The institutional design of early childhood education and care in Spain and its impact on equal opportunities

Since the year 2000, the provision of early years education and care for the under-threes (hereafter 0-3 ECEC) has undergone a steady increase in Spain. This growth has taken place in all 17 Autonomous Communities, albeit not in a uniform way. We analyse how state regulations regarding ECEC have evolved from the first National Education Law in 1990 (LOGSE) to the most recent one in 2020 (LOMLOE). We compare seven Autonomous Communities and assess the impact of their different management models and levels of coverage on equality of opportunities, both in how families access the services and in how much they pay. We try to ascertain under what conditions ECEC can go beyond being a policy that helps families juggle work and family responsibilities and become a redistributive and equal opportunities policy that helps the most socially disadvantaged groups. Our study concludes that although there are differences in both access criteria and in the price of services, all the regions studied have progressively moved towards services that aim to be more equitable, with an explicit recognition of the particular difficulties caused by low incomes, disabilities, single parenthood, or gender-based violence. Even so, certain structural characteristics of ECEC - such as the fluctuating nature of its financing, its weak public regulation and monitoring, and significant outsourcing to private providers - make it difficult to universalise the service in order to make it a truly redistributive policy.