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High quality basic provision demands competent professionals: reflective practitioners, who get opportunities to learn from and with each other, the children, the families and the community. VBJK has been developing methods and tools to help practitioners to reflect on their own practice. How do you really integrate different perspectives in your daily work? What is pedagogical documentation? How...

Belgium has a split ECEC system. Children aged 0 to 6 can first attend childcare and then pre-primary school from the age of 2,5. VBJK looks into how children start kindergarten. The very first school experience What does it mean for a 2,5 year old to start school? What are the differences with countries that developed a more integrated ECEC-system, where children can attend one service until th...

Evidently, the core of ECEC services for young children are the daily interactions between the adult practitioners and the children and the many interactions among children themselves. How do you stimulate the child’s wellbeing? How do you make children, every single one of them, feel welcome and safe? How do you give children confidence in themselves? How can you manage that children can relate...

Growing children love to mirror themselves to adults. In order to develop different aspects of their own (gender) identity, it matters that these adults would be both women and men. In ECEC services however, reality shows that only few professionals are male. Women are the overwhelming majority in childcare, in pre-primary education and in parental support services. Campaigning for male professi...

Evolutions in society, movements in employment, trends in the living environment of children and families, changes in pedagogical ideas… they all influence the work in ECEC services for Early Childhood Education and Care. Emerging themes Both nationally and internationally, VBJK works with practitioners, policymakers and researchers. This keeps us on our toes with recent developments. We try to...

One plus one equals more than two. This is what drives different ECEC organisations, working for families, towards closer cooperation. Examples are the Flemish Family Centres, the cooperation between childcare and school towards smoother transition to kindergarten, the community based childcare centres, working together with other community services towards more inclusion and accessibility, out of...