**1. Introduction**

Over the last decades, the establishment of the Early Childhood Education (ECE) as a key to the success of different aims on the international agendas for education, which is based on the recognition that ECE services can contribute to these goals, has been one of the main issues of the global agenda. As a matter of fact, early childhood education has become one of the areas identified for improvement within this framework, as the UNESCO-sponsored World Conference on Early Childhood Care and Education: Building the Wealth of Nations in Moscow, September 2010 outlined in its purpose. Hence, the Moscow Framework for Action and Cooperation, adopted by the Conference [1], moved ECE higher up on political agendas by planning a strategic position for ECE in the now current development and education agendas.

Nowadays, the SDGs hold the quality of early childhood care and education systems as a key element of the goal number 4 on education, and it is understood to play a major role in achieving the desirable outcomes [2]. In this respect, education SDG 4 covers learning from early childhood through adulthood, while stressing the universality of the goals and targets for countries at every level of development, as well as the key themes of education quality, learning, inclusion, and equity. Equity is emphasized here as means of focusing on quality without addressing the many aspects related to those on the margins and those who have been left behind. Actually, the beneficial role of quality ECE to, among other contributions, guarantee the success of the attainment and completion of primary education has been fully demonstrated by diverse international surveys, such as Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). This named survey across OECD countries shows that there is a better performance for students at the age of 15 years who attended preprimary school than for those who did not attended, even after accounting for students' socioeconomic status [3].

Latin American countries have also advocated for the development agendas, with the essential role played by education for sustainable human development. Moreover, when referring to education challenges in achieving the education goals in the region, the expansion of early childhood care and education services remained a priority [4]. Along this same line, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) aims at the universalization of preschool education [5], from an approach that is matched by the OECD [6], with respect to the central role of education policies in the fight against the transmission of inequality from one generation to the next. This is an especially relevant goal if those policies have been concerned with early childhood and the advancement of compulsory education. Yet, the inequitable socioeconomic structure of Latin America indeed interacts with the inequality in educational participation also at the ECE level, resulting in a dynamic where preschool education can hardly develop as the desirable equalizer to potentially tackle these social inequalities.

There is a widespread consensus in considering that overcoming the serious inequalities is the greatest structural challenge for the entire region of Latin America [5], especially because these disparities spread in the context of low socioeconomic mobility, which stems from existing political and family mechanisms that perpetuate the problem [7]. As a result of this imbalance, the disadvantaged groups continue to suffer lower opportunities of education, and unequal education continues to be as one of the challenges from the Latin American educational reality. The UNESCO Regional Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean (OREALC) noticed that important levels of inequality related to elements such as social class, ethnic origin, and geographic location can be found in all countries of the region, which constitute the factors blocking the expansion of the provision of quality education [8]. Furthermore, the educational mobility in Latin America is very limited in comparison with other regions of the planet; thus, when the educational attainment from one generation with respect to their parents is assessed, the correlation between the level of the parents and their children is significantly higher in this region than in the rest of them [9].

Bering in mind these conditional factors, the aim of this work is to examine and compare the impact of the implementation of compulsory preschool education in the different Latin American countries and their diverse societies. Specifically, the focus is on the extent to which preschool education can mitigate the social inequalities in children's learning outcomes generated within the family context. Therefore, comparable data are analyzed and confronted in order to disentangle if compulsory preschool education can reduce social inequalities in educational attainment within this region.

**5**

*Compulsory Preschool in Latin America: Comparative Evolution and Future Challenges*

In World Declaration on Education for All (EFA) 1990, ECE was committed as the first fundamental goal for the Latin American countries that submitted this agenda, and, since then, expanding ECE access has been recognized as a priority. Nevertheless, UNESCO pointed out that the compulsory attendance policy could become a crash course for children prior to enter formal schooling without being complemented by measures to ensure the child's attendance in the early phases of ECE [10]. To this concern, the Educational Goals for 2021, which were adopted by the Ibero-American Conference on Education and reaffirmed in 2010, include ambitious goals relating to ECE. Particularly, the third general goal and its target reflect the political importance that the expansion of ECE from the early ages has taken on in the region. Moreover, the targets to include the children from vulnerable groups in this expansion can be founded in the second target from this agenda in order to promote equity and an equitable access to ECE. Quality ECE for low socioeconomic status children has been found to benefit from ECE to a greater extent than high socioeconomic status children [11]. Hence, it has been necessary to monitor the expansion of access to ECE as a first step to assess the equity but, along with it, the equity of the distribution and the quality of the provision needs to be examined. The implementation and evaluation of the above-mentioned agendas have provided for strategies and action plans, as well as they have open new prospects to identify the trends and development of their consecution over time. As positive consequence, nowadays, it is possible to measure and compare the levels of achievement that the Latin American countries have reached in the expansion of ECE over the last decades. This comparative exercise allows the establishment of particular paths and dynamics that have taken place in the different countries and moments, in order to relate them with the present challenges and opportunities that education

For the purpose of this work, the selection of indicators responds to the availability of comparable data of ECE in Latin American countries, focusing on the mandatory attendance policies and the real benefit of them. Therefore, in the next section, compared information shows a short description of the main types of provision of the national system in early childhood education together with the main selected elements on compulsory preschool education. These elements are the mandatory access and the age range for a guaranteed place, as well as the evolution of school life expectancy in ECE and of the scope of children with preschool experiences after the transition to primary school. Furthermore, in this first subsection, there are also compiled data on the equity of access in order to study the development and achievement of ECE expansion by comparing the enrolment ratios over

The second subsection of the comparative study will focus on the last three rounds of PISA results and its evolutions from a selection of countries in order to relate their developments with the progresses on the implementation and the expansion of the compulsory attendance policies in ECE. This cross-national study of the comparable data over time can reveal to what extent the compulsory attendance policy has benefitted the Latin American countries, from a general perspective. In the same line, this exercise can help to show the disparities between these

Bearing in mind that there are multiple pathways and different influences to understand the diverse ways in which ECE policy can be made efficient [12, 13], the comparative conclusions of this study will be presented in the final section of the work. There, some future perspectives and challenges around the compulsory preschool are also discussed, in order to complement the extracted conclusions.

countries and the different social groups within these countries.

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.81779*

is facing within this diverse reality.

time, as well as the school life expectancy.

**2. Methodology**

*Compulsory Preschool in Latin America: Comparative Evolution and Future Challenges DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.81779*
