Monitoring for quality improvement in early childhood care and education settings

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Early childhood care and education is gaining prominence internationally as the foundation of strong education systems (Education Commission, 2016; World Bank Group, 2018) and a key contributor to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations, 2015). Around the world, pre-primary enrollments have grown by more than two-thirds over the past decade; at least one year of preschool education is compulsory in 50 countries (UNESCO, 2015). Despite this progress, inequities in access persist. Gross enrollment rates for pre-primary education are less than 20% in low-income countries compared to more than 80% in high-income countries (UIS, 2017). In most countries, children from low-income households still are less likely to participate in formal early learning opportunities than those from higher-income households (UNESCO, 2015).

The emphasis on rapid expansion of early childhood care and education has raised concerns about the quality of provision (Woodhead et al., 2009), especially given the low level of training and support received by many early childhood educators (Mitter & Putcha, 2017; Neuman, Josephson, & Chua, 2015). Research has shown that quality is essential for ensuring that children benefit from formal early learning experiences (Behrman, Engle, & Fernald, 2013; Engle et al., 2011; Raikes, 2015), whereas low-quality services can have potential negative long-term effects (Lipsey, Farran, & Durkin, 2018). With high rates of private provision (Samman, 2016) and decentralized governance in many low- and middle-income countries (Britto et al., 2014), the landscape for early care and education is complex, which makes it challenging for policymakers to ensure consistently high-quality provision for all children.

Achieving quality in early childhood care and education requires alignment across systems, settings, and the adults who serve at the “agents of change” in children’s lives (Britto, Yoshikawa, & Boller, 2011). Designing comprehensive standards for quality services and mechanisms for collecting data on these standards are two complementary approaches for helping to determine the extent to which services are beneficial for young children and how they can be improved. To address the need for contextually appropriate approaches to monitoring quality early learning environments, a number of new tools have been designed specifically for use in lower-resource contexts (e.g., MELE, IDELA-CE, TIPPS). In addition to providing feedback to early childhood providers and program managers on areas for improvement, these data can contribute to national quality monitoring and assurance efforts and guide policy decisions about the targeting of scarce resources. Despite these benefits, governments and partners face many practical implementation challenges to monitoring early childhood settings, and there is limited research on the effectiveness of different approaches in low- and middle-income countries.

This panel session will highlight diverse experiences with measuring and monitoring the quality of early childhood education settings in low- and middle-income countries. The presenters will share efforts by governments and civil society organizations to develop new monitoring tools to assess the quality of early learning environments and to build national quality assurance systems. Given that quality monitoring of early learning settings is an evolving and challenging issue in many countries, presenters will share guidance based on their research and country experience for those are interested in strengthening connections among data collection and policy and program improvements.

Sub Unit

• SIG: Early Childhood Development

Chair

• Michelle Neuman, University of Pennsylvania

Individual Presentations

• Using the IDELA-Classroom Environment tool to monitor and improve ECCD center quality - Jonathan Seiden, Save the Children; Caroline Dusabe, Save the Children

• Quality of early childhood education in Colombia: Results from a national study - Carolina Maldonado, Universidad de los Andes, Colombia; Catalina Rey, Universidad de Los Andes; Eduardo Escallón, Universidad de Los Andes; Ana María Nieto, Consultant; Angy Mateus, Instituto Colombiano de Bienestar Familiar (ICBF); Hirokazu Yoshikawa, New York University; Liliana A. Ponguta, Yale University; Sharon Lynn Kagan, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Quality of early childhood education in Brazil: Adaptation of MELQO - Laura Ogando, University of Sao Paulo/ Ribeirao Preto; Beatriz Abuchaim, Fundação Maria Cecília Souto Vidigal; Daniel Domingues Santos, University of Sao Paulo; Alejandra Meraz Velasco, Fundação Maria Cecília Souto Vidigal

Discussant

• Abbie Raikes, University of Nebraska