The analysis of early childhood care and education identifies what the evidence establishes, where comparison is limited and which qualifications must be reported.
For the analysis, the value of the present data lies in the questions it can answer reliably and in the limits it makes visible.
Application to early childhood care and education
For early childhood care and education, the 2007 Education for All monitoring focus on early childhood provides the contemporaneous context. It does not, without setting-specific evidence, demonstrate the operation of early childhood care and education.
The 2007 Education for All Global Monitoring Report, Strong Foundations, focuses on the issue. It treats early childhood provision as extending beyond access to pre-primary places and considers health, nutrition, care, protection and learning together. The report’s framing requires quality analysis to examine who participates, the suitability of provision for young children, workforce capacity and unequal access.
Controls for early childhood care and education
For the available evidence, provision for young children should integrate learning, wellbeing, protection and development, with expectations appropriate to age and context. When examining early childhood care and education, review should cover the stages at which learners receive information, provision, assessment, support and remedy.
For comparative analysis, comparison requires more than the use of a common label. When examining early childhood care and education, definitions, reference periods, population coverage, institutional boundaries and collection practices must be sufficiently aligned for the observed difference to have a stable meaning.
- Is the remaining difference educationally material?
- Has a classification changed?
- Are the populations defined on the same basis?
- Do the reference periods align?
- Are exclusions and missing records comparable?
Review of early childhood care and education
The principal risks in relation to the available evidence are unsafe ratios or environments, weak transition between home and school, unequal access to trained staff, and measurement that narrows developmental aims. Separate treatment would overlook how a failed control may prevent detection or operation of another safeguard.
Implications for early childhood care and education
Useful records include programme aims appropriate to child development, family communication and participation, transition and referral arrangements, staff competence and supervision, and safe environment and safeguarding records.
Authorities and providers reviewing the comparison should proceed in a defined sequence. The review should prepare a comparability table before analysing results. For early childhood care and education, record common elements, material differences, breaks in series and the direction in which each limitation may affect the conclusion; do not rank systems where those limitations remain material.
Decision-makers using evidence on the comparison should be told what the data cannot establish as clearly as what it can. For early childhood care and education, the finding should identify its analytical character and the system, institution, programme or learner population to which it applies. The basis for applying the result elsewhere should be established rather than assumed.
Evidence relevant to early childhood care and education
The analysis proceeds on the basis that participation rates do not establish the quality of early learning, and narrow academic measures do not provide a complete account of development or wellbeing. The analysis proceeds on the basis that association should not be presented as causation, and statistical significance should not be treated as evidence of educational importance without further analysis. Across the defined scope, material limitations should be stated with the finding presented to decision-makers and affected learners.
For early childhood care and education, decisions concerning the available evidence should remain traceable to the information available for the stated reference period.
For authorities and providers, the present development requires a clear account of how the comparison is implemented and how its effect is established. For early childhood care and education, public confidence cannot be separated from an institution's ability to identify responsibility and substantiate its conclusions.