Most parents are anxious that their children should do well in life and they often feel that this includes receiving a good education. Many parents are of the opinion that in order to achieve educational success, children should start on their formal school education as early as possible. Not content with this, they also feel that it will help their children enormously if they attend nursery schools which provide some kind of preschool education.
Nowadays, many countries place a great emphasis on the importance of state nursery education. To some extent, this is in response to the pleas of working parents for the state provision of better childcare. These state nursery schools, at least for the older children attending them, often have a kind of curriculum which the children have to follow, although this is not usually so rigid as an actual school curriculum. The idea is that nursery schools should teach the children a certain amount of knowledge about letters and numbers, for example, so that they will find learning easier when they get to school.