Abstract

Early Childhood Education (ECE) has been an area of interest because of its strong impact on the development of skills and benefits for learning at this age. However, participation in ECE programs is not equally distributed across social groups. It has been observed in different international contexts that there are factors such as availability, accessibility and affordability that hinder access for disadvantaged families. Chile has promoted policies to reduce these factors: greater availability of centers, priority selection in admission and free tuition. Through 56 semi-structured interviews from 7 centers, non-participant observations for six months in one of the centers and one year of fieldwork, we sought to understand access to ECE. The results show that, despite priority access policies, there are decisions on availability, implementation of accessibility and funding-oriented affordability practices that hinder access. This work provides new evidence and discusses the implications of the results for equitable access to ECE for disadvantaged families.