In Greece, both public and private kindergartens are available for children aged four to six. Since 2006, attendance has been compulsory for children from the age of five. These kindergartens, which are supervised by the Ministry of Education, teach the national curriculum, which has recently been revised. These combined measures are intended to prepare children more effectively for primary education, but also to address inequality, so that all children will have access to the same resources.

Overall, the country has made notable strides in preschool education. In the 1990s, the government made the bold decision to turn kindergarten teaching into a graduate profession. To achieve this, it launched an intensive—although not compulsory— retraining programme, sending almost every existing kindergarten teacher on a professional development course that would result in a graduate qualification. At the same time, all new preschool hires had to have graduate degrees.

Though impressive, challenges remain. There is no system of external evaluation, though a self-evaluation system has been piloted and is going to be fully implemented from September 2012. Pressures on preschool will mount as steep budget cuts persist. Furthermore, ECE has not been a priority either for government or parents, according to Konstantinos Petrogiannis, associate professor of developmental psychology at the Democritus University of Thrace in Greece: “Traditionally, the care and the education of the preschool child has belonged to the family principally and not to the educational system.” Such mindsets are difficult to change, not least because much of Greek society holds fairly traditional views on the role of the family, says Dr Petrogiannis.