Growing inequality and diverging paths in early childhood education and care: Educational disparities in Europe

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) is one of the most important services for children and their parents. It promotes children’s development and learning and mitigates inequalities among families and children, as well as enables mothers’ employment. It has become an important family policy advocated by international organizations. Previous research has shown that there is an educational gradient in the use of ECEC as children of mothers with low education level participate less. However, earlier studies have mostly been carried out at one time point and focused on gaps between low and other levels of education. This study, using EU-SILC survey data, focuses on the development of inequality in ECEC use of under three-year-old children during 2004-2019 in Europe, and on disparities between three education levels among mothers. The results show that together with increasing ECEC participation rates, the overall inequality has also increased in Europe. In most countries, inequality has increased between low and other education levels while in the few cases where it has decreased, this has happened between medium and high educated mothers. In advocating higher use of ECEC it is important to pay attention to socio-economic disparities within the rising participation rates.