Discussion and Conclusion

Revisiting the starting points of this research on policy implementation, the plurilingual education policy represents a recent social investment initiative in early childhood education and care to tackle educational inequalities that are produced in the later educational stages. As the state-of-research section revealed, previous research that is linked to the policy under analysis has focused so far on language practices in daycare centers with only a meta-perspective on the plurilingual education policy based on empirical data that were collected prior to the establishment of this language policy (e.g., Simoes Loureiro & Neumann, 2020; Kirsch & Seele, 2020; Neumann, 2018; see Chap. 4 ). Ongoing work that is directly related to the plurilingual education policy focuses on multiliteracy practices in daycare centers and partnership building in Luxembourg (see Kirsch & Aleksić, 2018; Kirsch, 2021). In regard to the aspect of educational inequalities, research in Luxembourg has mainly focused on primary and/or secondary school (formal education; e.g., Sonnleitner et al., 2018; Hornung et al., 2021; Simoes Loureiro et al., 2019; Hoffmann et al., 2018). Instead of focusing on language practices, this interdisciplinary research project fills a research gap, focusing on both the actual implementation of the policy and the educational inequality aspect of it in the field of nonformal early childhood education and care from a social science perspective (see Fig. 1.1 ). Accordingly, the aim of this research project was to analyze (I) the implementation of the newly established plurilingual education policy in the Luxembourgish early childhood education and care system with a particular view on (II) the salience of the aspect of reducing educational inequalities. In order to answer these central research questions, multiple sub-questions have been analyzed (see Chap. 5 ).