Home & Family in Early Care

Building Quality Relationships: Families and Early Care & Education Providers

Research shows that strong family-provider partnerships can lead to positive outcomes for children and families, including increased parental involvement in early care and education programs. In turn, policy makers, researchers, and practitioners are paying increasing attention to the quality of relationships between families and early care and education providers, to include: teachers, family child care providers, Head Start staff, and family, friend and neighbor caregivers.

Bank Street is engaged in several noteworthy efforts in this important area. What follows is a comprehensive resource listing of these efforts as compiled by faculty member Toni Porter, Senior Researcher in Bank Street’s Office of Innovation, Policy and Research.

The Family Provider Relationship Quality (FPRQ) Project. Funded by the Office of Head Start, and coordinated by the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation in the Administration for Children and Families, this four-year effort aims to develop a measure for assessing quality in relationships between families and providers. Project partners include Westat, Child Trends, the Erikson Institute and Bank Street College of Education.

The Project has produced two briefs:

• Family Provider Relationships: A Multidisciplinary Review of High Quality Practices and Associations with Family, Child, and Provider Outcomes; and,
• Family Engagement and Family-Sensitive Caregiving: Identifying Common Core Elements and Issues Related to Measurement.

Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS) and Family-Sensitive Caregiving. 

As interest grows in QRIS’s family partnership standards, Bank Street is actively engaged in research efforts that identify promising new approaches that assess these  aspects of quality.

It has produced:

• Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS) and Family-Sensitive Caregiving in Early Care and Education Arrangements: Promising Directions and Challenges (pdf), a brief on strengthening four QRIS family partnership indicators, and
• Currently is engaged in a paper on the alignment between QRIS and state Professional Development systems.

Tutu and Me. The College is engaged in a four-year longitudinal study of children who were enrolled in this Hawaiian family interaction program at age 3. The study seeks to understand the effects of Tutu and Me on children’s preparation for kindergarten. Research builds on earlier work with Tutu and Me, including an evaluation of its effects on caregiver quality, Tutu and Me: Assessing the Effects of a Family Interaction Program on Parents and Grandparents. (Note: Search by author, Toni Porter.)