NOREQ-ECEC Conference

The evidence for educational leadership in improving quality of teaching and learning

Professor Iram Siraj will draw on research evidence to show how successful leaders improve the quality of teaching and learning and thus children’s development … most powerfully, through their influence on staff motivation, commitment, knowledge, teaching practices and through developing self, and staff capacities for leadership for learning. She will introduce the research informed and validated CLIQRS tools she has been working on for over 20 years. She will focus on the Pedagogical Leadership in the Early Years (PLEY) scale, which staff can use to evaluate and enhance their own leadership for learning; to enrich practice that adds value to children’s development. The CLIQRS tools can also be used for auditing and research.

Dr Iram Siraj (OBE, FRSA, FAcSS, FLSW) trained as a teacher and worked in pre-schools in England. She is currently Professor Emerita of Child Development at the University of Oxford and a Distinguished Research Professor at the universities of Maynooth and Melbourne. She has led on longitudinal studies, including E4Kids and the FEEL study in Australia; the EPPSE study in the UK and Northern Ireland and the influential Researching Effective Pedagogy in the Early Years (REPEY) study, which first developed the concept of Sustained Shared Thinking (SST). She is the co-author of several complementary scales that measure academic, social-emotional, and physical development, and pedagogical leadership quality, in settings with young children – the MOVERS (2024), the SSTEW (2024), the ECQRS-EC (2025), and the PLEY scales (2025)- published by Routledge. Iram’s work supports democratising self-assessment of quality by educators within settings as well as for research.

Professor Iram Siraj - Child Department of Education, Jesus College

The conference serves as a milestone in a three-year network project financed by the Swedish Research Council, mobilizinge researchers in Sweden, Finland, and Norway, aiming to strengthen research on evidence-based preschool practice of high-quality and to identify synergies through applied multidisciplinary intervention research.

The conference seeks to present contemporary research on quality in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) in the Nordic Countries and to explore research-based strategies for future collective action towards the vision of high quality for all children in the Nordic region and beyond.

Across countries and contexts, high-quality early childhood education is increasingly recognized as a crucial foundation for lifelong learning, social inclusion, and societal well-being. Yet, the concept of quality remains multifaceted and contested, shaped by cultural values, pedagogical traditions, policy priorities, and the lived realities of children, educators, and families.

This conference provides a platform for researchers. It aims to bridge the often-separated domains of research and practice, fostering mutual learning and reflection on how to create educational environments that are at the heart of pedagogical and institutional development.

Key themes include:

• what constitutes quality in ECEC today
• what challenges are identified in research
• how can intervention research contribute to high ECEC quality
• opportunities and challenges with regard to research infrastructure for comprehensive quality research