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 than the majority of the international frameworks it currently refers to, having been in existence since 1948. The organization, which was established in the wake of World War II, has spent decades creating statements, position papers, and advocacy materials with the goal of elevating early childhood education to a political priority. The most recent in a long line is the Bologna Declaration, which was formally adopted in November 2025 following initial agreement at the July assembly. However, it comes at a time when the disparity between early childhood care rhetoric and reality has grown nearly ridiculous.
Take a look at the figures that UNESCO displayed at the Bangkok assembly in 2024. Globally, pre-primary enrollment actually decreased from 75% to 72% between 2020 and 2023. Roughly 30% of young children in nations where data are available are not developing normally. In order to achieve anything approaching universal pre-primary enrollment by 2030, the world must hire at least six million more early childhood educators, with trained-teacher ratios in low-income countries hovering around 57%. By the way, that goal was established more than ten years ago. It doesn’t appear promising.
The Bologna Declaration itself seems to have been written by people who have had enough of being courteous. Its preamble begins with an open admission of suffering, citing the children of Gaza, Ukraine, and over fifty other nations that are suffering from hunger, conflict, and displacement. It has an unvarnished quality that is uncommon in international declarations; it seems as though the writers felt that formality was no longer necessary. The “adult-centric, technocratic, and school-oriented models” that reduce early education to test preparation for five-year-olds are rejected in one passage. Instead, it argues that the essence of what young children deserve is play, creativity, storytelling, music, and art.
It’s a beautiful vision. It remains to be seen if anything is altered. OMEP has no enforcement authority. It has the ability to advocate, declare, and suggest. It cannot make a wealthy country stop treating preschool funding as a line item to cut when budgets are tight, nor can it force a government in Sub-Saharan Africa to devote 10% of its education budget to pre-primary programs. Similar promises were made in the Tashkent Declaration of 2022. According to most accounts, the follow-up has been inconsistent at best.
However, there is something noteworthy about the Bologna document’s specificity. It challenges the common belief that teaching older children requires more training than caring for younger ones and instead advocates for the professionalization of early childhood educators. Curricula that respect mother tongues and local knowledge must be culturally grounded. It demands community centers, toy libraries, and secure outdoor play areas. These aren’t nebulous goals. These are design guidelines for a system that has not been developed in the majority of nations.
The previous year, there were almost 400 attendees at the conference in Bangkok, but only about 35 of the presentations addressed human rights. Every keynote speaker identified climate change as a defining threat to young children, but none of them addressed it. You can learn something about the true state of the field from this discrepancy between what practitioners actually study and what leaders say matters. Stuck in the incremental stage despite wanting to be urgent.
In most nations, OMEP’s announcement won’t make headlines. Seldom does it. Tucked away in its cautious wording, however, is an unsettling reality that governments appear unwilling to face: the youngest citizens are the easiest to ignore and the most expensive to do so.
