OMEP Brings the Case for Early Childhood to the UN - But the Fight for Recognition Isn't Over

From 31 August to 2 September 2026, the Open-Ended Intergovernmental Working Group on an Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child (OE-IGWG) met in Geneva for its second session.

The Working Group's mandate, set out in Human Rights Council Resolution 56/5, adopted on 10 July 2024, is precise: to explore, elaborate and submit to the Council a draft Optional Protocol that would explicitly recognise the right to education as including early childhood care and education, and require States to make public pre-primary education free to all - starting with at least one year - and public secondary education free to all, alongside provisions on international cooperation and streamlined reporting.

It is a mandate born of scale. The resolution notes that, according to UNESCO, 250 million children and young people are out of school, mostly at secondary level, and that UNICEF estimates nearly half of all pre-primary-age children worldwide - at least 175 million - are not enrolled in pre-primary education. Costs to families, social inequality and lack of infrastructure remain central barriers, and girls remain more likely than boys to be excluded altogether.

This would be a fourth Optional Protocol to the CRC. Unlike the Convention's existing protocols, which addressed protection from specific harms, this one would address something more foundational: whether the right to free, public education - already binding for primary schooling under the CRC - should extend, with the same legal force, to the years just before and after it.

The session opened strongly. More than 60 states took part on the first day alone, and one of its most powerful moments came from child representatives from Liberia, Sweden, Croatia, Mexico and Indonesia, who spoke directly to delegates about the hidden costs - transport, uniforms, materials - that still keep children out of school, particularly children living in poverty, refugee children, children with disabilities, and children from minority and Indigenous communities. Georgia and Sierra Leone each gave up their own speaking slots so a child could take the floor instead.

Discussion then turned to the ten draft Key Principles guiding the eventual Protocol text. Most found broad support. Two did not: lifelong learning, and the procedural question of an individual complaints mechanism - both left for further intersessional work.

OMEP was not alone on the floor this week. Throughout the session, civil society organisations used every available minute after the panellists to make the case for the Protocol - among them Girls Not Brides: The Global Partnership to End Child Marriage, Plan International, Human Rights Watch, Education International, the Irish Network for Education Worldwide (INEW), the Brazilian Campaign for the Right to Education, Lumos Foundation, the Latin American Campaign for the Right to Education, Federación Internacional de Fe y Alegría, International Disability Alliance, Make Mothers Matter, Global Campaign for Education, and Global Forum for the Defence of the Less Privileged. Each brought a few minutes and a different angle, but the message across the room was consistent: children cannot wait for this Protocol to advance.

OMEP's Delegation & Focus

OMEP's own delegation - Klara Bahtić, a preschool teacher with eight years of classroom experience in Zagreb, Croatia and a OMEP World Secretary, and Professor Cate Carroll, OMEP's Vice President for Europe and Professor of Education and Pedagogy at Liverpool Hope University - delivered a joint oral statement grounding the legal debate in classroom reality.

Their central argument: pre-primary education - the year or two before school starts - is real and measurable, but it is only the most visible slice of something larger. Early childhood care and education is the full continuum of care, protection, health, nutrition and early learning that begins the day a child is born, and OMEP asked the Working Group to name that continuum explicitly in the Protocol, rather than leaving it implied.

On the session's third day, OMEP returned to the floor to reaffirm its support for advancing the Protocol, underscoring that early years are foundational to development and that the obligation to provide ECCE remains insufficiently defined in international law - recognised in principle, but not yet precise enough to implement, monitor or enforce. OMEP's full statement, along with the oral intervention, is available as a downloadable document alongside this article.

Research Professor Klaus D. Beiter (North-West University, South Africa) laid out the legal case for the Working Group, distinguishing between the near-universal factual agreement that ECCE and free education matter, and the much harder legal question of whether current international law already creates binding - specifically, minimum core - obligations to provide them. His answer: not yet. Existing Committee interpretations describe ECCE as encouraged, not required, and secondary education under the CRC remains optional ("measures such as...") rather than mandatory. A hard-law Optional Protocol, he argued, would close that gap.

By the session's close, the Working Group adopted a set of draft recommendations  - with some amendments - to carry the process forward. In short, the Group agreed to:

• Continue intersessional consultations to further explore the Protocol and build understanding among states - informal, without decision-making authority
• Further review the Key Principles in a structured way during the intersessional period
• Continue ensuring ethical, safe and meaningful child participation in the drafting process
• Encourage Member States to promote national, regional and international dialogue on the Protocol
• Draw on technical input from UN entities, the Committee on the Rights of the Child, and potentially an engaged legal consultant, where resources allow

Here is the harder truth behind this week's progress: several European states were not in the room for key parts of the discussion, and those that did engage were not, on the whole, supportive of the Protocol. Real momentum toward recognising early childhood care and education as the starting point of the right to education will require European governments to show up - and to advocate, not just observe.

That is the work ahead. OMEP will keep pressing, in Geneva and at home, until the youngest children are visible not only in this Protocol's text, but in the policy and funding decisions that follow from it.