Health & Nutrition

The SEEPRO-3 study presented here is the fourth in a series of research projects based at the State Institute of Early Childhood Research and Media Literacy (IFP) in Munich and funded by the German Federal Ministry for Family and Youth Affairs (Bundesministerium für Familie, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend). The new SEEPRO-3 study¹ focuses on the 27 member states of the European Union and six non-EU countries - a total of 33 countries. Reports on the early childhood workforce and the early childhood education and care (ECEC) systems in Norway, Switzerland and Serbia are presented for the first time in this context.

Learn more about the history of the SEEPRO project.

Throughout Europe, early childhood education and care (ECEC) systems are continuously evolving through expansion and consolidation, with reforms and innovations shaping many countries. ECEC staff are essential for quality interactions, stimulating environments, and supporting children's wellbeing and learning. However, nearly all countries report staff shortages, highlighting the need to update data on the qualifications and competencies of early childhood leaders, pedagogues, and assistants.

This homepage presents results from the fourth SEEPRO-3 project, with documents for 33 countries. Each country's profile includes:

1. ECEC Workforce Profile (Country Report): Details on qualification requirements, workforce composition, professional education systems, reform initiatives, research projects, and working conditions. These reports, provided by long-term partners, were compiled based on a research specification and reflect extensive collaboration.
2. Key Contextual Data Synopsis (Country-Specific Background Information): Overview of the ECEC system and demographic data, compiled by the project team and reviewed with supplementary data from partners.

Documents are available in English and German, serving a wide audience including educators, government officials, employers, researchers, early years staff, and other stakeholders across Europe and beyond.

Access the country profiles here.

SEEPRO-3

2024

This policy brief presents the causes and consequences of ECEC staff shortages as well as possible measures to address these shortages.

Within the context of the European Education Area (EEA) strategic framework, the working group on early childhood education and care (ECEC WG) supports EU members states to implement the European Quality Framework for ECEC, which is a key part of the 2019 Council Recommendation on High-Quality ECEC Systems. Throughout 2022-2023, the ECEC WG has been focusing on the monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of quality in ECEC. This topic is one of the five pillars supporting the provision of quality. In addition, the group discusses a number of topics related to the organisation and the quality of the ECEC sector, such as staff shortages or providing support to Ukrainian refugees.

Directorate-General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture (European Commission)

2023

The Council of the European Union approved the European Child Guarantee (ECG) with the objective of addressing and combating child poverty and exclusion (Council of the European Union, 2021). The ECG aims to provide access to essential services and support to children (defined as persons under 18 years old) in the following key areas: early childhood education and care (ECEC), education (including school-based activities and at least one healthy meal each school day), healthcare, nutrition, and housing. The workforce in these areas plays a vital role in delivering accessible and high-quality services.

The aim of this project is to provide categories and definitions of workforce related to ECG and to map relevant data sources across EU. 

This working paper is organised in three main sections. The first section, "Defining and categorising the workforce relevant to ECG” is further divided into subsections for ECEC, education, healthcare, nutrition (with a subsection for "At least one healthy meal each school day"), and housing. Each of these subsections includes definitions of the specific field, national differences found when doing a country-level mapping of the workforce and a general discussion. There is also a subsection related to those jobs that span across all the key areas described above and/or that cannot be directly classified within one of them. The second section includes mapping of the data sources at the international level relevant to the workforce categories identified in the first section. The document concludes with a third section summarising the main finds and classifications.

Kadri Arrak and Kaupo Koppel (Civitta)

European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (Eurofound),

2024

The Parent Support Workforce Needs Assessment Tool aims to help officials within Ministries and government agencies reflect on the ways in which they can support personnel delivering parent support programs for pregnant mothers and caregivers with children under 3. This tool is relevant for programs embedded in primary healthcare as well as those that are delivered across other sectors, including social/child protection, nutrition, and education. Drawing inspiration from the UNICEF Pre-Primary Diagnostic and Planning Tool and the Early Childhood Workforce Initiative, this tool is intended for countries with parent support programs at either the sub-national or national levels. The scope of this tool includes parent support facilitators, community health workers, nurses, social workers, and other frontline providers who work directly with young children and their families, as well as supervisors and trainers, working to deliver programs primarily in community settings and/or in health clinics.

Results for Development and International Step by Step Association

2023

The ICM Standards for Midwifery Education (2021) are an essential pillar of ICM’s efforts to strengthen midwifery worldwide by promoting high quality education programs that prepare midwives who meet the ICM definition of a midwife. The ICM Standards for Midwifery Education are based on foundational ICM Core Documents and Position Statements. Importantly, the Standards address inclusion of the Essential Competencies for Midwifery Practice (2019) as the basis of the midwifery curriculum.

The purpose of the ICM Standards for Midwifery Education (2021) is to establish benchmarks for midwifery education programs, promote high-quality teaching and learning processes, incorporate the ICM Essential Competencies for Midwifery Practice (2019) into the curriculum, provide a framework for designing and evaluating midwifery education programs, assist in continuous quality improvement, enable systematic reporting of quality indicators, and contribute to improving midwifery education programs worldwide.

International Confederation of Midwives

2021

Early childhood home visiting programs support pregnant women and families with young children so they can be healthy, safe, and better prepared to reach their goals. The success of these programs is dependent upon recruiting and retaining a skilled, committed, and satisfied workforce. This brief summarizes findings from the Home Visiting Career Trajectories study—a national study of the home visiting workforce—on workplace factors in recruiting and retaining qualified staff.

This document investigates the characteristics of home visitors and their supervisors, the characteristics of home visiting jobs, and the factors that contribute to the recruitment and retention of home visitors. It provides information on the career pathways and work experiences of home visitors and their supervisors to support Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) awardees, local programs, and home visiting model developers in recruiting, training, and retaining qualified staff. The document presents the findings of a national descriptive study of the home visiting workforce in local agencies receiving MIECHV funding, with a focus on the workplace factors that relate to home visitor recruitment and retention.

Sarah Benatar, Amelia Coffey, and Heather Sandstrom

2020

Reflective supervision is a form of supervision that supports home visiting implementation quality by helping providers develop critical competencies and manage powerful emotions that often accompany the work. Sessions focus on the complexity and importance of all relationships (e.g., supervisor-supervisee; provider-client; parent-child) over administrative compliance or performance evaluation. Quality reflective supervision delivered over time may lead to improvements in service quality, staff retention, and family outcomes. Most evidence-based home visiting models encourage the use of reflective supervision, as does the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) Program.

Despite this general acceptance, home visiting lacks a clear, agreed-upon definition of reflective supervision and an understanding of key elements and best practices. The field also lacks evidence that reflective supervision achieves its intended outcomes, and an understanding of the elements that work best for specific contexts and supervisees. The Supporting and Strengthening the Home Visiting Workforce project seeks to identify gaps in knowledge about reflective supervision and home visitor professional well-being and to develop a conceptual model for each to support future research, policy, and practice.

Allison West and Patricia Madariaga, Johns Hopkins University Mariel Sparr, James Bell Associates

2022

The success of a child’s healthy development is largely dependent on their primary caregiver’s capacity. The 2016 Lancet Early Childhood Development Series1 highlights that efforts to support children are not likely to bear success unless they concurrently provide support for the caregivers upon whom children depend for care.

Many barriers exist to caregiving including that:

• Caregivers may lack the physical, psychological and social capacity to care for their child.
• Highly adverse conditions may introduce threats to caregiver’s well-being and their resources for caregiving.

In responding to these barriers, there is also recognition that frontline workers, who are often community volunteers and caregivers themselves, are not equipped with adequate skills to enable them to support caregiver needs.

Caring for the Caregiver (CFC) is a foundational training module that is designed to address these needs, and to complement existing maternal and child health programmes including the UNICEF/WHO Care for Child Development (CCD) Package and the UNICEF Infant and Young Child Feeding (IYCF) Package. CFC can also be utilised as a foundational course for other sector programs whose success is dependent on caregiver and family capacity (e.g. health promotion programmes such as WASH or child protection programmes).

CFC training translates well-established evidence on how to support emotional well-being and mental health, presenting these in practical activities which encourage self-care, family engagement and social support. The training package provides curriculum for training frontline workers to address barriers to responsive caregiving and it provides supporting implementation materials for counselling caregivers.

CFC was developed for the UNICEF West and Central Africa Regional Office (WCARO) by expert consultants, with a series of consultations and pilot training activities in two countries: Mali and Sierra Leone.

UNICEF

2019

The goal of the research ‘Bulgaria grows with its children: Building professional competences for early childhood development’ (hereinafter referred to as ‘research on the early years workforce’ and ‘the research’) is to outline the main directions for improvement of the professionalization of the early years workforce on the basis of data – quantitative and qualitative – as well as to formulate recommendations for policy development in this area.

This summary shares the main results and recommendations derived from this research.

Dr. Natalia Mihaylova and included Dr. Ivanka Shalapatova, Elitsa Gerginova, Savelina Roussinova, and Dimitar Ivanchev

2021

The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has upended families’ lives, with school closures, social distancing, and stay-at-home measures limiting their access to support systems, while adding to health concerns and economic uncertainties. As families face these varied stressors, it is even more important that parenting programs, which seek to promote positive and responsive caregiving, improve health and nutrition, and enhance social and child protection, continue to operate. Against this backdrop, and facing restrictions on normal in-person operations, many parenting programs have had to innovate to continue service delivery and help families navigate this difficult time.

• How are parenting programs reorienting their services in response to COVID-19?
• How are parenting programs supporting their personnel to deliver these critical services? 

This brief seeks to shed light on these questions. Developed by the Early Childhood Workforce Initiative (ECWI), a multi-stakeholder global initiative co-led by Results for Development (R4D) and the International Step by Step Association (ISSA) that works to support and empower those who work directly with young children, the brief highlights common approaches parenting programs are using to continue engaging with families, including transitioning to deliver services virtually and adapting to provide enhanced psychosocial support. We use the five priority actions to support the early childhood workforce outlined in ECWI’s COVID-19 Position Statement as a light guide and explore how some parenting programs are prioritizing the health, safety, and psychosocial well-being, expanding training and guidance, and recognizing the workforce delivering these critical services. Several short case studies provide context and detail to these programs’ efforts and the brief concludes with a set of reflections on the challenges and possibilities ahead.

Kavita Hatipoglu with support from Michelle Neuman and Denise Bonsu (R4D) and Konstantina Rentzou and Zorica Trikic (ISSA)

2021