Excerpts from the report:

The Country Note for Austria is an output of the Thematic Review of Early Childhood Education and Care Policy, a project launched by the OECD's Education Committee in March 1998. The impetus for the project came from the 1996 Ministerial meeting on Making Lifelong Learning a Reality for All.

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Following the terms proposed by the sponsoring ministry, the Country Note for Austria seeks to place the issues around early childhood provision firmly within the Austrian context, and to review early care and educational policies and practices as they currently meet the needs of Austrian children and their families. In particular, the Ministry of Education requested the team a) to pay specific attention to the early years as the foundation stage of lifelong learning, in which basic competences and above all, the motivation to learn should be laid; and b) to provide benchmarks and comparisons with other countries to inspire quality improvements at all levels of the system.