A review of research on the effects of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) upon child development. CARE project; Curriculum Quality Analysis and Impact Review of European Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC)

Abstract

This report considers the Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) curriculum throughout Europe. It explores the official curriculum, specified by national or regional governments, along with the implemented curriculum that is provided ‘on the ground’ by staff to enhance children’s development. The official curriculum documents at national or regional level are often called ‘steering documents’. Moreover, the implemented curriculum is sometimes called the ‘experienced’ or the ‘realised’ curriculum, i.e., what the staff realise in their daily practice and what the children experience day by day. The CARE project has studied European curriculum in three ways: (1) by developing a template according to which the 11 partners in the CARE Consortium described the curriculum in their own countries; (2) by analysing the responses of our partners across 11 countries to the CARE curriculum template, with the aim of identifying commonalities and differences in the broadly representative sample that comprises the CARE consortium; (3) by considering information from the templates in light of selected research literature on effectiveness - NOT through a formal literature review which is the task of another Work Package in the CARE project (Melhuish et al., forthcoming) - but by comparing the template findings with widely cited, key studies. The analytic template originated as a series of questions at a curriculum conference held in Oxford (March 2014). This template was further refined as members of the CARE consortium provided information about ECEC in their home countries. The conclusions and recommendations presented in this report are based on analysis of the completed country templates (i.e. the survey of countries represented in the CARE Consortium), but also on recent EU reports and selected international literature