ECD practitioner professionalisation on learning through play
Challenge:
On 1 April 2022, the Government of South Africa migrated the responsibility for Early Childhood Development (ECD) from the Department of Social Development to the Department of Basic Education (DBE), setting in motion the process of ensuring free and compulsory ECD for all children, for two years prior to entering Grade 1. This function shift underlines the ambition of the Government to focus on the delivery of an integrated and aligned model that will ensure access to quality early learning and development opportunities for all children in the country.
Key players in ensuring quality early learning are the ECD practitioners and leaders of schools and ECD centres. Many ECD practitioners are not fully qualified as teachers yet. The function shift creates great opportunities to address several important aspects related to ECD practitioner professionalisation. To ensure that the curriculum and pedagogies in the early years are rooted in effective, play-based approaches, practitioners need effective professional development support. This support is needed at scale, with limited resources in the system to provide it, hence the cost and scalability of professional development models needs to be considered.
Goal:
ECD practitioners at national and provincial level have strengthened competencies to apply pedagogies of learning through play.
Partners:
Approach:
To support the function shift, the project centres on strengthening the professional development of ECD practitioners, focusing especially on play-based learning approaches.
The project is built around two pillars:
- Vision-building and the development of professional teaching standards, pathways and guidelines for ECD practitioner professionalisation at national level.
- Strengthening the competencies of the relevant government officials, Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) and other stakeholders on ECD and LtP at provincial level. KwaZulu-Natal is the largest province in South Africa in terms of population, hosting almost a quarter of South Africa’s learners, teachers, and schools, with a large part of the school population coming from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Adhering to a path-to-scale approach, the partners collaborate throughout the project in the following phases:
- Conducting a mapping exercise to take stock of the existing professional development materials and models for ECD practitioners.
- Development and validation of professional development materials and models at limited scale.
- Piloting and assessing the effectiveness of the approach at scale in KwaZulu-Natal province, targeting 200 centre/school leaders and 1000 ECD practitioners.
- Further scaling of the approach in KwaZulu-Natal province, involving additional external professional development providers, targeting 1800 centre/school leaders and 9000 ECD practitioners.
The efforts undertaken at provincial level at the different phases of the project are used to draw lessons to feed into the strategic policy objectives at national level.
By the end of the project:
- National government and other relevant national stakeholders have developed a shared vision, standards and guidelines for ECD practitioner professionalisation / professional development on LtP.
- The KZNDoE and CSOs at provincial and district level have improved knowledge and skills to actively support LtP.
- 10,000 ECD practitioners have improved knowledge of play-based teaching and learning methodologies.
- 2000 school and ECD centre leaders are better equipped to support the professional development of ECD practitioners in their centres and schools.
- Parents and caregivers of children enrolled in ECD centres and schools support the use of LtP in ECD.
- 480 000 young children benefit from strengthened play-based learning.
