Leading and Enhancing Quality Improvement in Early Childhood Education and Care

Dear Colleagues,

Quality improvement is increasingly recognized as an essential component of a strong early childhood education and care (ECEC) sector. Many approaches have been developed to enhance quality across various levels of ECEC systems, including improvement efforts within ECEC programs, institutions of higher education or professional associations, and state/regional/national ECEC systems and policies.

In practice, quality improvement efforts across these contexts require coordination, shared responsibility, and collective engagement across roles and system levels. As a result, leadership is a key driver of improvement. Leadership can be understood as a highly relational, collaborative process through which individuals and groups work together to influence positive change toward shared goals. Defined in this way, leadership is not ascribed based on a role or job title, but rather is inclusive of all those working to improve practices, programs, systems, policies, and outcomes.

While quality improvement is widely recognized as important in ECEC, and continuous quality improvement is often identified as a goal, many gaps remain in knowledge about how to effectively lead, enhance, and sustain quality across multiple levels of the system. For example, there are gaps in our understanding of (1) what approaches are effective for improving quality in different ECEC contexts and settings; (2) how leadership practices within ECEC programs (by administrators, early educators, support staff, and/or parents) can, or might, influence quality improvement in those settings; and (3) what it takes to implement quality improvement efforts at scale (either across all employees within an ECEC setting or across all ECEC settings within a state/region/country).

This Special Issue invites rigorous investigations that address existing gaps in our understanding of what makes quality improvement efforts effective across different ECEC settings and/or at multiple levels of ECEC systems. While there are many ways of conceptualizing what quality is, the focus of this Special Issue is on the capacity to improve quality as defined in the local or study context. We welcome original empirical studies (employing qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods research designs), systematic reviews and/or meta-analyses, and theory-driven contributions that extend the field’s understanding of the role of leadership, broadly defined, in quality improvement across the ECEC sector serving children up to the age of five.

Potential topics include (but are not limited to) the following:

1. What is needed for the effective implementation of quality improvement initiatives in specific or various ECEC settings?
2. What is needed for the scaling and sustainability of quality improvement in specific or various ECEC settings?
3. What is needed to build capacity for continuous quality improvement in various ECEC settings and contexts?
4. The role of leadership in ECEC quality improvement efforts.
5. The role families can or do play in enhancing quality in ECEC programs.
6. The policies or systems that contribute to or promote quality improvement in ECEC programs.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Anne Douglass
Dr. Yujin Lee
Dr. Tamara Halle
Dr. Kathryn Tout
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• early childhood education and care
• leadership
• quality improvement
• policy
• continuous quality improvement
• parent leadership
• teacher leadership