Education & Care

This report which was issued by BRIDGE, Ilifa Labantwana, National ECD Alliance (NECDA), the Nelson Mandela Foundation, Smartstart and the South African Congress for Early Childhood Development (SACECD), is based on a survey of 3,952 ECD operators in South Africa conducted in mid-April 2020.

In line with government’s concern for lives and livelihoods, the organizations that issued the report believe that support needs to be offered to ECD operators owing to the circumstances they find themselves in due to COVID-19. The report constitues a proposal that requests government to appropriately assist ECD workforce during this precarious time of COVID-19.

After presenting the reasons why ECD operators should be accomondated in relief interventions and the impact on ECD operators' sustainability, caregivers and children, two possible interventions that the state can take to support the ECD sector during this time are presented: 1) Support to the ECD workforce to offset their loss in income and 2) Support to ECD operators due to loss of income from reduced fee payment.

BRIDGE, Ilifa Labantwana, National ECD Alliance (NECDA), Nelson Mandela Foundation, Smartstart, South African Congress for Early Childhood Development (SACECD)

2020

The COVID-19 virus has created considerable uncertainty about the remainder of this school year, the next school year, and beyond. Federal, state, and local government responses should be informed by understanding current policies and their history, including the effects of the last major economic crisis, the Great Recession, on America’s state-funded preschool programs.
The 17th edition of The State of Preschool, the National Institute for Early Education Research’s (NIEER) report on the annual survey of state preschool policies, provides government policymakers valuable information for planning short- and long-term responses to the crisis. The report includes information for every state on child enrollment, resources (including staffing and funding), and quality standards. It also provides information on where children are served, operating schedules, and other program features relevant to planning the education of children in a post-COVID-19 world.

National Institute for Early Education Research

2020

This paper reports on a study into the possible roles social media might play in teacher education in challenging contexts. It focused on the role of WhatsApp use and developing teacher resilience by forming teacher communities of practice. This work built on prior activity taking place in teacher associations in three sub-Saharan countries: Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire and Rwanda and sought to develop both good practices in using WhatsApp for distance teacher development as well as engage in collaborative research. The paper shows that social media can play an important role in the professional development of teachers in remote and challenging contexts, but that we need to consider the workload and role of moderators and establish realistic expectations for groups, where there is limited access to the internet.

Gary Motteram and Susan Dawson

2019

It is paramount that the Education in Emergencies sector shares and learns from promising policies, practices, and research approaches for supporting teachers in crisis contexts. For this reason, this publication provides donors,policymakers, practitioners, researchers, and teachers with compelling examples of programs and practices that positively influence improvements in teachers’ work conditions and teaching practice. Authored by researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers working in education in emergencies, the 24 studies in this publication showcase promising practices in teacher management, professional development, and well-being from diverse regions and contexts.

The case studies are organized by three thematic areas:

• Teacher management (i.e. teacher recruitment, supply, compensation, supervision, certification, etc.)
• Teacher professional development (i.e. training modalities that include face-to-face training, coaching, mentoring, distance, and/or online learning etc. for either pre-service or in-service approaches; teacher collaboration; coordination across providers; collaboration with national teacher training institutes), and
• Teacher well-being (i.e. including social, emotional, physical, intellectual, financial, cultural, and spiritual well-being; interventions to support teacher well-being).

They present a snapshot of promising research methods, evidence-informed policy making, and innovative approaches to program design and implementation from diverse regional and crisis settings, as well as diverse organizations and teacher profiles.

Inter-agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE)

2019

Little research attention has been paid to documenting and analyzing attempts of education systems moving quickly and at scale to provide online learning when all or many schools are closed. Related 'good practices' are considered rare, and on the whole, activities and initiatives of these sorts are poorly documented, especially when it comes to the needs of learners and education systems across the so called 'developing world'.

This brief extrapolates from the existing knowledge base about the use of educational technologies in general over past decades, as well as from consensus expert and practitioner wisdom and experience, to offer high-level guidance and 'rules of thumb' for policymakers forced to make related decisions in fast moving, very challenging circumstances with little guidance or relevant experience.

World Bank

2020

The COVID-19 crisis has revealed how much our nation relies on early care and education services in order for other workforces to function, yet chronic disregard for early educators’ well-being has essentially rendered their needs invisible. The Center for the Study of Child Care Employment has developed a set of 5 recommendations intended to be undertaken together, that help protect the lives of early educators and their communities and prioritize getting financial relief directly to childcare programs and staff. The recommendations are concluded with a series of resources to help stakeholders understand the severity of this crisis.

Center for the Study of Child Care Employment

2020

The aim of this paper is to supports the ways countries may go about developing or strengthening their pre-primary workforce. There are multiple pathways to competent and effective workforce that may be relevant to different country context and that may combine different level of qualifications, with training and retention strategies in support of developing adapted career trajectories for pre-primary teachers. Our focus in this paper is to summarize the background evidence and research available in the area of pre-primary workforce development that can in turn support the outline of options and pathways to be developed further through in the next part of the work.

UNICEF/Jan Peeters, Ayça Alayli, Marilou Hyson and Hsiao-Chen Lin

2019

Our objective during the explorations was to provide guidelines for those working with parents and other caregivers about how to communicate with parents about learning through play. Caregivers and especially parents have a great role to play in their children’s well-being and brain development. This makes it more important to communicate with parents about the benefits of their role, for the sake of the child’s development.

The co-created outcomes from this Exploration are the following guidelines for communicating with parents and caregivers about their role in engaging children in playful activities.

Alejandra Zaragoza Scherman, Eszter Salamon, Rosemarie Truglio, Tim Jay

The LEGO Foundation

This report sheds a light on some of these disparities for the early years workforce. It includes a review of the relevant literature; an analysis of quantitative data covering a large representative sample of workers in England; and 40 interviews with early years practitioners, setting managers and local policy-makers. The most common barriers identified in all three strands of research were pay, work demands, certain demographic characteristics, training and the organisational climate of the early years provider. 

The study addresses the following research questions:

• How stable is the EY workforce in England?
• What are the main barriers to stability?
• How do these barriers vary by region?
• How do these barriers vary by provider type?

Social Mobility Commission

2020

If there is one silver lining to the COVID-19 crisis, it’s probably the growing appreciation of childcare as an essential service and backbone to the growth and development of our economies. Maniza Ntekim, UNICEF’s Regional Advisor for East and Southern Africa, reminds us of the impor- tance of early childhood services, noting particularly that “If we leave early childhood education behind, we leave learning behind. If we are serious about tackling inequality, addressing the learning crisis, and making education systems work better, we have to scale up investment in early childhood education during and after this pandemic.” Early childhood services are even more important to parents now because to be productive and engaged in economic activities, they need safe, stimulating, and nurturing environments for their children. A focus on early childhood services is therefore critical in the broader plan to build back better.

Despite the well-established evidence that early childhood services are essential to human capital formation, socio-economic development, women’s employment, and increased equality, its workforce is one of the most undervalued in the world. This blog focuses on the early years’ workforce in Africa, calling for action to support them to keep services running.

AfECN

2020