Education & Care

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) services for children under six years of age play a fundamental role in laying strong foundations for lifelong learning and wellbeing, especially in the first three years of life. Quality ECEC services can make an extraordinary difference in children’s lives, especially for the most disadvantaged. Research indicates that children from vulnerable groups derive even greater benefit from high-quality ECEC than their peers from more advantaged families.

Our Recommendations:

European Commission identified staff professionalization as one of the key issues for the ECEC field. In many countries, part of the workforce is represented by low-qualified ECEC assistants. Studies have shown that assistants have fewer chances for qualification and professional development and are not taken into account in policy documents. Improving the competences of all staff (core practitioners and assistants) would improve the services’ quality, which would in turn help eliminate barriers in front of families in using ECEC services.

The early childhood education and care (ECEC) workforce plays a critical role in the quality of provision. There has been growing interest by policymakers at the local and international levels and ample research has shown a clear consensus about the importance of quality in ECEC. This research article focuses on the role of assistants in ECEC based on a holistic conceptualization of education and care and examines 15 European country profiles.

While a global understanding of teacher well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic is beginning to emerge, much remains to be understood about what early childhood teachers have felt and experienced with respect to their work and well-being. The present mixed-method study examined early care and education (ECE) teachers’ working conditions and physical, psychological, and professional well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic using a national sample of 1434 ECE teachers in the U.S.

Early educator well-being is increasingly understood as a critical ingredient of high-quality early education and care. The COVID-19 pandemic has threatened educator well-being by exacerbating existing stressors and introducing novel stressors to all aspects of early educators’ lives, and early educators have had differential access to resources to cope with these new circumstances.

The early childhood education (ECE) workforce plays a key role in promoting early childhood development by their interactions with young children during formative years. However, the inherent demands of the profession and the work conditions within ECE settings affect job satisfaction and overall health and well-being.

A stronger, more effective early care and education (ECE) workforce is essential for supporting children’s development. Yet the nation’s ECE workforce faces many challenges, including inadequate compensation that varies widely by jurisdiction, high staff turnover, and disparities in training and resources across the ECE sector. To address these challenges, states are working to implement new policies and establish new requirements to better support their ECE workforces.

The success of a child’s healthy development is largely dependent on their primary caregiver’s capacity. The 2016 Lancet Early Childhood Development Series1 highlights that efforts to support children are not likely to bear success unless they concurrently provide support for the caregivers upon whom children depend for care.

Many barriers exist to caregiving including that:

The InTrans project has identified five key actions that policy decision-makers, providers and leaders should undertake – in social dialogue with trade union organizations – to enhance the participation of children and families to Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) in times of crisis and beyond.

The goal of the research ‘Bulgaria grows with its children: Building professional competences for early childhood development’ (hereinafter referred to as ‘research on the early years workforce’ and ‘the research’) is to outline the main directions for improvement of the professionalization of the early years workforce on the basis of data – quantitative and qualitative – as well as to formulate recommendations for policy development in this area.



This summary shares the main results and recommendations derived from this research.