people and planet

11
comparable across countries and various types of service
provision (Ishimine and Tayler, 2014). Many measures
have yet to be fully validated in all countries.
The most widely
used tool, the
There are different tools
Early Childhood
for measuring early
Environment Rating
childhood education Scale (ECERS),
was developed at
quality, which tend to
the University of
involve class observation, North Carolina in
documentation and 1980 and revised
in 1998 (ECERS-R)
interviews
and 2015 (ECERS3).
Variants of it focus
on infants/toddlers,
family child care and school age care. As part of a
3-hour visit, the tool uses 43 items to measure process
and structure aspects of quality in 7 key areas: space
and furnishings; personal care routines; language and
reasoning; activities; interaction; programme structure;
and parents and staff. In the latest revision, the ‘parents
and staff’ subscale, which relied on self-reporting, has
been dropped (Harms et al., 2015).
ECERS-R forms the core of formal, observation-based
quality assurance systems in much of the United States
and has been translated and adapted for countries
including Germany and Italy. Researchers in Bahrain
(Hadeed, 2014), Bangladesh (Aboud, 2004), Brazil
(Campos et al., 2011) and Cambodia (Rao and Pearson,
2007), and in the Caribbean (Lambert et al., 2008),
have also used this tool. However, while it tries to be
comprehensive, ECERS-R only uses a selected set of
questions for each domain.
The Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS),
developed at the University of Virginia in 2008, focuses
instead on just one domain, teacher-child interactions
(Hamre et al., 2007). It relies on 4 cycles of 15-minute
observations of teacher and child interactions, evaluating
the degree of instructional and socio-emotional support
and overall classroom organization.
CLASS was validated in the United States but has also
been applied in research and policy-oriented studies in
Europe (e.g. Finland, Pakarinen et al., 2010), Latin America
(e.g. Ecuador, Araujo et al., 2015) and sub-Saharan Africa
(e.g. United Republic of Tanzania, Shavega et al., 2014).
Neither ECERS-R nor CLASS was originally developed
for international use. By contrast, the Global Guidelines
Assessment (GGA) of the Association for Childhood
Education International, developed in collaboration with
the US national committee of the World Organization for
Early Childhood, set out to measure progress on the 2002
Global Guidelines for Early Childhood Education and Care in
the 21st Century (Barbour et al., 2004). The GGA is divided
into five areas: environment and physical space; curriculum
content and pedagogy; early childhood educators and
caregivers; partnership with families and communities;
and young children with special needs. It has been used
in East Asia (e.g. the Republic of Korea, Wortham, 2012),
Europe (e.g. Greece, Rentzou, 2010) and Latin America
(e.g. Guatemala, Hardin et al., 2008). However, it has not
been validated in relation to child outcomes.
Overall, several studies, mostly using ECERS-R, find
positive associations between programme quality and
measures of child development linked to pre-academic
cognitive skills or social-behavioural development
(Burchinal et al., 2008; Sylva et al., 2006). But the size
of the effects tends to be small (Sabol and Pianta, 2014;
Gordon et al., 2015).
The use of such tools is a helpful prompt for debating
quality in target 4.2. It helps decision-makers address
priorities, e.g. in China, where views are divided on the
relative merits of whole classroom vs child-centred learning
(Li et al., 2014; Hu, 2015). It also points out differences in
quality between facilities or types of programmes within
countries – e.g. in rural Indonesia, where differences in
quality were shown between various types of provision
(Brinkman et al., 2016) – and identify significant
differences between countries (e.g. Vermeer et al., 2016).
Countries and the international community should
consider using such tools to monitor the quality of early
childhood education provision more systematically.
The process of consensus building should begin with
countries setting their own goals and standards – and
using a mechanism to monitor them. They should use
and adapt the tools that are most applicable to their
context and that give useful feedback to educators for
professional development (UNICEF, 2012a).
MEASURING QUALITY OF SYSTEMS
At the system level, a variety of tools have been
developed. The World Bank Systems Approach for
Better Education Results (SABER) has published
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CHAPTER 11 | TARGET 4.2 – EARLY CHILDHOOD