The fact that a Spanish early childhood organization traveled to Oslo to advocate for children’s rights is telling. Not to a UN meeting in Geneva, not to Brussels, but to a research congress in Norway centered around a classroom environment assessment tool. The Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale-focused ECERS Congress may not seem like a clear area for advocacy. However, the decision made some sense for OMEP Spain.
ECERS is not a curriculum. It’s an observational framework, a methodical approach to examining the physical and social surroundings of a preschool and determining whether or not it genuinely promotes the growth and well-being of the kids. The scale is more than just an assessment tool for OMEP Spain, a group of scholars and educators from universities in Sevilla, Girona, Vic, and UNED. It’s a lens. Additionally, using that lens in a global context with colleagues from OMEP Sweden and Norway fosters the kind of cross-border dialogue that national policy discussions seldom generate on their own.
The Oslo conference provided OMEP Spain with a unique opportunity: a room full of individuals who are serious enough about early childhood environments to measure them. It may not seem important, but that common beginning point is. A large portion of political advocacy for children’s rights typically operates at the level of declarations and frameworks, remaining abstract. Concreteness is what the ECERS approach requires; is there enough light, room for independent movement, and materials for meaningful play in this space? In this situation, is the child treated as a recipient or a participant in the adult-child interaction? There is no room for diplomacy when it comes to those questions. The child is either supported by their surroundings or not.
It’s easy to underestimate the networking aspect of OMEP Spain’s presence in Oslo. The congress’s meetings with OMEP Sweden and Norway weren’t coincidental; rather, they were a part of a larger European initiative to develop common stances on early childhood policy. Despite decades of research on the developmental importance of early childhood education, it still does not receive the same political and financial recognition as compulsory schooling. This structural issue affects all three organizations, even though they operate within different national systems. Developing ties between OMEP’s national chapters is one strategy for coordinating pressure on that common issue.
This trip to Oslo should be considered in the broader context of OMEP’s energy investments.
Throughout 2025, the parent organization made formal interventions at the UNESCO General Conference in Samarkand, the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, and the UNESCO Executive Board in Paris, all of which pushed for a more robust formal recognition of the right to free, high-quality early childhood education. In an effort to gain more permanent access to those policy discussions, OMEP has also applied for UNESCO Associate NGO status. On that spectrum, the Oslo Congress falls somewhere else: it is more pragmatic, less formal, and closer to the classroom floor. There is a sense that OMEP recognizes the need for both registers: the high-level diplomatic language and the detailed, fact-based discussion about what really takes place in a room with four-year-olds.
The outcome of the visit to Oslo is still unknown. Relationships, commitments, and sometimes nothing at all are the results of conferences. However, OMEP Spain’s choice to attend—traveling from Madrid to Oslo to discuss rating scales and children’s rights in a room full of researchers—suggests that the organization doesn’t think advocacy is limited to formal settings. It can occasionally occur during a congress meeting in a Nordic city, during a discussion between coworkers who have a measuring device and are worried about the results.
