Indicators for early childhood education and care

Elena Meroni (), Esperanza Vera-Toscano and Sara Flisi

No JRC102774, JRC Research Reports from Joint Research Centre

Abstract: The main purpose of this technical brief is to investigate the comparability between two early childhood education and care indicators currently used by the European Commission – namely the Barcelona target and the ET 2020 ECEC benchmark – and to identify methodological differences and common traits that may have implications in their use for policy-making. Results show that, despite being potentially similar measures of participation of children in early childhood education and care in the different countries, they are essentially different in their nature as they cover different groups of individuals. Additionally, the fact that they use different datasets, namely administrative data from UOE and survey data from EU-SILC, implies that they follow diverse data collection protocols; in particular, the use of EU-SILC survey data brings the risk of not having a fully representative sample of the children population; and exposes data to respondent and interviewer’s biases, which further contributes to the existing differences between them. Notwithstanding, results provided in the brief suggest that the different age composition of the two indicators could explain a consistent part of the difference in the overall shares; in the majority of countries, for age groups 4 and 5, numbers are quite similar. Thus, while still taking into account all the caveats explained in this document, we could conclude that for these age groups results could be equally used for policy support. Some suggestions for the improvement of the Barcelona target sub-indicator for the ET 2020 ECEC benchmark within the Joint Assessment Framework are also proposed.

Keywords: Indicators; ECEC ET 2020; Barcelona Target; early childhood education and care (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 20 pages
Date: 2016-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC102774 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ipt:iptwpa:jrc102774

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in JRC Research Reports from Joint Research Centre Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Publication Officer ().