Early Childhood Care and Education collection: Evaluation of the Early Years Programme of the Childhood Development Initiative (ECCE), 2008 – 2011

The Early Years Service was a two year service for preschool children, with integrated health care, wrap-around supports and professional development elements. The programme sought to strengthen children’s positive dispositions to learning through enjoyable, challenging and enriching opportunities within the family, education and care facilities and community to enhance their well-being, identity and participation. Specifically, it sought to make pre-school children more ready for the transition to school by achieving moderate improvements in relation to the following: All domains of the child’s development, including physical well-being, social and emotional development, approaches to learning, language development and emergent literacy; Parent psychological health, as well as the quality of parents’ relationships with the child and their parenting skills; and The child’s environment – social relations in the home, school and community, improving outcomes for the child, through a focus on the child’s family and environment. The programme was evaluated between 2008 and 2011 by the CDI Evaluation team at the Centre for Social and Educational Research at the Dublin Institute of Technology and the Institute of Education at the University of London. The programme was evaluated using a two-pronged approach, and included (1) a quantitative assessment of the programme (this data is being archived with ISSDA) and (2) a qualitative assessment of the implementation ‘process’. The evaluation sought to answer the following questions: To what extent did participation in the programme result in better outcomes in terms of child development (cognitive, language and social)? Did parental participation in the programme result in better outcomes (parental stress, parent estimation of child social skills and behaviour, home-learning environment)? Did service participation in the implementation of the programme result in better outcomes in terms of environmental quality (curricular, process and structural)?