Together with the Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports, the Czech Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs finished a full framework two years ago to keep an eye on and rate the quality of early childhood education and care all over the country. More than 70 experts from more than 30 organizations—including ministries, universities, cities, service providers, and even parents—took part in the process. The end result is a single system based on five areas: admissions, staffing, curriculum, evaluation, and management. It was paid for by the European Union and carried out with UNICEF’s help. By most measures, this is the most organized effort any European country has made to define what good early childhood care looks like and then create tools to keep track of it.
It’s hard not to notice how well the timing works. When this starts, Czechia is not in a strong position. Not even 7% of kids younger than three are in formal child care, which is a lot less than the EU average of 37.5%. Up to 40,000 kids ages three and four still don’t go to kindergarten. Many of them come from poor families. Still, between 2018 and now, the country’s child care opportunities tripled, rising from about 10,000 spots to over 26,000. That really does grow. The worry, which Czech officials were not afraid to voice, is that growing quickly without a way to check quality is a risk that you will lose in the end.
This framework is unique because it tries to increase access and care about quality at the same time, rather than one after the other. It would have been easier and better for politics to just say “win” on the capacity numbers and move on. That’s why the Czech government built a monitoring system first, before the system got any bigger. It was made clear by Minister of Labor Marian Jurečka: accessibility is not enough on its own. It’s not easy to say that when your enrollment numbers are still so far below what’s normal in Europe.
The framework covers things that seem pretty obvious when you write them down, like the qualifications of staff, what kids learn in early childhood programs, and how they actually spend their days. However, it’s surprisingly rare to see these things written down in a national evaluation system. The monitoring structure looks at how staff interact with kids, how staff interact with parents, and how well kids are doing in general. The level of detail makes me think that the people who made it spent time in real kindergartens, not just government offices.
Some American states might not like what they’re reading here. The US spends a lot of money on early childhood programs—Head Start alone costs more than ten billion dollars a year—but there isn’t a unified, rigorous national framework for figuring out if those programs actually help kids grow and learn. Each state sets its own rules, which lead to very different outcomes. Many states have quality rating systems, but they are so different in how they work that it is almost impossible to compare them. It’s still not clear if the different approaches taken at the state level add up to anything coherent at the national level.
It’s not magic what Czechia built. Not a promise, just a way to keep an eye on things. The framework was helped make by an inter-ministerial working group that will still be meeting, which shows that the government sees this as a living process rather than a finished document. In a way, that continuity is more important than the framework itself, because systems this complicated tend to drift without constant oversight.
When you watch this from afar, you might get the impression that the real lesson isn’t about preschool education at all. It’s about what happens when two government departments work on the same issue together instead of separately. That part might be the hardest for other countries to copy more than anything else.
