The growth of pre-primary education globally is not simply the product of deliberate policy choices. Broader socioeconomic transformations are at work too, and chief among them is the rising share of mothers seeking to go back to work. As this blog, drawn from the 2026 GEM Report, argues, that shift has driven demand for early childhood education in ways that are clearly visible in both data and policy histories.
Crucially, the relationship runs in both directions. Pre-primary education expands partly in response to mothers seeking work, but it is also a precondition for it. When affordable, quality childcare is available, women are freed to enter or re-enter the labour market in the first place.
Making early childhood care an easy choice so that mothers can afford to go back to work.
In high-income countries, women’s employment rates rose from 47% in 1995 to 54% in 2024. This was facilitated by governments that expanded early education provision, regulated a growing private care sector, and introduced subsidies to improve affordability and guarantee minimum quality standards.
Individual country experiences illustrate the gains clearly. In Quebec, Canada, low-cost universal childcare led to an estimated eight-percentage-point rise in maternal labour force participation. In Poland, a 2009 reform that lowered the primary school starting age and guaranteed preschool for five-year-olds produced a 10% increase in available places and a 4.2% rise in maternal employment — particularly among highly educated mothers and families with three-year-olds. In Spain, rolling out public preschool for three-year-olds raised mothers’ employment probability by three to seven percentage points. Argentina saw similar gains following the expansion of public preschools.
In the UK, where childcare rates were some of the highest in the world, an organisation ‘Pregnant then screwed’ in 2022 ran a march with 15,000 mothers calling for more affordable early childhood care so that they could go back to work.
In lower-income countries, however, the picture is starkly different. Women’s employment rates have declined — from 64% to 55% in low-income countries and from 58% to 54% in upper-middle-income countries — or stagnated, as in lower-middle-income countries, where rates have remained around 40%. Limited full-day provision, high transport costs, and weak regulatory oversight across much of Africa, Asia, and Latin America continue to make it far harder for mothers to afford to go back to work.
Address labour market policy and you may improve education outcomes too
Policymakers need to take seriously the fact that this relationship is bidirectional. Early childcare policy histories in Europe show that it was labour market shifts and not pedagogical agendas alone that drove the initial expansion and formalisation of early childhood provision. In the Nordic countries, the rise of dual-earner households and a political commitment to gender equality formed the backdrop for near-universal entitlement to early childhood education. This supported mothers to continue working while also reducing the unequal burden of care that continues to fall disproportionately on women.
The data makes the connection impossible to ignore
The likelihood that mothers go back to work is directly associated with the number and ages of their children. Across a sample of 80 countries, an increase in pre-primary enrolment from 60% to 90% is associated with a rise in the female employment rate from 40% to 50%. Globally, the female labour force participation rate stands at 52% overall — but reaches 82% among women living alone without children, falls to 64% for those with a partner and no children, and drops to 49% for those with a partner and a child under six.
Maternal employment also declines with the age of children. Across OECD countries in 2021, the share of employed mothers rose from 61.5% among those with a child under two, to 70.2% for those with children aged three to five, and 76.3% for those with children aged six to fourteen. Data from 36 mostly middle-income countries reinforces this: female labour force participation averaged 68% with no children under six, 63% with one, 53% with two, and just 44% with three or more.
What this means for policy
These patterns reflect the reality that when formal care is unavailable, unreliable, or unaffordable, women bear the cost in career interruptions, reduced hours, or exit from the labour market altogether. Policymakers must therefore attend not only to the supply of early childhood provision (its accessibility, affordability, and quality) but also to its design. Short daily sessions or provision tied to school calendars will not enable mothers to return to full-time work.
As the 2026 GEM Report demonstrates, long-term changes in education are often shaped by forces that have nothing to do with education policy itself. The expansion of early childhood care and education is a case in point: it cannot be understood, or effectively advanced, without understanding the labour market pressures, gender inequalities, and household decisions that surround it. Improving provision means grappling with demand as much as supply, and recognising that for many parents, the decision about whether to send a child to preschool is inseparable from the question of whether they can afford to go to work at all.
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