There are more and more children attending day care and more and more places available, but there are still regions where families continue to have difficulty finding a solution, reveals the report 'Annual Education Balance 2025', a research work developed by Edulog, the 'think tank' for Education of the Belmiro de Azevedo Foundation.

Between 2018 and 2023, the number of children up to three years old enrolled in day care grew by 13.8%. Access has become more democratic with the free Creche Feliz program, launched in 2022, say researchers, showing that there is now a higher proportion of students whose parents do not have higher education, "a sign of the rapid diversification of the socioeconomic context and cultural capital of families".

"The coverage rate has increased, but day care is still not for everyone", warns the study released today, which shows that only 48% of children under three years old were enrolled in 2023, a year in which the coverage rate reached 55%, with 130,787 places available.

Of the more than 130,000 places, only 87% were actually occupied, because demand does not always match supply. The families that feel this gap the most are those in the regions of Lisbon and Porto, as well as in the southwest of Alentejo and the Algarve.

The study also warns of possible flaws in the pedagogical quality of these professionals, since only about 6% of the curriculum of the Bachelor's Degree in Basic Education is dedicated to the age group of children under three years old.

This analysis, which looks at Education from day care to higher education, concludes that families have increasing access to the education system and that participation rates at all levels of education continue to increase.

Universal education is closer to becoming a reality in both early childhood education, as well as in elementary and secondary education: All children between the ages of 6 and 14 are already attending elementary school and about 90% of young people of regular age were enrolled in secondary school in the 2022/2023 school year.

However, the researchers point out that there are still "territorial and socioeconomic imbalances", since the supply is concentrated in large urban centres and there is still a "lack of response in regions with low population density".

In preschool, 94% of children aged three to five were enrolled in a school, with schools in the centre registering the highest percentage of children in preschool (99.9%), followed by the Autonomous Region of Madeira (98.3%) and Alentejo (98.1%), in contrast to the Setúbal Peninsula, where the school enrolment rate is the lowest in the country (83.1%).