The EDUFIRST project working for early childhood education and care services begins at UVic-UCC

The four partners in the Improving Early Childhood Education and Care Services (ECEC) for inclusion, equity, community participation and climate justice (EDUFIRST) project, coordinated by UVic-UCC and with Jordi Collet as the principal investigator, met at the Casa Convalescència on 29 and 30 January for the launch meeting and to place the research on an official footing. In addition to UVic-UCC, the Barcelona Municipal Institute of Education, the city of Milan (Italy) and the city of Tempere in (Finland) will participate in this project, which is being funded by the Erasmus programme. The research aims to provide support for collaboration between cities in order to improve early childhood education and care services, based on training programmes, among other resources. 

The Kick-off meeting that took place in Vic last week was used to schedule the work for the next twelve months, draw up the script for the City Background Reports and the City Visit Guidelines that each city will provide to the other partners in the project, and create the framework for the main debates around which the project will be based. 

Shared challenges in Barcelona, Milan and Tampere 

The three cities participating in the project, Barcelona, Milan and Tampere, face shared challenges involving early childhood services in terms of which services to offer, what to do with the unmet demand, how to improve the quality of these services for children aged 0 to 3 years and their families, and how to enhance the professional development of educators, among other issues. In order to respond to a new model of ECEC services from the perspective of public policy, governance and pedagogy - the ultimate goal of the EDUFIRST project - the next steps to be taken in 2024 are the visits to the three cities. The goal is to find out about their services, as well as the challenges and difficulties they have, at first hand. 

After the visits, the three cities, led by the UVic team consisting of Jordi Collet, Laura Farré, Àlex Paniagua and Glòria Olmos (members of the UVic Education Research Group - GREUV), Verónica Jiménez and Mila Naranjo (members of the Attention to Diversity Research Group - GRAD) and Berta Vila (a member of the Applied Linguistics, Didactics and Literature Research Group - GLOSSA), will build a new model of ECEC services in 2025, taking advantage of the strengths and working to address the weaknesses identified in each city. 

To mark the visit by the representatives of the three cities to UVic-UCC, the lecturers Berta Vila and Francesca Davoli, who teach on the bachelor's degree course in Pre-School Teaching in the Faculty of Education, Translation, Sports and Psychology (FETEP) discussed the teaching and research work that takes place in the Teresa Buscart and Montessori classrooms, and the links with the educational community. The Serra de Sanferm Municipal Nursery School and the El Remei Municipal Family Centre in Vic were also visited, so that the foreign partners in the project could find out about Vic's project for early childhood and families. 

The EDUFIRST project will last for thirty-three months, and is scheduled to come to an end on 29 September 2026.