A report written by Pia Britto, Hirokazu Yoshikawa and Kimberley Boller highlights the importance of improving not only access to, but also the quality of, early childhood interventions. The authors argue: “In the past there has been a greater focus on building access to ECD program services with less emphasis on quality, particularly when programs are taken to scale in low- and middle-income countries.”

The report argues that in moving forward policy-makers must ensure that quality is as much of a priority as access or we will not see the sustainable and meaningful changes in child and family outcomes which wise investments in ECD have the potential to bring about.

ECD is defined by the article as including the development of health, learning and behaviour from the prenatal period through the transition to primary schooling. In addition it refers to the wide range of services to support young children and their families, including health, early learning and education, family support and social protection.

The lights are going on around the world. There is evidence that ECD is emerging as a public policy focus around the world. The strength of the evidence means that a failure to invest in ECD is now being seen as an equity issue: “glaring disparities in outcomes and opportunities across countries, and in most cases within countries, are driving an international agenda to achieve equity.” Equity requires equal access to quality ECD services.

A challenging question for policy-makers is: What is quality ECD? This paper provides guidance on how policy-makers, practitioners and researchers can work together to ensure, measure, improve and sustain program quality.

Defining the elements of quality ECD is made difficult by the “rich tapestry” of ECD programmes that make up the full ECD continuum. The authors point out that the measurement of quality is likely to vary. They argue further that quality yardsticks used in wealthier countries need to be broadened to be able to accommodate notions of quality relevant to poor and developing countries; the “one size fits all” approach is inadequate – it must be grounded in country and community context, values and needs.

Measuring quality through a process of child assessments and reporting on aggregated data at a programme, local, regional or national level, as well as through child development indicators such as health, growth and language development, has been the predominant approach to measuring quality. While this is important, it is too limited an approach to examine quality. “Efforts to assess quality in ECD programs require attention to how quality dimensions are developed and conceptualized ... and to ecological systems levels at which quality can be measured, incorporating structural and process quality.” Examining and determining quality on this basis requires a multi-level inquiry divided into (1) settings and systems and (2) five sets of dimensions.

The ecological approach to quality motivated by the authors calls for considerations of quality specific to the setting of the program: is it, for example, set in a clinic, a home, or a community; who are the providers of the service – parents, service providers or others? At all setting levels, there are a number of cross-cutting dimensions of quality; at each level, the programme must exhibit quality (a) interaction and communications, (b) leadership and management, (c) physical and spatial characteristics, (d) resources, and (e) alignment with community and societal values and principles.

Policy decisions about investments in ECD must ensure that all the dimensions of quality are targeted and resourced as well as monitored and measured.

The arguments put forward in this article are of central importance to the South African ECD arena. We are currently undergoing a “scaling-up” phase – a phase which is marked by the risk of focussing only on increasing access, rather than focussing on increasing access to quality services. For ECD advocates, it is critical that there be focussed and collective advocacy to ensure that ECD plans, budgets and monitoring and evaluation frameworks articulate and support the provision of quality ECD services. ECD advocates must make maximum use of the space that is made available through various notice and comment processes to review national, provincial and local ECD plans and budgets.

WEB LINKS FOR THIS ARTICLE

Click here to view the report on the quality of ECD programmes