Universally available, quality pre-primary education is critical to a child’s cognitive, social and emotional development, growth, school readiness and future economic potential. Pre-primary education must go beyond access to include quality and equity not least because low-quality early childhood education has limited or even negative effects on children’s development.
It is with this in mind that UNICEF is working with Cambridge Education on a thought provoking new series of Think Pieces covering a broad range of educational matters and issues. UNICEF has commissioned 10 short papers by leading researchers and practitioners to stimulate debate around educational challenges in Eastern and Southern Africa. These papers will be part of a new global blog series called “Think Education”.
The most recent piece in the series covers early childhood development by Dr. Elizabeth Spier (AIR) and Hirokazu Yoshikawa and Paul Oburu (NYU) set out how critical universally-available, quality pre-primary education is to a child’s cognitive, social and emotional development, growth, school readiness and future economic potential.
Accompanying the blog is the full paper and a video presentation. Here is the link to the piece: https://blogs.unicef.org/blog/every-child-pre-primary-education/.
Subsequent up-coming papers will be focusing on pre-primary, parents and caregivers, teacher performance and curriculum reform so do follow UNICEF for more.