Improving Preschools Evaluation in Serbia, Monitoring Project PDO in Quality

One of the key ”Inclusive Early Childhood Education and Care” Project objectives is to improve monitoring and evaluation of the preschool education quality in order to secure informed decision-making and enhance learning conditions and well-being of children.

The Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development, in close cooperation with the Institute for the Education Quality and Evaluation and the European Policy Centre, has initiated the activities that would contribute to the improvement of external evaluation through supporting the implementation of the revised Preschools Quality Work Standards.

In recent period, the Consultative Group has been formed (comprising twenty professionals – education advisors and preschool practitioners) and education quality evaluation experts hired, who jointly developed descriptors for different levels of achievement of quality standard indicators (at the levels 2 and 4), as well as corresponding tools for gathering data on the quality of work in preschool institutions. The developed tools were successfully piloted and their metric characteristics tested.

Another result of this fruitful cooperation was the development of methodology for monitoring the project development objective (PDO) in the area of preschool quality that would serve as a base for the preparation of baseline and endline studies dealing with project activities affecting prechool education quality (the studies will be available by the end of 2019 and in 2022 respectively). In the forthcoming month all education advisors from school directorates will receive a two-day training on new Prechool Curriculum Framework, and attend a one-day conference on the apllication of tools for evaluation of the quality of work in preschool institutions.