3 de September de 2026
The role of Early Childhood Education in the literacy process was highlighted in remarks by Beatriz Cardoso, Labedu’s Strategic Advisor, during Metrópoles Talks “São Paulo: Education that Transforms.” Held on August 13 by Metrópoles in partnership with the City of São Paulo, the event brought together public-sector representatives, business leaders, and specialists across four panels dedicated to the challenges and opportunities for advancing education in the city.
Beatriz took part in the panel “Literacy at the right age: the City Curriculum, learning recovery, and the results of the São Paulo Assessment,” moderated by journalist Vanessa Oliveira. The panel also included Lucimeire Cabral de Santana, pedagogical coordinator at the Pedagogical Coordination Office (COPED) of São Paulo’s Municipal Department of Education (SME), and Silvia Lima, Advocacy Manager at the Ayrton Senna Institute.
When asked what it means for a child to be literate at the “right age,” Beatriz argued that the very concept of a “right age” is reductionist. She reaffirmed the importance of having metrics and monitoring, without, however, turning the pedagogical process exclusively into a response to them.
According to her, literacy is a staged process that is not completed at a specific moment, but extends as part of continuous learning throughout life. For the specialist, the need to track indicators has led to an excessive focus on a single point in time, which impoverishes understanding of the process as a whole.
Beatriz also revisited the connection between literacy and Early Childhood Education, highlighting the role of intentional play as a form of learning at this stage. “It is the embryo of a culture, of a society. There, the child is processing very big things that seem minimal and insignificant,” she said, arguing that there is no separation between stages: what happens in early childhood sustains later learning.
The panel also discussed the risks of rushed literacy instruction. Beatriz warned of the temptation to bring the process forward, starting it too early in the expectation of resolving in advance challenges that emerge later on. “This does not meet children’s developmental needs and can have very serious consequences,” she said.
For her, the field is currently experiencing a moment of heterogeneity in views on literacy: while valuing assessments and indicators is positive, there is also a risk of reducing the concept to mastery of the code, when quality literacy also requires inference, metacognitive thinking, command of different reading media, among other competencies.
Asked which conditions, beyond initial training, make a difference for quality literacy, Beatriz pointed to the fragility of initial teacher education in Brazil as a structural challenge, which overloads continuous training with practical knowledge that should have been addressed earlier. For her, changing this reality requires investment and time—two scarce resources in education networks. “Time is one of the greatest luxury items we have in almost everything in this society. In education, it is no different,” she emphasized.
According to the advisor, the path forward involves building collective spaces for continuous training, anchored in mechanisms for monitoring and data-based discussion, and not only in informal exchanges of opinion among teachers. “We need to create methodologies and ways of doing this work so it isn’t reinvented from scratch every time,” she said, reinforcing the importance of systematizing training pathways that have already shown results, rather than repeating dispersed efforts in each network.
In closing her participation, Beatriz argued that advancing literacy requires society to understand the shared responsibility among school, family, and different social actors. For her, ensuring every child has regular access to reading from the earliest years and the right to be heard by the adults around them already represents a fundamental step in this process. The panel reinforced the importance of aligning curriculum, teacher training, and assessment as parts of a single strategy to ensure that all children have the opportunity to learn to read and write consistently.
Watch the full panel: