When you leave a certain type of conference, you feel both professionally energized and loose in a quiet way. That kind of meeting took place at the 76th World Assembly and International Conference of the World Organization for Early Childhood Education (OMEP) in Bangkok in July of last year. There were about 400 people from all over the world there, but it wasn’t a well-planned celebration of progress. There was more of an honest reckoning about it.
OMEP has been around since 1948. It works in more than 60 countries and has been fighting for children’s rights since the very beginning of their lives for many years. But the Bangkok conference, which had the theme “Right from the Start for ECCE: Step Beyond All Together,” didn’t feel as formal as other meetings. Speakers weren’t just giving results; they were also sounding alarms in a serious way.
The tone was set early on by Mathias Urban, who is in charge of the Early Childhood Research Center at Dublin City University. He named the pressures that are putting young children under a lot of stress right now: climate change, forced migration, poverty, and weakening democratic norms. He chose to use the phrase “concrete hope” to argue against passive optimism. It wasn’t to feel better. It was to do something different. Chair of the Board at ARNEC, Sheldon Shaeffer, called what’s happening now a “polycrisis.” This word stuck with everyone because it described something that single-issue frameworks can’t quite do.
It wasn’t easier to dismiss the information that was given. The ECCE Lead for UNESCO talked about the first global report on early childhood education and care. From 2020 to 2023, the number of people enrolled in at least one year of pre-primary school dropped from 75% to 72%. Five7% of early childhood teachers in countries with low incomes have not gone to school to learn their job. The report says that there is a bigger lack of money for pre-primary education than for any other level. These aren’t just general policy notes. The things they talk about are how millions of kids are growing up right now.
What made the conference important wasn’t how big the problems were; that’s been written about a lot of other places. It was how the people who took part pushed for something more open. A holistic approach, many speakers said, doesn’t mean anything if the health and education sectors keep working together. A former WHO advisor on child health made it clear: the two systems depend on each other, and acting like they don’t have effects that show up years later. Some American school systems, which are still mostly set up around departmental silos, might not like that message.
One of the calmer and more memorable times was the peace education symposium. Kids from Nagasaki had made cranes out of paper. Children who had moved to Cyprus had painted pictures about rights and peace. It’s simple to skip over small things like that. But those details—the cranes, the paintings—make you remember something. These weren’t just props. They showed what early childhood educators can do when they are given the tools and the freedom to try.
It’s still not clear how much of what was talked about in Bangkok will lead to long-lasting changes in policy. There was a call at the OMEP conference for a UN Decade for Early Childhood Care and Education. This would bring ongoing political attention and, ideally, ongoing funding. That depends on long-term pressure from civil society, which has been known to be slow to build and easy to ignore in the past.
It’s clear that the way people talk about early education is changing. People who are close to the work are questioning the old framework, which said to enroll more kids and build more infrastructure. Mercedes Mayol Lassalle, president of OMEP, said that the culture around early childhood needs to change along with the systems. It’s more difficult to make that case. Also, it’s most likely the right one.
