¿Pública o Privada? Comparación entre Dimensiones de la Calidad en Dos Redes de Educación Infantil 0-3

Previous research shows that access alone is not enough to ensure the expected benefits of Early Childhood Education. Therefore, this paper analyses different conditions of educability following the growth of enrolments rates in Spanish 0-3 Early Childhood Education. It is essential to deeply understand this issue, particularly in a context characterised by a diversity of providers, with a slight dominance of private provision. By comparing two 0-3 networks – a public municipal network in Barcelona-Catalonia and a private one in Andalusia – the paper reveals how the ownership and management of schools can affect the unequal development of five dimensions of quality at this stage: staff training and working conditions, team coordination, and the treatment offered and allowed to families. The results come from two case studies with a qualitative strategy: 39 interviews. Public schools would demonstrate superior conditions in terms of educability across the five dimensions. However, what this article achieves is, first, to broaden perspectives on quality by analysing the experiences of professionals in schools and, second, to reveal some factors and interdependencies that give rise to differences in quality between public and private establishments that other studies have already attempted to measure