This Policy Brief draws on the "Quality beyond Regulations" policy review undertaken by the OECD between 2018 and 2022 to foster an understanding of the different dimensions of quality in early childhood education and care (ECEC), focusing on process quality in particular. Process quality encompasses children's daily interactions through…

The early childhood education and care (ECEC) workforce is foundational for providing high-quality learning, development and well-being experiences for young children. Policies can support the development of this workforce by addressing requirements for initial education and continuing professional development, as well as the working conditions of…

'Won't somebody think of the children' is a battle cry calling into question the current positioning of the child and care within international/national childcare policy. This plea is constructed within a framework that recognizes that childcare policies may be guided, developed and implemented in good faith. Nevertheless, there are often…

There is considerable rhetoric internationally around the need for national curricula to reflect the changes that are taking place in the world outside school. This raises questions about what a quality curriculum in a technological era should look like, and equally challenging issues about how to achieve the necessary changes in schooling in…

The purpose of this study is to determine the direction of causality between the quality of education and technological development for the selected Northern European countries over the period 2006-2017. To this end, we employ the bootstrap panel causality test. The findings of our study indicate that the quality of education leads to changes in…

The central role of teachers in ensuring the quality of education has been increasingly recognised internationally in recent decades. This paper reviews various shifts that have occurred in the initial teacher education agenda internationally during this time period. The paper reviews the radical reform that has occurred in the structure and…

This book provides significant information regarding the policies and provisions for early childhood teacher education programs in universities in fourteen different countries. Early childhood education and care (ECEC) is expanding rapidly across the globe with unprecedented numbers of children attending EC centres, requiring the investment in…

Concise, clear and comprehensive snapshots of vocational education and training systems in EU, Iceland and Norway: this is what the Cedefop Spotlight on VET series offers. Building on individual country Spotlights, this publication provides an overview of VET systems with their distinctive qualities, such as main accession and progression routes…

In recent years, the enhancement of learning and teaching has become a priority, not only for higher education institutions, but also for national governments, the European Union and the Bologna Process. This report aims to map the learning and teaching landscape in 28 higher education systems and to provide insight into how teaching enhancement…

According to globalisation theories, the importance of international organisations such as UNESCO and EU regarding processes of policy-making is increasing and it is no longer the nation state alone that is regulating policy. Focusing on equity and social justice as central topics of the global discourse, the article raises the question of how…

This paper shares the Irish adult educator's experiences of Quality Assurance (QA). Educators are found to be largely supportive of QA but contradictions emerge. These include philosophical tensions, inconsistent moderation and incongruence between the stated values of QA and a more powerful government-led employability discourse.

This paper provides a comparative analysis of policies, strategies and programmes for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) integration in primary and post-primary education, that were active in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and in the Republic of Ireland in 2016. The analysis showed that while KSA was a relative newcomer to the…

Supporters of free college in the US often point to countries that do not charge tuition to argue for the policy. However, international examples often illustrate that free-college policies entail unintended consequences. Ireland offers a particularly apt case study on that point. In the mid-1990s, Ireland abolished tuition for full-time…

The relationship between school inspection and school self-evaluation in Ireland has shifted from a largely theoretical one to that of a regulatory requirement where schools are mandated to engage with an externally devised process of self-evaluation. The conduct of self-evaluation in schools is quality assured by the inspectorate. It is not clear…

This handbook, first published in 2014, aims at helping policy makers and social partners understand some of the ways in which learning in the workplace can be encouraged and how its quality can be improved. It is also intended to help them understand some of the ways that such learning can be organised in a structured manner so that it benefits…