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Government and councils in Catalonia have adopted a clear-cut 0–3 education and care model involving bolstering the network of public nursery schools and thereby increasing the number of public places available alongside the existing private options. The goal is to increase the availability of formal early childhood education, serving the dual purpose of enabling parents to work while providing education and care for young children. Enrolment rate at the age of two rose by 10 percentage points between 2003 and 2017 and since then it has remained at 60%. From 2017, a sliding-scale fee system was introduced in Barcelona and other cities to reduce economic barriers to accessing public nursery schools. However, this policy has not led to a corresponding rise in enrolment rates for this age group. Our analysis concentrates on mothers opting for school-based services, with the goal of identifying the factors that influence the use of institutionalised early childhood education and care (ECEC) services in Barcelona. Our findings reveal that sliding-scale pricing has increased the enrolment of children of mothers with low incomes in public nursery schools, while the quality of services has attracted middle and upper-class families. Nevertheless, public ECEC services are not adapted to meet the needs of working-class mothers who, although they are not in socially vulnerable situations, cannot afford private nurseries. In sum, family circumstances, primarily factors related to social class, employment status, and the availability of family support, are linked to the likelihood of choosing school-based public ECEC services.

In this introduction we present early childhood education and care (ECEC) as the topic of this book and how we position it in relation to the wider theoretical and conceptual debate on social innovation. We carry out an extensive review of the main concepts on which this book is based (social innovation, policy learning and institutionalisation), and we present the conceptual model that lies behind the instrumental case of Barcelona that connects these three concepts. This chapter will also introduce the content of this book, presenting Part I and Part II, and their role in this book's argument.

This chapter focusses on how early childhood education and care (ECEC) has been extended and configured in recent decades in advanced capitalistic countries. We will first set out the main societal benefits associated with public investment in ECEC and then discuss how neoliberalism and cutbacks in social services have coexisted with the expansion of ECEC as a social policy in recent years.

In particular, we will delve into the role of Social Investment as a policy framework that supports the expansion of ECEC in advanced capitalistic countries, and then we will highlight the challenges that ECEC faces in terms of universalisation and diversity of needs, areas in which social innovation (both citizen and institution-led) is playing an emergent and growing role.

In this conclusive chapter, the authors summarise the main findings of the book by reviewing the empirical evidence of the seven cases of social and policy innovation in ECEC analysed and by comparing them in the context of their respective welfare regimes. The authors then review the risks of social innovation as well as the challenges for ECEC policy and for institutionalisation dynamics. The authors identify the factors that help understand the role of social innovation within the context of welfare state retrenchment and discuss implications in terms of the capacity of social initiatives to address social inequalities. The case of Barcelona, together with the other cities presented in this book, helps to understand how public bodies have innovated in ECEC policies by learning from social innovation and how they have become more capable of tackling the diversification of needs among citizens.

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.

The Israeli state has always offered minimal early childcare (ages 0–3) provisions, basically intended as welfare services for underprivileged mothers joining the labour market. With restrictive eligibility criteria, the majority of the population has no access to these services and resorts to the private childcare market, notorious for its poor conditions and high costs. In this unsupervised domain, innovative early childhood education and care (ECEC) solutions have been introduced, typically led by middle-class families. Paradoxically, although these innovative arrangements promote ECEC as an educational (rather than as a welfare) project, they remain a world apart from the educational system. Rather than studying these dynamics as an economically driven phenomenon, we examine them as a culture-distinction mechanism that forms an exclusive, however vague, extra-system space, based entirely on local actors' activism and inspired by global ‘progressive’ educational agendas. Following a historical review of Israel's ECEC policies, we investigate the sociocultural motivations and concerns of proponents of alternative kindergarten schemes for children aged 0–3 (both parent-involvement projects and private enterprises) through an analysis of their identity discourse, self-imaging, and self-positioning. We show how these actors claim moral capital by dissociating themselves from the domain of ‘regular kindergartens’ by reconstructing an alternative sense of ‘being an educator’ that is ‘in the person’, entwined with a sense of communality, thereby impeding the institutionalisation of innovative ECEC initiatives.

Research has defined social innovation as citizen-led initiatives that offer new products and services that satisfy self-defined social needs that are not met by the current public or private provision. This means that policy intervention would be at loggerheads with the aims and means of social innovation projects, as it involves institutional leadership. However, numerous studies have demonstrated that social innovation might foster new solutions that could provide inputs for policy learning. We provide evidence of policy changes in early childhood education and care in Barcelona between 2015 and 2023, where the ‘new municipalist’ city council developed socially innovative services that were partially inspired by citizen-led projects. This chapter will show how policy change occurred by institutionalising innovative practices to meet an increasingly diversified demand for 0–3 services from an inclusive perspective.

Social innovation in early childhood education and care (ECEC) in the city of Barcelona has emerged from two different sources. On the one hand, from citizens' initiatives that have developed over the past 20 years, including childminders, care groups, and free-education nurseries. On the other hand, from the local council, which has put together a network of municipal ‘family spaces’ as part of its 0–3 policy. Over the past decade, family spaces have had a scant presence and a complementary aim in relation to the municipal nurseries network, but ever since the approval of the municipal ECEC Plan in April 2021, they have become one of the pillars of an innovative local policy in which an intensified effort has been made to expand them and redefine them to construct a new model. This is a case of policy learning where the local council has incorporated features of citizen-led social innovation into a new type of municipal ECEC services. Both strands of social innovations are alternatives to school-like environments and share aspects that address pedagogical models, the balance of care and education, and approaches to parenting. However, they differ in their definition of social innovation, the needs they respond to, the costs for families, and therefore, the public they aim to serve. This chapter explores and compares the motivations of families who opt for citizen-led social innovation in ECEC and those of families who opt for institution-led social innovation, to identify the challenges faced by each model. The empirical data used to elaborate this chapter comes from 56 interviews and 4 direct observations.

This chapter explores social innovations in childcare policies in France, focussing on their role and their institutionalisation process. Despite France's robust national family and early years childcare policies, marked by theoretically high coverage rates for children under 3 (59.8 places per 100 children under 3 in 2019), local governance complexities and persistent social and territorial inequalities have led to the appearance of social innovations at the grassroots level. Historically, these initiatives have gradually gained recognition and become institutionalised into public policy. However, recent policy reforms have prioritised managerial efficiency and competition among public, non-profit and for-profit providers, and implemented a growing number of top-down instruments such as calls for projects to support innovative projects. In this context, social innovations aim to address various social needs, such as territorial inequalities, social diversity, integration of vulnerable mothers into employment, and provision of childcare during non-standard hours. The case of the department of Seine-Saint-Denis exemplifies how social innovations can emerge in response to insufficient local provision to address the needs of disadvantaged families, and how they manage to combine childcare and work integration. It illustrates the fact that social innovation can be driven both from the bottom up and, when serving as instruments of public policy, from the top down. Nonetheless, this case also shows that, while innovative, these local initiatives do not fundamentally transform the institutional framework of national childcare policy.