Survey on day-care centers ongoing

An inter-agency council is now conducting a nationwide survey of the country’s day-care centers and workers to determine the quality of services they provide and to pinpoint the areas that need to be improved to enhance early childhood care and development (ECCD).

Former Sen. Teresa Aquino-Oreta, who now heads the ECCD Council, said the council initiated the survey in order to know the state of all day-care centers operating in the country and to determine the qualifications of the workers running them. She said the results of the survey would enable the council to find out how else the council’s partner agencies could help.

The Departments of Social Welfare and Development, Education, and Health; National Nutrition Council; and Union of Local Authorities of the Philippines (ULAP) are Council members.

The data gathered, Aquino-Oreta said, would be used as benchmark in standardizing the quality of day-care centers and workers in the country.

The survey among the 48,430 day care workers aims to find out their capabilities, competencies, conditions and personal circumstances. Supervisors or mentors of day-care workers will also be included in the survey.

“We want to come up with a competency framework for the standardization of day care workers and be able to come up with more programs and trainings for them,” Oreta said, adding that the same results would be used to come up with a national data on day-care workers.

Oreta further said that with the survey results, the council could choose the best practices in pre-school teaching and replicate these in day-care centers in other areas.

Aquino-Oreta, who spoke before ECCD stakeholders from the Visayas, cited as example some local government units (LGUs) in Metro Manila that are sponsoring ECCD/pre-school training for their day care workers.

She also said that with figures showing more than half of those who enter Grade One have no learning experience at all, the council had decided to strengthen its ties with stakeholders and non-government organizations to bring pre-school kids together, even in a non-classroom setting, and teach them.

Mothers, on the other hand, should also be made to realize the importance of enrolling their children in day care centers and not just wait for the time their six-year-old child enters Grade One, Oreta added. –PNA