Quality looks different depending on where you stand, and that is okay. Many years ago I read a paper by Lilian Katz that has stayed with me ever since. Katz suggested that the quality of an early childhood program can be viewed from five perspectives. Each one looks at the same service and asks a different question of it.
Top down. This is quality as regulators and assessors see it: ratios, qualifications, space and policies. These are the features we can count and check. They matter, but they only tell part of the story.
Bottom up. This is quality as the child experiences it, day after day. Katz asks us to imagine how the program feels from the inside of a child's day. Does the child feel welcome, safe and engaged? Is the day interesting and meaningful to them?
Outside inside. This is quality as families experience it, through the service and their relationships with staff.
Inside. This is quality as educators and staff experience it, through their work, their team and their leaders.
Outside. This is quality as the community and wider society judge it, and what they expect an early childhood service to be.
What I value most about Katz's framework is that no single perspective is complete on its own. A service can tick every regulatory box and still feel cold to a child. A team can love working together while families feel left out and unwelcomed
I want to stay with the outside inside perspective for a moment, because it invites us to think about what quality looks like for a family. When we talk about partnerships with families and their experience of an early years service, these questions might help us reflect:
- Am I greeted by name, and do staff know my child?
- Is my knowledge of my child valued?
- Can I understand what is happening, in a language and format that works for me?
- Am I asked, or am I told?
- Is my family's way of doing things respected, even when it differs?
- Do I trust the people who care for my child?
None of these questions show up in a ratio calculation or a policy folder. Yet for many families, they are the whole picture. A parent may never read our philosophy statement, but they will remember whether someone knew their child's name at drop off on a hard morning.
Quality is hard to define, but that does not mean we can set other people's perspectives aside. So what happens when our ideas clash? When a family's idea of a good day differs from ours? When what educators value is not what the community expects, or when a regulatory requirement sits uneasily with what a child needs in that moment?
Perhaps these tensions are not problems to solve so much as conversations to have. When we hold more than one perspective at the same time, we are more likely to notice who is being heard and who is not. That noticing is where quality begins to grow.
So I leave you with a question. Whose perspective on quality do you lean on most, and whose might you be missing?
