Strengthening the young child’s care environment

This edition of Early Childhood Matters is devoted to the Foundation’s issue area ‘Strengthening the care environment’. Regular readers will recall that the previous two editions introduced the other two of our three new issue areas, namely ‘Successful transitions: The continuum from home to school’ and ‘Social inclusion and respect for diversity’.

Strengthening the care environment is about giving every child the chance to survive and thrive. As so often, the case for acting on behalf of disadvantaged young children can be based on both rights – as enshrined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child (crc), which recognises a child’s right to “full and harmonious development”, along with General Comment 7 (gc7) of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child – and pragmatism.