Education Co-Responsibility: Advancing Participatory Cultures in Early Childhood Education

Family participation is widely recognised as an important dimension of quality in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC), particularly in provision for children aged 0–3 years, where education, care, emotional well-being, and early development are closely interconnected. Within this context, relationships between families and ECEC professionals extend beyond conventional forms of parental involvement, as continuity between home and the early childhood centers becomes integral to children’s everyday experiences of learning and care. However, regular opportunities for communication and participation do not necessarily develop into sustained collaboration or become embedded within a participatory culture. This study examines how institutional self-evaluation in a municipal early childhood institution in southern Spain informed the diagnosis of existing participatory practices and the subsequent design of a participatory improvement strategy. A qualitative documentary case study was conducted using multiple sources of institutional evidence, including self-evaluation and planning documents, family communication and participation records, quality-improvement documentation, and reflective field notes generated during the self-evaluation process. Thematic analysis identified four interrelated conditions shaping family and community participation: reciprocal communication, trust and mutual recognition, opportunities for shared decision-making, and sustained community collaboration. The analysis further showed that existing participation was predominantly informative or associated with specific activities, while opportunities for families to contribute to dialogue and selected aspects of institutional decision-making remained limited. These findings informed the development of a context-specific participatory strategy and the conceptualisation of Education Co-Responsibility (EC-R) as an interpretative concept for understanding how complementary responsibilities among ECEC settings, families, and community stakeholders may contribute to the development of participatory cultures. The study provides an empirically grounded account of how documentary self-evaluation can connect institutional diagnosis with participatory planning in a 0–3 ECEC schools.

Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) in the twenty-first century operates

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