UNESCO

While viewing the UNESCO website, a few things caught my attention when thinking of my goals.
"High quality childcare, particularly for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, promotes motivation, confidence, good cognitive and linguistic development and school readiness."  High quality care is always in the forefront of my professional and personal goals.  It is what drives me to continue my education and take my career to the highest plateau possible.  In Singapore, childcare centers fall under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education (MOE) and Ministry of Community Development and Sports (MCDS).  These two entities came together in 1999 to collaborate on guidelines for childcare setting and preschool settings.  The childcare centers there cater to children from 2 months to 6 years of age from the hours of 7am to 7pm.  This is very impressive for the needs of the families they serve.  This gives parents more opportunities to work and more flexibility of care. In the late 1990s, the MCDS was given the tasked to improve the quality of the preschools as well as with teacher training, and the MOE already had the task of improving early education this brought about the collaboration of the two groups.
 Brazil has a proposal in place for mandatory funding from local governments to fund preschool for children.  The Fund for Development of Primary Education and Teacher Development (FUNDEF) helped improve enrollment of children in their preschool programs from 92% in 1996 to 96% in 2000. Because the FUNDEF had such great encouragement of raising enrollment, policymakers saw a chance to propose a Congressional Bill.  Funding is very important to early education programs.  With the right funding preschools can be accessible and affordable to all those who need care.


http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0013/001374/137413e.pdf