Early Childhood Ireland’s focus on practice is about both improving everyday practice and learning from everyday practice, in early childhood care and education settings.
Two principles, in particular, guide our work:
- We believe that all children are competent, eager learners and we want to provide interesting and stimulating experiences for them, so that they have opportunities to demonstrate and stretch their competence.
- We also believe that early childhood practitioners are competent and we want to provide opportunities for them to share their learning and inspire each other.
What we do
Early Childhood Ireland’s core aim in practice is to help service providers and practitioners to work on quality improvement – so that they continue to improve the experiences they provide for children and families in their services.
Early Childhood Ireland works towards achieving this aim through developing and delivering:
- Government programmes such as Síolta, Aistear, Literacy and Numeracy etc.
- Quality programmes addressing specific area of practice such as our Quality Play Programme, Quality Outdoors programme, the Baby Room Project, Marte Meo Programmes
- Sharing learning based on our research and expertise and on our experience of working with services– through Learning Stories, Presentation and podcasts, research, involvement in projects such as the National Early Years Learning Initiatives, our Neighbourhood Play Research and our Musicians in Residence project with Common Ground
