O.5 Public Pressure for Expanded Childcare and the Gradual Universalization of ECE in Norway

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BOX O.5

Public Pressure for Expanded Childcare and the Gradual Universalization of ECE in Norway

Norway’s state early childhood education (ECE) sector grew out of mounting public pressure to provide childcare. The country began by providing federal subsidies to formal childcare programs in 1962, followed by a formal survey to determine the state of childcare options and the demand for formal childcare. The survey found that 35 percent of mothers with three-to-six-year-olds stated a need for formal childcare but there was only 5 percent childcare coverage nationwide. The same survey found that, of those who used out-of-home care on a regular basis, more than 85 percent relied on informal and unregulated arrangements.

Norway defined its first set of ECE sector objectives in its 1972 Kindergarten White Paper. The document proposed radical changes to public childcare policies, setting out universal childcare—with a focus on children with special needs—as an explicit goal over the policy cycle. The government set out to quadruple the number of childcare spaces within the first decade and then passed the Kindergarten Act in 1975 to regulate kindergartens.

The development of Norwegian ECE policy has been an iterative process spanning many decades. After introducing the first Kindergarten Act in 1975, the government defined a phased effort to expand and publicly finance access. Shortly thereafter, Norway introduced the aim of publicly subsidizing universal access to high-quality ECE in the same decade and then focused on establishing federal regulations for quality of care, including establishing teacher requirements, a national curriculum, and a universal framework for early childhood education and care provision. In 2005, Norway instituted a new Kindergarten Act, incorporating strict regulations for how ECE centers would be staffed and operated and introducing a five-year recruitment initiative as well as new regulations for kindergarten teacher education. This was accompanied by new goals and standards, with the Directorate for Education and Training issuing national guidelines on inspection to help municipalities and county governors’ offices fulfill their monitoring roles. Since 1975, progression toward universal access has occurred incrementally, with parental fees charged for ECE decreasing correspondingly. ECE enrollment in Norway stands at 97 percent as of 2018, with grants to kindergartens continuing to ensure that low-income families pay a maximum of 6 percent of their income for a place in kindergarten (Engel et al. 2018).

Sources: Engel et al. 2018; UIS 2020.