Competences & Standards

The Vision for Specialised Child Protection Services in the Republic of Moldova lays out a common vision on the system of child protection services and includes a variety of specialized services needed in order to form an integrated and coherent system to meet the complex needs of children victims and witnesses of child abuse and neglect.

• This document looks at the core areas within child protection systems:
• policies and standards;
• programmes, services and implementers;
• coordination and oversight;
• resourcing; and
• social norms.

In addition, key monitoring actions are proposed in order to increase the accountability of all those with responsibility for the safety and care of children.

The role of social work in international child protection: best practices in stakeholder cooperation focuses on the intersection of law, policy implementation, and social work in child protection, specifically child protection involving children who are separated by an international border from their families.

In addition to providing an overview of the role of social work in child protection this paper also presents several key strategies for building cooperation and collaboration between social workers and legal and judicial partners.

Authors, Julie Gilbert Rosicky of the University of Oregon and Felicity Sackville Northcott of Johns Hopkins University, offer detailed recommendations for mutually supportive and sustainable international social work and legal cooperation.  

Early Childhood Care and Education in Five Asian Countries seeks to consolidate early childhood developments in Asia as a basis for The Head Foundations further research and advocacy in this area.

A general overview of the ECCE landscape in the Asia-Pacific region is introduced by this resource. Country profiles are included as a way to share data on individual countries. These country profiles are presented through five aspects:

1. Programme structure,
2. Teacher qualification
3. Demographics
4. Funding and governance structure,
5. Public-private share

These profiles also provide a look at current concerns and recent developments in the countries. Common threads between these profiles are also addressed.

Framework for assessing standards for practice for registered nurses, enrolled nurses and midwives provides a resource for persons assessing the standard of practice of nurses and/or midwives, as well as for nurses and/or midwives whose performance is undergoing assessment.

• The aim is to guide the assessment of competence against the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia standards for practice for registered nurses, enrolled nurses, nurse practitioners and midwives. This important measure ensures the initial and continuing competence of nurses and midwives.
• The framework comprises:
• Principles for assessing standards for practice;
• Critical issues in assessing performance; and
• Key elements in the assessment model.

Early Learning Career Pathways Initiative: Credentialing in the Early Care and Education Field introduces a career pathways framework 4 in use by several federal agencies, provides a national landscape of states’  requirements for ECE staff related to credentialing, highlights five states at various points in the development of ECE career pathways, and shows how early learning system components used in the majority of states align with the Six Key Elements of Career Pathways Framework that other industries use. The elements in this framework are:

Element 1. Build Cross-Agency Partnerships and Clarify Roles: Engage key cross-agency partners at the local and state levels, agree to a shared vision, and gain support from political leaders. Clearly define and formalize roles and responsibilities.

Element 2. Identify Sector or Industry and Engage Employers: Select sectors and industries and engage employers in the development of career pathways.

Element 3. Design Education and Training Programs: Design career pathway programs to provide a clear sequence of education and credentials that meet the skill needs of high-demand industries.

Element 4. Identify Funding Needs and Sources: Raise and/or leverage resources necessary to develop and operate the career pathway system and its education and training programs.

Element 5. Align Policies and Programs: Pursue state and local policy and administrative reforms in order to promote career pathway system development and to support implementation.

Element 6. Measure System Change and Performance: Assess system-wide change and measure performance outcomes to ensure continuous improvement.

Worthy Work, STILL Unlivable Wages: The Early Childhood Workforce 25 Years after the National Child Care Staffing Study offers a snapshot of today's early childhood teachers in the United States. The report takes a look through four lenses:

• Then and Now: Trends in Wages, Education, and Turnover Among Early Childhood Teachers, 1989-2014. A comparison of available evidence reveals the extent of change in center-based teachers’ wages, education, and rates of turnover over the past quarter century.
• Economic Insecurity Among Early Childhood Teachers. New evidence reveals the serious consequences of inadequate compensation on this predominantly female, ethnically diverse workforce.
• The Public Costs of Inadequate Compensation. An examination of how widely early childhood workers and their families use public benefits offers a first look at some of the hidden costs of the low wages endemic to this workforce.
• Policy Efforts to Improve Early Childhood Teaching Jobs. An appraisal of state and national efforts to improve the quality of early care and education in the United States focuses on how adequately these have addressed the low wages of the teaching workforce.

The report also offers thoughts on paths forward and reinvigorating the national conversation on the status and working conditions of teaching staff.

Excerpt

"In the 25 years since the release of the National Child Care Staffing Study, combined developments in science, practice, and policy have dramatically shifted the context for discussions about the status of early childhood teaching jobs, and the importance of attracting and retaining a well-prepared workforce that is capable of nurturing young children’s learning, health and development. Three narrative elements of this changed early care and education landscape set the stage for the new evidence presented in this report:

• A developmental story. Since 1989, we have gained exponentially greater knowledge of the powerful role of children’s earliest encounters with caregiving adults in setting a sturdy or fragile foundation for lifelong development.
• An economic story. There is now a far more widespread appreciation for the wise investment that high-quality early care and education (ECE) constitutes for children, families, and society at large.
• A policy story. For the first time since 1971, when national child care legislation made it all the way to a presidential veto, there is serious debate at the federal level, echoed in virtually every state, about the vital importance of improving the quality of early education, with vast implications for what we expect of the early childhood teaching workforce."

In the United States, cross-sector core competencies for the prenatal through 3-year-old field are currently being broadened to encompass competencies needed for working with children 3-5 years old. The charge of this report was to: 

1. Identify core competencies needed by the P-3 workforce in Los Angeles County;
2. Develop training approaches to support development of these competencies; and
3. Create and field test strategies in selected Los Angeles communities for integrating the core competencies in professional development systems and developing strategies to sustain their use.

This report captures core competencies agreed upon by the workgroup tasked with this report, as well as recommendations regarding the prenatal through three-year-old workforce.

In debates about child care and early education, the voices of providers are often missing. Voices of child care providers: an exploratory study on the impact of policy changes document findings from a study on child care provider perspectives on how regulation and policy changes impact their work.

Researchers used interviews and focus groups with home-based providers and center-based administrators in New York, United States counties. Several themes emerged, including:

• the undervaluation of child care providers;
• challenges faced by providers and the parents of the children they serve;
• regulatory disconnect; and
• discretionary implementation of laws and regulations.

Findings from the study suggest that, excluding input from providers when creating policy, may have unforeseen and even harmful results.

The EC Workforce 2020 Plan sets out a three-year roadmap for a comprehensive professional development system designed to recruit, retain, compensate, develop, and support a high-quality, diverse, early childhood workforce.The first section of this plan outlines the shared vision and guiding principles that underpin the goals provided in the document. Next, the plan details six goals:

• Workforce development
• Recruitment and retention
• Compensation
• Leadership
• Finance
• Data and continuous quality improvement

The plan also highlights key objectives and activities to best support and advance the workforce. 

Early Childhood Policies and Systems in Eight Countries: Findings from IEA’s Early Childhood Education Study  is an exploration of early childhood education (ECE) provision and its role in children's preparation for school and participation in society. In this context, formal early education and provision of care for young children from birth to the age of primary school is described and analyzed in Chile, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Italy, Poland, the Russian Federation and the United States. The data was collected by way of a policy questionnaire, which collected basic information about the wider policy context for ECE in the participating countries. This report provides an overview of strategies, as well as systemic and structural results of ECE policy at the national and, where necessary, subnational levels.

This research study, from International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, presents key findings are presented throughout the report, alongside their supporting evidence.