DIMENSIONS OF THE AVAILABILITY OF NURSERY AND CHILDREN'S CLUB SERVICES: DEFINITIONS, INDICATORS, EMPIRICAL RESULTS

The article addresses the issue of the availability of care and early education services for children up to 3 years of age. The aim of the study is to show the multidimensionality of accessibility in subjective and objective terms. One of the goals set in the article is to derive an operational definition of the availability of care and early education services for children under 3 years of age. In this respect, secondary research (desk research) was used. Content analysis (treated as qualitative data) from existing sources constituted the basis for formulating the operational definition of accessibility. Another goal of the article isto present public statistics data and the results of an empirical study (quantitative and qualitative methods), carried out in the first quarter of 2023, regarding formal care for young children in Poland. In Poland - as data from the Central Statistical Office show - the universality of care provided by nurseries and children's clubs is increasing, but it is still far from meeting the revised Barcelona goals. Not all municipalities have a nursery or a children's club, and services are most often provided outside the public sector; regional measures regarding the relationship between the number of children and places vary greatly while maintaining interregional comparability, and there are no adjustments for children with disabilities. However, the results of an empirical study conducted in 2023 indicate shortages of local care services in nurseries and children's clubs, deficiencies of infrastructure and equipment for children with disabilities, and issues of developing the competences of care and early education staff.