Early Childhood Education and Care in Luxembourg - Is attendance influenced by immigration background and socioeconomic status?

For decades, researchers have been raising awareness of the issue of educational inequalities
in the multilingual Luxemburgish school system. Especially children from families with a
migration background or a lower socio-economic status show large deficits in their language
and mathematics competences in comparison to their peers. The same applies to children
who do not speak Luxemburgish or German as their first language (Hornung et al., 2021;
Sonnleitner et al., 2021). One way to reduce such educational inequalities might be an early
and extensive participation in early childhood education and care (ECEC). Indeed, participation
in ECEC was found to be positively connected to language and cognitive development in other
countries, especially for children from disadvantaged families (Bennett, 2012). However, these
children attend ECEC less often (Vandenbroeck & Lazzari, 2014). There are indications that
lower parental costs might go hand in hand with a greater attendance of ECEC in general (for
a Luxembourgish study, see Bousselin, 2019) and in particular by disadvantaged families
(Busse & Gathmann, 2020). The aim of this study is to spotlight the attendance of ECEC in
Luxembourg during the implementation of the ECEC reform after 2017 which increased free
ECEC hours for all families from 3 to 20 hours a week. We draw on a large dataset of about
35.000 children from the Épreuves Standardisées (ÉpStan, the Luxemburg school monitoring
programme) from 2015 to 2021 and investigate which children attend any kind of regulated
ECEC service (public, private or family daycare) in which intensity, taking socio-economic and
cultural family factors into account. The findings might help to understand in which contexts
ECEC attendance should be further encouraged. Implications for future policy decisions are
discussed with the goal of further promoting equal educational opportunities for all children.