How to improve Early Childhood Education and Care
During the online event ‘Early Childhood Education and Care in Europe: A focus on inclusion and staff professionalisation’, the European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth Mariya Gabriel presented the outputs of the Working Group on Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC), including the final report on ‘How to recruit, train and motivate well-qualified ECEC staff’ and a toolkit for inclusive early childhood education and care’. The working group operated from November 2018 to December 2020 and was composed of national experts from 35 European countries (including Switzerland), several European associations with expertise in the field, as well as International and European Agencies. The expert group’s main objective was to discuss how to universally increase the quality of ECEC, with a specific focus on inclusion and staff development. The publications follow the Council recommendations adopted on 22 May 2019 on ‘High-Quality Early Childhood Education and Care Systems’, stating that EU Member States should promote the professionalisation of ECEC staff, including leaders.
The report tackles three key points: a mapping of the current employment situation in the ECEC sector, the issue of how to make the related professions more attractive and the importance of staff training in the quality of ECEC. The main conclusion of the report is that overall quality of ECEC increases when the number of staff with the right qualifications and motivation to stay in the profession is sufficient. To achieve this goal, the working group proposes five suggestions to all the entities involved in ECEC. Stakeholders need to support the attractiveness of the ECEC sector and allow the professional development of its staff. The sector in itself needs to receive the recognition it deserves to improve recruitment and staff retention by developing career prospects. Recruitment should be restructured, by augmenting the different professions in ECEC to accept a wider range of profiles. In addition, establishing common core competences for ECEC staff could help define their abilities and skills, and thus facilitate the recruitment process. Lastly, access to high quality initial education and lifelong training for the staff can help the professionalisation of the sector.
On the other hand, the toolkit focuses on how crucial inclusive and high quality ECEC is for children with difficult individual or family circumstances. The working group focused on three main points to create the toolkit: finding the best strategies to make ECEC systems more accessible to all children, evaluating specific strategies that can be adapted to different categories of disadvantaged children and ways to measure the inclusiveness of these systems. The toolkit is divided into three sections to best respond to these points. The first section concerns the possible universal policy measures that would benefit all children, if implemented. Here, the working group gives recommendations on different aspects of education policies related to ECEC: from the importance of designing global strategies at national and/or local levels to improving the accessibility and affordability of the sector. The second section describes the best practices that could benefit all children and families, such as building healthy transitions between households, ECEC and primary school. The last part of the toolkit is dedicated on how to work with specific groups of children and families, namely children who have specific needs, including children with disabilities or learning needs, children with migrant backgrounds or refugees, Roma children and children with specific household situations. In addition, related to the current COVID-19 crisis, the working group focused on how to ensure that children in lockdown still receive quality ECEC.
In addition to this report and toolkit, the European Commission is taking further concrete steps to improve social inclusion of children. In the recently published European Pillar of Social Rights Action Plan, one of the key points aims at reducing the number of people at risk of poverty or social exclusion by at least 15 million by 2030, of which at least 5 million should be children. Adding to this, the European Commission on 24 March 2021 published the EU Strategy on the Rights of the Child (2021 – 2024) as well as a Proposal for a Council recommendation establishing the European Child Guarantee. This comprehensive framework is a major step forward to putting children at the centre of EU policy making. The EC wants to ensure that all children, especially those most at risk, have access to basic rights, like education and healthcare. Both documents were created on the basis of consultations with 10’000 children, as well as citizens and other stakeholders.