While policy-makers and researchers in the field of early childhood education and care (ECEC) often seem to speak different languages, overwhelming research evidence on how quality ECEC can play a key role in alleviating the effects of disadvantage can be extremely relevant for policy-makers. In this article, we focus on how philanthropic…

The Dutch government has decided to intervene in parents' role in bringing up their children by imposing compulsory parenting support. As such an intervention has to be legitimatised as being "in the interests of the child", it is important to take a closer look at this concept. First it is shown that it is not evident that the…

This paper presents a model of the approaches open to government to ensure that early childhood services are affordable to families. We derived the model from a comparative literature review of affordability approaches taken by government, both in Australia and internationally. The model adds significantly to the literature by proposing a means to…