International Development and Early Learning Assessment Technical Paper

Early Childhood Care and Development (ECCD) programs help ensure that young children fulfill their right to healthy development and education, and ultimately assist them in reaching their full potential.

In the ECCD field, there are few international tools available that can be used to holistically measure children’s development and emergent skills. In 2011, Save the Children completed a comprehensive review of the existing child development assessments and documented a number of important limitations with existing tools. Many of the instruments available were limited in their approach, either targeting only one skill area or a specific age group and many were reliant on parent or teacher report rather than directly assessing children’s skills.

The goal for International Development and Early Assessment (IDELA) is to develop a holistic, rigorous, open source instrument that is feasible and easily adapted to different national and cultural contexts. IDELA was developed with an aim to support continuous program improvement across Save the Children’s and partners’ numerous country sites, to increase accountability among ECCD initiatives globally, and to offer cohesive and ongoing data and evidence about children’s learning and development across countries that can help governments and global actors to bring successful ECCD programs to scale.