Progressively Building Sustainable Quality ECE

8 | Quality Early Learning

potential for expansion of some nonstate models may be limited by management capacity and the fragmentation of service provision, reinforcing the need for an effective public system to engage with nonstate providers.

In sum, more and better investments are needed to make the most of ECE’s enormous potential and avoid repeating the same mistakes that led to the global learning crisis in primary education. Expanding access to ECE without sufficient quality constitutes an inefficient use of limited resources that may bring about negligible or even detrimental effects on learning (Britto, Yoshikawa, and Boller 2011; Howes et al. 2008). Although more resources and a systems approach are essential to ensuring the long-term stability and quality of ECE provision at scale, more child learning can be achieved if investment decisions are informed by the growing body of evidence on how to improve the effectiveness of ECE to nurture children’s ability to learn. In the face of resource and capacity constraints, further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the most essential aspects of ECE should be prioritized first for ECE to expand effectively and promote learning for all children.

The rich body of knowledge synthesized in this volume and past experiences from countries around the world suggest that successful policy and program implementation to build high-quality ECE systems should be grounded on promoting child learning above other potential imperatives. Resources are always limited; thus, systems face trade-offs not only between the breadth and quality of coverage, but also across crucial elements of quality, and between short- and longer-term goals. For example, as ECE systems expand, they carry substantial infrastructure and other major recurrent costs, such as teacher salaries. These costs often make up a large percentage of ministry of education budgets, limiting resources for investment in curricula, materials, professional development, and other needs; conversely, an immediate need for learning materials may hold up investments in monitoring systems that help ensure the quality of ECE over time. As governments assess how much can be achieved in the short, medium, and long run, they should take care to consistently allocate resources toward promoting learning in ECE classrooms along the way. This section discusses ways to prioritize, sequence, and implement recommendations from the volume’s chapters to progressively build sustainable quality ECE at scale.

Overview | 9

Balancing the Quantity and Quality of ECE

The recent expansion of access to ECE has the potential to lift many children’s early learning trajectories. But overly ambitious targets and plans risk instilling pressure to scale quickly without ensuring quality. Quality can be harder to achieve at scale and often decreases as systems expand. A rapidly growing ECE system can challenge existing quality assurance efforts given that standards may be harder to uphold at scale without strong focus on and investment in quality. For example, the provision of suitable spaces to meet growing ECE supply can be challenging, and, in many places, expansion has been completed in the absence of ensuring minimum safety standards. Systems that have rapidly increased coverage have also struggled to secure the necessary workforce to meet growing service provision. Confronted with the challenge of identifying and training staff, some systems have made hiring and training requirements more flexible without adequately investing in the preparation of and support for those without qualifications, thus compromising the quality of their ECE workforce (Pardo and Adlerstein 2016).

The challenges and opportunities that countries face to improve conditions for child learning depend to some extent on countries’ quality and coverage starting points, which, as documented earlier in this overview, vary widely across LMICs.14 The pace at which countries expand access to ECE and the pace and sequence of investments to improve quality also vary significantly, reflecting what is already in place as well as the political will, momentum, and finance for ECE that define countries’ possibility frontiers. Together, these factors determine a country’s pathway to improving access to quality ECE.

Figure O.3 presents a highly stylized snapshot of starting points, with nascent ECE systems reaching a small fraction of the population with limited quality on one end of the spectrum (lower-left quadrant), and more established ECE systems reaching a significant percentage of children and providing quality services that promote learning on the other (upper-right quadrant). In addition to starting points, figure O.3 presents a few illustrative pathways toward quality early learning. Although the figure represents an abstraction of the very diverse, complex, and typically nonlinear trajectories countries follow on the path to expanding ECE, it helps illustrate how prioritization and sequencing of key investments to promote child learning at scale may vary by countries’ starting points, possibilities, and aspirations.

Pathway 1 in figure O.3 is illustrative of Ethiopia’s efforts to rapidly expand coverage from 5 percent in 2010 to 80 percent by 2021, while building quality. Pathway 2 reflects a more gradual process of consolidation of resources, learning, and budget expansion, such as the approach