The types of services available to children and their parents vary significantly across OECD countries. This makes international comparisons of ECEC more challenging. The revision of ISCED in 2011 was a significant first step towards better identifying the education component of ECEC programmes and capturing information about ECEC services designed for children under the age of 3. Extending this typology to ECEC services that are considered an integral part of countries’ ECEC provision but do not comply with all the ISCED 0 criteria, offers opportunities to better understand enrolment statistics.

While much progress has been made in recent years, additional efforts are needed to pursue the development of ECEC indicators to take into account other characteristics that affect the interpretation and comparability of statistics across countries.