How Does an Early Learning Centre Measure Children’s Progress?

No modern and responsible Early Learning Centre will ever view its mission as being to encourage competition between children in academic development.
However, parents and Early Learning Centre professionals need some mechanisms to ensure that a given child is progressing in line with anticipated norms for their age.

Early Learning Centres and progress measurement

When monitoring how a child is progressing, much use is made of globally established measures that give an approximation of what a child should be capable of at a given age. Such measures though can be very limited in their applicability, and they require interpretation in the context of every single individual child.

That’s because young children aren’t machines! To some extent, they defy measurement and categorisation. For example, a child may be ahead of expectations in reading skills but perhaps behind in another, such as drawing and writing skills. What specialist Early Learning Centre personnel will do is form an aggregate view of the child’s development, looking at their progress overall. Minor variations in one area may be of no significance whatsoever.

We always caution parents against consulting too many statistical charts relating to child development and ‘averages.’ They are useful and informative, in an academic sense, but they need to be interpreted in line with a broad and very experienced perspective of the child’s total abilities. It’s worth remembering that for an average to be an average, many children will, by definition, be either slightly ahead or behind it.

Where variations are broad-based

It’s not unusual to find a child who is either a little ahead or behind the ‘norms’ across a wider range of areas.

This is rarely cause for concern or an indication that they will necessarily always be a high academic achiever in later schooling. These measurements of performance may vary considerably through a child’s development and schooling.

Professional development personnel will have techniques available to help those who are developing a little more slowly to keep progressing and typically their pace of learning will increase gently over time.

Broad-based and inconsistent progress

In a few, relatively rare, cases, a child’s development may be consistently below averages for their age and across a wider range of subject areas. Those variances may also be larger than what might normally be covered when saying “a little behind”.

There is no obvious ‘yardstick’ for measuring this – much will depend upon the centre’s professional assessment of the child and their experience.

Again, this is not necessarily cause for major concern because there are sometimes huge and inexplicable variations in child development rates. However, where this is seen and remedial help is not having any significant effect, the Early Learning Centre would raise the subject with the parents concerned. They might recommend a specialist review of the child’s development progress.

Summary

No Early Learning Centre sees its role as being that of constantly administering tests and development progress checks. This is all done in a relaxed and ongoing observational way.

Where there are some minor delays and issues, they will be quickly addressed in an informal, tried-and-tested way using best practice methodologies. In almost all cases, a little extra help for children is fun and ultimately very successful.