Not nearly enough people paid attention to what changed around 2022. There was a sudden influx of education reformers, government ministers, and development economists in Tashkent, Barcelona, and New York who all said different versions of the same thing: we’ve known for a long time that what we’re doing with early childhood education isn’t working.
It’s hard to argue with the money. UNESCO says that 244 million children and young people around the world are not in school right now. About 60% of kids around the world can’t read and understand a simple text by the time they are ten years old. Four out of every five five-year-olds have never been to any kind of pre-primary school. These are not general statistics. They speak for a generation—actually, several generations—that is going through life without the basic tools that most policy discussions take for granted.
Even though it’s important to be honest, the COVID-19 pandemic didn’t cause the problem. It just made it worse. It made an already serious problem worse. The problem was caused by not enough money, unequal access, and a system that was mostly made for a world that doesn’t exist anymore. It seems like the pandemic made educators face some truths they had been avoiding for decades.
It’s interesting to see where the momentum is going now. The UNESCO World Conference on Early Childhood Care and Education took place in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in November 2022. The result was the Tashkent Declaration, which said that all participating countries would spend at least 10% of their total education budget on pre-primary education. It also pushed for pre-school teachers to get the same pay and working conditions as teachers in elementary schools. People often miss the second point, but it’s very important. Early childhood educators have traditionally been paid a lot less than other teachers. This affects who works in the field and how long they stay.
It’s still not clear if these promises will lead to long-lasting changes in policy or if they will just go away, like some conference declarations do. It makes sense to be skeptical here. But the fact that more than 130 countries committed to education reform at the UN’s Transforming Education Summit in New York suggests that this time is a little more important than usual. Seventy-four ministers of education went to UNESCO’s Pre-Summit in June of that year. No longer is that a side conversation.
The reform movement isn’t just about getting things done. Climate literacy, digital fairness, and equal education for boys and girls are all part of the bigger plan. UNESCO looked at 100 countries and found that about half of them did not teach about climate change in their national curriculum. Almost 463 million school-age kids couldn’t go to school online. These gaps feel more and more unaffordable in a world that keeps expecting more from the graduates that come in.
As I watch this all happen, I get the sense that the conversation has grown up in a meaningful way. There has been a lot of research on the long-term benefits of investing in early childhood education for decades, so the case for doing so is not new. There is a weak but growing political will to make it a budget priority instead of a soft social program. This is something that feels new. The real question is whether governments do what they say they will do. The movement has helped make the case. Now it’s time for the harder part: making institutions answer for changing something.
