Reviewing two national standards for child day care facilities : standard 5 and standard 6, are they reflecting today's needs?

Abstract

The new demands and challenges that early years practitioners face in a rapidly changing field may influence the development of the childhood and even along his/her lifetime. Some form of structural policy framework is inevitable to guide and assist them along the way to overcome the day-to-day challenges. In Malta, the publication of the National Standards for Child Care Facilities was a leap forward to ensure a better, safe and healthier environment for the children. The study has sought to focus on the application and re-evaluation of the national standards of the child day care facilities introduced in July 2006 by purposely selecting two National Standards that seem to be the founding foundations of the early years child's development. In order to conduct the study, five child day care facilities with particular geographical location or educational approach were explored to identify the level of compliance with the national standards of care in Malta. This study was carried out between December 2013 and April 2014 and provides significant insight on child day care in Malta. Basically, the design encompassed three main sources of references in order to collectively generate the triangulation methodology. First, by analysing local and foreign documentation on materials related to the child care facilities and standard policies. Secondly, five interviews carried out with every manager /co-ordinator of the centre and last by distributing questionnaires to service users whose children attend on regular basis. The findings show that most of the interviewees gave a lot of importance and substantial weight to the standard 6 which refers to the relationship between the parents. Even, the standard in itself makes continuous reference on the adoption of more participation and collaboration between/among parents/guardians. However some comments/remarks resulted from the questionnaire shows that although the carers do their best to try and build a strong relationship with the service users, it was still very indicative that in some instances this factors lacks and more efforts should be placed by the manager/co-ordinator to increase the level of participation with the parents/guardians mostly during the daily activities. Positively, it was quite visible that from the feedback received from service users clearly indicated that they have seen significant improvement on the development of their children during the time spend at the facility. Thus standing out that prequisits of compliance are eventually being reached by the facilities. In addition, along the study, it was indicative that other form of structural or unstructural educational methodologies could be introduce to enhance the skills of the children and the grey areas that have not been locally explored. It would also be interested to suggest that policy makers may participate more by getting more feedback from the service providers but also from the services users.