Background: Early childhood development (ECD) is pivotal in addressing educational inequality and reducing income disparities in South Africa. Government initiatives to integrate ECD into the education system underscore a positive trajectory. Aim: This study assesses the impact of relocating ECD to the Department of Basic Education (DBE) in South…

Uncertified teachers are the foundation of early childhood systems across the nation. As states and districts move into professionalizing early childhood education, experienced but uncertified teachers are facing the need to enroll in teacher preparation programs to receive certification and retain their jobs. This article investigates the effects…

Quality rating and improvement systems (QRISs) are designed to assess, improve, and communicate the quality of early care and education programs. Using administrative data, we investigated whether providers that participated in a county-level QRIS saw increases to their global quality (tier) rating, domain-specific quality ratings, and scores on…

Typically, leadership is identified as a key to constructing high-quality early childhood education services and creating provisions to promote children's successful outcomes. However, leadership does not occur in isolation. Organisational management scholars point out that success in organisations is mostly reliant on effective followers. Despite…

Coaching is a key lever for supporting professional learning in early childhood, and coaches serve a critical role in the coaching process. However, little is known about coaches themselves which is a critical gap in evaluating the efficacy of coaching and for making decisions around coaching policies and practices. This mapping review synthesizes…

Cognition research has demonstrated that babies, from birth, can detect numerical correspondences and abstract properties of objects and events. However, this limited existing research is often distant from educational practice, and thus, this information may be inaccessible to early childhood educators; most of whom hold pre-Bachelor level…

The early childhood education care (ECEC) practitioner landscape is complex and encompasses many roles including center-based and school-based administrative, teaching, and support staff as well as home-based unregulated child care family child care (FCC) providers and home-based regulated (e.g., registered or licensed) FCC providers who…

Montessori education has existed for more than 100 years and counts almost 16,000 schools worldwide (Debs et al., 2022). Still, little is known about the implementation and fidelity of Montessori principles. Measuring implementations holds significant importance as it provides insight into current Montessori practices and because it is assumed…

This paper discusses the qualifications of operators of Malaysian childcare centers, namely TASKA and TADIKA, and the challenges faced by practitioners in the industry of early childhood education (PAKK). This research used both qualitative and quantitative methods involving interviews and a survey. The sample study comprised 727 respondents…

The staff shortages in the early childhood education and care (ECEC) sector in Germany are an important issue. They impact centres that are forced to close earlier, shut down entire groups or are unable to open at all due to the lack of pedagogical staff. However, the federal states have been making efforts to address this problem. This article…

The purpose of this study is to contribute to the discussion concerning adaptations and improvements of preschool teacher education. Such changes are crucial, because many newly qualified preschool teachers struggle to live up to the requirements the profession places upon them. This study is conducted in Sweden, where early childhood education…

Teacher registration is increasingly utilised as a governance mechanism to audit teachers' work and drive professional practice. There is limited and mixed empirical evidence, however, as to whether registration drives teaching quality. Our study extends this limited empirical base by critically examining the policy trajectory in Australia to…

Early Childhood Education (ECE) is fundamental to holistic development of children between zeros to eight years old. Thus, teacher professional development is key to enabling children grow and develop in the most appropriate ways. This study examined the extent to which teacher professional qualification in Early Childhood Education influences…

The qualifications that early childhood (EC) teachers attain vary across the 50 states. This variance is likely associated with the differences in state-level childcare licensing policies governing the qualification attainment of EC teachers. This research explores the relationship between childcare licensing policy and the qualifications that EC…

Finnish early childhood education and care (ECEC) experienced system-wide changes in legislation, curriculum, and teachers' and centre leaders' qualification requirements between 2013 and 2018. Through these changes, the Finnish ECEC follows the global trends shifting the focus of ECEC from care towards education. The data are leaders' (N = 41)…