IDELA: Fostering Common Solutions for Young Children

"In LMICs [low- and middle-income countries], there is limited guidance on the 'how to' of programs: how to get a return on investment and how to boost children's early development, especially for children from socio-cultural minorities."

Developed by Save the Children, International Development and Early Learning Assessment (IDELA) is a global tool that measures children's early learning and development and provides early childhood development (ECD) programmes, donors, and government partners with evidence on the status of children from 3.5 to 6 years of age. This report presents an overview of the instrument and shares a set of case studies that show the range of uses for ECD programme and policy implementation that IDELA can facilitate. As such, it is a resource for policymakers and practitioners working toward the global commitment to a multi-domain conceptualisation of child development and learning in the first years of life, as is articulated, for example, in Indicator 4.2.1 in Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 (the proportion of children that are developmentally on track in health, learning, and psychosocial well-being).

IDELA is a direct child assessment that spans four developmental areas: motor functioning, language and early literacy, numeracy, and socio-emotional development. IDELA also includes optional questions related to executive function (short-term memory and inhibitory control) and approaches to learning (persistence, motivation, and engagement). IDELA takes approximately 30 minutes to administer and is mostly done through tasks and games - for example, on letter and number identification or measurement and comparison. The child is asked to do things like draw pictures, listen to a story and respond to comprehension questions, count different quantities of beans, and identify ways to solve a conflict with a friend. Local materials can be used, and community members like teachers, health workers, and university students can be trained to reliably administer the assessment. Although IDELA is built around a set of 22 core items, work in varied national and cultural contexts proves that IDELA can be adapted to new settings, programme needs, and cultural and language contexts. For example, using IDELA with the Government of Bhutan added to the bank of questions around spiritual and moral development.

Since IDELA's public launch in September 2014, its uses and users have expanded, growing on average by one country each month. IDELA has now been used or is being used by Save the Children and by 22 partners (research institutions, international aid organisations, civil society organisations, and government bodies) in projects in 45 countries. "Its accessibility enables underfunded government ministries as well as small community service organizations to use the same tool as academic and multilateral institutions, thereby bringing them into the conversation." In partners' studies, IDELA uses have spanned many different types of programmes and sectors, including cash transfers, child protection, education in emergencies, health, inclusion, primary education, technology, and youth. Some ways in which IDELA is being used include:

• Governments, academics, international and local non-governmental organisations (NGOs), corporations, and private schools use IDELA to learn if and how early childhood education (ECE) interventions work for children, with a view to improving and expanding future interventions. For example, having identified the challenges that children face in Tanzania when entering primary school, UBONGO developed an ECE-focused education programme for pre-primary children. This show, Akili and Me, was designed in part around the IDELA competencies and created in conjunction with a Tanzanian creative team to ensure that the educational cartoon complied with international pre-primary standards and was in an environment familiar to viewers in Tanzania. Along with research partners from University of Maryland and Daystar University in Nairobi, the UBONGO team conducted a randomised control trial to assess the impact of Akili and Me on pre-primary children (4- to 5-years old) in Morogoro, Tanzania from low- and middle-income families. The children were assessed using IDELA before and after a 5-week intervention completed in the classroom. After controlling for differences in age, gender, and children's baseline knowledge, the research team found that children who watched Akili and Me demonstrated a 9% gain in fine motor skills and a 13% gain in emergent literacy as compared to children in the control group.
• IDELA allows partners to identify groups of children who may lag behind peers or not have programme access at all. For example, Lebanon is now sheltering over one million registered Syrian refugees; of the 126,000 refugee children of pre-school age, 90% have critically unmet ECE needs. To respond to this, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) began piloting a 4-month programme, Preschool Healing Classrooms (PHC), to respond to the needs of young children experiencing distress and displacement by providing nurturing, safe, and consistent learning experiences through play, exploration, and social interactions. The pilot PHC programme demonstrated "impressive gains across all the IDELA developmental domains", and, in the 2016-2017 academic year, IRC expanded its reach to 3,000 refugee children. An equity lens can illuminate the need for course correction, rendering interventions more effective for more children over time. For example, finding that children from minority language groups in Laos and Vietnam score significantly lower in literacy development than peers from the majority language group facilitates advocacy and additional inputs so the children reach the same skill level as their peers who speak the language of instruction in the formal schooling system (Save the Children, 2017).
• By using IDELA's measures and indicators, partners from across and within sectors and countries form a shared language where none might otherwise exist. This common language supports collaboration. One example of organisations coming together across contexts has been with excluded groups of Roma children living in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. Together, Open Society Foundations, Results for Development, Roma Education Fund, Save the Children, Step-by-Step Foundation, and the World Bank have been building evidence on ECE programming for Roma children in 14 countries in the region. While each team will have strong evidence for local programming, together their evidence in the region can be used at high levels of national and international decision-making.
• As countries set out to fulfill their commitment to providing quality early childhood care and development opportunities for all children, IDELA can help them identify areas for investment and solutions with promise. It also gives partners evidence to articulate the mismatch between current systems and what children actually need to succeed. For example, The Ministry of Education, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), Save the Children, and other national partners in Bhutan collaborated on an impact evaluation of the national ECE programme. This national assessment has led to new government and civil society initiatives to reach the most socially, culturally, and geographically marginalised children. In 2017, Save the Children and the Ministry of Health piloted ELM at Home, a modification of the national Early Literacy and Math (ELM) programme, in combination with UNICEF's Care for Child Development programme in areas where children do not have access to ECE centres.

In conclusion: "IDELA can be administered consistently in low-resource settings and can quickly identify which strategies will most effectively improve results for children. To shift the reality of children in LMICs we need to leverage measurement that proves what works; IDELA is such a lever."