Introduction

The Luxembourgish government has made the initiative of providing children with the best possible care for better opportunities in many areas of life—regardless of children’s backgrounds—a national priority for the early childhood education and care sector. While for a long time, the focus of such education-related policies was primarily on the primary, secondary, and tertiary education systems, this policy attempt involves an earlier and crucial stage in the educational trajectory that encompasses predominantly nonformal education. This new interest in early childhood education and care and language acquisition is rooted in outcomes of the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Luxembourgish educational monitoring (EpStan—Épreuves Standardisées) that emerged in the 2000s, indicating rather below-average student achievement in the Luxembourgish education system and persistent disadvantages for certain socioeconomic and language groups (e.g., Ministère de l’Éducation Nationale, de la Formation Professionnelle et des Sports, 2000; SCRIPT/EMACS, 2012; Hadjar et al., 2015, 2018). A new understanding of disadvantage—the roots of which have been shown to be traceable to early childhood and language acquisition at an early stage—have brought early childhood education and care under the spotlight of political intervention (UNESCO, 2023). In order to foster children’s development, early childhood organizations (services d’éducation et d’accueil, SEA) are tasked with fulfilling a state mission, namely to prepare children for the Luxembourgish society and education system. Shifting the focus towards high-quality educational standards of childcare provision, this initiative also includes a plurilingual education program in early childhood education and care for children between the ages of one and four. Aiming to foster young children’s language development, the plurilingual education program—introduced in October 2017—was designed to familiarize children with Luxembourgish and French, and to valorize their home languages. In “enabling children today to understand the languages they will be speaking tomorrow” (Ministère de l’Education Nationale, de l’Enfance et de la Jeunesse [MENJE], 2017: 1), the intention is for this education program to make a significant difference in the Luxembourgish education system by facilitating its transition from monolingual to plurilingual education in early childhood, and in doing so, to fill a gap in Luxembourg’s multilingual and multicultural society.