Defining and Evaluating ‘Quality’ Early Childhood Education in an International Context: Dilemmas and Possibilities

Abstract

In the first part of this paper we show how definitions of quality have implications for the way that quality is ultimately evaluated in early childhood education, and the role that this has in directing policies, in setting and regulating standards, assessing services, and in planning for action and improvement. The paper has been written to encourage greater discussion of the issues and to provide practitioners and students with a critical understanding of some of the major theoretical issues that surround many of the popular conceptions of quality in early childhood education. Perceptions of quality have tended to polarise in the past decade in two directions, there have been those who have argued for a set of objective measures to be applied, and those who have favoured more subjective or relativistic accounts. We argue that this polarisation is especially unhelpful to practitioners who use objective criteria in inspection, regulation, policy and in practice development, and must engage with the multiplicity of perspectives held by children, parents, staff and policymakers. We argue that while there may be legitimate variations in the curriculum goals and contents of early childhood education, a good deal of the provision that is instituted to satisfy these goals may be assessed using a common set of broadly defined yet objectively measurable pedagogic criteria.

Key Words:

• quality
• curriculum
• pedagogy
• criteria
• objectivist
• relativist