Quality Improvement Principles

Providing a high quality early learning experience for all children is vitally important for their later life chances. Research shows that high quality early education, together with a positive learning environment at home, has a strong effect on children's attainment at the end of primary school. The same research also suggests that poor quality early education adds no more value than having no early education at all.

Focusing on quality improvement provides a way of making sure that all children get a high quality early education experience. Evidence suggests that children from black and minority ethnic families, disabled children and other groups at risk of exclusion, still fall behind in some aspects of learning and development before they reach school age. Quality improvement allows an ongoing focus on whether the needs of all children are being met.

Improvement must also be a continuous process. Constant and careful monitoring of every child's progress in learning and development - as set out clearly in the Early Years Foundation Stage- has to be at the heart of practice in settings.

Pdf file icon Quality Improvement Principles

Using the 12 Quality Improvement Principles

The National Quality Improvement Network (NQIN) hopes that, over time, quality assurance schemes and local authorities will evolve their quality improvement work to match the principles set out here. The network believes that the 12 principles will be particularly useful:

To identify the full range of components and the most effective practice in quality improvement support to settings, so that there is a consistent understanding and vision of quality.
To provide a basis for reviewing quality improvement approaches or quality assurance schemes to see how well they are doing and how they could improve.
To enable funders and commissioners of quality assurance schemes to assess the relative strengths of different schemes.
To contribute to local authorities' strategies to meet their new statutory duties to improve outcomes for children and reduce inequalities.
To shape training programmes for the practitioners and managers of settings, and for quality improvement mentors and verifiers.
To enable local authorities to work together within a common framework.
To provide a framework for multiple-site commercial providers to review their own quality improvement functions.

The approach based on the Quality Improvement Principles is not about compliance and ticking boxes against the DfES agenda; rather it is about enabling local authorities and national organisations to deliver their vision for setting quality, adding colour, innovation and creativity to the national framework. The NQIN will work nationally and regionally to support the long-term drive to bring about learning, change and improvement in settings.

For further details - www.ncb.org.uk

extract taken from the Quality Improvement Principles guide

Last Modified: 30/08/2007 10:03:12
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