Conference rooms are home to a certain type of irony. Before the ink dries, the world moves on. Hundreds of people travel from all over the world, sit through days of deliberation, and produce documents that could actually change how governments treat their youngest citizens. That’s essentially what transpired in Bangkok during the 76th OMEP World Assembly and Conference held at Chulalongkorn University last July, and the discrepancy between what was decided and what was reported warrants more than a cursory look.
On their own terms, the numbers are striking. 580 people took part. 52 nations. The meeting rooms of the Faculty of Education and the Centara Grand at Central World Hotel were used for five full days. The theme, “Right from the Start for ECCE: Step Beyond All Together,” conveyed the somewhat awkward optimism common to international education events, but there was more going on behind the branding. The assembly and the discussions that surrounded it produced twelve different policy directions that were influenced by keynote speeches, working groups, and the kind of conversations that take place in the corridor but are not included in official summaries.
Out of those directions, three were covered. About three. The remainder fell somewhere between the institutional memory of delegates who took notes and then boarded their flights home and internal reports.
Perhaps this is just the way international policy operates—quietly, slowly, and mainly without a public. However, it’s difficult to ignore the discrepancy, particularly when you consider what was actually being discussed. The term “polycrisis” was used by Mathias Urban, Director of the Early Childhood Research Centre at Dublin City University, to characterize the world that children are growing up in, which includes the slow grind of poverty, forced migration, climate catastrophe, and democratic erosion. He wasn’t making dire predictions. He listed the challenges that educators in dozens of nations face on a daily basis and made the case that early childhood systems should be rethought rather than patched.
One of the conference’s more subtly radical moments was the framing of ECCE as a response to systemic collapse rather than a developmental nice-to-have. There was no trend. However, it influenced at least four of the assembly’s policy recommendations, such as those pertaining to emergency-responsive curricula, teacher training in conflict-affected areas, and a renewed effort to have ECCE funding recognized as crisis-mitigation spending rather than merely social investment.
Meanwhile, UNESCO’s worldwide enrollment statistics and the Tashkent Declaration follow-up dominated the news. The fact that enrollment rates for a year of organized pre-primary education fell from 75% in 2020 to 72% in 2023 is the kind of regression that should worry people, and both are truly significant. Thus, the percentage of trained teachers in low-income nations should be only 57%. These figures were worthy of the attention they received. The issue is that while the messier, more procedural task of converting commitments into legal frameworks does not make for clear headlines, numbers do.
The work being done on the Guiding Principles on ECCE Rights, a multistakeholder effort to combine disparate legal obligations across human rights instruments into something states could actually use, was one of Bangkok’s less well-known themes. This framework was presented at the conference by the Right to Education Initiative. It didn’t receive much attention. Even when work at this level of technical detail has the potential to impact millions of children, there is a feeling that it seldom does. By its very nature, policy architecture is not glamorous.
It’s also important to note that Thailand had never hosted this specific assembly before. That in and of itself illustrates how early childhood advocacy’s geography is changing, moving away from its institutional roots in Europe and toward a more truly global dialogue. Under the direction of Acting President Prof. Dr. Wilert Puriwat, Chulalongkorn’s Faculty of Education was obviously committed to making the occasion more than just ceremonial. Now, the question is whether the choices made in those rooms will gain institutional support or if they will have to wait until the following conference cycle to be reviewed.
The next one has already begun. In honor of Janusz Korczak, the 78th OMEP World Assembly is set to take place in Poznań, Poland, in July 2026. Children’s voice, agency, and rights-based pedagogy are some of the themes that will change, but the structural challenge of creating meaningful work and then hoping that people will be interested long enough to take action will probably not change.
Bangkok produced twelve policy changes. Three made news. The remaining nine are still waiting to be picked up by someone.
