An Equal Start?

Providing Quality Early Education and Care for Disadvantaged Children

Edited by Ludovica Gambaro, Kitty Stewart, and Jane Waldfogel

Edited by Ludovica Gambaro, Kitty Stewart, and Jane Waldfogel

Distributed for Policy Press at the University of Bristol

Paper $41.95 ISBN: 9781447310525 Published September 2015 For sale in North and South America only

Cloth $115.00 ISBN: 9781447310518 Published February 2014 For sale in North and South America only

Early childhood education and care has become a central policy concern in many countries, and as services expand it is crucial to examine whether children from disadvantaged backgrounds receive equitable services. In An Equal Start? experts from eight countries—the United States, the United Kingdom, Norway, France, the Netherlands, Germany, New Zealand, and Australia—examine how early education and care is organized, funded, and regulated in their respective countries. They give up-to-date pictures of the access to services, providing rich insights into how policies play out in practice and the effects on the provision of services to disadvantaged children. Together they reveal a number of common tensions and complexities that many countries face in ensuring that early education and care is affordable, accessible, and of the highest possible quality.