Starting well?

Starting well: Benchmarking early education across the world, is an Economist Intelligence Unit  research programme which ranks the preschool environments in 45 countries. You can read the report here. Scroll down to the end to see Australia's ranking. You may be shocked to see we are 28 out of 45! Here is one reason why:

Many high-income countries rank poorly, despite
wealth being a major factor in a country’s ability
to deliver preschool services. Australia, Canada,
Singapore and the US, for example, are all listed
in the lower half of the Index, despite having
high average per-capita incomes.
This is not to
suggest that quality preschool programmes are
lacking in these countries. But such schemes are
not available or affordable to all strands of society,
while minimum quality standards vary widely.