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).

Save the Date: Froebel Trust Conference in London on 2 March 2019

Save the date for the Froebel Trust's 2019 Conference, to be held on Saturday, March 2, 2019 from 9:15-16:00 at Grove House, Froebel College, University of Roehampton in London. The conference theme is Stories from Research and Practice. Information about how...

New Book: Routledge Int’l Handbook of Froebel and Early Childhood Practice, Tina Bruce, Peter Elfer, Sacha Powell & Louise Werth, eds.

Routledge's International Handbooks series has published a new volume of essential reading for all those interested in the history, analysis, and practical implementation of Froebelian principles in education. The new Routledge International Handbook of Fr...

8th International Froebel Society Conference (Hiroshima, 6-8 Sept 2018)

The 2018 International Froebel Society conference was a rousing success! We are extremely grateful to our colleagues at the Japanese Society for the Study of Pestalozzi and Froebel and at Hiroshima Bunka Gakuen University, who organized a terrific confere...

New Book: ‘The Translatlantic Kindergarten’ by Ann Taylor Allen

Oxford University Press has published a new book by renowned historian (and IFS plenary speaker) Professor Emerita Ann Taylor Allen entitled The Transatlantic Kindergarten: Education and Women's Movements in Germany and the United States (2017) As the Press...