Kindergartens, child participation rises to 35.5%. But we are overtaken by Spain and France

Partly it is yet another bitter fruit of denatality. Partly it is the socio-territorial gaps that continue to exist in our country despite the NRP. The fact is that Italia continues to have one of the lowest participation rates in services for the under-3 age group. And it also continues, accomplices of the structural problems of the labour market and other barriers to entry, to penalise access to kindergartens for children of parents in situations of economic and labour disadvantage, social fragility, and migratory background. All of this accentuating the distances with the main competitor countries and being overtaken even by Spain.

In short, equity and quality of services remain the Achilles heel of our system of childhood education services. A comparative research on childhood education services in France, Germany, England, Spain and Italia, promoted by the Agnelli Foundation and carried out by a group of national and international researchers, coordinated by Francesca Bastagli (Head of Research, Agnelli Foundation) and Emmanuele Pavolini (Professor of Economic Sociology, University of Milan), highlights this fact while waiting to see the first effects of the NRP measures.

The target set by the EU for 2030 of at least 45% participation is still a long way off, if we consider that by 2025 in Italia it is 35.5%, according to EU-SILC data measuring it across the EU. These figures are growing, but still insufficient. France is close to 60 per cent, Spain 55 per cent, and Italia is about at the Italian level, with the difference that the German model provides family leave of 12-14 months, generously subsidised, and therefore children start going to the nursery when they are one year old.

However, as participation increases, the gaps paradoxically widen, especially if we consider the gap between households in the highest and lowest income brackets, which has more than doubled in favour of the former in twenty years: the difference was 7.5 percentage points in 2005-6, when overall participation was still below 25 per cent, but rose to 19 points in 2023-4, when about 35 out of 100 children of that age were attending day care or similar services.

Even if we look at the other indicator, i.e. the number of places for under-threes, Italia is behind: according to Istat, in 2023-24, we are at around 32 places per 100 children. They were 30% the previous year, 25.5% in 2018-19 and 22.4% in 2013-14, the first year of the Istat survey. Much is expected from the NRP, which has invested over 4 billion to create, by the end of the plan, almost 184 thousand places, about two thirds of which are for children under three. But over the same period of time, denatality would also weigh heavily: again according to Istat, the decrease in the population under three years of age from 2021 to 2027 will be very significant: - 8.5 per cent