Children Don’t Just Receive Quality in Preschool—They Help Create It

For decades, the science of early childhood education and care has been built on a deceptively simple assumption: that quality is something educators deliver and children receive. A major new review published in Educational Psychology Review argues that this assumption is not only incomplete but may be actively undermining efforts to make early education equitable. Drawing on three decades of research, the review, led by Samantha Bly, Sandy Houen, Sally Staton, and Karen Thorpe of The University of Queensland’s Queensland Brain Institute, contends that quality in early childhood education and care, or ECEC, is profoundly relational. It is co-created in the daily interactions between educators and children, which means that each child—and the collective of children in a classroom—shapes the quality of provision as much as the adults do.

The starting point for the argument is well established in developmental science. Children are not passive recipients of their environments; they actively shape the experiences and interactions they encounter. Research on parenting has long acknowledged that children are not only moulded by parents but also shape parenting in return. Yet far fewer studies have considered the inputs that children and groups of children bring to ECEC services. When children walk through the door of a preschool or childcare centre, they carry with them unique individual characteristics and experiences of their home and community. These influence their behaviour and their capacity to engage in learning, for better or worse. Because ECEC is a group setting, the characteristics and circumstances of all children in the room influence the demands placed on educators and their capacity to facilitate high-quality, responsive learning experiences. When classroom resources are limited, or even equal across classrooms where some children need far more individualised support, inequity is inevitable.

The stakes are high. Children spend long hours in ECEC services, and government investment in early education rests on the promise that these settings can deliver optimal developmental opportunities, especially for children whose home and community circumstances may limit their educational prospects. The review’s central claim is that delivering on that promise requires abandoning one-size-fits-all models of quality. The authors are careful to stress that the aim is not to assert that children, families, or communities have deficits, but that ECEC should be responsive to the requirements of each—and that responsiveness may require different levels and types of resourcing to achieve equity.

Teaching and learning in the early years centres on the relationship between educator and child, a relationship one pair of researchers has memorably described as “a dance.” Interactions in ECEC set the foundations of ongoing learning, extending beyond constrained curriculum content to unconstrained skills such as regulating emotions, getting along with others, and learning how to learn—skills with enduring effects. Structural characteristics like curriculum, physical resources, staffing levels, and qualifications are enablers of quality, but the evidence places interactional quality between educator and child as the key predictor of child development. Crucially, that relationship is reciprocal and bidirectional: educators, each child, and the collective of children co-create quality.

Yet standard measurement tools tell a different story. The review analyses widely used instruments such as the Classroom Assessment Scoring System for pre-kindergarten and the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale, and finds that they disproportionately weight educator actions. In the Instructional Support domain of CLASS-PreK, for example, three of four dimensions are described entirely in terms of what the teacher does, with only one dimension focusing on genuine educator-child interaction. The scales also place heavy weight on verbal interactions, which limits their capacity to capture non-verbal strategies such as pauses and silences that encourage children to drive their own learning, and may fail to capture cultural variation in relationship norms and interaction styles. These limitations may explain why professional development interventions, which have succeeded in changing educator behaviours to align with standard definitions of quality, have delivered negligible effects on children’s developmental outcomes. The problem, the authors argue, is treating quality as standard rather than responsive.

To understand how the field arrived here, the review updates a 2020 systematic review of classroom composition and quality, extending the search to 2025. The combined literature reveals a consistent pattern: with the exception of gender, studies report significant associations between demand on educators—indexed by younger child age, higher learning needs, greater disadvantage, and minority status—and reduced interactional quality. Heterogeneity of class composition is likewise associated with poorer observed quality. But the authors also document a striking trend: publications examining demographic composition peaked between 2010 and 2020 and then declined precipitously. They hypothesise that researchers have recognised the limits of demographic designs, which consistently replicate a problem without informing the actions needed to fix it.

Demographic variables, the review argues, serve only as distal proxies for demand. They do not measure intersectionality, directly index child requirements, or capture the influence of an individual child on an educator or classmates. Evidence from school-sector studies is instructive. A behavioural-genetic twin study of children aged five to twelve found that children’s challenging behaviour—irritability, negativity, impulsivity, distractibility, and hyperactivity—rather than ability, was the major source of demand on teachers, and that a single child presenting behavioural challenges can limit the educator time available to every classmate. An experimental study manipulating classroom grouping found that students placed with children with behavioural difficulties had poorer academic outcomes. Importantly, such behavioural challenges are often social in origin, predicted by adverse and traumatic events, hunger, and tiredness. And the consequences flow back to the workforce: children who place higher demand on classrooms can diminish educator wellbeing and even catalyse staff turnover, which in turn disrupts the attachment relationships that underpin quality.

What would better science look like? The review proposes finer-grained, individualised measurement of each child’s input across the varied activities of the ECEC day, paired with research designs that disaggregate child and educator contributions. Borrowing logic from behavioural genetics, the authors outline three designs. A “same educator, different day” design exploits the fact that class composition changes daily in daycare, holding the educator constant while composition varies. A “same educator, different event” design observes the same educator across activities that carry different levels of demand—transitions, mealtimes, and sleep times are known to be more challenging than free play. Finally, a “same child, different educator” design follows focal children longitudinally as they transition between educators, isolating the child’s contribution to quality. A school-sector study of the same teacher working with different mathematics classes offers a template, finding that student characteristics contributed seven to thirteen percent of the variance in instructional quality across individual lessons.

The policy implications are equally significant. Because children requiring higher levels of educator support are not evenly distributed across communities, the authors argue for proportionate universalism: universal access to ECEC, but with greater intensity of resourcing for services experiencing higher complexity and demand. Targeted, wrap-around interventions in highly disadvantaged communities have demonstrated improved equity in child outcomes, providing empirical support for the approach. Enacting it, however, requires better measurement. Administrative data on child developmental vulnerability at school entry can guide community-level tailoring, but geographic indices may miss children who need support outside low socio-economic areas. Quality Rating and Improvement Systems offer a finer-grained lever, but the review documents how early test-based approaches have proven costly, inefficient, vulnerable to gaming, and stressful for educators. Emerging collaborative models of quality improvement, which gather localised information from families, providers, and educators, present an opportunity to co-create quality between government agencies and ECEC services.

For practice, the message is that supporting educators is inseparable from supporting children. Educator wellbeing is consistently associated with the capacity to be responsive, and is shaped by personal circumstances—most educators are women whose pay and conditions are generally poor—and by organisational decisions about leadership, staffing, agency, and professional development. Children’s wellbeing matters too: a hungry child cannot take advantage of learning opportunities, making food provision an essential component of the program rather than an optional extra. Deep engagement with families and communities takes time and resources that are often unrecognised. The review’s conclusion is blunt: when children and educators enter an ECEC service, they do not leave their personal and community circumstances at the door. High-quality early education is fundamentally responsive, and achieving it requires not only well-trained educators but tailored resourcing that enables quality to be enacted at the frontline—delivered, measured, and funded with the child, the children, and the community at the centre.

Subject of Research: The role of child and classroom contributions in shaping equitable, high-quality early childhood education and care

Article Title: Community, Children, Child: New Directions for Equitable Delivery Of High-Quality Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC)

Article References: Bly, S., Houen, S., Staton, S., & Thorpe, K. (2026). Community, Children, Child: New Directions for Equitable Delivery Of High-Quality Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC). Educational Psychology Review, 38(1), Article 120. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-026-10215-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10648-026-10215-7

Keywords: early childhood education and care, ECEC quality, educator-child interactions, classroom composition, child contributions, educator wellbeing, interactional quality, equity, proportionate universalism, quality measurement, challenging behaviour, classroom research design