 When you go back to the early 1990s when the EU for the first time sort of looked into this whole area, the whole debate was about childcare, it was about the EU encouraging member states to invest in childcare in order to increase women's participation in the labour market. That was sort of the macro economic argument basically and it took quite a while to move that discussion on in a way that children actually appeared in that picture for the first time. So to officially acknowledge and sort of frame it in the political realm that there is a right to education and care for young children from birth, at the moment in Europe we are at the stage where all the official documents, the council recommendations refer to early childhood education and care as one integrated concept and this I think is fundamentally what enables early childhood services institutions to provide holistic supports for young children and their families. One of the things that we've come to understand over the years is that it is very important to embrace this notion of diversity, that children are diverse and different and that is normal. There is no such thing as the normal child and then we place children outside of that sort of narrow understanding of normality because what happens then is that the child in itself, the child that doesn't have the dominant language as it's the first language or the child with the migration background is placed in this situation of being deficient. The child becomes the problem and that problem needs to be fixed and quite often in mainstream provision we still see this attitude in the way we set up services and we talk about children with special education needs. For instance we have to be very clear that early childhood education and care has a very important role to play but only in relation to other and much broader policy areas. The best quality early childhood education and care program is not going to solve structural issues of poverty and racism and exclusion in society but it can contribute. Early childhood education and care systems have been extremely vulnerable to disruption. What we do see is that countries that have more established, more integrated systems tend to be more resilient in the way they're able to support children and families through this crisis. I'm speaking to you from Ireland, a country where 70% of all places for young children are provided by private providers. We're now seeing the facing a situation where it's very unlikely that all of these services are going to reopen again because their business model has basically collapsed. Apart from the need to look at how resilient our assistance and how much do we rely on unsustainable models to provide an essential public service, the other element is to how to provide continuity. What we've seen is that some countries and I'm at the moment thinking of countries outside of Europe who are much more advanced in terms of these integrated systems, they've been able to maintain that contact with families much more easily because they know where the families are, where the children are. So they were able to set up home visiting services and they were able to provide basic nutrition for instance. It is not just about early childhood educators supporting children in that transition to primary school. I think what we urgently need is a discussion between the early childhood provision and the compulsory school system about how to receive and how to welcome this unique cohort of children that has gone through this experience of trauma disruption on an unprecedented scale and for schools to position themselves in a way but there is no assumption that it can be we can go back to business as as usual and children will just sort of somehow be made ready for school and off they go on to their learning trajectory.