidenced by the current learning crisis, in spite of near universal enrollment rates in primary education, increased access may not lead to more learning.5 As access to ECE expands, countries must ensure that expanded access is predicated upon parallel investments in quality to promote child learning. In this volume, quality ECE refers to center-based education services for children ages three to six that nurture children’s potential and promote early l earning. While there is no universal threshold for “enough” quality, key investments to improve children’s learning outcomes include improving the capacity of the ECE workforce (both educators and leaders), providing age-appropriate pedagogy and curriculum, and ensuring safe and stimulating learning spaces. Increasingly, evidence suggests that, for investments in ECE to be effective, program quality—the quality of classroom interactions and environment—should be at least higher than the quality of care and stimulation that children would experience in the absence of the program (either at home or at an alternative program) (Cascio and Schanzenbach 2014). This volume provides actionable and evidence-based strategies for the delivery of quality ECE at scale. Chapters 1 through 6 synthesize evidence on key factors and strategies for effective ECE service delivery that leads to child learning,6 and discuss how these strategies can be put into practice in LMICs. This overview provides guidance on how to prioritize investments in ECE to ensure quality, beginning with a review of the evidence on the promise of ECE and current challenges to realize its potential, followed by a discussion on ways that governments can sequence investments and implement recommendations from the volume’s chapters so that access is expanded with sufficient quality to promote early learning. The overview’s closing section discusses key complementary investments in the home
