32 | Quality Early Learning
NOTES 1. Learning poverty means being unable to read and understand a simple text by age 10. This indicator brings together schooling and learning indicators: it begins with the share of children who have not achieved minimum reading proficiency (as measured in schools) and is adjusted by the proportion of children who are out of school (and are assumed not able to read proficiently) (World Bank 2019). 2. For instance, in nearly 40 LMICs, grade 1 enrollment rates are 30 percent greater than the number of grade 1–age children, largely because of repetition in grade 1 (Crouch and Merseth 2017). 3. Other crucial interventions to support human capital development during early childhood include health, nutrition, and protection from stress. 4. ECE includes center-based programs delivered at preschools, kindergartens, nursery schools, and community centers. These programs can be public, private, or community based and can range from one year right before the start of primary school to three years starting at age three. 5. Motivated by the Millennium Development Goals, in the past two decades many countries rapidly expanded enrollment in basic education. However, this expansion came with stagnation or reduction in learning outcomes because systems were not equipped to receive new entrants and ensure quality (World Bank 2018b). 6. In this volume, learning encompasses holistic child development and wellbeing, which are necessary conditions for learning. 7. In its Smart Buys report, the Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel, cohosted by the World Bank and the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, endorsed ECE as a Good Buy given that there is good evidence that these interventions are cost-effective (GEEAP 2020). 8. Provision of ECE varies greatly around the world. In countries where ECE is the purview of more than one system, sometimes services are split by children’s age, with the early childhood education and care system providing services for younger children (for example, three-to-four-year-olds), while the year immediately before primary school (five-to-six-year-olds) is provided by the local education system. In other cases, both systems deliver services for children three to six years old in parallel. 9. The literature on ECE typically distinguishes between “structural” and “process” dimensions of quality. Structural quality encompasses quality of physical and other basic elements of the classroom that are easily and objectively quantifiable, such as infrastructure, materials, and play items, as well as standards related to staff-to-child ratios and group size, among others. Structural features can influence process quality and accelerate and support learning. Process quality relates to children’s everyday experiences and involves the social, emotional, and instructional aspects of children’s classroom experience, including the daily interactions that children have with their teachers,
