Cross-country comparison of superdiversity and religious education in ECEC curricula

This article examines how early childhood education and care (ECEC) curricula in five European countries – Austria, Finland, Ireland, Sweden, and Switzerland – address superdiversity and religious education. The study explores how these educational frameworks articulate children’s right to religious freedom, understood both as freedom to and freedom from religion, within the succeeding pedagogical and civic mandates. Drawing on curriculum analysis, the paper compares how ECEC systems conceptualise diversity, inclusion, and worldview education in contexts of increasing secularisation and religious pluralisation. The findings of the presented analysis illustrate that while all five curricula recognise diversity as a pedagogical resource, they operationalise religious freedom differently. Namely, the curricula in Finland, Sweden, and Switzerland adopt explicitly non-confessional, rights-based approaches that balance neutrality with recognition of lived diversity. In contrast, Austria retains a provider-sensitive model where confessional frameworks remain optional, whereas Ireland demonstrates a tension between inclusive ECEC curricula and denominational primary structures. Across contexts, ECEC emerges as a formative arena for translating human rights principles into practice, highlighting the interdependence of positive and negative religious freedoms in cultivating inclusive, democratic citizenship already in the early years.