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This bulletin for professionals presents an overview of child welfare supervision and explores the dimensions of supervision that agencies may want to consider as they seek to strengthen the effectiveness of their services to children and families. This bulletin is designed to provide child welfare supervisors, managers, and related professionals with examples of States’ efforts to strengthen supervisory capacity and with tools and resources to enhance supervisory skills.

The Innovative Pedagogical Approaches in Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE): A Resource Pack includes case studies from nine countries. Each is an example of an innovative pedagogy developed according to a specific context and with concern for sustainable learning.This resource pack discounts the idea that ECCE should solely rely on a “universalized ‘one size fits all’ model" and emphasizes the need for ‘real-life’ approaches that connect children with their communities. Innovations in ECCE in the Asia-Pacific region are often intended to improve not only the lives of children but also those of the entire community. These examples of transformational pedagogy are inspirational reads for practitioners, researchers, and policymakers.

For a child welfare agency to achieve its mission, it must attract, develop, and retain a skilled and ready workforce. Yet, child welfare agencies across the country are struggling to recruit, hire, train, support, and retain committed and high-performing staff. To hear key stakeholder concerns about the child welfare workforce, the Children’s Bureau and the National Child Welfare Workforce Institute invited 28 state and county agency leaders and 7 university partners, Children’s Bureau staff and national consultants to participate in a Workforce Workgroup on March 4-5, 2013. This report is a compilation of the most pressing child welfare workforce issues they face and recommended strategies for developing the child welfare workforce of the future.

Child Care Staff: Learning and Growing Through Professional Development offers insights and shares innovative practices about the current professional development and support activities currently offered to the Australian early childhood workforce.

Drawing on the views and experience of 684 child care service directors/managers/owner-operators and staff across Australia, this publication aims to answer questions about how professional development impacts children’s outcomes and the measures of effective support services.

The quality and qualifications of the childcare and early years workforce are steadily improving and have never been better. But the sector has reached tipping point, with increasing evidence that early years practitioners are severely under strain.

The public funding environment is set to remain challenging over the next five years. However the substantial investment in early education and childcare that is being made through the Tax-Free Childcare scheme and the doubling of the free childcare entitlement for working families provides a vital opportunity to support workforce development. This briefing makes a series of practical recommendations, many of which do not require additional public funding, which seek to remove barriers to entry and progression and support the sector to retain and make the most of the talented individuals already working in childcare and early years.

The appendices from the Critical Competencies for Infant-Toddler Educators Related Professional Criteria, provide clear and concise guidance on essential knowledge and skills for infant-toddler educators.

Illustrating how criteria from various partners can be used together to support the preparation and professional development of infant-toddler educators, this document includes related professional criteria, tools and child development benchmarks.

Professional preparation and ongoing professional development (PD) for the early childhood education workforce is essential to providing high-quality services to children and families. Consistent terminology and definitions related to PD methods, roles, knowledge, and capabilities have emerged as a critical issue for the early education field. Recently, states have experienced new early childhood education system challenges and needs related to training and technical assistance (TA). The urgency of these issues grows, particularly as states increase their focus and work on quality improvement activities, including quality rating and improvement systems (QRIS).

To support related efforts, the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) and the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies (NACCRRA) jointly developed this glossary of professional development, training, and technical assistance (TA) terms. Additionally, NAEYC and the Alliance of Early Childhood Teacher Educators (a collaborative effort of the National Association of Early Childhood Teacher Educators and ACCESS–Associate Degree Early Childhood Teacher Educators) will continue to explore and develop national education-related definitions as a companion to this training and TA glossary.