Why do we need to be concerned about school readiness? What are the prerequisite skills and competencies that children need to thrive at school? Can these maximize their learning potential?

At present, all parents want to make a successful start to school for their child, but many parents are unsure as to how they can do this. Additionally, there is lack of understanding among ECE educators as well about how to make children ready for the school.

We bring to you all, this discussion forum as an unique platform to come together and participate, discuss, comment, share ideas and much more!

Inclusion is a word that is understood in many different ways – or perhaps more accurately, inclusion is a term that means different things to different people.

There are many questions that arise when we start talking about inclusion in early childhood, including inclusion of whom and into what?

In 2010 researcher Jennifer Gidley and her colleagues outlined three ways of understanding social inclusion:

The narrowest understanding relates to inclusion as access, so in early childhood this would involve access to early childhood services;

A broader understanding is a view of inclusion as participation, this would involve both access andactive participation within early childhood services;

The broadest understanding of inclusion is inclusion as human potential.

A human potential understanding of inclusion involves embracing diversity in all its forms. This involves a process of social transformation whereby individual potential is supported not only through access and participation, but also through a process of actively engaging with the complexity of humanity. Therefore, being able to value all individuals and support their potential without focusing on deficits or seeking to assimilate or change people to fit the system. This focus on possibility and human potential requires not just providing access and supporting participation, but also being open to rethinking the way in which we set up early childhood services.

Inclusion is about everyone, everywhere. However, inclusion often comes to be associated with minority groups because of the tendency for minority groups to be excluded and therefore conscious efforts to fight against that exclusion and segregation become necessary.

Facilitating inclusion is often viewed as an ‘added extra’ or a ‘special effort’ born out of kindness or charity. On the contrary, inclusion is fundamental to a functioning society – thus inclusion is the responsibility of everyone.

Inclusion is not territory for kind-hearted ‘do-gooders’, it is not about granting ‘special favours’, nor about changing someone to fit the elusive ‘norm’ in order to be ‘granted’ access to the community (or indeed the world!). Rather, inclusion is about recognising our shared humanity and moving beyond false notions of entitlement to recognise that for any of us to succeed as members of society we need to be included.

Inclusion requires accepting and celebrating human diversity.

For those of us committed to early childhood care and education (ECCE), we need to ask ourselves how will we create services that are inclusive of all children and families? - and not perpetuate a situation where we create a "them" and an "us" and then make adjustments to fit "them" in. This requires providing access and facilitating participation and engagement, but it also requires systemic change, social transformation and a focus on potential and possibility so that all children belong.

Bringing about inclusion in early childhood in reality is challenging, so we also need to think about why it is important. There are many different reasons or rationales and I would like to provoke discussion by raising a few.

Research demonstrates that all children benefit socially, academically and physically when they are included in ECCE and beyond. Brain research highlights powerfully the importance of the early years of a child’s life. Research tells us that participation in high quality early childhood programs has significant and long-term impact in a range of ways that relate to quality of life. There are also economic arguments regarding the importance of ‘investment in early childhood’. However, these benefits are only possible for children who are included.

Exclusionary or stigmatising social beliefs are generally recognisable in stereotypes and prejudices. Stigmatisation is a considerable barrier to inclusion and impacts on opportunity as well as a child’s sense of self. Researcher Paul Connolly and colleagues, from Queen’s University in Belfast, have found that even at 3 years of age children can demonstrate cultural preferences and are able to identify symbols of conflict or exclusion and identify groups of people they ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ on this basis, reflective of community prejudice. By age 6, children are able to make unsolicited prejudiced statements about community members.

Children don't develop these beliefs in a vacuum. Their beliefs are influenced by those adults involved in ECCE (whether they are teachers, family members or other community members), along with the presence and absence of groups of marginalised people, and the representations of people within the media and other popular culture. The development of these entrenched prejudices in early childhood creates a cycle of prejudice that inhibits social cohesion. Fostering inclusion in early childhood has the potential to break this cycle.

Of course there is also a human rights argument for inclusion in ECCE. Inclusive education is the right of every person, as articulated in the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (to which all countries other than the USA and Somalia are signatories). The right to inclusion (including within education) is also articulated in the 2006 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with a Disability. Inclusion is about recognising the rights and dignity of every human being.

Based on these arguments - which are only some of the many arguments behind the importance of inclusion - if children are all included from their earliest years then over time this will:

Improve academic, social and physical outcomes for all children;

Impact on the child’s brain development;

Increase the child’s engagement with the world;

Have economic benefits for all;

Reduce inequities;

Reduce human rights violations;

Be fair and just;

Enable all members of society to participate and belong; and

Bring us closer to reaching the human potential for all.

In everyday and exceptional circumstances, inclusion in early childhood can lead to more cohesive and more strongly functioning communities and societies.

Inclusion in early childhood has the potential to not only change all children's lives for the better, but to transform the whole of society.

Major social movements such as the civil rights movement (centred around anti-racism); women's and gender rights movements; community advocacy around the Millennium Development Goals; and the disability movement are examples of collective human efforts towards greater inclusion. While these movements have had greater and lesser success in different ways and in different contexts, they have also demonstrated so many possibilities.

Inclusion happens in a myriad of ways across different contexts everyday. However, inclusion is not a ‘tick-a-box’ and it is not something that will ever be ‘finished’ – it is an ongoing process. While there are challenges, there are enormous benefits to engaging with this process. To facilitate shared discussion within this international forum, I would like to pose some questions:

What do you understand inclusion in EECE to mean?

Why do you consider inclusion in ECCE is important?

In your current role in ECCE, how do you see yourself/your organisation as being inclusive?

What experiences and examples of inclusion in ECCE can you share? (These might be at the micro level in terms of day-to-day ECCE practice or at the macro level in terms of policy or broader social change.) What were the outcomes of such inclusion?

What barriers to inclusion in ECCE have you encountered? What suggestions or questions do you have for addressing or overcoming these barriers? What do you see as some of the steps to becoming more inclusive within your current ECCE role?

What factors have you found to support inclusion in ECCE? How can these be maximized to increase inclusion in ECCE (in your role/organisation and beyond)?

Programs like Sesame Street and Nickelodeon were able to say that children can learn literacy. There are thousands of people through research who say that they learnt English language through Sesame Street as children. So TV can have an impact in being multi-lingual, some amount of language literacy from other languages, some key words which helped make for a better world.”, says Dr. Asha Singh.

Dr. Asha Singh is an Associate Professor with Lady Irwin College and is a Specialist in Theatre in Education. In this video blog, she talks about certain issues pertaining in children as young as 6 years. Emphasizing on the importance of play during early childhood years, Dr. Singh says that with every action the child is intending to explore, experiment, see and experience. Play is an integral part of early childhood and the child is continuously experimenting and experiencing something new through it. Talking about children growing up amidst media, she says that parents should practice ‘co-viewing’ which is watch what they are watching, along with them. It is also important to channelize the media content for the child and help them in meaning making. Talking about the appropriateness of online games, she says that in this era of gizmos and gadgets, children have nearly forgotten being close to nature. Even though cyber space has many opportunities, the child should be made aware of the joys of outdoor plays.

]]>Discussion ForumThu, 09 May 2013 11:52:30 +0000For Early Childhood Programs, How Good is Good Enough?http://ecceportal.in/index.php/activities/discussion-forum-blog/item/18-for-early-childhood-programs-how-good-is-good-enough?
http://ecceportal.in/index.php/activities/discussion-forum-blog/item/18-for-early-childhood-programs-how-good-is-good-enough?

The quality of early childhood programs may be defined as the standards met along a small number of program dimensions involving early childhood teachers and what they do in their programs. These dimensions involve teacher preservice education and number of children per teacher, teacher inservice training in and use of a valid child development curriculum, teacher engagement of parents in contributing to their children’s development, and regular assessment of curriculum implementation and children’s development. High-quality early childhood programs meet these standards while low-quality programs do not.

The case for quality in early childhood programs is powerful. High-quality programs, such as the longitudinally studied HighScope Perry Preschool Program and Abecedarian Child Care Program, have been shown to have long-term effects and strong economic return on investment. Low-quality programs do not have these effects. Brain research makes it clear that children are developing critical skills in their early years from birth onward.

At the same time, the case against quality in early childhood programs is implicit and virtually universal. It has to do with simple economics, the allocation of scarce resources. Young children, and their advocates, have little economic or political power. The standard for child survival in early childhood programs is much lower than the standard for their thriving in early childhood programs, for these programs contributing positively to their development. Families are expected to provide for young children, and the role of government towards them is less well established. Long-term effects are harder to measure and link to early childhood programs than immediate effects. But, mainly, competing alternatives for spending money often take priority over spending money on young children.

Early childhood program quality, which might be simply represented as the cost per child for programs, never takes complete precedence over competing priorities. Quality is always determined as some balancing point between maximum contribution to young children’s development and spending nothing at all or merely enough to keep a program open without regard to its quality or effectiveness. This balancing point is the result of the allocation of scarce resources among competing priorities. The obvious way to calculate the cost of a program is to multiply the cost per child for the program times the number of children in it. But other considerations determine the amount of money determined to be available for the program, an amount generally less than the other calculation, leaving only two alternatives – either spend less per child or serve fewer children.

The argument for maximizing economic return on investment is powerful and easily understood.

Early childhood programs can also have different purposes – nutrition, education, and child care, for example. Their worth can be considered in terms of these various purposes. Affixing economic value to these various effects helps weigh one against the other and early childhood programs against others expenditures. In cost-benefit analysis, the financial value of the program’s effects per child is compared to the cost per child of operating the program. If the value of these effects is greater than the cost of the program, the program is worth doing from an economic perspective. Paradoxically, it has greater worth than a program that costs less per child but does not have financially valuable effects. However, these principles of deciding whether a program is worthwhile can conflict with each other, leading ineffective programs to be preferred over effective programs because their operating cost is less.

Given that the extra cost of quality in cost-beneficial early childhood programs and the universal need to keep costs as low as possible, what is needed is a body of research studies regarding true efficiencies in cost-beneficial early childhood programs. These studies would address the following questions and others like them.

What preservice education do teachers need to provide highly effective early childhood programs? Technical training in early childhood education does not seem to be enough, but is the broad education provided by bachelors’ degrees absolutely necessary? What if teachers received the professional courses of a bachelor’s degree without the courses in other areas? What about professional education for lead teachers and technical training for other teaching staff?

What is the maximum number of children of various ages per teacher for a highly effective early childhood program?

What research evidence is needed to consider an early childhood curriculum valid? How much curriculum training do teachers need to implement such a curriculum effectively? Do other teaching staff need the same amount of curriculum training as lead teachers? How might curriculum training be better integrated into preservice education?

How do teachers best engage parents in contributing to the development of their children? How do teachers provide opportunities for meeting and other communication that fit into the lives of busy parents, particularly in extended-day child care programs?

How do we collect data on children’s development that is developmentally appropriate but also valid and reliable? Can teachers collect these data or are outside data collectors necessary?

How do these components of quality relate to each other? Which are most important? Can we trade off more expensive components, such as fewer children per teacher, by providing less expensive components, such as better trained teachers?

The problem with conducting such research is that it requires a firm societal commitment to cost-beneficial early childhood programs as well as efficient ones. But false efficiency is often used as an argument against cost-beneficial programs. So early childhood programs stumble along, underfunded, robbing our children and our society of the benefits of which they are capable.

Despite differences in culture, religion and government, countries in the Asia-Pacific have a shared interest and growing passion transcending ethnic and national groups and boundaries in expanding ECD programs and services. A detailed discussion on each country’s efforts and challenges it faces to universalize ECCD programs and services without compromising quality is presented in the 2011 SEAMEO INNOTECH Report on ECCD Quality Assurance in Southeast Asia. ARNEC (2011) has recognized a few noteworthy programmes in the field of ECD. There are certainly much more noteworthy practices in the Asia- Pacific region . Each of these programmes has a unique strength.

According to ARNEC (2011), a noteworthy practice is a programme, initiative or project that has shown initial promise and effectiveness in responding to a particular need of young children (conception to 8years), and that can serve as an inspiring model for other actors.

ARNEC (2011) defines specific characteristics of noteworthy practices as following:• Noteworthy practices are useful and practical; they answer a specific need;• Noteworthy practices show initial effectiveness in addressing the need;• Noteworthy practices promote holistic responses and empower disadvantaged and excluded groups of children;• Noteworthy practices mobilize parents and communities to support children’s care and development;• Noteworthy practices are cost effective and are sustainable over time; they have a clear and realistic sustainability plan

In Sri Lanka, Plantation Rural Education and Development Organization (PREDO), the objective of the programme is to educate the parents, especially pregnant mothers, of the importance of ECCD, preschool education, and health and nutrition of the child.

In India, Mobile Crèches focuses on services/programmes for children under 6 years, with special emphasis on the urban poor child and the migrant child in slums and construction sites.

in education for the most disadvantaged people in urban slums and rural areas. The bodhshalas offer a remarkably seamless integration for students from preschool into primary (Govinda, 2006).

In Bangladesh, Save the Children has been implementing a Transition Program Approach since 2002 up to 2015 in its different projects. The Transition Program Approach (TPA) is a package of activities practiced within grades I and II children in and outside classroom that improves quality of learning and aware each stakeholder about ones roles and responsibility towards children’s holistic development.

In Philippines, a Save the Children program,- called Positive Deviance/Hearth, aims to decrease current and future child malnutrition cases by empowering mothers and families through integrated community-based ECCD interventions.

In Pakistan the Releasing Confidence and Creativity Program (RCC) supported by the Aga Khan Foundation and USAID works in poor rural communities in Sindh and Balochistan.

In Cambodia, ‘A New Day for Kids’ places special emphasis on adult and child reflect circles, to promote caregiver/parent development and empowerment, even going beyond good principles and practices of ECCD to cover health, agriculture, and financial management.

In Kyrgyz Republic, Aga Khan Foundation, working alongside its local partner, the Mountain Societies Development Support Programme, their programme’s goal is to improve early learning opportunities for children in remote areas of the Kyrgyz Republic by enhancing knowledge, skills and attitudes to help them become contributing members of society.

In Indonesia,Tanjungsari Model Integrated ECCD, empowered families and communities to care for their own health and their children and provide a stimulating environment for young children.

In Myanmar, ECCD Network Project, provided basic integrated ECD services to disadvantaged children (under 5) in 51 selected communities of the peri-urban areas of Yangon in Myanmar, to establish childcare networks at the community level including school-based pre-kindergartens and to raise public awareness of the importance of a holistic and integrated approach to ECCD through advocacy and social mobilization.

In Thailand, The Life Skills Development Foundation (TLSDF), mission is to improve the quality of life for vulnerable children and families in northern Thailand.In Philippines, Healthy Start, focuses particularly on pregnant women and families with newborns to not only increase positive parenting behaviors and decrease environmental risks but also strengthen relationships within families and increase access to local social, medical, and employment services, with formal monitoring of child development through a comprehensive assessment tool.

In China, Early Childhood Curriculum: A Hybrid of Traditional Chinese and Western Ideas. These are, in some ways, at odds with the traditional Chinese educational notions (such as teacher authority, discipline, and acquisition of knowledge through memorization) which are considered important for both early learning and cultural transmission.

In Sweden the carefully designed education policies and political and financial support enabled primary schools to be more responsive to children’s individual learning needs, in many ways mimicking preschool learning pedagogies.

In USA, the Child-Parent Center Program was part of the Chicago Public School system and often housed at the local primary school. The pre-school and primary school components worked in sync with each other and assured a high level of learning continuity for child and family.

In Nepal, a Save the Children supported transition program introduced children (during their last few months in the ECD centers) to some of the activities and skills that would be emphasized once they entered school. Results include a significant improvement in school attendance, pass rates, promotion and a corresponding reduction in drop-out and repetition (Bartlett et al, 2004; Arnold, 2003).

In Jamaica, the pilot ‘Pre-Primary to Primary Transitions Program’, begun in 2001 with support from UNICEF to the government’s Basic Education and Early Childhood Education (BEECD) is another emerging example that is linking pre- and primary schools as well as tracking children (ages 4-8) moving between them.

The objectives are to improve the quality of teaching and learning in preschools and grades one and two, as well as coordination between the levels, increase parental support for children’s learning, and improve attendance and enrolment.

In Kenya, Zanzibar and Uganda the Madrasa Community-Based Early Childhood Program, has worked with Madrasa Resource Center (MRC) support for more than 15 years in Kenya, Zanzibar and Uganda in response to families’ desire to give their children a good start – enabling them to succeed in school and at the same time reaffirming local cultural and religious values and knowledge.

In Mali, where early childhood provision is almost non-existent, a “Pedagogue Convergent” is being introduced.

Escuela Nueva, operating since the ‘70s as a system of community schools in rural Columbia, by the ‘90s had expanded to 18,000 schools, increasing primary school participation by around 60% (Rugh and Bossert, 1998). The active curriculum encourages children to participate in their learning.

The thirty Central Eastern European and CIS countries implemented Step by Step Transition - Primary School Program which establishes an intentional connection and overlap in teaching and learning styles between two normally distinct levels. Where possible, Step by Step transitions children together from pre-school into the same primary classrooms.

Early childhood development (ECD) programs are considered one of the most promising approaches to providing more equitable outcomes, if these are covering deprived and at-risk children and families. While the number of children and families served by ECD programs has grown, research shows that without a concurrent commitment to program quality, potential gains for children may be lost and glaring disparities in outcomes maintained. Globally, in the field of social policies and programming, ECD is a fairly new entrant, yet one that comes with much promise supported with compelling scientific evidence (Britto, 2011). The noteworthy approach put forward in this article provides recommendations to ensure that all children have access to the quality of ECD programs that will improve multiple domains of development. The conceptualization and improvement of quality in ECD is the key to achieve individual potential for children, families and societies.