The Future of Education

In 2014, the Report of the Working Group on ECEC under the auspices of the European Commission entitled Proposal for key principles of a Quality Framework for Early Childhood Education and Care indicated that “the early years from birth to compulsory school age are the most formative in children’s lives and set the foundations for children’s lifelong development and patterns for their lives”. Additionally, many research studies show that quality ECEC services have positive impact on children as well as on their parents and families, on women employability, well-being and quality of life. In particular, the use of the term “quality” implies the analysis of a wide variety of variables that contribute to the definition of dynamic quality models, which calls for a greater attention to minimum standard of service requirements to be shared and agreed with public institutions and relevant ECEC stakeholders (parents, educators/carers/auxiliary staff, trade unions etc.).
Based on these statements and on the context of 6 European countries, namely Italy, Romania, Lithuania, Malta, Hungary, Ireland along with the long term experience of the European Parents’ Association, the EU SEQUENCES project was born to respond to the need of improving the quality of ECEC services. With a bottom-up approach and starting from the educators’ experience, it aims to develop and implement adequate tools for self and external evaluation of quality.
To achieve these goals, partners have designed a Toolkit containing 33 ready-to-use tools referred to the 5 quality areas indicated by the European framework (access, workforce, curriculum, monitoring and evaluation, governance and funding). Alongside with it, a training curriculum has been developed, to prepare and support the ECEC staff during the 6 months piloting phase of tools. Having the opportunity to test these tools and bring the direct experience of different countries is a response to the need for quality services. Finally a Multi-stakeholders’ Guidelines will be created, for promoting quality assurance in ECEC targeting policy-makers, services and parents/families.
The SEQUENCES project is expected to lead to significant improvements in terms of developed competences and a positive spill over effect in the Quality Assurance management of ECEC settings.

Keywords: ECEC, early years education, quality framework, self-evaluation, external evaluation;