Download the presentation slides of this webinar here.
Date
20th September 2022 from 9.30-11.00 CET
Title
Quality assurance in early childhood education and care services
Speaker
Sven Iversen, Managing Director. AGF (Association of Family organisations), Germany.
Description
Early childhood education and care (ECEC) has undergone major dynamics and changes throughout the last years in Germany. There are discrepancies between families’ reported needs for places in early childhood education and care and the actual participation rates of children attending early childhood services. Still, the proportion of children under three years of age that attend publicly subsidised community-based early childhood education and care or family day care is increasing continuously.
From the perspective of the family organisations joined under the umbrella of AGF in Germany the following aspects of the quality of ECEC services have to be taken into account: general access to childcare and its opening hours, qualification and training of professionals, professional-child-ratio and maximum group size, development of guidelines for pedagogic work, training and educational partnership as well as long-term quality assurance.
Join us to hear about the work of AGF which has been advocating for strong investments in early childhood and closely monitoring the European Child Guarantee developments.
More information
https://www.ag-familie.de/home/dokumente.html?en
EU context
There are similar dynamics and challenges in many countries regarding the development of quality early childhood education and care, which is why the European Union has taken different initiatives in the last years:
May 2019: Council Recommendation on High-Quality Early Childhood Education and Care Systems
This recommendation identifies 5 key components of a qualitative system: access to early childhood education and care; training and working conditions of staff in charge of early childhood education and care; definition of appropriate curricula; governance and funding; monitoring and evaluation of systems. The Quality Framework has already supported reforms in many countries and helped improving the offer of early childhood education and care.
June 2021: Council Recommendation establishing a European Child Guarantee
On the day of the breakfast byte webinar, the following countries have published their National Action Plans on the Child Guarantee: Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, The Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden. More here
September 2022: Proposal for a Council Recommendation on Early childhood education and care
This was proposed by the European Commission as part of the European Care Strategy package launched on 7th September, and should be adopted by the Council of the EU by end of 2022. More here
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After a great year 2021 connecting with the COFACE Family Lab community through regular breakfast byte webinars looking at different types of supports to families (a support service, a campaign, a policy, a project, and more) we launched a new breakfast byte series again in 2022.
It is focusing on diverse types of family supports across the EU, including campaigns on inclusive education, cross-border recognition of familial ties, family leadership for an inclusive life, employment supports to adults with disabilities, tips for child safety in the home, training of non-formal education staff for working with children with and without special needs, building energy systems which put families before profits and more.
With these breakfast bytes, we aim to increase critical thinking and understanding of family support systems. The target group of the webinars is especially professionals working with families and children but is open to all (researchers, policy-makers, teachers, health workers, families, and more). It is more important than ever to connect professionals through transnational exchanges in order to tackle the social impacts of COVID-19 on families and children.
Did you miss our breakfast Bytes series or you would like to re-watch it? You can find it on COFACE TV, our Youtube channel.
Download the presentation slides of this webinar here.
