Abstract:

Early Childhood Development (ECD) provides a solid foundation for child’s developmental needs. Through ECD endeavours children are prepared for life-long learning to eliminate potential delays that may deter their development. This enables early identification of children with challenges to provide support and arrange interventions where necessary in ensuring that children reach their full potential. Hence, this paper focusses on qualitative, equitable and sustainable Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) provisioning for the development of young children from 0 – 4 years. From the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s) number 5, children are to be provided with equitable education that is of good quality in preparing them for the primary education. This means that ECD centres should prepare young children for formal schooling. Despite that ECD sector has been prioritized, young children seem to be inadequately prepared for formal schooling as the challenges that they face beyond pre-school still prevail. This at times may be caused by practitioners’ inability to stimulate young children and the provision of early learning programmes that do not benefit young children. This may be aggravated by having children with learning difficulties. These challenges may affect quality of ECCE provisioning and may be perceived as compromising children’s development. This paper therefore intends to examine the quality, equity and sustainability of early childhood education provisioning from the selected pre-schools. This paper is underpinned by Vygotsky’s theory of social constructivism. This paper used interpretivist qualitative approach as it wanted to examine the ECCE provisioning for qualitative, equitable and sustainable development from the selected ECD centres and the role that is played by practitioners in ensuring that ECCE provisioning strives for sustainable development where all children regardless of their differences are afforded an opportunity to access quality and equitable education. Practitioners and ECD centre principals were selected purposively from Buffalo City Municipality, and data was collected from them through focus groups and semi-structured interviews. From the data collected, the results showed inadequate training and support of the practitioners, limited resources, physical space and cooperation of parents. Based on the findings, the study recommends the department to provide necessary support for practitioners to provide qualitative equitable ECCE provisioning for sustainable development. In addition, effort to establish and maintain stakeholder partnerships to be prioritized in order to maximize stakeholder collaboration and engagement to support the quality provisioning of ECCE. Furthermore, parental involvement to be strengthened for parents to understand and support their children's development and learning.

Keywords:

Early Childhood Care and Education, ECCE provisioning, ECD centres, Equitable, Inclusion, Partnerships, Practitioners, Qualitative, Stakeholder collaboration.