Training & professional development

The experience of children under age three with early childhood education and care (ECEC) is crucial for their learning, development and well-being and for parents’ return to work. Despite increasing recognition of the importance of ECEC for the youngest children, little is known about this sector. The OECD Starting Strong Teaching and Learning International Survey  (TALIS Starting Strong) is the first international survey that focuses on the ECEC workforce. It asks staff and leaders about themselves and their settings, including the practices they use with children and their views on the sector.

This thematic report focusses on ECEC for children under age three, an option of the Survey in which four countries (Denmark, Germany, Israel and Norway) participated. The report answers many questions that are important for parents, actors in the field, and policymakers.

OECD

2020

For most children, early childhood education and care (ECEC) provides the first experience of life in a group away from their families. This experience plays a crucial role in children’s learning, development and well-being. The benefits of high-quality ECEC are not restricted to children’s first years of life. However, little is known about this first experience. What do children learn and do in ECEC settings? With which staff do children interact at their centers? Do all children face the same opportunities to enroll in high-quality settings? What are the main spending priorities to raise the quality of ECEC? These are key questions for parents, staff and policy makers. The OECD Starting Strong Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS Starting Strong) is the first international survey that focuses on the ECEC workforce. It offers an opportunity to learn about the characteristics of the workforce, the practices they use with children, their beliefs about children’s development and their views on the profession and on the sector.

This first volume of findings, Providing Quality Early Childhood Education and Care, examines multiple factors that can affect the quality of ECEC and thereby can influence children’s learning, development and well-being.

OECD

2020

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) services for children under six years of age play a fundamental role in laying strong foundations for lifelong learning and wellbeing, especially in the first three years of life. Quality ECEC services can make an extraordinary difference in children’s lives, especially for the most disadvantaged. Research indicates that children from vulnerable groups derive even greater benefit from high-quality ECEC than their peers from more advantaged families.

Our Recommendations:

• Promote the societal value of ECEC services and ECEC profession
• Establish a minimum standard of qualification accompanied by opportunities for career development for ECEC staff working with children under three years of age
• Track data on ECEC staff qualifications and define targets for the levels of qualification of ECEC staff working in ECEC services, especially those working with children under three years of age
• Define aligned competence profiles across different categories of ECEC staff to ensure high-quality service provision
• Implement policies and mechanisms that bring more diversity in the ECEC workforce (gender, cultural background, etc.)
• Increase investments for improving the ECEC staff working conditions (child-adult ratio, child-free time, renumeration, working environment)

European Commission identified staff professionalization as one of the key issues for the ECEC field. In many countries, part of the workforce is represented by low-qualified ECEC assistants. Studies have shown that assistants have fewer chances for qualification and professional development and are not taken into account in policy documents. Improving the competences of all staff (core practitioners and assistants) would improve the services’ quality, which would in turn help eliminate barriers in front of families in using ECEC services. This analytical report emphasizes the role of investing in the professionalization of assistants in quality improvement in ECEC and presents findings from the analysis of ECEC assistants 15 European countries. Lastly, the report provides recommendations on how to develop coherent pathways toward qualification and continuous professional development for ECEC assistants accompanied by country examples.

Peeters, J.; Sharmahd, J.; Budginaitė I.,

2016

A stronger, more effective early care and education (ECE) workforce is essential for supporting children’s development. Yet the nation’s ECE workforce faces many challenges, including inadequate compensation that varies widely by jurisdiction, high staff turnover, and disparities in training and resources across the ECE sector. To address these challenges, states are working to implement new policies and establish new requirements to better support their ECE workforces. For instance, some states have increased the minimum wage or established salary parity policies for pre-kindergarten and K-3 teachers. Other states have set minimum qualification requirements for their child care or pre-kindergarten lead teachers.

This project aims to improve the ECE field’s understanding of the various policies and funding decisions that states are implementing to support their ECE workforces, and how these system-level changes impact ECE staff and the children they serve.

Child Trends

2022

Early educator well-being is increasingly understood as a critical ingredient of high-quality early education and care. The COVID-19 pandemic has threatened educator well-being by exacerbating existing stressors and introducing novel stressors to all aspects of early educators’ lives, and early educators have had differential access to resources to cope with these new circumstances. Using survey data collected between April and June 2020 with a sample of 666 early educators in community-based center, family child care, Head Start, and public school prekindergarten programs across Massachusetts, we document the pandemic's initial influence on educators’ sense of well-being. Adopting an ecological perspective, we consider educator-, program-, and community-level factors that may be associated with reported changes in well-being. Most educators indicated that their mental and financial well-being had been affected. These changes were not systematically associated with most contextual factors, although there was clear evidence of variability in reported impacts by provider type. These findings underscore the need to support educator well-being, as well as to create policy solutions that meet the heterogeneous needs of this essential workforce.

Keywords: Early education and care, Early educators, Early education and care workforce, Educator well-being, COVID-19 pandemic

Emily C. Hanno, Madelyn Gardner, Stephanie M. Jones, and Nonie K. Lesaux

2022

While a global understanding of teacher well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic is beginning to emerge, much remains to be understood about what early childhood teachers have felt and experienced with respect to their work and well-being. The present mixed-method study examined early care and education (ECE) teachers’ working conditions and physical, psychological, and professional well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic using a national sample of 1434 ECE teachers in the U.S. We also explored differences in working conditions and well-being among in-person, online, and closed schools, given the unique challenges and risks that ECE teachers may have faced by teaching in these different modalities. From the results of an online survey, we found that in the early months of the pandemic, many ECE teachers faced stressful, challenging work environments. Some were teaching in new, foreign modes and formats, and those still teaching in person faced new challenges. We found many common issues and challenges related to psychological and physical well-being across the three teaching groups from the qualitative analysis, but a more complicated picture emerged from the quantitative analysis. After controlling for education and center type, we found that aspects of professional commitment were lower among those teachers teaching in person. Additionally, there were racial differences across several of our measures of well-being for teachers whose centers were closed. Upon closer examination of these findings via a moderation analysis with teacher modality, we found that Black and Hispanic teachers had higher levels of psychological well-being for some of our indicators when their centers were closed, yet these benefits were not present for Black and Hispanic teachers teaching in person.

Keywords: COVID-19 impact; early care and education; early childhood teachers; well-being; job demands; teaching modality; racial disparity

Kyong-Ah Kwon, Timothy G. Ford, Jessica Tsotsoros, Ken Randall, Adrien Malek-Lasater and Sun Geun Kim

International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health

2022

The success of a child’s healthy development is largely dependent on their primary caregiver’s capacity. The 2016 Lancet Early Childhood Development Series1 highlights that efforts to support children are not likely to bear success unless they concurrently provide support for the caregivers upon whom children depend for care.

Many barriers exist to caregiving including that:

• Caregivers may lack the physical, psychological and social capacity to care for their child.
• Highly adverse conditions may introduce threats to caregiver’s well-being and their resources for caregiving.

In responding to these barriers, there is also recognition that frontline workers, who are often community volunteers and caregivers themselves, are not equipped with adequate skills to enable them to support caregiver needs.

Caring for the Caregiver (CFC) is a foundational training module that is designed to address these needs, and to complement existing maternal and child health programmes including the UNICEF/WHO Care for Child Development (CCD) Package and the UNICEF Infant and Young Child Feeding (IYCF) Package. CFC can also be utilised as a foundational course for other sector programs whose success is dependent on caregiver and family capacity (e.g. health promotion programmes such as WASH or child protection programmes).

CFC training translates well-established evidence on how to support emotional well-being and mental health, presenting these in practical activities which encourage self-care, family engagement and social support. The training package provides curriculum for training frontline workers to address barriers to responsive caregiving and it provides supporting implementation materials for counselling caregivers.

CFC was developed for the UNICEF West and Central Africa Regional Office (WCARO) by expert consultants, with a series of consultations and pilot training activities in two countries: Mali and Sierra Leone.

UNICEF

2019

The goal of the research ‘Bulgaria grows with its children: Building professional competences for early childhood development’ (hereinafter referred to as ‘research on the early years workforce’ and ‘the research’) is to outline the main directions for improvement of the professionalization of the early years workforce on the basis of data – quantitative and qualitative – as well as to formulate recommendations for policy development in this area.

This summary shares the main results and recommendations derived from this research.

Dr. Natalia Mihaylova and included Dr. Ivanka Shalapatova, Elitsa Gerginova, Savelina Roussinova, and Dimitar Ivanchev

2021

The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has upended families’ lives, with school closures, social distancing, and stay-at-home measures limiting their access to support systems, while adding to health concerns and economic uncertainties. As families face these varied stressors, it is even more important that parenting programs, which seek to promote positive and responsive caregiving, improve health and nutrition, and enhance social and child protection, continue to operate. Against this backdrop, and facing restrictions on normal in-person operations, many parenting programs have had to innovate to continue service delivery and help families navigate this difficult time.

• How are parenting programs reorienting their services in response to COVID-19?
• How are parenting programs supporting their personnel to deliver these critical services? 

This brief seeks to shed light on these questions. Developed by the Early Childhood Workforce Initiative (ECWI), a multi-stakeholder global initiative co-led by Results for Development (R4D) and the International Step by Step Association (ISSA) that works to support and empower those who work directly with young children, the brief highlights common approaches parenting programs are using to continue engaging with families, including transitioning to deliver services virtually and adapting to provide enhanced psychosocial support. We use the five priority actions to support the early childhood workforce outlined in ECWI’s COVID-19 Position Statement as a light guide and explore how some parenting programs are prioritizing the health, safety, and psychosocial well-being, expanding training and guidance, and recognizing the workforce delivering these critical services. Several short case studies provide context and detail to these programs’ efforts and the brief concludes with a set of reflections on the challenges and possibilities ahead.

Kavita Hatipoglu with support from Michelle Neuman and Denise Bonsu (R4D) and Konstantina Rentzou and Zorica Trikic (ISSA)

2021