From South Auckland to San Francisco with QIM
The Early Learning Taskforce and Ko Awatea presented at the second Annual Carnegie Foundation Summit on Improvement in Education in San Francisco in late February.
The presentation focused on the results of a joint project to increase participation in early learning and improve health outcomes in South Auckland using a Quality Improvement Methodology (QIM).
QIM follows a discipline of inquiry of practice using the Plan Do Study Act (PDSA) cycle. While QIM is regularly used in both international and national health settings, our project with Ko Awatea marked the first time in New Zealand QIM has been used in an education context with education professionals.
In the project, early childhood education (ECE) centre managers hypothesised about a potentially productive change, predicted the outcome, and gathered evidence to determine whether the change was an improvement. The results were analysed, and each change was then adopted, discarded, or revised and tested again.
Some ECE centres in South Auckland found they were facing a number of challenges in maintaining attendance rates (including financial hardship and poor health – from skin infections to head lice), which result in poor educational and social outcomes.
At the summit we heard about others who are doing similar work. For example, an organisation in Chile is also working with ECE services to improve attendance, health outcomes and oral literacy capability using a QIM model. Their 4 year project has had positive results for the children and families engaged in the centres.
The Summit highlighted that the QIM approach is being used in educational institutions in the US to improve learning outcomes and support teachers across the education pipeline. In Michigan, for example, it has been used to improve literacy and in Baltimore it has been used to retain first-year teachers.
It also demonstrated that when education administrators, managers and teachers are systematic about making improvements to their organisation and teaching practice, they are more likely to get positive results for the families and their children.
The Early Learning Taskforce made great connections with the delegation from Chile:
L to R: Monique Davies (Ko Awatea Middlemore Hospital), Jilly Tyler (Early Learning Taskforce, Ministry of Education), Francis Duran Mellado and Susana Toledo (Fundacion Educacional Oportunidad – Chile)