Researchers from Macquarie’s School of Education have conducted a long-term study exploring the drivers, opportunities and challenges of quality improvement in early childhood education centres across Australia.
High-quality early childhood education and care (ECEC) offers children from all social backgrounds a strong start to their lives, supports parenting and workforce participation and sustainably strengthens the national economy for current and future generations. As a result, governments, ECEC providers and researchers are placing an increased focus on the frameworks, systems and measures that underpin, analyse and promote continuous quality improvement in ECEC services.
Australia’s National Quality Standard (NQS) outlines the criteria to assessing the quality of early childhood services. A four-point rating scale (Exceeding NQS; Meeting NQS; Working Toward NQS; and Significant Improvement Required) is applied to services following a regular and sequential assessment and rating process.
Commissioned by the Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority (ACECQA), Macquarie researchers, alongside Queensland University of Technology and Edith Cowan University, explored long day care (LDC) services that had improved their National Quality Standard (NQS) rating from Working Toward NQS to Meeting or Exceeding NQS, in order to understand opportunities for continuous quality improvement across the sector. The study found genuine and sustained quality improvement is a shared responsibility with approved providers, service leaders, educational leaders, teachers and educators playing a vital role. Additionally, the findings identified five priority areas to support and sustain quality improvement:
- The role of the approved provider and organisational support
- Quality improvement within services requires organisation leadership, support and resourcing. This includes the recruitment and retention of qualified and skilled teachers and educators, support for professional learning, resourcing and a positive work environment. The research found greater support for quality improvement in larger services or services operated by larger organisations. However, some smaller services were also creating local networks and engaging external mentors to enhance organisation support.
- Service leadership
- Service leaders play a critical role in supporting and sustaining quality improvement, including leading the service philosophy and maintaining a positive and supportive work environment. Early childhood education services that improved to Exceeding NQS had detailed philosophy statements, comprehensive stakeholder management and systematic approaches to the revision of the philosophy.
- The role of the educational leader
- Effective educational leadership is essential to quality educational programs and practice. Early childhood education services that improved their quality assessment rating to Exceeding NQS showed value and support toward the Educational Leader role, ensuring the right person was recruited and were provided with training, resources and time.
- The involvement of individual educators
- Continuous quality improvement is based on shared learning and effective teamwork. Services that improved to Exceeding NQS demonstrated how individual educators were involved in quality improvement strategies, committed to continuous improvement and were professionally accountable.
- NQS assessment and rating
- Meaningful engagement with the assessment and rating process provided a platform for continuous quality improvement in early childhood education services. Quality Improvement Plans (QIPs) were present within services, but varied in content, length and format. Critical reflection and goals were consistent themes in QIPs, but some lacked detail on how to enact this. Assessment and Rating reports were also reviewed by the research team, who identified different approaches to assessment and reporting, particularly the information and support provided to services in identifying strategies and goals for achieving improvement.
The Macquarie team are continuing to conduct research with this multi-layered, rich dataset in order to uncover the nuanced factors within early childhood education and care services that underpin and contribute to quality improvement.
More information on the ACECQA-funded project can be found here. A practical guide for supporting continuous quality improvement can be accessed here.