Starting Strong IV
Monitoring Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care
Research suggests that, when it comes to early childhood education and care, quality matters most. A growing number of countries are establishing monitoring systems to ensure quality and accountability in these programmes. This new publication explores how countries can develop and use these systems to enhance service and staff quality for the benefit of child development. It offers an international perspective and concrete examples to help policy makers, monitoring experts and practitioners in the field develop their own monitoring policies and practices.
Improving monitoring policies and practices in early childhood education and care (ECEC)
The overall challenges of monitoring quality include, among others, defining quality, establishing a coherent monitoring system, and ensuring that monitoring contributes to policy reform and quality improvements. Example challenges in monitoring service quality are defining what constitutes quality, and keeping settings abreast of the latest standards. Challenges in monitoring staff performance include monitoring curriculum implementation and linking staff quality to quality improvements. Challenges in monitoring child development include creating an accurate picture of a child’s development and recognising children’s individual development. The lessons learnt indicate, among others, that it is important to share good practices, ensure stakeholders understand what constitutes quality, have coherent monitoring frameworks, and have well-balanced and defined purposes of monitoring. Besides, monitoring should be linked to policy development and contribute to transparency for ECEC stakeholders, and include voices and views of different stakeholders.
Also available in: French
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