Striving for quality sounds like a no-brainer, but working out what quality really means, and how to cultivate it, can be more difficult.
One way of measuring quality is to look at child-to-staff ratios. Liz Truss's Affordable Quality report (in practice much more focused on the affordable than the quality) advocates increasing child-to-adult ratios in child care. As well as lowering costs, she suggest this could allow childcare worker salaries to rise, attracting those with higher qualifications in childcare, and therefore improving the quality of the care. While higher salaries could certainly play a part in raising the qualifications of the workforce, low ratios need to be protected. They are not only important for child outcomes in themselves, they also allow for further improvement and development of caregivers, giving more time for session planning, reflection, self-development and management.
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