Making Sense of good Practice

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Making Sense of good Practice

DECET's new publication "Making Sense of good Practice" is available for download in 6 languages.

Recently, the OECD issued the second comprehensive and influential 'Starting Strong' report. It makes a strong case, backed up by international research, that early childhood matters. But also that not every early childhood matters in a similar way. In order to enable all children to benefit from early childhood care and education, service provision must offer high, rather than average quality. And that obviously is a matter for continuous debate: what constitutes high quality?

Recent international research contributed to the understanding that quality is not an objective truth that lies out there, waiting to be discovered by experts. It is constructed and reconstructed over and over again. Developmental psychology, for instance, has helped us to understand children’s needs, but it has historically also been a science about the average child, that of course, does not exist. Today, it is clear that what quality is also depends on who the families are we wish to serve. What excellence is in an inner city of the UK differs significantly from what excels in a Greek suburb. Consequently, framing universal quality criteria has very often contributed in privileging the already privileged groups in our western societies.