Introduction

The past decade in Germany has witnessed an unprecedented increase in policy initiatives and fast-paced change in the field of early childhood education and care (ECEC). This enhanced prioritisation of the years from birth to the start of compulsory schooling at age six has been stimulated by three main agendas.

The first is a longer-term policy concern regarding the expansion of publicly subsidised early childhood services. Propelled by the issues of gender equity, women's workforce participation and life–work balance, and accompanied by debates around other factors such as the low fertility rate in Germany, the first significant moves towards increasing the levels of early years provision in the Western regions gained momentum during the 1990s. This was considerably later than, for example, in the Nordic countries or in France. A first wave of policies centred on granting legal entitlement to a place in kindergarten for all three-, four-and five-year-olds as from 1996. As one of the challenges that followed, kindergartens in Western Germany found themselves faced with increased demands for extending predominantly half-day provision into longer or full-day options. Currently, a second wave of expansion policies represents a more fundamental and paradigmatic change. In 2007, government legislation pledged to extend legal entitlement to a place in a centre or home-based setting to one-and two-year-olds. August 2013 was set as the target date for providing places for 35% of this age group. After decades of political and cultural resistance towards publicly subsidised education and care for the under threes, an extraordinary transformation is now taking place. The year 2007 marked the starting point of a highly prioritised drive in the Western federal states to increase the very low levels of services outside the larger metropolitan areas. The dynamics associated with this high-speed expansion and the related issues of quality of provision is a constant theme throughout this chapter.

The second is the early education agenda, initiated by the publication of findings from the first round of the international OECD-PISA (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development-Programme for International Student Assessment) study at the end of 2001. Besides highlighting unexpectedly low reading performance levels of 15-year-olds, the findings also pinpointed significant achievement gaps between children with and without an immigrant background, suggesting that the former are particularly disadvantaged within the German school system (see also OECD, 2004).