Early childhood care and education: a window of opportunity

Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) of children in our country has been recognized as an area of attention in the Indian policy discourses for several years. India’s flagship Integrated Child Development Services Scheme (ICDS), (now Poshan Abhiyan 2.0) is the world’s largest program for children under six (6) years of age.

It is however only in the last decade that the domain has received much-needed attention with the National ECCE Policy 2013, followed by several curriculum frameworks. National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 recognizes the significance of early childhood years. With this, there is now explicit recognition through Foundational Stage as the first five years of schooling.

Aspects of ECCE: care, community and play

The domain is generally looked at through four key interlinked aspects that are shared below.

Early childhood: This refers to the most significant period of life, with the most rapid development of a human being. It comprises the first eight years of a young child’s development, starting from the time of conception. Rapid growth and development mark this period, wherein, as neuroscience research suggests, brain activity is at its peak. The quality of environmental, social, nutritional inputs and experiences determine the quality of neural networks being formed, as well as the physical growth and qualitative aspects of the child’s development.

At this stage, children as society’s developing citizens are entitled to the right to life, play, and safe environment. This period of rapid change involves the development of the ‘whole’ child, across multiple areas/domains of development. These include thinking, communicating, physical strength and movement, understanding emotions, regulating emotions, appreciating, and developing habits of the mind that help focus, learn, and adapt.

Each child has a unique development pathway. This is determined by various factors in their environment and genetic predispositions. Several unique aspects, including neurodiversity and developmental atypicality among children, may be first noticed in this critical period of the early years.

Care: This is a complex interlinked aspect that determines the overall well-being of the child. For instance, the availability and attention to basic aspects of nutrition, vaccination, sanitation, availability of clean drinking water, and good sleep are critical. So are positive reciprocal interactions with adults in the environment, early sensorial stimulation, a hygienic environment, and being loved and cared for as a growing dependent individual in the family and community.

A child is the most vulnerable in this phase. They are prone to diseases, falls and safety concerns, and other significant effects negative environment and experiences can have on the child’s well-being. Care—an all-encompassing term—therefore, is central to this period of development. The child’s immediate ecosystem, comprising the mother’s health, parental well-being, other caregivers in the family and institutional contexts, becomes critical to ensure the young child’s care and well-being.

Education: Traditionally seen as the preparation or ‘readiness’ to read, write and do arithmetic, education in this age has come to mean ‘helping the child develop optimally’ as well as ‘providing tools for learning and making sense of the world around them’. It involves interlinked and comprehensive development that children experience across all domains of development. These include physical-motor, socio-emotional development, language development, cognitive development, and learning to appreciate creativity and aesthetics in their environment.

Young children are curious and constantly exploring their environment. They are constantly interacting with environmental processes related to explaining, clarifying, and questioning. These guide children’s thinking and curiosity. These also help them learn something new, either conceptually or strengthening their skills, or learning to be a certain way in their own social context. The last includes, for instance, regulating their anger, or being able to share or express themselves confidently.

All of these are aspects that need input from the adults around the young individual. And these comprise what is referred to as education of the young child. This reference to education is distinct and different from the typical subject-specific, content-specific learning that we often understand as the focus of schooling and beyond the reading-writing-arithmetic that school readiness is often understood as.

Play: This is an integral part of a child’s everyday routine. It happens to be the foremost process through which a lot of ‘educational aspects’ discussed above are achieved. Play can be a self-directed, child-initiated engagement. It can also be an active learning method used by educators to engage children meaningfully. In both these avatars, play enables significant advancements of several developmental processes and learning about the world and people around them.

Our national policies and curriculum framework have always recommended play-way engagement for young children even in formal institutional environments. However, it is the limited understanding of the potential of play, and what education in the early years should be about that limits the caregivers’ and educators’ belief in the use of play as a pedagogic tool and resource.

When we as practitioners plan and implement programs in the ECCE domain, all of these above aspects, the early childhood development period and its demands, care considerations that entail all-encompassing well-being and basic facilities and nutrition for the young child, educational engagement, and play as central to children’s learning and development, need careful consideration and attention in the planning of quality ECCE interventions.

Landscape for ECCE engagements: the local context of family, community, and ground-level institutions

Another aspect that is critical to foreground with respect to planning programs or intervention in the domain, is the level at which the intervention is planned. For example, is the planned intervention based on direct work with children? Or does it target other levels of engagement, which indirectly contribute to the young child’s development and well-being.

The above figure shows the various levels at which the ECCE interventions can be planned. Interventions can be at different levels of the ecosystem. What each of these levels entails, and an illustrative range of aspects with respect to ECCE that we can look out for as practitioners during our visits and engagements, are indicated below.

Family: The mother’s health, her age at pregnancy, nutritional requirements, mental well-being, antenatal (before pregnancy), perinatal (during pregnancy), and postnatal (after pregnancy) care, are critical factors. So are her status as a lactating mother and the primary caregiver for the child in the first few months of the child’s growing up.

Similarly, fatherhood is also a critical part of the puzzle. Preparations on aspects about fatherhood, to-be father, and role of the family environment and the father in bringing up the child are important. We also need to keep in mind the critical contributions that a father can make to enabling a positive home environment for the mother and child. Awareness of critical aspects of child-development is significant for helping fathers prepare for their role and to meaningfully participate in family childcare environments.

Grandparents in our context offer significant support systems and are often active participants in early childcare. Programs that focus on learning from their knowledge of childcare and cultural practices, as well as programs that enable participation, and contribute to their fresh learning on scientific perspectives on nutrition, health, and child development are valuable ECCE engagements on the ground.

Siblings, particularly the role of elder siblings who actively do co-parenting in our context, need attention. Several interventions focus on this aspect—of supporting siblings for their own education and schooling, as well as understanding the role of siblings in everyday care practices. There are other elements of this component that need attention. This is something to actively think about when planning comprehensive ECCE interventions.

At the family level, we can look into several interlinked aspects. These include mothers’ education, her health and pregnancy indicators, number of children, and parents’ routines and livelihood opportunities. We can also plan interventions with the knowledge of what kind of routines the adults (parents, grandparents, older siblings) in the family have with their children.

Having just functional conversations on daily routines is valuable, but not sufficient. Spending time with children telling stories, narrating personal experiences, and conducting play and simple activities in the home and the kitchen is desirable. Reading aloud to the children, and going to the marketplace along with them, are also critical.

The community and the neighborhood: The immediate community and neighborhood can potentially ensure the availability of basic infrastructure such as primary health centers, parks, safe and hygienic surroundings, sanitation and safe drinking water facilities, clean air and other aspects that influence young children’s health and well-being. While working with communities and family, and understanding the child’s microsystem in general, we could look out for general neighborhood facilities and infrastructure, sanitation, availability of clean drinking water at the village level, and toilet facilities at household and community levels, etc.

The quality of the ECCE center and its functioning is highly dependent on what the community demands and the support it provides. Community participation can be gauged in terms of contributions for resources for physical infrastructure, educational resources such as library books, toys, outdoor play material and other perishable resources including food/vegetables, etc.

Other quality engagements can also be seen as indicators. These include provision of a local volunteer or assistant educator, participation of youth, parents, grandparents, and other members of the community in engagement and learning.

Institutional care and education settings: Institutional care settings, and professionals who work within these settings, now exist within the child’s immediate micro-environment. Much of the support offered is also now programmatic in nature. These programs are often offered outside of the home and the family environment. Here, community workers or formally trained professionals engage children. Their understanding about children, development, playful learning, curriculum, their own professional development, and program management, all become aspects of active consideration for ECCE programs.

As practitioners in the field, while visiting and working with formal institutional care and educational settings, we ought to look out for the following.

We need to find out whether basic infrastructure such as clean, well-ventilated rooms, safety in the overall surroundings such as the location of gas burners and cylinder, roadside safety, and other aspects on hygiene and sanitation, availability of clean drinking water and toilets, etc. exists or not.

We also need to have a sense whether children are accessing the center or not. We need to know their family backgrounds, their regularity in participation, engagement in ECCE programs, and their parents’ involvement.

The professionals working in the space, which include the educators (Anganwadi teachers, assistant teachers, and helpers), are an important part of the ecosystem. The time they give on all aspects of childcare, especially educational engagement, the training programs they attend, home visits and other routines being followed, celebration of ECCE days and mother/parent-teachers meetings being conducted by the educators, are all critical aspects to look out for.

The system/officials who support the functioning of the Anganwadi centers or preschools (the principals/center managers, supervisors and other monitoring personnel) are equally important. The time they give on all overall visits, and the nature of their engagement during their center or preschool visit is crucial. We need to see whether they look at curricular aspects, or only administrative and data management aspects, and their professional development forums created by the department or school administration.

Landscape for ECCE engagements: curriculum and curricular resources

At the next level is the purpose, the processes, the content, and the people engaged in the development of curriculum and curricular resources for engaging all the key stakeholders involved in ECCE. Critical aspects include deliberations on their purpose, their focus, age-appropriateness, availability, and gaps. A gamut of areas including play material, play areas, outdoor and indoor material, books, etc. are to be explored as potential areas for quality ECCE programs in our context.

As ECCE professionals working on the ground, this requires understanding at two levels. First, at the level of the ECCE domain itself and what it calls for with respect to child development and learning. It involves a thorough grounding in holistic child development, its different sub-domains, the developmental pathways, and atypicality and diverse and unique trajectories for all children. Such a grounding should lead a practitioner to ask what kinds of early environments will support this development, and how this translates to organized curriculum and material resources that can facilitate this process.

Second, as practitioners, it is imperative to understand and be well-versed with the local and national vision of ECCE engagements in formal educational and care spaces. For example, what local state departments and national standards and curriculum recommend as curricular goals, learning standards, assessment practices, etc. A clear and deep understanding of this is necessary to develop and support appropriate play-based and experiential programs on the ground. This further embedded in the local cultural context such that the ECCE engagements among other aspects, also inculcate sense of belongingness and citizenship values in young children.

Some important learnings to focus on would be to ‘what not-to-do’ with children of this age group and the Foundational Stage of schooling, along with ‘what to do’ and ‘how best to work’ with young children to enable maximum learning and development. Integration of play in the curriculum and innovation with experiential modes to enable children to develop different ways to learn is crucial. The latter includes observation, trial and error methods, asking questions, imagining, and thinking through different dilemmas and making meaning of the world.

Practitioners also need to explore ways of supporting children to learn to read and write well, in multiple languages in our multilingual environments. Important questions to ask in this context are the following. What are some early experiences that will enable this learning? What will spark an interest in children and build their readiness in reading a variety of literature (and in writing), which is beyond textbook and subject-specific requirements?

Similarly, aspects on early inquiry, mathematical thinking and its development, use of local material and environment as a teacher, how to assess children such that assessment is a continuous and meaningful process also need consideration. And further, meaningfully locating all this in children’s own contexts and environments is critical. Working with parents, knowledge of local referral services, being resourceful to engage all stakeholders effectively are other critical aspects of early educators’ knowledge and capacity.

As professionals working on the ground, a third level becomes important. This involves the needs of those who support and mentor children on the ground. This would require thorough grounding in program management and processes of mentoring and support. It would also need a nuanced understanding of the quality parameters and standards that need to be ensured, and their contextual reference points in diverse Indian contexts. To be able to provide this grounded support, an understanding of ethics that all caregivers and educators will need to follow on the ground, is also important.

Landscape for ECCE engagements: policy initiatives

Policy-related aspects constitute the third layer of ECCE engagements. It is apparently the outermost, seemingly peripheral and distant. However, it is also the one that most directly influences every child. It is at the heart of key changes on the ground. Policy aspects of each of the areas of care and education demand attention with success stories of what works on the ground, and what needs contextualizing and further attention.

Programs don’t work in isolation. Local contexts, state-level priorities and availability of financial and other resources, including availability of full-time well-trained staff to ensure delivery of ECCE programs, determine the effectiveness of ECCE interventions and programs.

As practitioners, we need to collectively influence local policy decisions and advocacy based on what works on the ground. We should also build networks that can together advocate for evidence-based allocation of financial and other resources. We must also work toward developing policy makers’ intent and will to invest and focus on quality of early childcare systems and curricula. All of this is critical for ensuring high-quality early care and educational experiences.

In conclusion

Many aspects contribute to the overall quality of ECCE programs offered on the ground. These include the content, environment, local cultural embeddedness, skills, beliefs, values and dispositions of all who work at these levels. The relevant knowledge and attitude carried by stakeholders in families, communities, and institutional spaces is also critical. So are the ideas transmitted in the curricular resources, and the policy and program frameworks.

All levels and kinds of interventions and programs have a cumulative effect that influences the quality of ECCE for the young child. These have the potential to improve the growing child’s quality of life and overall development and well-being. The landscape of ECCE, therefore, offers a true window of opportunity. It is an opportunity for the children to achieve their optimal development potential. It also potentially offers our society a window to achieve its potential for collective transformation.