The BCQAS · Version 1.0
Quality matters
The BC Child Care Quality Assessment Standard is a quality assessment tool for licensed group child care programs in British Columbia. It is free to download and use.
Why it exists
Licensing sets a floor. It does not measure quality.
Licensed child care in British Columbia is regulated by the Ministry of Health through child care licensing officers. The Child Care Licensing Regulation sets basic health and safety standards: group sizes, educator qualifications, physical facility requirements, health standards, and a requirement to run a program offering cognitive, language, physical and social learning.
What it does not do is regulate curriculum, the quality of administration, or the quality of educator interactions. It does not require a licensed program to work with the provincial Early Learning Framework. It was never designed to measure quality, and it doesn't.
The BCQAS fills that gap. It is a self-assessment tool, not a licensing instrument and not a ranking. You are not required to submit your results to us, to the Ministry, or to anyone else.
The case for doing it at all is not only about children. In jurisdictions that use an accreditation or quality assessment standard, environmental and administrative quality improves — and educator turnover, one of the largest single factors in program quality, drops substantially.
How it's built
Six quality areas
Eighteen standards and sixty-two elements, covering the whole of a service rather than one room in it.
1 · Program & practice
Seven standards, twenty-seven elements — the largest area by some distance. Pedagogical choice and critical reflection, pedagogical narration, the BC Early Learning Framework, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, outdoor learning, diversity education, trauma-informed responses to behaviour, inclusion of children needing additional support, and social-emotional literacy.
2 · Health & safety
Sleep, rest and relaxation; illness, injury and hygiene; healthy eating and physical activity; respectful diapering; supervision and protection from hazard. Plus emergency procedures — defined, communicated to parents, and rehearsed monthly at different times of day and in different locations.
3 · Environment
Whether indoor and outdoor spaces, buildings and materials are suitable, safe, clean and accessible to every child; whether the space supports multi-modal learning and in-depth inquiry; early literacy; and environmental stewardship.
4 · Staffing
Whether educator arrangements nurture responsive, reciprocal, respectful relationships, and whether management and educators learn from each other as professionals rather than through a chain of command.
5 · Families & community
How families are brought into the service from enrolment and contribute to decisions, whether staff reflect the community, how complaints are handled, and whether the service works as a place where families can discuss and debate what they value in their children's education.
6 · Administration & leadership
Administrative, financial and human resource policy; clear roles and decision-making; legal compliance; a Quality Improvement Plan used for real goal-setting; orientation for new educators; and ongoing mentorship, including individualized training plans that move educators toward higher qualifications.
Scoring
Zero to four, per rubric line
Every element carries a list of rubric lines, and each line scores from 0 to 4.
0 if any item falls under "does not meet expectations" — regardless of how much is present at higher levels. 1 if nothing sits in "does not meet expectations" but only some of the "meets expectations" items are present. 2 when all "meets expectations" items are there. 3 when all "exceeds expectations" items are there. 4 for outstanding performance: everything at "exceeds", plus evidence of further steps toward excellence. Fours are unusual by design.
Rubric scores total to an element score, and elements total to a standard score. The document sets out the score bands for every element and every standard, so you can see exactly where a result lands.
Rubric lines are also tagged by service delivery area: program and planning, professional competence, learning community culture, parent community, materials and environment, pedagogical narration, administration, and mentorship. That cross-cut is what turns a score into a plan — it shows which part of the service needs attention, not just how you did.
A common question
Why more than ECERS?
A child care program is not the room it happens in. The environment is one factor among many, and measuring it alone gives you a score without telling you what produced it.
Take a reading area in disrepair. Is the program underfunded for materials? Do educators need professional development in inclusive practice? Are there no procedures for maintaining classroom materials? Is there no community literacy partnership, so classroom books carry all the load? Do educators get no administrative release time, leaving upkeep to unpaid hours? Is there no monthly maintenance review, no adequate cleaning service, no parent involvement expectation? Every one of those produces the same shelf, and every one needs a different fix.
The research on effective early childhood programs points the same way: a workforce that is appropriately skilled, trained and compensated, with continuing investment in professional development; rigorous program standards with ongoing training, technical assistance and continual quality improvement; small groups and strong ratios; a language-rich environment; developmentally appropriate curriculum; a safe physical setting; and warm, responsive adult–child interactions.
Outcome-based standards elsewhere — Alberta's accreditation standards, Australia's National Quality Standard, NAEYC's accreditation standards — all reach past the environment for the same reason. The BCQAS follows them.
A design choice
Prescriptive where it helps, open where it matters
Highly prescriptive instruments — ECERS, ITERS, Toronto's Assessment for Quality Improvement, NAEYC's accreditation standards — have a real advantage. They give a clear path to a higher rating, and they produce better inter-rater reliability, meaning two assessors tend to reach the same result.
Their cost is that they don't accommodate diversity of philosophy, they don't reflect BC's Child Care Licensing Regulation, and they leave educators little room for critical reflection about why a practice makes sense in their particular setting and community.
Open-ended, outcome-based standards do reflect the CCLR and the BC Early Learning Framework. They respect that quality is reached in different ways in different settings, and they assume educators are competent professionals with the autonomy to do their jobs. Their cost is interpretation: results shift depending on who is assessing — something anyone who has lived through licensing officer turnover in this province will recognise.
The BCQAS deliberately blends the two. Enough prescriptive detail, grounded in research and in BC's own regulations and frameworks, to show a service what to do next. Enough outcome-based room for educator autonomy, service philosophy and community context.
What we've seen
Using it in BC
Findings from our own research with BC programs using the BCQAS. This is association research rather than an independent peer-reviewed trial, and is worth weighing accordingly.
Educators preferred it
Educators reported preferring the BCQAS to other standards, because the rubrics leave room for teacher autonomy and individual pedagogical philosophy while still setting out a framework for quality.
Six months in
Educators and administrators reported measurable improvement in teaching skills, program quality and the program environment six months after first implementing it.
Parents noticed
Parents reported believing that program quality had improved when comparing before and after use of the BCQAS.
Free download
Get the BCQAS
No cost, no account, no email required. Download it, print it, and use it with your team.
BC Child Care Quality Assessment Standard
Version 1.0 (2019). The full standard, with every rubric and the scoring bands. 125 pages.
BCQAS Frequently Asked Questions
Why BC needs a quality standard alongside licensing, and why the BCQAS is built the way it is. 3 pages.
Prefer to work in Word? Both are also available as BCQAS.docx and BCQAS-FAQ.docx.
Using the BCQAS in a research project, a training programme, or across a group of centres? We'd like to hear about it — CCPofBC@gmail.com.
In child care, things are interconnected. Looking at one part of service delivery in isolation cannot tell you why quality is where it is. BCQAS Frequently Asked Questions
Where the evidence stands
Two things are worth holding together. Structural quality — ratios, group size, qualifications, space — is what a regulator can count, and it predicts what actually happens between an educator and a child only partially (Phillipsen et al., 1997). The largest Canadian study of centre quality found that in infant and toddler rooms, staff education and the number of adults in the room directly predicted measured quality (Goelman et al., 2006). That is part of why we treat wages and qualifications as quality issues rather than separate labour issues.
At the same time, associations between widely used quality measures and children's later outcomes are more modest and less consistent than the sector's rhetoric usually allows (Burchinal, 2018). We think that argues for exactly what the BCQAS is — an improvement tool a service runs on itself, not a score attached to funding. Campbell's point that an indicator degrades as more decision weight is loaded onto it (Campbell, 1979) applies to quality scales as much as to anything else.
References
- Alberta Association for the Accreditation of Early Learning and Care Services. Accreditation Standards.
- Australian Children's Education & Care Quality Authority. (2018). National Quality Standard Assessment and Rating Instrument.
- Bukutu, C., & Hanson, T. Caregiver turnover in Alberta accredited day care programs. Alberta Centre for Child, Family and Community Research.
- Burchinal, M. (2018). Measuring early care and education quality. Child Development Perspectives, 12(1), 3–9. doi:10.1111/cdep.12260
- Campbell, D. T. (1979). Assessing the impact of planned social change. Evaluation and Program Planning, 2(1), 67–90.
- Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. (2007). A Science-Based Framework for Early Childhood Policy.
- Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. (2007). Early Childhood Program Effectiveness (InBrief).
- Goelman, H., Forer, B., Kershaw, P., Doherty, G., Lero, D., & LaGrange, A. (2006). Towards a predictive model of quality in Canadian child care centers. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 21(3), 280–295. doi:10.1016/j.ecresq.2006.07.005
- Harms, T., Clifford, R. M., & Cryer, D. (2014). Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale (ECERS-3). New York: Teachers College Press.
- National Association for the Education of Young Children. Early Learning Program Accreditation Standards and Assessment Items.
- Phillipsen, L. C., Burchinal, M. R., Howes, C., & Cryer, D. (1997). The prediction of process quality from structural features of child care. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 12(3), 281–303.
- Toronto Children's Services. (2017). Early Learning and Care Assessment for Quality Improvement.
Questions about the BCQAS