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Research suggests that, when it comes to early childhood education and care, quality matters most. A growing number of countries are establishing monitoring systems to ensure quality and accountability in these programmes. This new publication explores how countries can develop and use these systems to enhance service and staff quality for the benefit of child development. It offers an international perspective and concrete examples to help policy makers, monitoring experts and practitioners in the field develop their own monitoring policies and practices.

Contributors to this publication provided country data, country-specific policy information, comments on the drafts, etc. as members of the OECD Network on Early Childhood Education and Care (listed in alphabetical order).

Monitoring child development and outcomes is increasingly widespread, to identify children’s learning needs, enhance their development, raise service quality, staff performance and inform policy making. It is key to choose tools in a way that meets the goals of the monitoring practice and is appropriate to children’s developmental stages. Most practices are locally defined rather than nationally regulated. Many tools are used, covering a broad range of developmental domains. The tools used range from locally designed approaches to standardised tools validated in and adapted to the needs of various countries.The practices used for monitoring differ greatly within and between countries, depending on the age group and settings concerned. Observational tools are most common and often allow to monitor a wide range of domains, from language and literacy to socio-emotional skills. This is also done through narrative assessments. Direct assessments are less widespread and tend to have a narrower focus, e.g. on language skills and health. The key actors monitoring child development and outcomes are ECEC staff, who often perform it in a regular manner, sometimes complemented by monitoring through ECEC managers and external agents. Despite those efforts, further refinement is needed to ensure that the monitoring tools in place can provide more accurate information to support children, staff and policy makers.

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) remains high on the policy agenda in many OECD countries. In a majority of OECD countries, education now begins for most children well before they are 5 years old. Enrolment rates continue to increase for children of the age of 3 and above, as well as for children under the age of 3. This has been made possible, in part, by the extension of legal entitlements to a place and the efforts to ensure free access for the older age group (e.g. 3-5) and selected population groups such as the younger age group (e.g. 0-2) or the disadvantaged group. The largest share of funding for the sector comes from public sources, and governance responsibilities are often shared between national, regional and local authorities, often split between ministries of education, social affairs, and employment. Given the increase in enrolments, policy makers have turned their attention towards educational content and pedagogy for better quality, towards the integration of services for more effective service delivery, and towards child experiences and outcomes for higher return of investment.

Even though considerable responsibilities for ECEC monitoring tend to be transferred to local authorities, common trends emerge. First, monitoring is on the rise across countries, to ensure accountability of investments in ECEC and satisfy an interest in quality enhancement. Second, efforts are made to improve monitoring methodologies and processes. Structural quality is most commonly monitored for regulatory compliance. The importance of monitoring “process quality”, e.g. the quality of staff-child interactions, is being increasingly acknowledged, and monitoring staff quality has gained prevalence. More and more information on child development and outcomes is being gathered. The active role of local governments in managing ECEC quality is being complemented with national quality frameworks to support providers’ monitoring. Third, areas of monitoring such as service quality, staff quality and child outcomes are rarely monitored separately. Fourth, ECEC monitoring progressively aligns with the primary-school monitoring system. And fifth, monitoring results are becoming increasingly publicly available.

Monitoring service quality is, together with staff quality, the most common area of monitoring reported across the countries and jurisdictions that participated in this study. External monitoring practices include inspections, which are used by all jurisdictions, and parental surveys, which are used by half of all jurisdictions. Self-evaluations are implemented by three-quarters of the jurisdictions. The instruments and focus of monitoring service quality differ by practice, although observations and surveys are often used. Inspections mainly focus on regulation compliance. Inspections and self-evaluations focus strongly on communication and collaboration within settings, and with parents and families. The frequency of monitoring service quality usually depends on previous monitoring results. Countries mainly monitor to inform policy making and improve the level of quality. Jurisdictions do not always find it easy to ensure that monitoring practices support ECEC settings in stimulating child development, designing and implementing a unified monitoring system in decentralised countries, and ensuring appropriate training to those who conduct monitoring.

Across countries and jurisdictions, enrolment rates in early childhood education and care, especially for children under 3, are rising, and more attention is being paid to the quality and educational content of care. Meanwhile, a trend has emerged towards integrating services and ECEC governance across different age groups. The largest share of funding for the sector comes from public sources, and governance responsibilities are often shared between national, regional and local authorities. Countries and jurisdictions provide a mix of centre-based and home-based care, with great variations in settings across countries, with family day care in the homes of carers, in addition to kindergartens, crèches and preschools.

Staff quality is monitored by all the jurisdictions surveyed, mostly through inspections and self-evaluations. Inspections focus on staff qualifications, the overall quality of care and teaching, process quality, as well as planning skills. Observations, interviews, analysis of internal documentation and the results of self-evaluations are often used in inspecting staff quality. Peer reviews focus on the overall pedagogical quality, curriculum implementation, process quality and teamwork between colleagues. Self-evaluations make use of self-reported surveys and self-reflection reports, focusing on communication skills, while parent surveys ask about child development, as well as communication between staff and parents. The frequency of monitoring staff quality is often decided at local or setting level and is dependent on the last monitoring result in most jurisdictions.Countries monitor staff quality to inform policy making, improve staff performance, enhance quality and determine staff training needs. The benefits of monitoring include better-trained staff, staff who are more highly qualified, and better descriptions of responsibilities for different staff grades in ECEC.

The overall challenges of monitoring quality include, among others, defining quality, establishing a coherent monitoring system, and ensuring that monitoring contributes to policy reform and quality improvements. Example challenges in monitoring service quality are defining what constitutes quality, and keeping settings abreast of the latest standards. Challenges in monitoring staff performance include monitoring curriculum implementation and linking staff quality to quality improvements. Challenges in monitoring child development include creating an accurate picture of a child’s development and recognising children’s individual development. The lessons learnt indicate, among others, that it is important to share good practices, ensure stakeholders understand what constitutes quality, have coherent monitoring frameworks, and have well-balanced and defined purposes of monitoring. Besides, monitoring should be linked to policy development and contribute to transparency for ECEC stakeholders, and include voices and views of different stakeholders.

A consolidated body of research and, in particular, from neuroscience in recent years shows that early childhood education and care (ECEC) provides a crucial foundation for future learning by fostering the development of cognitive and non-cognitive skills that matter for success later in life. OECD countries have undertaken measures to increase enrolments in ECEC for all children, for example by offering parents legal entitlements to a place for their children, increasing public spending in ECEC, and by lowering the starting age of compulsory education.