When a student opened the first page of Pearson Edexcel’s A Level Mathematics Paper 1 in an exam room early on June 3, they quickly realized that this was not what their two years of preparation had prepared them for. Thousands of students discovered a Change.org petition calling for a fair review of the paper within hours of leaving the hall. It had more than 20,000 signatures in less than a day. Along with more than £2,500 in donations, the number was over 34,000 at the time of the last count. Since then, England’s exam authority, Ofqual, has acknowledged that…
Author: Kelsey Myers
Kelsey Myers
Kelsey Myers is a Senior Editor at worldomep.org and a dedicated advocate for early childhood education whose work begins — and ends — with a simple belief: that the earliest years of a child's life matter more than almost anything else we can invest in. Based at a local school, Kelsey works daily alongside the children and families whose experiences inform everything she writes. She doesn't observe early education from a distance. She is inside it — in the classrooms, on the playgrounds, in the conversations between teachers and parents that shape how young children understand the world around them. That proximity gives her writing a warmth and specificity that purely policy-driven commentary rarely achieves. Through her writing at worldomep.org, Kelsey brings that same energy to readers — making the case, clearly and consistently, that early childhood education deserves far more attention than it typically receives. Kelsey shares her personal opinions on: https://x.com/Butterflyboule
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Twenty-year-old James “Weston” Higginbotham was a student at Auburn University studying biosystems engineering. By all accounts, he was the type of person who would carry a spider outside instead of stepping on it. He was an environmentalist, a vegan, and a young man who disagreed with his own mother about the environmental impact of artificial intelligence while on vacation. The final meaningful conversation his family would have with him was during that argument about her using ChatGPT to locate restaurants in Japan. On May 25, the Higginbothams traveled together to Japan for what was supposed to be Grayton, Weston’s younger…
Two students sitting in the same exam room, answering the same questions, paying the same tuition, and attending colleges with fifty-six different financial situations seem a little ridiculous. However, that is exactly the situation in the sixty-seven colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, where Clare Hall, which is only a short bike ride away, has about £43 million in net assets and Trinity College Cambridge has about £2.4 billion. Even though the disparity is not new, looking at the numbers still makes people take a second look. Due to centuries of accumulated endowments, property portfolios, and investment returns, Oxbridge’s colleges have…
Anyone who considers how nations construct their futures should be concerned about this number. Despite making up about one-third of all children on the continent, only 6.5% of social spending on children in 26 African countries is allocated to children under the age of five. The vast majority of the remainder goes to older children. Mostly teenagers. When you take into account what decades of developmental research actually say about when investment matters most, this pattern appears reasonable on paper. This picture has been significantly clarified by a recent wave of research associated with the World Organization for Early Childhood…
Poznań is not the type of city that usually garners international attention for discussions about education. This university town in western Poland is more well-known for its museum of croissants and Renaissance town hall than for its policy disputes regarding the treatment of its youngest residents. However, Poznań will host the 78th OMEP World Assembly and Conference from July 14 to 18, 2026. The theme chosen by the organizers, “When a Child Speaks…” Korczak’s Inspirations for Education and Children’s Rights,” is specific enough to indicate that this will not be a typical event. Though perhaps less so among the general…
While most English schools carry out their regular midweek schedules on June 11, a loose coalition of educators, childcare providers, and play advocates will attempt something small but intentional: allowing kids an additional 31 minutes of unstructured play. No educational apps, no tablets, and no carefully chosen screen content. Just play, in whatever unstructured, messy way kids come up with when adults take a step back. It’s not a random number. It is derived from Article 31 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which acknowledges the right to play, relaxation, and rest for all children.…
A certain type of statistic ought to make people stop in their tracks, but it rarely does. Thirty-one percent of children in the UK have relatively low incomes. By the time they are five years old, children who qualify for free school meals are already five months behind their classmates. These figures are uncontested. They are derived from official government reports. However, if they are mentioned at all, early childhood care and education seldom take up more than a paragraph buried within a larger policy narrative. The World Organization for Early Childhood Education’s British branch, OMEP UK, appears to have…
For many years, OMEP UK’s work on sustainability in early childhood education took place in a setting that is familiar to anyone who follows niche advocacy: it was well-respected in the field but mostly unseen outside of it. The organization, which was a part of the 1948-founded World Organization for Early Childhood Education, had created a genuinely thoughtful framework for teaching children under the age of eight about sustainability. It featured a self-audit tool created in ten different countries, an award program, and academic support. It lacked reach, though. When Nursery World became involved, that gradually but noticeably changed. Nursery…
In the summer of 2025, representatives from over sixty nations convened in a grand hall in Bologna, Italy, to discuss children under eight. Not college students, not teenagers, and not prepared for the workforce. kids who still require assistance tying their shoes. During its 77th World Assembly, the World Organization for Early Childhood Education, also known by its French acronym OMEP, issued a statement that, when stripped of its diplomatic language, amounts to a direct accusation: most governments are failing the youngest members of their societies, and they are doing so with full knowledge of the consequences. OMEP is older…
If you know where to look, you can see that something strange is taking place in early childhood education. Corporate logos are appearing in previously unheard-of locations in cities like Austin, Nashville, and Charlotte: on the walls of daycare facilities, in the fine print of brochures for preschool programs, and on grants that support classroom operations. Once the primary provider of funding for initiatives like Head Start and the Child Care and Development Fund, the federal government has been retreating. And corporate America has quietly but clearly begun writing checks into that growing gap. The figures present a clear picture.…