Early Childhood Educators and Child Abuse Prevention: Perspectives, Findings, Actions

Summarizes findings and implications from the Supporting Teachers, Strengthening Families initiative on how early childhood educators view their role in preventing child abuse and on the need for more training and resources

Pathways to strengthen the pre-primary workforce in low-and middle-income countries : white paper

The aim of this paper is to set the stage for the development of a guidance (loosely defined) that 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. The matrix and key options it may provide will be informed by evidence and current practice across countries. The application of such matrix will be informed by many factors in each country that affect workforce development- some of these include differences in enrolment rates between regions and countries, ministerial leadership for pre-primary education, capacity of institutions, such as training institutes for example, at country level, resources available for teacher training and development, among many others. 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. Our analysis in this paper is based on evidence and examples from low- and lower-middle income countries, and on relevant international research on early childhood workforce development. In general, we can say that the challenges teachers face in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are not entirely distinct from the issues within early childhood education (ECE) in OECD countries, but they are often more pronounced in the LMICs contexts (UNESCO, 2015, 11)