The debate on justice in philosophy revolves around two different problems. Roughly, the issue of retributive justice concerns the justification of punishment for crimes, whereas the problem of distributive justice has to do with who should get what goods. Large parts of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child (crc) can be read as spelling out what rights, resources and support children should have access to. This chapter, then, concerns distributive justice. However, the problem of distributive justice tends to be conceptualized as a problem concerning adults. The social contract tradition in political philosophy is a case in point.1 It takes the problem of politics to be about a group of people who gather to come to an agreement about how they should live together. They set down the principles for this in a contract to which they all agree. Underlying this approach to justice are ideas of autonomy and, especially, responsibility. To be autonomous is to be self-governing. Usually, this ideal is set out in three assumptions. An autonomous agent is rational, informed, and not coerced.2 If the parties to the agreement were not autonomous and hence not able to govern themselves, then it would be difficult to see the point of the contract exercise. Such assumptions of autonomy run deep in political philosophy. One way of explaining what it is to be a child is to say that it is to be a person who has yet to develop autonomy.3 This is also what justifies giving children education. They have a need to become informed and to develop their capacity for rationality. Another way of thinking about childhood is that it is a period of vulnerability.4 If the autonomy of children is vulnerable, then it would be wrong to hold them accountable in the same way as autonomous adults. Both ideas of childhood point in the same direction: we should not hold children responsible the same way we do adults, and perhaps we should not hold children responsible at all in this regard. This is not because children would be in some sense worse off than adults, but because they are different in a morally relevant way.5 In this chapter, I will investigate what happens to theories of justice if children and related ideas of responsibility are taken seriously.6 In particular, I will look at issues of equality of education through this lens. In order to have an account of distributive justice, one needs to define both a principle of distribution and a metric of justice.7 A principle of distributive justice specifies how things should be distributed. One example is the principle of strict equality – that each person should have an equal amount of what is valuable – but, somewhat surprisingly, equality has been understood in several different ways in recent literature. Some have suggested that justice is about each person having a sufficient but not necessarily equal amount of what is valuable.8 Others have proposed that equality should be understood as responsibility-catering, so that a just distribution tracks responsibility where appropriate.9 Another approach starts from the observation that we could care about equality either because we find it important that each person gets an equal share or because we care about the situation of those who are worst off.10 A prioritarian principle of justice then says that justice demands the distribution that is most beneficial to the least fortunate, even if this distribution is unequal. In this chapter, however, we will not focus on this question,11 but will instead investigate a set of topics that are more directly connected to how childhood may affect an account of justice. In particular, we will focus on the metric of justice. This is an account of the goods with which the theory of justice is concerned. If we say e.g. that justice has to do with equality, then we must ask: equality of what? In the next section, we investigate how the assumption of responsibility and taking childhood seriously affect what this metric might be. Our answers there will have impact on other aspects of the theory of justice. Section three addresses the topic of time and justice; if the metric of justice involves goods that are only or especially valuable in childhood, then it seems that some costs in terms of such a metric cannot be compensated for in adulthood. Section 4 applies a distinction regarding approaches to justice – usually found in debates about economic policy – to the issue of education. Redistribution is where resources are redeployed to help out people who find themselves in a problematic situation, whereas pre-distribution is the idea that we should ensure that people have sufficient resources to avoid problematic situations. The final section investigates whether there might be several different problems of justice, so that, for instance, one principle might be appropriate for the sphere of healthcare while some other rule may be more to the point for education. The chapter also sums up an account of distributive justice which takes children seriously by saying that the fundamental problem of justice is how to organize the main social institutions so that they cohere into a single, just system of social cooperation. This means, importantly, that e.g. the education system should be understood as working together with other important institutions like the family and the labour market. It means also that the institution of education may run on one principle of justice, but that the appropriate principle of justice for teachers may be another.