A New Look on Early Child Care and Education (ECCE) as Joint Responsibility

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by OmBimo

Early Childhood Education in Brazil remains a priority yet faces persistent obstacles, including fragmented institutions outside the formal system, limited systematic supervision, and incomplete official statistics. An initiative supported by the Millennium Fund and implemented through Educational Boards—linking public and private actors—aims to strengthen in-service professional development and build network capacity for educators. The discussion highlights how children’s early years require protection, care, and stimulation from pregnancy to age six, and reviews evidence-based gaps in teacher qualification and early learning quality.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages9

Reading Time23 min

AccessFree to download

Early Childhood Education challenges in Brazil

Institutional fragmentation and supervision gaps

Impact strategy: Educational Boards model

Foundations for child well-being and development

Protection, care, and stimulation from pregnancy to six

Relational competencies and play-based learning

Quality of educator training and working conditions

Teacher qualification indicators

Adverse daycare conditions and curriculum gaps

A New Look on Early Child Care and Education (ECCE) as Joint Responsibility Maria da Graça Gomes Paiva Alessandra Schneider Maria Lúcia Salle Machado Pollyana Vilela Duarte Perinazzo UNESCO, Porto Alegre, Brazil Improving the quality of Early Childhood Education has been a priority in Brazil, but it is still a challenging issue to be faced. The fact that an indefinite number of institutions exist on the borders of the educational system, the lack of systematic supervision, and incomplete official statistics are only a few of the challenges. The Millennium Fund for Early Childhood Education has been developed to directly improve the quality of educators who work with Brazil’s most socially vulnerable students. An innovative model of joint responsibility utilizing public and the private sectors in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, has resulted in the implementation of a social technology called Educational Board. This experimental model has been carried out in municipalities of four southern states of Brazil for the past five years. This article addresses the approach developed at the Educational Boards (which focused on in-service professional development and network capacity building), the program’s impact on improving Early Child Care and Education (ECCE) in Brazil, as well as the lessons learned so far. Scientific evidence has shown that the child’s early years demand adequate protection, care and stimulation as the foundations for his or her well-being and development (UNESCO, 2006) . In other words, fulfilling the child’s well-being and basic needs both in terms of nourishment and nurturing, particularly from pregnancy to six years of age, recurrently demands not only technical but also more skillful human knowledge of what a healthy and happy childhood actually means to everyone as both a right and an absolute priority to be praised and guaranteed in any community or society. As claimed by Clouder (2008),“whoever works with children has got to recognize within himself/ herself his/her own childhood so as to promote the child’s well-being. If we forget our childhood, we lose our humanity. We no longer see each other as humans”. In addition, the ability to pickup the child’s social signals of happiness, well-being, or anger, does require from both parents and caregivers high-quality knowledge on early child care and education. More and more, the development of relational competences through playing and through the joyfulness of playing requires not only updated knowledge or guidance from solely specialized literature, but should go beyond that when it comes to daily routines in adverse education and poor care conditions of daycare centers—whether the centers are philanthropic, communitarian or public. On top of that, if the child belongs to a family in social vulnerability, and he/she is regularly being attended by child practitioners who are not professionally qualified to guarantee his/her well being from the very beginning, local authorities from both public and private sectors should be both sensitized and mobilized to invest in professional qualification on Early Child Care and Education (ECCE) involving the whole staff of those centers. That is to say that giving these children the right start should be a commitment not only for those who interact with them, but also for those in charge of enacting public policies or deeply engaged social responsibility actions, large companies and corporations included. © 2009 Current Issues in Comparative Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Current Issues in Comparative Education, Vol. 11: 33-41. M. Paiva, A. Schneider, M. Machado, and P. Perinazzo Brazil is the ninth largest economy in the world, with an area of 8.5 million square km. However, the disparity between the rich and the poor is quite dramatic: out of 190 million people, the richest 10% hold 45.3% of all national income, whereas the poorest 50% receive only 13.

FAQs

What are the main challenges facing ECCE quality in Brazil?

Quality remains difficult due to an indefinite number of institutions operating at the margins of the educational system, lack of systematic supervision, and incomplete official statistics.

What is the Educational Board model and what does it target?

Educational Boards are a joint-responsibility social technology using public and private sectors to support in-service professional development and strengthen network capacity in participating municipalities.

Why is professional qualification especially important in early childhood care?

Children need adequate protection, care, and stimulation from pregnancy to age six, and families in social vulnerability require high-quality knowledge and skilled practitioners to safeguard well-being and development.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by OmBimo