Austria's Child Guarantee National Action Plan - An overview

2021 was a turning point in the fight against child poverty, with the launch of two landmark initiatives, the EU Strategy on the Rights of the Child and the European Child Guarantee.

As EU Member States submit their Child Guarantee National Action Plans, Eurochild will share highlights from each plan that members, children's rights advocates and influencers can use in their own work to ensure children's rights remain high on the political agendas across Europe.

The Austrian government submitted Austria's Child Guarantee National Action Plan (NAP) in 2023. 

The Austrian Child Guarantee National Action Plan focuses on:

• Early Childhood Education and Care: Additional funding to expand coverage, adopt flexible opening hours, strengthen staff’s skills (inc. inclusive teaching skills), promote inclusion (e.g. multilingual kindergartens, integrative groups for children with special needs, interdisciplinary cooperation), standardize provision of service.
• Inclusive Education and School-Based Activities: Education Package for sustainable acquisition of skills (new curricula, revision of skills assessment, new obligation to complete compulsory education), address drop-out of education or training , improve educational and career guidance, barrier-free extracurricular youth work (e.g. Kultur:Bildung), comprehensive and interdisciplinary culture of prevention, increase school support staff
• One healthy meal each school day: inclusion of the “School Cafeteria Guideline” and the School Catering Checklist, “Healthy eating from the start” overview, introduction of the “Food literacy and consumer education” in the curricula
• Healthy Nutrition: REVAN programme (e.g. promotion of breastfeeding), Quality Standards for Catering in Kindergartens,
• Healthcare: “specialist doctor initiative” for understaffed specialist subjects, Target-based Health Governance & Austrian Healthcare Structure Plan to strengthen and further develop child and adolescent psychiatric care and networks, Parent-Child Health Passport
• Adequate housing: housing law reform to foster and create greater social equality in the housing sector, study to determine the number of children affected by homelessness, eviction prevention

Check out the rest of the Child Guarantee National Action Plan Overviews!

Eurochild and its members will continue to call on Member States to release their plans and to work on ensuring the Child Guarantee National Action Plans helps end child poverty.

This overview presents highlights extracted from the National Action Plan (NAP) from Austria published in 2023. It is not exhaustive nor does it evaluate the NAP and uses the same terms as those in the NAP. It is intended to summarise key elements & to signpost stakeholders to other relevant analyses.