Bibiam Aleyda Díaz
Ejecutiva Principal de Proyectos de Desarrollo Social de CAF -banco de desarrollo de América Latina y el Caribe-
The COVID-19 pandemic has plunged Latin America’s education systems into crisis, affecting the learning and comprehensive development of millions of students, including the youngest children attending schools and early childcare facilities.
We also know that the pandemic most severely affects children growing up in poor and vulnerable households, where they do not receive the care and stimulation they require for their proper mental, emotional and physical development at this key stage of their lives. It is therefore essential that societies undertake and strongly drive actions to close these gaps and ensure that all children have access to high-quality early education.
In this context, a group of ministry officials and representatives of agencies in charge of early education programs in several countries of the region, as well as experts and representatives of civil society and cooperation agencies—including CAF—has been working since 2016 on defining and implementing a Regional Agenda for The Comprehensive Development of Early Childhood, which seeks to guide countries’ efforts to strengthen early childcare public policies across four areas: intersectorality and financing, quality of services, measurement, and collaboration and partnerships.
In particular, the second agreement of this agenda calls on countries to “strengthen management for quality, relevant and timely comprehensive care, aimed at early childhood in the environments where they spend their lives.”
Based on the analysis of the best experiences in the region and the evidence available, this collective recently issued eight action recommendations to improve the quality of early education, namely, a quality vision, quality assurance systems, the strengthening of the nuclear family, family training, quality measurement, skills and certification, the revaluation of early childhood education and care staff and a regional exchange space.
First, it is important to define a quality vision for initial education, which means reaching legitimate and sustainable agreements at the national level and between strategic stakeholders on what skills, knowledge and attitudes children must achieve at this stage of their lives, through an appropriate relationship between their learning and development. Building consensus on the importance of care, love and protection for the youngest ones, as well as the relevance of play in learning and integral development, and establishing minimum conditions for care, are some of the key elements of this vision.
Additionally, to implement this vision it is essential to have quality assurance systems that, as intersectoral and interinstitutional representation groups, lead the design of quality standards for the provision of child care services, while establishing mechanisms for their implementation, monitoring and evaluation.
The strengthening of the nuclear family is the third recommendation, and consists of including actions aimed at promoting the quality of life of families as co-responsible stakeholders of child development in cross-sectoral work mechanisms. This involves recognizing aspects such as interculturality and the territory’s social diversity as fundamental elements of child care, along with promoting the gradual implementation of measures that facilitate an equitable distribution of household work and a greater involvement of men in parental tasks.
Similarly, training families should be the main focus of work in early education, which means developing programs for training, participation, and family empowerment, from a perspective in which the community itself is the main agent of change for the families. These programs should be evidence-based and adapted to the particular contexts of communities, as well as include all family members and significant adults involved in parenting.
The fifth recommendation relates to quality measurement. It is essential that countries make progress in institutionalizing permanent mechanisms to measure the quality of initial education services, in order to implement continuous improvement and understand the impact of the various programs. These measurements should include both structural standards and process indicators, adapting them to other specific evaluation mechanisms. Measuring the quality of early education should be understood as an ongoing process, with the respective regulatory framework and resources needed for implementation. It should be based on a clear content and objectives, both in terms of measurement and use of the results, that lead to comprehensive improvement plans and foster decision-making and public policy agendas.
Having a skill-boosting framework and certification processes for professionals and staff in charge childcare is also a recommendation of the Regional Agenda. The framework should permeate into the curricula of early professional and continuous training, as well as be the benchmark to define profiles and certification processes, together with skill standardization. Emotional and social development, knowledge of the child development process, adaptive leadership, management of tools for positive interaction and collaborative relationships with parents, are some of the skills prioritized in these frameworks.
The seventh recommendation relates to the revaluation of early childhood education and care staff, in an effort to recognize socially their importance in providing high-quality early education. It is important for countries to produce information on the effectiveness of high-quality teaching practices for this stage, to disseminate good practices and to promote social awareness about the issue.
Lastly, it is recommended that public and private stakeholders involved in early childcare maintain a regional exchange forum to facilitate the permanent transfer of knowledge, as well as to adapt frameworks of action that serve as feedback to national public policies, while bolstering decision-making at all levels.
Due to the current crisis, governments of the region are working together with civil society organizations and institutions involved in early education, in an effort to develop an assortment of plans to support teachers and families. In this context, the above recommendations seek to guide not only national, regional and local governments, but also all agents involved in the generation of knowledge and the development and implementation of policies and programs aimed to foster child development, in a way that all efforts made can help as efficiently as possible mitigate the negative effects of prolonged confinement, which are currently taking a toll on physical and emotional health.
