Studies show promising outcomes for participation in early childhood education programs. Those children who participated in programs such as Perry Preschool achieved better test scores, entered tertiary education more often, were less likely to be welfare recipients, were less likely to commit crime, and had better incomes than those in the control group (Duncan & Magnuson, 2013; Heckman & Masterov, 2007). In this regard, early childhood education plays an important role not only in determining the level of competence later on but also for equal opportunities in society. If one now strives for an equitable education system and frames the theoretical approach on the basis of the distributive justice, resources have to be distributed in such a way that unequal starting conditions at school are compensated (Rawls, 2020). Here, early childhood education could play a significant role, since empirical studies show that investment in early childhood education can be particularly promising, especially for disadvantaged children (Duncan & Magnuson, 2013; Heckman & Masterov, 2007; Melhuish et al., 2015). Based on the sociological work of Boudon (1974), a distinction is made between two sets of causes to explain educational inequities. There are primary origin effects, which are shown by the fact that children from higher social classes are more likely to acquire competencies that are helpful for a successful education at school with regard to their upbringing, equipment and support within their families, which is one of the reasons why these children perform better at school, whereas children who are socially disadvantaged tend to have cognitive disadvantages. The secondary origin effects are also evident in parental educational decisions, which in turn depend on the family's resources, which are crucial for the further educational development of their children (Becker, 2007). If one now looks specifically in terms of their mathematical competencies in early childhood, these primary origin effects stand out. The study of (Jordan et al., 2006) showed that socially disadvantaged children have poorer mathematic competencies. Furthermore, their learning growth was investigated and with regard to story problems, they were 4 times more likely to fall into the group with the lowest learning growth, similar results were also shown with regard to number comprehension. As far as the secondary effects of origin are concerned, it can be seen that attendance at an early childhood education institution is related to other contextual factors such as employment and the parents' level of education (Jessen et al., 2018; Müller et al., 2014).  In addition, it was shown empirically that the duration of attendance at an early childhood education institution plays a significant role. Thus, the competence advantage of those children who have attended a kindergarten for two years compared to those who have not, is a difference of 51 points in a mathematical test (Sylva et al., 2004). If the focus is now placed specifically on Kosovo the international reporting of the TIMSS study 2019 has been able to confirm, based on initial analyses of the data, that those children who attend an early childhood education institution as well as those children who already pursue mathematical activities in the family achieve better results in mathematics (Mullis et al., 2020). However, these analyses do not take a more specific look at which children receive such educational opportunities and which children are left alone from the beginning as well as the identification of correlations, so this paper is devoted to the following research questions:

1. Which children attend early childhood education institutions in Kosovo?
2. Is there a significant relationship between the duration of participation as well as early childhood activities in the family with mathematical achievement?

The analyses are based on a secondary analysis of the data from the TIMSS 2019 study, which examines country-representative samples of students from the 4th and 8th grades. This paper utilizes the 4th grade data from Kosovo (nstudents= 4496; average age was 9.9 (Foy & LaRoche, 2020)). For the purpose of this paper, the data provided by parents in the Early Learning Survey on the duration of the early childhood attendance of their child, early literacy and numeracy activities before primary school, their own level of education and employment situations. To analyze research question 1, we use descriptive statistic. For answering research question 2 we conducted linear regression analyzes estimating early childhood attendance, and early numeracy activities on overall mathematics competences using IDB Analyzer.

The results of the descriptive analysis have shown that there is no significant gender difference within the participation rate in early childhood education institutions. Consistent with previous research (Jessen et al., 2018; Müller et al., 2014), results of the current study indicated that attendance of early childhood education institutions is related to the contextual factors mentioned above, such as employment and the educational level of parents. For this purpose, the mother's employment and her level of education were considered, and it is evident that the higher the factors are, the more likely the child is to attend early childhood education institutions. In terms of the importance of the duration of attendance of an early childhood education institution and its influence on the mathematical performance of the pupils, similarities were found between the current study and Sylva et al. (2004). The results of the regression analysis show that there is a significant relationship between the mathematical performance of students and both the duration of attendance of an early childhood educational institution and early home numeracy activities. The results of this work could provide an impetus to move closer to the goal of an equitable education system in Kosovo by drawing for example attention to the effectiveness of kindergarten attendance. Furthermore, these initial insights show that in the future to deal more with the characteristics of the institution of early childhood education and develop measures to improve participation in early childhood education institutions. In addition, this study also provides an opportunity to highlight which children are left alone from the beginning, as they do not have the same starting conditions for primary education, in order to create measures to counteract this.

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