TALIS Starting Strong is a collaborative effort, bringing together expertise from participating countries that share an interest in developing a survey project to inform their policies about the early childhood education and care (ECEC) workforce and quality of provision. This report is the product of collaboration and co-operation among the member countries of the OECD participating in the first round of TALIS Starting Strong. Engagement with bodies representing teachers (Education International) and regular briefings and exchanges with the Trade Union Advisory Council (TUAC) at the OECD have been very important in the development and implementation of TALIS Starting Strong. In particular, the co-operation of staff and leaders in the participating centres has been crucial in ensuring the success of TALIS Starting Strong.
In the context of OECD objectives and the programme of work and budget of the OECD Education Policy Committee, the Extended ECEC Network on TALIS Starting Strong, a sub-group of the OECD Network on Early Childhood Education and Care, has driven the development of the project and its policy objectives. This includes the objectives of the analysis and reports produced, the conceptual framework and the development of the TALIS Starting Strong questionnaires. The Extended ECEC Network has also overseen the implementation of the survey and the preparation of this report.
Participating countries implemented TALIS Starting Strong at the national level at national project centres through, among others, national project managers (NPMs), national data managers (NDMs) and national sampling managers (NSMs), who were subject to rigorous technical and operational procedures. The NPMs played a crucial role in helping to secure the co-operation of ECEC centres, to oversee the national adaptation, translation and validation of the questionnaires, to manage the national data collection and processing and to verify the results from TALIS Starting Strong. The NDMs co-ordinated data processing at the national level and liaised in the cleaning of the data. The NSMs were responsible for implementing TALIS, respecting sampling procedures and other rigorous technical and operational procedures. In addition to the nine participating countries, the United States, United Arab Emirates and Kazakhstan have contributed to the development of the questionnaires.
A Questionnaire Expert Group (QEG) was established to translate the policy priorities into questionnaires to address the policy and analytical questions that had been agreed by the Extended ECEC Network. A Technical Advisory Group (TAG) was assembled to advise during the decision-making process for technical or analytical issues. A group of subject-matter experts and analysts were also critical in the analytical phase and drafting of the initial reports.
The co-ordination and management of implementation at the international level was the responsibility of the appointed contractors, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), its consortium member Statistics Canada (Ottawa, Canada), and Rand Europe (Cambridge, United Kingdom). The TALIS Starting Strong Consortium included staff from the IEA offices in Amsterdam and Hamburg, Statistics Canada and Rand Europe. The IEA Hamburg was responsible for the overall survey planning, sampling, survey administration and the international data management. The IEA Amsterdam was responsible for overseeing the verification of the translation and for quality control in general. Rand Europe managed the development of the survey instruments and conceptual framework. Statistics Canada, as a subcontractor of the IEA Hamburg, served as the sampling referee.
The OECD Secretariat had overall responsibility for managing the project, monitoring its implementation on a day-to-day basis and serving as the secretariat of the Extended ECEC Network on TALIS Starting Strong.