Publications

This chart summarizes Kindergarten and Pre-Kindergarten programs across Canada’s provinces and territories. It compares program auspice, schedules, age groups, and enrollment criteria. It shows whether attendance is mandatory, participation rates, curriculum and pedagogy guidelines, staff qualifications, and parent fees. It also notes whether programs receive federal support through the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care agreements. This resource helps policymakers, educators, and parents understand regional differences and identify areas for improvement in early learning.

In Spring 2025 Better Together launched Bright Beginnings, an 8-part podcast series with thought-provoking episodes filled with insightful conversations and fresh perspectives on strengthening early childhood education and supporting those who make it possible.

Each episode features expert discussions on key topics, including the impact of early learning, the specialized knowledge of educators, inclusive practices, play-based learning, and more.

Delivering early childhood education (ECE) through public schools has garnered increasing attention due to its potential to address systemic challenges within the early education workforce. These series of papers explore the benefits of integrating early childhood programs into public school systems, focusing on how this approach improves workforce conditions, enhances professionalism, increases professional learning opportunities, and promotes equity across the sector.

Delivering early childhood education (ECE) through public schools has garnered increasing attention due to its potential to address systemic challenges within the early education workforce. This paper explores the benefits of integrating early childhood programs into public school systems, focusing on how this approach improves workforce conditions, enhances professionalism, increases professional learning opportunities, and promotes equity across the sector.

To understand the role of preschool in public education, we must examine its impact on children's academic, social, and emotional development. Preschool also supports working parents, improves access to quality early learning, ensures continuity in education, and helps reduce social inequities.

Excerpt: "Low wages deter new graduates from entering the child-care field and drive away those already employed. Of the 4,200 early childhood educators that Ontario colleges graduate annually, fewer than 60 per cent enter licensed child care, and only 40 per cent remain after five years. Small wonder for the exodus. One in five child-care staff responding to our survey told us they hold a second job to make ends meet. Over 55 per cent of couple families, and 83 per cent of lone parent families, are concerned about their housing."

Description: A comprehensive collection of Canada-wide legislated qualifications of child care centre supervisors, ECE qualified, and non-ECE qualified staff.

Excerpt: "La penurie d'educateurs de la petite enfance (EPE) qualifies a freine les efforts d'expansion des places dans le cadre du systeme pancanadien d'apprentissage de la petite enfance et de garde des jeunes enfants (système d'AGJE). Cette pénurie d'educateurs a incite certains decideurs politiques de l'Ontario a chercher des raccourcis, notamment a remettre en question la necessite d'un diplôme de deux ans pour être admissible comme educateur de la petite enfance. La reduction des qualifications des éducateurs ou d'autres stratégies de déqualification, comme l'augmentation des ratios, ne sont pas des solutions."

Excerpt: "The world is witnessing some of the highest levels of conflict in decades, with more than 110 armed conflicts occurring across Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Latin America and Europe. The impact of these wars on children is vast and multifaceted. The trauma inflicted is enduring and will shape the rest of their lives — and by extension, the societies in which they, and we live. As researchers who study how public policies can intervene to reduce adverse outcomes for children, we contend that wars are not bound by geography. Airstrikes terrorize children in conflict zones, while those living in the nations involved in these conflicts also experience trauma in the form of poverty, neglect, and discrimination."

Resources for Truth and Reconciliation - Updated September 2025

Dr. Petr Varmuza

Excerpt: "Ontario’s first “Service Plan for Child Care Services” (1992) came into existence as a negotiated response to successive provincial governments’ dislike of Toronto’s long-standing effort to move beyond the administration of the child care subsidy system and equitably manage the provision of services across, what was then, Metropolitan Toronto. Additionally, the provision of municipally operated child care centres was a special target, as it is now, regardless the important function they played in the most disadvantaged communities.

Since then, service plans became a provincially mandated documents usually produced on a five-year cycle consisting of listening to the service providers and soliciting public input primarily from parents searching for child care or child care subsidy. Rarely there is a formal, public review of the accomplishments since the approval of the previous plan, including the full range of successes and failures. Once approved by the municipal authority, they often undergo minimum public scrutiny, ongoing evaluation and review."