Competences and Standards

Competences and Standards have a significant impact on those who work directly with young children and their families. That’s why we need them for the early childhood workforce! Resources on our Knowledge Hub can answer questions about what Competences and Standards might look like, how they align with the changing demands of the workforce, what training might support reinforce chosen competences and more.

What are Competences & Standards? 

Competences and Standards affect the professionalization of the workforce. They are impact the relevance personnel’s initial training, as well as their continuous professional development, their mentoring, monitoring and evaluation, and their improvement efforts.

So, we need them. But, what are they? Competences and Standards are that agreed upon requirements and expectations for what early childhood workers should know and be able to do, as well as the core principles guiding their work with young children and their families. This entails professional profiles of different roles within diverse early childhood services and defining competences at individual, team, institutional and systems level.

We have many resources on our Knowledge Hub for this topic – from studies to webinars. Check out some of our most popular and newest resources on the topic Competencies and Standards below.

What’s most popular?

Competences and Standards are a hot topic for users of our Knowledge Hub. Take a look at the resources that are most downloaded below.

Strengthening and Supporting the Early Childhood Workforce: Competences and Standards
Part of a series of resources from the Early Childhood Workforce Initiative aiming to better understand the size and scope of the challenges faced by the early childhood workforce. Strengthening and Supporting the Early Childhood Workforce: Competences and Standards focuses on filling the gap in order to identify common approaches and challenges.

National Guidelines - Best Practice in Early Childhood Intervention

National Guidelines - Best Practice in Early Childhood Intervention presents eight recommended best practices in Early Childhood Intervention. This text draws upon extensive consultation with key stakeholders in the early childhood intervention sector.

Global Advocacy Toolkit for the Social Service Workforce 

The Global Advocacy Toolkit for the Social Service Workforce from the Global Social Service Workforce Alliance focuses on creating a common narrative to advocate for social service workers. It provides tools and tips helpful for developing and implementing an advocacy plan, including how to set up objectives, choose the audience, decide and elaborate the main messages, select the advocacy tools, develop a press release, accompanied by useful examples.   

What’s new?

We update our Knowledge Hub regularly as we find the latest and most impactful resources available. Take a look at the newest resources touching on Competences and Standards.

Voices of child care providers: an exploratory study on the impact of policy changes
Voices of child care providers: an exploratory strudy on the impact of policy changes documents findings from a study on child care provider perspectives on how regulation and policy changes impact their work. Researchers used interviews and focus groups with home-based providers and center-based administrators in New York, United States counties.

The early years workforce: a fragmented picture
The early years workforce: a fragmented picture, produced by the Education Policy Institute, gathered administrative data about early years providers and staff in England. The aim of this report was to create a clearer picture of the demographics, pay and qualification levels of the early years workforce. The report aims to understand how these characteristics vary across school-based settings, private, voluntary and independent providers and childminders.

Pursuing Quality in Early Learning: Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) Teacher Competency Framework for Southeast Asia (SEA)
Recognizing the crucial roles that teachers have in early childhood development, UNESCO developed a competency framework for Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) teachers in Southeast Asia. The Framework was realized through a consultative and participatory process, taking into account insights from ECCE teachers, researchers, and practitioners from across Southeast Asia.

Webinars on this topic

Competences and Standards: why do we need  them for the early childhood workforce?
This webinar is all about Competences and Standards – addressing their significant impact on those who work directly with young children and their families.

Challenges and opportunities in integrating early years services: a spotlight on the workforce
The objective of this webinar was to discuss the conditions for interagency work from the perspective of those in a position of leadership in the early year’s workforce.

Scaling up the early childhood workforce to support children birth to age 3: Lessons from Peru and Mozambique
Here, our panel of experts discusses the challenges in scaling up the early childhood workforce through two case studies targeting children nagged birth to three and  their caregivers.

Early childhood practitioners as advocates and activists
We put the spotlight on the notion of early childhood practice being political, and on early years practitioners as activists and change agents.

Diversity and identity - the early childhood workforce
This webinar provides a platform for discussing the identity of the early childhood workforce and how this impacts on early childhood policies and practices and the recognition of the early childhood profession.

We have even more excellent resources on Competences & Standards stored all in one place. But, don’t take our word for it! See for yourself on our Knowledge Hub.

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By: Vidya Putcha

Child care workers, preschool teachers, teacher assistants, social workers, community health workers, nurses — these are just a sampling of the many women and men who work with our youngest children to ensure their healthy development. Through their day to day work and interactions, these individuals have the opportunity to transform a child’s developmental trajectory, but often do not receive adequate pay, training, support, or incentives in order to maximize impact.

We know that these individuals, collectively comprising the early childhood workforce, need to be better supported, but how?

As part of the Early Childhood Workforce Initiative, Results for Development and the International Step by Step Association helped to answer this question by carrying out landscape analyses on two critical themes relating to the workforce: competences and standards, and training and professional development. We studied these themes to not only understand the size and scope of relevant challenges but to surface promising approaches to addressing them.

Based on our research, we found that policymakers can undertake several actions to better support this workforce. Here are four such actions:

1. Develop job descriptions and competences for roles within the early childhood workforce.

Competences, which lay out what an individual should know and be able to do, can help guide training, recruitment and monitoring and mentoring. With more clearly defined competences, training curricula can be designed to help learners focus on specific areas based on their individual needs and the knowledge and skills important for their job performance. Competences can also guide recruitment processes and help staff and supervisors assess performance on a continuous basis. In particular, tools based on established competences can help supervisors assess performance, provide follow-up support and track progress over time

Policymakers looking to develop competences for a role for the first time should develop job descriptions which clarify the scope of a particular role if they do not already exist and also look to examples of competences from global or regional efforts to guide their process, such as the Global Social Service Workforce Alliance’s competences for para professional social service workers or ISSA’s Competent Educators of the 21st Century.

2. Ensure that all members of the workforce, regardless of their role, have opportunities to learn and grow — both prior to entry and while in their roles.

Although some countries are prioritizing training and professional development for members of the early childhood workforce, opportunities remain limited for people who work with the very youngest children, auxiliary staff such as teacher assistants, and remote populations. In order to be effective in their roles, these individuals, often volunteers or staff without formal education, need a core set of knowledge and skills.

To ensure opportunities are available more widely, policymakers may consider using distance learning to reach remote and underserved populations or offering subsidies for training courses. Under the ECD component of South Africa’s Expanded Public Works Programme, which aims to upgrade the quality of existing ECD services and also support the expansion of the sector overall, government funding is available to support training fees and stipends for prospective and current practitioners working with children ages 0 to 4 and in Grade R (pre-primary).

3. Offer sufficient opportunities for practical skill-building in initial preparation and in-service training programs.

Prior to entering into the workforce, professionals and paraprofessionals need a better understanding of what they will do on a day-to-day basis and how best to approach their work. During field education or internships, they may be able to observe professionals and paraprofessionals in their jobs, apply theories and principles learned in the classroom to real life situations, and experience the issues inherent in working with different communities. Once they enter into their roles, members of the workforce can benefit from opportunities to receive feedback and discuss challenges in their day-to-day work through coaching and peer learning.

For example, the Madrasa Resource Centers in East Africa offers weekly reflection groups led by mentors which provide the space for early childhood development teachers to reflect on day-to-day practice. Such peer learning initiatives can be more effective than training and professional development imparted through lectures or presentations.

4. Ensure that training curricula and materials are relevant to local contexts.

Training and professional development curricula are often not tailored to local contexts and as a result, may not prepare early childhood workforce members to address issues that are relevant to the communities and populations they serve. For example, research from the social and child protection sector in West and Central Africa indicates that training materials and curricula are often imported from other countries such as the U.S. and the U.K., and not adapted to the needs of specific countries. 

However, there are some promising approaches that have been utilized. In supporting community health workers to integrate early childhood screening and counseling in their work in Mozambique, PATH utilized resources from the Care for Child Development (CCD) package as a starting point for developing training materials, which were then adapted to the Mozambican context. Due to the linguistic diversity in Mozambique and low literacy levels, PATH made the decision to use pictures in the training and counseling materials as much as possible. These visual tools are used as a basis for generating discussion and facilitating interactive exercises, and have been well-received by health workers.

Developing the next generation of the early childhood workforce will require a number of actions, including policy reforms which address difficult topics such as remuneration and incentives. And while the recommendations above will not, on their own, address the entirety of challenges facing this workforce, they may offer examples for how policymakers can better support these individuals through the establishment of sound competences and standards and investment in effective training and professional development.

Our work supporting the early childhood workforce continues. To stay engaged with new evidence and resources from the Early Childhood Workforce Initiative, sign up for the ECWI Newsletter today!

Vidya Putcha is a Senior Program Officer on the Global Education team at Results for Development (R4D), where she focuses on early childhood development.
 

Evidence is growing that early childhood development (ECD) services have a strong, positive impact on children’s development. Research from diverse contexts shows that interventions which promote nurturing care in early environments significantly improve childhood development and later adult outcomes. For example, a study of the Hogares Comunitarios de Bienestar program in Colombia, which provides child care and nutrition services to children under age six, found that adolescents ages 13-17 who had participated in the program were almost 20 percent more likely to be in school than those who had not participated. 

Despite increasing knowledge on the benefits of ECD, however, we still don’t know as much about one of the most critical parts of ECD programs: the early childhood workforce. Research shows that the workforce is one of the most important factors influencing the quality of ECD services. For example, in the early childhood education and care sector, evidence indicates that caregivers’ level of education and participation in training is a better predictor of program quality than other factors such as child-staff ratios or group size.

While we know that the workforce is important, key questions remain unanswered. What do early childhood professionals and paraprofessionals need to know and be able to do in order to perform effectively and how does this vary across contexts? What types of training and support do staff receive? How is the early childhood workforce recruited, monitored, and evaluated?

Answering these questions requires evidence that is global in nature and deeply textured to reflect the diversity of the early childhood workforce. Assessing and learning from the full breadth of early childhood efforts is no easy task, but it is exactly what we seek to do as part of the multi-stakeholder, multi-country Early Childhood Workforce Initiative (ECWI). Through the ECWI, we are carrying out a series of global landscape analyses on four critical themes: competences and standards, training and professional development, monitoring and mentoring, and recognition of the profession.

These analyses aim to establish the size and scope of the challenges faced by the early childhood workforce, while also highlighting promising practices countries have adopted in response to these challenges. Spanning a range of roles including professionals and paraprofessionals, paid and unpaid workers, and frontline workers and managers, from the education and care, health and nutrition, social protection and child protection sectors, these analyses aim to provide a comprehensive overview of the current status of the workforce worldwide. Such a vast review and synthesis of literature on the early childhood workforce has never been done before and is sure to generate some interesting findings.

What are the keys to the strengthening the workforce?

We are focusing on four themes which are essential to the strengthening and support of the early childhood workforce:

• Competences and Standards – Competences and standards ensure that there are agreed requirements and expectations for what early childhood workers should know and be able to do. They also lay the groundwork for the core principles, regulations, guidelines and procedures guiding their work with young children and their families.
• Training and Professional Development –Since the early childhood workforce is very diverse, including, for example, many volunteers or staff without formal education, training and professional development opportunities support the acquisition of necessary skills and competencies.  
• Monitoring and Mentoring – Creating systems for monitoring, evaluation/assessment, and continuous feedback and coaching are important for ensuring that workers receive information that they can use to improve their practice on an ongoing basis and for linking members of the workforce to pathways for career advancement.
• Recognition of the Profession – Currently, the level of remuneration, working conditions, and status of the early childhood workforce are poor, even relative to primary teachers, nurses, social workers, and other similar professions. Recruitment challenges, high turnover, and low morale compromise the quality of provision. There is a need to explore ways to improve the attractiveness and perception of the profession and promote ways to give voice to practitioners in their daily work and in policy discussions, including through collective action.

Where we are now and what’s to come

We are currently working on the first two of four landscape analyses covering competences and standards and training and professional development, two interrelated themes. Clearly articulated competences and standards ideally inform the way that training and professional development programs and curricula are designed. Simultaneously, effective training and professional development programs align with predefined competences and standards to ensure that early childhood professionals are equipped with the skills necessary to perform successfully.

The two landscape analyses will provide an overview of general early childhood workforce trends, explore key themes that emerge from the synthesis of literature, and provide in-depth country reviews to illustrate how systems are tackling key workforce challenges.

Initial findings from our research show that the number of university-level pre-service programs are increasing worldwide. In China, for example, more than 250 university-based programs, including 61 with master’s programs, have been established in the social and child protection field since the late 1980s, when social work was legally recognized as a profession. However, universally, challenges persist regarding quality of educational opportunities and in terms of who has access to them. Additionally, while countries have made efforts to align training and professional development opportunities with nationally and internationally recognized competences and standards, gaps persist between policy and practice.  Evidently, despite progress made in raising the status of the early childhood workforce, more work remains to be done. With that said, several countries have made significant efforts to address these gaps. For example, Indonesia has established a set of agreed upon core competences and core subject areas to be applied by all universities and schools of social work, allowing for consistency in the types of competences and skills emphasized in formal training programs for social service workers. Similarly, in the early childhood education and care sector, New Zealand has developed a robust teacher education and course accreditation process that ensures alignment between teacher training programs and predefined quality standards.

Through the ECWI landscape analyses, we plan to highlight promising approaches countries have adopted to address pressing workforce challenges, and also identify areas for further work.

We hope that a diverse group of stakeholders working in ECD can use the findings of these landscape analyses to:

• Generate lessons for countries looking for ways to support and strengthen the early childhood workforce
• Enhance existing programs, policies, research, and advocacy efforts concerning the early childhood workforce

Stay tuned for findings from these two studies, to be shared in the coming months.