The study looked at questions such as what exactly makes a competent early childhood practitioner, how this competence can be understood - and its development supported, in the highly complex and demanding field of working professionally with young children, families and communities. The authors also analysed the approaches different countries take and asked what lessons can be learnt from practices developed by practitioners, training institutions and policymakers across Europe.

Policy makers and researchers generally agree that high quality early childhood education and care can be very beneficial for children. Besides ensuring wide access to these facilities, their quality is a major concern. Staff competences are widely considered to be a crucial factor for the quality of services for young children and therefore for the benefits children can draw from them. However, in many European countries there is a huge diversity of staff qualifications, and large parts of the workforce dealing with young children are unqualified.

The authors of the study recommend policy-makers and practitioners to

• promote professionalism in early childhood education and care across all layers of the professional system, including practice, management, qualification and training, and research
• improve pre- and in-service training of the workforce
• develop an understanding of qualification requirements for staff that shares common values and respects the diversity of possible approaches to realise them across Europe.

The study was prepared over the last year and a half by researchers from the University of Ghent and the University of East London. It outlines the core competences of staff within the early childhood education and care services dealing with children from birth to compulsory school age.

One of the strengths of the study is that it uses a wealth of data and evidence from European research and thus helps to develop a European approach to a field in which so far the evidence from the Anglo-Saxon literature has been overwhelming. Another strong point of the study is that when analysing competences it not only looks at individual staff but includes those at institutional, inter-institutional and systemic level.

European co-operation

In 2010, EU countries set themselves a shared target of raising the share of children between the age of four and the start of compulsory education that participate in pre-school education from 92% (2008) to 95% by 2020.

During the Hungarian EU Presidency in the first half of 2011, the European Commission presented a plan for European countries to co-operate in order to widen access and raise the quality of early childhood education and care in Europe. EU Education Ministers endorsed this plan in May calling for policy co-operation at European level.

The outcomes of the study will feed into the work of a new expert working group on early childhood education and care, to be launched this autumn.

To know more

• Full study "Competence requirements in early childhood education and care" [Annex – research documents]
• European Commission: Early childhood education and care

EU source