- Funding Programme
- Year
- 2024
Raising the quality of early childhood education and care by strengthening governance, monitoring, and evaluation
The Commission is supporting Bulgaria and Portugal with reforms to raise the quality of early childhood education and care for children from birth to start of compulsory school education years. The main objective is to enable the authorities to take action to strengthen the governance of the ECEC systems and develop comprehensive monitoring & evaluation (M&E) systems in support of high-quality services.
Context
High-quality early childhood education and care (ECEC) is a powerful equalizer for children’s development and lifetime opportunities. It lays the foundations for learning and competence development and helps combat inequalities and social exclusion, favouring especially the most vulnerable children. ECEC is also an important policy tool for employment, enabling parents to reconcile family and work life.
Children’s right to affordable, high-quality ECEC is recognised a core principle under the European Pillar of Social Rights. Through the European Education Area (EEA) Member States have pledged to improve its accessibility, inclusivity and quality.
Bulgaria and Portugal both face challenges in ensuring comprehensive quality levels across the ECEC system. In both countries, responsibility for ECEC is split among different authorities, and a plurality of service providers are following different quality standards. This structure, while complex, highlights the need for comprehensive and coherent monitoring and evaluation (M&E) mechanisms, including strengthened co-operation across Ministries, that can provide a full picture of ECEC service effectiveness as a pre-condition for ensuring consistent quality and equitable access across services.
Support Measures
The support measures include:
- An “As is” analysis of governance and M&E with regards to quality in ECEC to identify the strengths, weaknesses and needs of the sector.
- Analysis and lessons from European good practice in ECEC from other countries with relevant experiences for Bulgaria and Portugal.
- Tools to monitor & evaluate the quality of ECEC for national and municipal authorities, as well as practitioners at setting level, piloted in selected settings. In Bulgaria this will be a concept for a comprehensive M&E system for ECEC, and an associated M&E toolkit; for Portugal this will be a national quality framework and associated indicators.
- Proposals for a communication strategy to raise the public awareness on the importance of quality ECEC.
- Consolidated recommendations and next steps for the implementation and dissemination of the frameworks by the State authorities in Bulgaria and Portugal respectively.
Expected Results
The project is expected to lead to the following outcomes:
The Bulgarian authorities adopt a concept for a comprehensive system for the monitoring & evaluation of early childhood education and care, and a practical toolkit to support its implementation at different levels of the system.
The Portuguese authorities adopt a tested and piloted quality framework for early childhood education and care.
In the mid-term it is expected that stronger governance and improved systems of monitoring and evaluation will raise levels of quality of early childhood education and care in both countries, and across services for all young children before they enter primary education. The availability of high quality ECEC will have positive effects on individual children’s further development and learning and will provide parents with better opportunities of taking up employment.
More about the project
You can read the documents related to the project here: