Comparisons of international childcare systems

The Department for Education commissioned CREC to produce ‘Comparisons of International Childcare Systems’ drawing on data gathered from an earlier study for the Economist Intelligence Unit entitled ‘Starting Strong: Benchmarking early education across the globe’.

This report was to provide evidence for consideration by the 2013 Childcare Commission and was published as a supporting document to the DfE ‘More Affordable Childcare’ report in July 2013.

One of the key findings of this paper was that High performing European countries in terms of school outcomes appear to have:
- Higher staff: child ratios (higher number of staff to number of children) than other European countries
- Higher levels of staff qualification and training
- Relatively higher levels of regulation than other European countries
- Middle to high range response to the existence of a Government-led strategy and the level of investment

Interestingly, despite non-European countries such as China and Singapore scoring highly in international education comparison surveys, there is evidence to show that countries are converging in their systemic approach, with the non-European countries in this review putting in place reforms to match levels of structural quality with the best in European countries.

 CREC’s report, along with two other reports commissioned at the same time by the DfE for its childcare commission, can be found here.