‘Critical role’ of play in early childhood

THE importance of play, relationships and language for young children are the focus of guidelines which will be used by early education centres offering a year of free pre-school from January.

The early childhood curriculum framework is designed to support learning from birth to the age of six in any setting, but will be particularly relevant to the 4,200 providers who have already applied to offer the service announced in the budget last April. This represents about 90% of existing pre-school services and almost 100,000 are estimated to be available next year.

The National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) has spent eight years developing the Aistear framework, which will also be a training guide for those intending to work in early childhood education.