Diversity+

The high quality, inclusive Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) is an essential foundation for children’s successful lifelong health, learning, social integration, and personal development. It can also help close the achievement gap for children from vulnerable and disadvantaged groups and provide them with the best start in life. Yet, ECEC facilities, approaches and services have not always been designed and professionals prepared to meet the pluralistic needs of all children and their families.

What Diversity + project aims to?

To address these challenges Diversity+ aims to provide ECEC professionals, managers and practitioners with governance, benchmarking, recognition and professionalization tools to help them transform their practice and open up to diversity that exists among children and families.

What are we going to do?

This three-year project will develop concrete and practical resources that offer a structured and supported approach to quality inclusive service design. The toolkit will contain:

A Diversity+ Charter to set out the minimum requirements for an ECEC organization to be considered as “Diversity positive”;
An interactive digital Assessment tool which ECEC practitioners and managers will be able to use to assess current services and track improvements;
A “European Qualification Framework” (EQF) profile and training resources to profile key knowledge, skills and attitudes required to respond to the individual needs of children from different backgrounds or with special educational needs
A set of thirty interactive games that will help ECEC practitioners to work with children on recognizing and addressing biases, prejudice, discrimination, and exclusion, to sustain critical thinking in children, and support them to speak out for themselves and others, and threat everybody with empathy and respect regardless of their origin, gender, background, level of abilities, language and other existing differences.

Who is involved?

The project is led by the Italian partner CIAPE, and it involves other partners such as Link Campus University in Italy, Aspire-Igen in UK, Fondatsiya na Biznesa za Obrazovani in Bulgaria, Skola Dokoran in Slovakia, and Schola Empirika in the Czech Republic. ISSA contributes to the project by providing technical support for the development of different tools and resources, and leads its dissemination activities.

Diversity+ Toolkit

Diversity+ Charter

A set of minimum requirements that ECEC services and institutions have to meet to accommodate different types of diversity and be classified as inclusive and diversity positive (Diversity+). The Diversity+ Charter aims to provide practical guidelines and recommendations on how to make the ECEC environment more inclusive. Read more.

Read more about the Diversity+ Charter

Diversity+ Footprint Assessment Tool

Based on the European Quality Framework for Early Childhood Education and Care, this interactive digital tool is meant to support ECEC officers - often not specialised in diversity inclusion - to assess current services and mostly understand in a visual way the concrete, necessary steps needed to improve their provision. The organizations rated as having an ‘excellent’ Diversity footprint get a Certificate likely to increase the prestige of the organisation itself and encourage others to undertake a similar path.

Read more about the Diversity+ Footprint Assessment Tool

EQF of Diversity Ambassador in ECEC environments

The "European Qualification Framework of Diversity Ambassador in ECEC environments” is expected to improve ECEC HR management, to profile key knowledge, skills and attitudes required to respond to individual and group needs of children from different backgrounds and with special educational exigencies. Specific learning resources complement the EQF profile in order to smoothly develop the role of a Diversity Ambassador: key feature of a diversity positive ECEC provision. Also, the tool eases the readability of the profile, thus ultimately the professionals' mobility, across Europe.

Download: ENGLISH | BULGARIAN | CZECH | ITALIAN | SLOVAK

Read more about the Diversity+ Ambassador

Diversity+ Serious Game

An online game-based tool with 30 interactive scenarios, addressing teachers and other staff in early childhood education and care (ECEC). The animated scenarios are built around common situations arising in everyday dynamics related to discrimination, racism, bias and stereotypes.

Play the interactive scenarios ENGLISH | BULGARIAN | CZECH | ITALIAN | SLOVAK

Diversity+ eBook

The Diversity+ eBook aims to present the variety of approaches found across different European countries during the research phase of the project, and to provide examples of inspiring practices and solutions to existing problems. Read more.

Download: ENGLISH I BULGARIAN I CZECH I ITALIAN I SLOVAK