Tackling child poverty and ensuring disadvantaged children's access to Early Childhood Education and Care
Open
Status as published by the data source.
Expected Outcome:
Projects should contribute to all of the following expected outcomes:
• Policymakers gain insights into the cost of child poverty and the returns from securing access of disadvantaged children to quality Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) in the EU.
• Policymakers receive operational advice on ways to reduce this cost and support participation of disadvantaged children in quality ECEC to close the gap with other children in the EU. Scope:
Past studies researched the cost of child poverty, and the returns yielded by and ways to secure disadvantaged children’s participation to ECEC, yet their relevance to the current EU context is limited (i.e. most of them were conducted outside of the EU or they are now outdated). Producing EU-specific insights on these issues is the aim of this topic, which should help close the ECEC participation gap and improve social outcomes, in line with the European Pillar of Social Rights, while fostering fiscal sustainability and inclusive growth.
The proposals may:
• Define disadvantaged children, by going beyond monetary aspects of disadvantages, building on the EU’s concept of risk of poverty or social exclusion, and taking into account systemically marginalised groups.
• Estimate the cost of child poverty and the returns yielded by participation to quality ECEC by taking into account:
• children’s needs and effective benefits targeting them,
• the short and longer-term costs/returns,
• the economic, social, wellbeing and educational aspects of these costs/returns,
• children’s, parents’ and aggregate outcomes.
• Investigate barriers preventing disadvantaged children from accessing quality ECEC.
• Provide a mapping of the most efficient policies to reduce child poverty cost, comparing ECEC policies’ value for money with other policies.
• Develop evidence-based and operational policy advice, including ways to better account for these costs/returns in policymaking and good (established or innovative) practices to close the ECEC participation gap. Scalability of these practices may be addressed.
• Use research methodologies of relevance (qualitative and quantitative, including experimental ones), building on multidisciplinary insights (including from SSH disciplines), and either make use of existing datasets (including administrative datasets), or collect new data. Experts by experience (i.e. vulnerable children and parents) may be involved.
- Status
- Open
- Deadline
- (time not stated)
- Opens
- Published
- Total budget
- €12,000,000
- Grant range
- €3,000,000 – €4,000,000
- Country
- European Union (EU-wide)
- Programme
- Horizon Europe (HORIZON)
- Official page
- Open at the source portal
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- Integrated Approaches for Retrofitting Infrastructures with Innovative Energy Storage Technologies
- Demonstration of hydropower technologies for efficient and forward-looking refurbishment of existing hydropower plants
- Delivery of industrial CCUS clusters – Societal Readiness pilot
All calls under this programme
Similar opportunities
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- Global Human Rights and EU values
- Closing the learning gap: uncovering causes and effective policy interventions for declining youth skills in mathematics, reading, and science
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Where this came from
- Source document
- https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/data/topicDetails/horizon-cl2-2026-01-transfo-03.json
- Document fingerprint
e384246169bd6247(SHA-256, first 16 hex characters)- Retrieved
- First recorded here
What has changed
- url first recorded as https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/opportunities/topic-details/horizon-cl2-2026-01-transfo-03 on
- currency first recorded as EUR on
- amount_max first recorded as 4000000.00 on
- amount_min first recorded as 3000000.00 on
- budget_total first recorded as 12000000.00 on
- deadline first recorded as 2026-09-23 on
- opens_on first recorded as 2026-05-12 on
- published_on first recorded as 2025-12-12 on
- status_basis first recorded as source_status on
- status first recorded as open on
- title first recorded as Tackling child poverty and ensuring disadvantaged children's access to Early Childhood Education and Care on
Data source
© European Union, 2026. Source: EU Funding & Tenders Portal. Reused under Commission Decision 2011/833/EU — CC BY 4.0.
Retrieved from the source on .
The source last updated this document on Fri, 24 Jul 2026 08:42:13 GMT.
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