Child Care Facilities: Quality by Design
Discussions about the quality of child care most often revolve around what takes place inside any given child care center: curriculum and program content, adult-child ratios, teacher qualifications, and so on. Yet many of those factors — and ultimately, the quality of care in general — depend in no small part on the design of the center. This paper describes the interaction between building design and the quality of child care in more detail. It offers examples of effective efforts in Rhode Island and Connecticut to create superior child care facilities and recommends further steps to bring the issue more squarely into the discussion of what both communities and children need for health, growth, and success.
Executive Summary
Discussions about the quality of child care most often revolve around what takes place inside any given care center: curriculum and program content, adult-child ratios, teacher qualifications, and so on. Yet many of those factors — and ultimately, the quality of care in general — depend in no small part on the design of the center. The program’s staffing, content, and leadership are all crucial, of course, but so is the space itself. Inadequate or poorly designed space isn’t just unattractive or inconvenient, it actually reduces the effectiveness of the program — even when the other factors are first-rate.
Using the tools of community development
That observation calls for a new way of thinking, not just about child care, but about community development as well. The importance of buildings and architecture to the quality of child care means, among many other things, that the tools, techniques, and resources of community development can be critically important to the way children are cared for in low-income neighborhoods. For that reason, the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) and its Community Investment Collaborative for Kids (CICK) are working with dozens of community organizations and policymakers around the country to craft a deliberate, organized approach to the development of well-designed child care centers — both as a way of revitalizing communities and as a proven route to higher quality care for the children who live in them.
The relationship between the design of a child care facility and the quality of its program is more than just theory or conjecture. Recent research has lent objective weight to the connection between space and program effectiveness. A Connecticut study originally meant for quite different purposes unexpectedly turned up persuasive evidence that facility design can profoundly influence children’s experience in a child care center.