www.thebabyroom.blog

Our project aims to advance high-quality provision in the baby rooms of English nurseries. To understand how quality is defined, measured, and supported around the world, we’ve undertaken a global literature review where we are diving deep into all things quality for under twos.

However, we’ve run into a dilemma when it comes to defining quality.

In our desktop review, we’ve found that when people try to ‘define’ quality, they default to listing a set of structural quality indicators (like teacher:child ratios, group sizes, and teacher qualifications) and process quality indicators (like caregiving sensitivity, continuity of care, and teacher-child interactions). Some research uses measurement tools such as the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale (ECERS) and Infant/Toddler Environment Rating Scale (ITERS) as proxies for a definition of quality. On a positive note, more recent research discusses other interesting elements when it comes to quality provision for babies, such as:

• Educator wellbeing
• Educator working conditions
• Parent-educator relationships
• Low-stress environments
• The role of context, culture, and identity in quality

While the elements above give us snippets of what quality could be, there’s no real understanding of how these elements interact with each other. More importantly, there’s often no coherent sense of quality overall – nothing that ties all the individual indicators together.

This dilemma has pushed us to think about whether we even really want to ‘define’ quality in this project. A definition pins an idea in place and could perpetuate a false notion that quality is rigid and set in stone. We believe that conversations around quality need to be more open than this, asking what quality means for different people and in different contexts. At the same time, we feel strongly that we need a shared sense of quality in the baby room so that we can be confident we are doing the right thing by very young children and their families.

If we avoided working towards a definition of quality – on the basis that this is too rigid a way to approach the question – what could we work towards instead?

The first thing that floated to our mind is a model of quality. But we worry that a model follows in the steps of a definition, unintendedly inviting a rigid and mechanistic way of approaching quality in the baby room.

We know that we need to work with the sector to create a vision of quality. A vision is specific to time and place, and it is forward-facing. However, by definition, a vision is an idea of how things could be in the future, an ideal state that does not exist yet. If we stick at creating a vision without further explaining how this works on the ground, we run the risk of producing something idealistic that feels unusable among government, training providers or the sector at large.

Perhaps the answer is to create a vision, followed by something more concrete such as a framework or a blueprint.

A blueprint is defined as ‘an early plan or design that explains how something might be achieved.’ We wonder if a blueprint of quality works in the sense that it is sensitive to the contextual and dynamic nature of quality while also offering a pragmatic way to achieve quality, ensuring that it is useful to the sector.

Over to you!

• Which of these terms do you feel works best in thinking about quality – definition, model, vision, framework, or blueprint? Do you think we need to choose one? 
• Is there a better word we’re missing?

References

Cambridge Dictionary (n.d.) Blueprint. In Cambridge Dictionary Online. Retrieved on 28 October 2024 from https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/blueprint

Cambridge Dictionary (n.d.) Vision. In Cambridge Dictionary Online. Retrieved on 28 October 2024 from https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/vision