Experts agree that high-quality early childhood education promotes the healthy cognitive, social, emotional, and physical development of young children. Decades' worth of evidence shows that the highest quality early education is child-centred and play-based. And yet, in many places, early childhood education today is dominated by skills-based, academically-oriented, test-focused teaching.

We seek to change that.

As an organisation of educators, university-based researchers, and early years providers, the IFS provides an international forum for the development of child-centred and play-based educational theories and practices, especially but not exclusively those associated with the inventor of the Kindergarten, Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852).