Coordinating Health and Early Childhood Services

"Time is a dressmaker specializing in alterations." –Faith Baldwin

COORDINATING HEALTH AND EARLY CHILDHOOD SERVICES

The latest Policy Brief from UNESCO, "Cross-sectoral Co-Ordination in Early Childhood: Some Lessons to Learn," explores the importance of coordinating health services and early childhood services. This brief presents the elements of successful co-ordination. For example....

Co-ordination mechanisms are effective..."when their function is to co-ordinate a particular early childhood programme. For instance, in 2000 the Government of Singapore, seeking to co-ordinate pre-school education programmes provided by both the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Community Development and Sports, set up a Pre-School Education Steering Committee, with the MOE designated as the lead ministry. With imput from the Committee, to date a common kindergarten curriculum framework has been launched to be used by both services and a Kindergarten Bill is being prepared. Through another joint committee, the two ministries have also successfully developed a joint training framework for pre-school teachers and accredited training courses and trainers for the required preschool training courses, important steps towards the country's development of a common system of pre-school teacher training to improve the quality of teachers."

The complete policy brief can be found at http://www.unesco.org/education/educprog/ecf/pdf/brief9en.pdf.

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