 Children's experiences and early year services across Europe have the potential to be really influential in their current lives, in their future lives, and in fact throughout their life. So it is really critical that we make those experiences the best quality that we possibly can for children and for their families. When the Quality Framework came out in 2014, it was a proposal, a draft set of statements. And even in that format as it already made some impact in policy across Europe. Will children develop best in an environment where all stakeholders, all adults who work in the support of their care and education work in partnership with a common shared set of goals and understandings. And so those really important relationships are the starting point of quality. It is really important that staff, practitioners, teachers, parents and wider families in societies and communities work together, work together to share their understanding of how children best develop and learn. We also need a shared vision of what quality looks like in practice. That can be expressed through curricula or programs of learning that are informed by best evidence around how children develop and learn. We also really importantly need to find support at the macro system level. So policy makers need to provide the resources, the governance infrastructure and all of those elements that are going to create what has often been described as a competent system which supports quality at all levels from the top at policymaking right through to the experiences that children have. Early childhood education can lay foundation stones that really give children the potential and build their capacity to benefit from the offer of education right throughout the education system and indeed into their professional lives and in their personal lives as well. In early childhood we build strong foundations through fostering learning dispositions such as creativity, self-regulation, problem solving. We create children who understand each other, who can be members of communities and societies. We foster empathy and unfortunately in the current climate across Europe we could do with a lot more empathy and compassion. But what's really really important as well is the fact that you need highly qualified skilled adults to work with those young children, to support those really positive learning interactions to find those teachable moments where children make that breakthrough in their learning and development. Those adults need to be qualified appropriately but they also need to find the work rewarding. They need to be recognized and valued for the work that they do. Unfortunately too often across Europe the early childhood workforce tends to be the poorer relations in the education system and that's something that we must change. We really need to understand that the starting point for improving the quality of experiences for young children is to ensure that we have a strong, competent, confident workforce who feel fulfilled in their work. So they come in with that positive attitude that models learning for young children. We need to recognize that the work that early childhood professionals do is critical. If they cannot do a good job working with our youngest children then we are always going to be catching up in the remainder of the education system. They need to be given parity of status and parity of recognition and value. Transitions are something that's positive if they are supported correctly. Our first transition from the close warm connectedness of our families into an early years service is becoming more and more common for children across Europe. In recent times the numbers of children being funded to attend free early years services has increased quite dramatically. This presents challenges for the next stage, the next transition, the one into primary school because now we have a cohort of young children across Europe who have had hopefully the experience of high quality early education and care and this has developed their capacity, their learning dispositions, their skills, their empathy, their ability to communicate and primary schools and primary teachers need to be ready for that. They need to understand that there has to be continuity both in the experiences but also in the way in which children are recognized as competent, confident learners.