Parents and Teachers‘ Voices of Quality Preschool: Preliminary findings from Indonesia

This paper describes preliminary findings of a study on Indonesian teachers and parents’ perspectives of quality preschool program. It departs in one hand from the context of the Indonesian government massive promotion of early childhood programs and on the other hand of the country top-down, government-dominated quality system. Moreover, it is contextualized within the growing body of literatures, which emphasizes the centrality of quality issues to early childhood service and the notion that quality is a complex, contextual, multifaceted construction and idea. This study found that even though parents and teachers’ constructions of quality share some commonalities with those of the government-constructed ones, they significantly differ. The government-constructed quality framework for example emphasizes on teacher formal qualification, but teachers and parents have moved beyond such formality and urged the importance of teacher personal character

Keywords –early childhood education, Indonesia, parent, teacher, quality.