220 | Quality Early Learning
schools’ financial management, personnel management, students’ learning, and the use of information.
Key Takeaways • Quality assurance systems can help improve school management and ECE service delivery. • Quality assurance systems entail monitoring and accountability measures, including –– Developing comprehensive and localizable standards; –– Establishing an evaluation, support, and accountability system based on data; –– Using data efficiently to promote compliance mechanisms and target support; and –– Empowering and evaluating school committees.
PUTTING POLICIES INTO PRACTICE This section puts forward the policy implications for diagnosis, implementation, and monitoring of effective ECE management and leadership. It draws policy implications from the evidence discussed in the previous section, but the main insights come from high-income countries and more developed school systems. Therefore, it is important to gather evidence as reforms progress in LMICs. This section presents a road map for decisionmakers to implement the principles outlined above to boost the effectiveness of management and leaders’ work in ECE centers to promote and support quality learning. The implementation plan is anchored in the development and support of the school leader as the fundamental element of effective management.
Diagnostics To implement managerial, policy, and quality assurance reforms in ECE, the current situation and policies must be understood. Only then will it be possible to identify concrete opportunities to make changes that increase quality. To gain a complete picture of the ECE system from the managerial, policy, and quality assurance standpoints, the following types of studies would be helpful: • ECE national context diagnostic of policies. The first task is to thoroughly map existing national institutions to gain a clear idea of how they operate. A key activity at this juncture would be to review evaluations (if they exist)
