Excerpted from executive summary
High-quality early childhood education and care (ECEC) holds tremendous potential for children, families and societies, laying the groundwork for the success of future generations. Specifically, children’s daily interactions through their ECEC settings – with other children, staff and teachers, space and materials, their families and the wider community – reflect the quality of ECEC they experience. Together, these interactions are known as “process quality” and are the most proximal drivers of children’s development, learning and well-being. This report explores how policies create constructive conditions that ensure all children benefit from rich interactions as part of their ECEC experience and investigates the full potential of these policies beyond their regulatory nature. It stresses that quality, as a multidimensional construct, requires multifaceted policy solutions.