Early Childhood Care and Education | Original Article

ABSTRACT:

Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) is widely acknowledged across the world as a critical component of education for all children. As a result, governments have been pursuing it with vigour. Many nations throughout the globe have made significant strides toward achieving ECCE as a result of many initiatives. However, most of them were unable to either fulfil this aim entirely or without compromising its quality owing to a lack of resources, poor planning, and insufficient implementation tactics this was particularly true in a large and populous nation such as India. Numerous initiatives have been undertaken by the Government of India in order to improve quality. These include policy and plan formulation, constitutional amendments and acts, the development of quality standards and a curriculum framework, schemes, and flagship programmes such as Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), District Primary Education Program (DPEP), and the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA). In this endeavour, India has made certain compromises with regard to the non-negotiable quality criteria for ECCE, which has resulted in the development of both predicted and unforeseen problems and difficulties. As a consequence, the nation has fallen short of its goal of assuring quality in the ECCE sector. Recent studies, on the other hand, show that significant progress has been made in the area of quality reform. While there are certain areas where there have been modest successes, there have also been improvements in other areas, demonstrating that maintaining quality is an achievable goal in many areas. The purpose of this paper is to summarise measures taken by the Government of India, to analyse the ground realities, to highlight fundamental hurdles in quality reform in early childhood education and care, and to recommend viable enablers to achieve the desired results.