Valuing and evaluating the quality of ECEC for children aged zero to three

The quality of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) services became an important issue internationally at the beginning of 1990s. In most industrialised countries women's increased participation in the workforce across social classes meant demand for ECEC services became an important social issue. As professional knowledge and expertise of ECEC also increased, previous questions about the effects of children's attendance at ECEC services on their wellbeing and development were replaced by a more focused concern on quality of practices and their adequacy to guarantee positive outcomes. Thus, valuing and evaluating quality appeared to be two sides of the same coin (Moss & Pence, 1994). In Italy, widespread concern over the quality of ECEC services led to an increased focus on the issue of evaluation during the 1990s. Over the past decade our research group has designed a system for evaluating services for children aged zero to three. In this article we outline the approach on which the system is based (Di Giandomenico, Musatti & Picchio, 2008).