The Children's Amendment Bill aims to improve early learning access in South Africa, ensuring that vulnerable children receive quality education regardless of their settings.

A new draft law seeking to dismantle some of the barriers to quality early learning is the latest in a series of significant reforms disrupting the sector, for the benefit of young children.

These draft law reforms, decades in the making, have been hard-won, sometimes through advocacy and other times through collaboration between the government and its social partners. We should not take them lightly. They are signals that big wheels are turning for our youngest citizens.

We live in a country where more than a million children between the ages of three and five, mostly in low-income communities, do not attend any form of early learning programme. And far too many of the four-year-olds in preschool -- almost 60% to be exact -- are not developmentally on track to start Grade R.

This tells us that access to early learning, and the quality of services, must be improved to ensure children are ready to learn when they start school.

With this problem in mind, over the past decade, progress towards expanding access to quality early childhood development (ECD) services in South Africa has been steady but largely unseen -- laying policy groundwork, building operational systems, testing ways...