Early childhood education and care (ECEC) provides the basis of lifelong learning and has become a policy priority in most European countries. Research, conducted by the OECD and the European Commission, recognises that ECEC brings a wide range of benefits, such as social and economic, better child well-being and learning outcomes, more equitable outcomes, reduction of poverty and better social and economic development for society at large. In 2012, the OECD produced “Country-policy profiles” focusing on issues related to quality of ECEC in various countries. These reports point to areas for further reflection on current policy initiatives. With regard to the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, similar areas for improvement have been identified. Common key challenges have been defined, among which are: -improving alignment with primary schooling; -improving communication skills of staff for effective implementation and dissemination of the curriculum. In order to address the above described challenges, the Good Start to School project (GSS) project combines the efforts of 9 organisations from 3 European countries (the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary) to create an innovative toolkit, which will contribute to increasing ECEC teachers’ competencies to evaluate and address adequately children’s level of skills and maturity prior to entering into primary school education, thus ensuring a smooth transition. Furthermore, the project will seek to actively involve parents in the process in order to guarantee that all key stakeholders, directly responsible for the child’s wellbeing and attainment, are adequately engaged and contribute for increasing the quality of ECEC. The overall duration of the project is planned for 33 months, which will be followed by additional activities to ensure sustainability of results. The consortium consists of 3 enterprises active in the field of school education, 1 university and 5 education institutions providing pre-school education and care, thus ensuring that the GSS outputs will be designed, developed, tested, validated and disseminated through international cooperation, involving the key actors able to contribute to increasing the overall quality of Early Childhood Education and Care. The project proposes a comprehensive approach to address children's, teachers' and parents' needs, by developing a toolkit of instruments and methods (GSS evaluation card, GSS guide for teachers and GSS guide for parents). The project foresees the following specific objectives: - to design, develop, test and validate an innovative toolkit for evaluation of critical learning & development areas of children in preschool education level, which involves active communication between teachers and parents; - to train teachers how to apply the GSS toolkit and provide positive feedback to parents with regard to children’s attainment level and areas for further development. - to inform and guide parents on what they need to do in order to support their child during educational process and especially in transition between different levels. The main GSS results and impact can be summarised as follows: -For CHILDREN: improved level of key competencies, as well as knowledge and skills needed for primary school and further learning to facilitate smooth transitions between education levels. -For TEACHERS: increased level of competencies to evaluate children’s skills and competencies; increased level of competencies to address skills gaps; improved communication skills to provide adequate feedback to parents with regard to individual development and progress of their child; raised professional profile to deliver high quality teaching and adopt new methods and tools; -For PARENTS: increased awareness about their own child’s development, needs and expectations for level of maturity at entry stage; opportunity to be proactive in their children’s everyday life; increased level of influence on the process of design and implementation of syllabus at kindergarten and primary education. -For STAKEHOLDERS: increased evidence base for policy making in the field of ECEC; increased quality of ECEC provision for the pre-primary and primary education sector; The long-term impact of developing the GSS toolkit and activities is improved quality of the ECEC on national and European levels and fostering the importance of .basic and transversal skills as the basis for the development of key competences for lifelong learning among pre-primary and primary education pupils, teachers and parents.
Early childhood education and care (ECEC) provides the basis of lifelong learning and has become a policy priority in most European countries. Research, conducted by the OECD and the European Commission, recognises that ECEC brings a wide range of benefits, such as better child well-being and learning outcomes, social and economic benefits, reduction of poverty and better social and economic development for society at large. In 2012, the OECD produced “Country-policy profiles” focusing on issues related to quality of ECEC in various countries. These reports point to areas for further reflection on current policy initiatives. With regard to the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, similar areas for improvement have been identified: -improving alignment with primary schooling; -improving communication skills of staff for effective implementation and dissemination of the curriculum. The Good Start to School project (GSS) combined the efforts of 9 organisations from the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary to create an innovative toolkit, which will contribute to increasing ECEC teachers’ competencies to evaluate and address adequately children’s level of skills and maturity prior to entering into primary school education, thus ensuring a smooth transition. Furthermore, the project tried to actively involve parents in the process in order to guarantee that all key stakeholders, directly responsible for the child’s wellbeing and attainment, were adequately engaged and contribute for increasing the quality of ECEC. The overall duration of the project was planned for 33 months, which will be followed by additional activities to ensure sustainability of results. The project defined the following specific objectives: - to design, develop, test and validate an innovative toolkit for evaluation of needed learning & development areas of children in preschool education level, which involves active communication between teachers and parents; - to train teachers how to apply the GSS toolkit and provide feedback to parents with regard to children’s attainment level and areas for further development. - to inform and guide parents on what they need to do in order to support their child during educational process. The consortium consisted of 3 enterprises active in the field of school education, 1 university and 5 education institutions providing pre-school education and care, thus ensuring that the GSS outputs will be designed, developed, tested, validated and disseminated through international cooperation, involving the key actors able to contribute to increasing the overall quality of Early Childhood Education and Care. The project proposed a comprehensive approach to address children's, teachers' and parents' needs, by developing a toolkit of instruments and methods. GSS Toolkit includes: PREDICT – the diagnostic and evaluation tool is intended for the continuous recording and evaluation of the education progress of the child in kindergarten. METHODOLOGY FOR TEACHERS – introduces PREDICT, including instructions on how to work with this tool, generally diagnostic methods, examples from practice. METHODOLOGY FOR PARENTS – introduces how kindergarten teachers work with children on their social-emotional development using the PREDICT toll, and how beneficial good-quality communication between the kindergarten and the parents is for the development of the child. ELECTRONIC FORM OF THE PREDICT TOOL – allows for simple visualization of the measured results, and for a clear and easy-to-follow presentation of the results for the individual child, as well as for the entire class. The main project activities were tasks aimed at creating a GSS toolkit: designing, developing, testing and validating, production parts of project outputs - translations, layout setting, typesetting, expert reviews, proofreading, printing). Further activities were 4 international project meetings, 2 short-term international teaching/training activities, 3 international dissemination events and other extensive dissemination activities (several meetings with stakeholders, teacher training, further project and intellectual outputs promotion). The main GSS results and impact is summarised as follows: -For CHILDREN: improved level of key competencies, as well as skills and areas development to facilitate smooth transitions between education levels. -For TEACHERS: increased level of knowledge in pedagogic diagnostics area and competencies to evaluate children’s skills and competencies; increased level of competencies to address skills gaps; improved communication skills; raised professional profile to deliver high quality teaching and adopt new methods and tools; -For PARENTS: increased awareness about their own child’s development, needs and expectations for level of maturity at entry stage; opportunity to be proactive in their children’s everyday life; increased level of influence on the process of education.