Exploring the quality of early childhood education and care environment in Bulgarian kindergartens

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article presents an exploratory study of educational quality in Bulgarian kindergartens at a time the educational system undergoes significant transformations in aligning with the principles shared by the majority of European countries. The focus is on the structural and process characteristics of quality, as measured by ECERS-3 on a moderately representative sample of classrooms (N = 40). The one-way repeated measures ANOVA revealed significant differences between five subscales. Care practices and positive social interactions scored highest, while subscales representing the common instructional approach scored lowest due to the insufficient learning opportunities tailored to the individual needs of children. The measures for quality improvement require the instruction to be more flexible with free-choice activities and play in small groups. Through the K-means analysis we identified three profiles of dimensions that characterise different classrooms. The cluster that covers the majority of classrooms with large size groups represents an overall mediocre quality across all aspects of the educational environment. Two other clusters depict the opposite profiles with the highest and lowest scores. The methodological findings of present study favour the application of multi-methods approach in quality evaluation and the involvement of multiple informants for better representation of universality and cultural specificity of educational context.