Starting Strong VI

Some of the workplace skills that we value most, whether it's curiosity and creativity, or an ability to think independently while still working collaboratively, are best developed in the earliest years of life.Early childhood education and care (ECEC), as children's first experience outside the home environment, holds immense promise for guiding children towards a positive and rich life-long learning and development path.However, this role of ECEC is coupled with great responsibility in not only ensuring access to but also quality of services.Historically, policies on ECEC have focussed on setting norms to safeguard the safety of young children, such as the formulation of standards on buildings, materials or staff-to-child group ratios.However, it is the quality of interactions which children experience, known as process quality, that matters most for their development, learning and well-being.This leads to two key questions:1. Which policies set the best conditions for children to experience high quality interactions in ECEC settings?2. To what extent are existing policies in OECD countries supportive of high quality interactions in ECEC settings?Fostering process quality involves designing policies in a way that best facilitates meaningful interactions in ECEC settings, going beyond simply a regulatory nature.This was the focus of the Quality beyond Regulations policy review, which the OECD developed to help countries and jurisdictions better support the different dimensions of quality in ECEC.This report summarises the main findings of the policy review and is accompanied by a website that presents policy indicators in participating countries and jurisdictions, clarifying their links to process quality.This report, Starting Strong VI: Supporting meaningful interactions in early childhood education and care, represents the culmination of the Quality beyond Regulations policy review undertaken between 2018 and 2021.