Recent calls from sector stakeholders for “stronger standards and support” in Early Childhood Development (ECD) are both timely and necessary. As highlighted in the Inside Education report on the recent ECD summit, there is growing urgency to address quality assurance, practitioner support, and system accountability in early learning spaces.

But there is a prior conversation we rarely have. When South Africans hear “ECD” most picture a centre – a registered Early Learning Centre with practitioners, a curriculum, and a subsidy. The sector’s policies, registration frameworks, and funding structures have all been built around that image. Meanwhile, the majority of children under six are at home, with a caregiver who has no formal training, no subsidy, and no structured support. Any conversation about raising quality that starts and ends with centres will miss most of the children we are trying to reach.

At Mikhulu Trust, we welcome this renewed focus on strengthening the ECD sector. But we also believe that any conversation about “standards” must be grounded in a deeper question: standards for what purpose, and in service of which children and families?

Because behind every policy framework, registration requirement, and quality benchmark is a child’s earliest experience of learning—and a caregiver doing their best in often very constrained circumstances.

South Africa has made important progress in recognising ECD as a critical foundation for lifelong learning and equity. Yet, access to quality early learning remains deeply unequal. Too many children still grow up without access to stimulating environments, trained practitioners, or adequate resources.

However, focusing only on regulation and compliance risks missing a crucial reality: quality is not only produced through systems—it is also produced through relationships.

The daily interactions between caregivers and children, the conversations during story-sharing moments, the language used to comfort, explain, and explore the world – these are not “soft add-ons” to ECD quality. They are the foundation of it.

Calls for improved standards must therefore go hand in hand with investment in people. Not only in formal ECD practitioners, but also in parents, grandparents, and community caregivers who are children’s first and most consistent teachers.

This is where a gap often remains in policy discussions. Systems tend to focus on centre-based compliance, while underestimating the learning that happens in homes and informal spaces every single day.

The summit itself resolved that parents should receive compulsory ECD education during a child’s first 1,000 days. That is welcome, and it reflects a growing recognition that caregivers at home are not peripheral to ECD – they are central to it. But declarations and funded delivery are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where most parenting support initiatives disappear. What is needed is not only political will, but replicable models with evidence behind them.

If we are serious about improving early childhood outcomes at scale, then we must ask: How do we support caregivers who are already teaching, even if they do not call it “teaching”? How do we build confidence in adults who may feel excluded from formal education systems? How do we ensure that quality ECD is not limited to registered centres, but extended into everyday family life?

The summit panellists spoke about professionalising the sector and improving curriculum quality. These are legitimate goals. But professionalisation that focuses only on centre-based practitioners will not reach the caregiver at home with a child on her lap and no formal training behind her. The question is whether we can build quality into those interactions too – and the evidence says we can.

Evidence consistently shows that responsive interaction—talking, asking questions, responding, and shared storytelling—is one of the strongest predictors of early language and cognitive development. At Mikhulu Trust, we refer to this as dialogic book-sharing: a simple, powerful practice where caregivers and children explore picture books together through conversation, even when the caregiver is not a confident reader.

This matters because it challenges a common misconception: that literacy and learning only begin when formal reading instruction starts, or when adults are highly literate themselves.

Children develop early language, thinking, and emotional skills through everyday interaction. When caregivers are supported to engage in these moments with confidence, the quality of early learning improves dramatically -—without requiring expensive infrastructure or complex interventions.

One of the risks in the current push for “stronger standards” is that quality becomes reduced to compliance: registration, audits, checklists, and monitoring systems.

Regulation matters for accountability, it cannot be the only expression of quality. But without parallel investment in support, training, and caregiver empowerment, standards can become exclusionary rather than enabling.

Practitioners in back-room and garage centres – as the summit panellists acknowledged – often bring deep love for children and years of community trust. That is not nothing. A compliance-first framework that phases these practitioners out with investing in them first will not raise quality, it will simply shrink the system.

A truly effective ECD system must therefore balance standards that ensure safety and consistency; support that builds caregiver confidence and capability; recognition of learning in both formal and informal spaces, and the last of these is the one most consistently left out of the conversation.

South Africa’s ECD challenges are too large to be solved within the formal system alone. Government, NGOs, communities, and families all have a role to play – but not in isolation, and not if the policy conversation continues to treat “ECD” as synonymous with “registered centre”.

What is needed is a shared understanding that early learning begins long before children enter Grade R, and long before they encounter structured curricula. It begins in conversation. In storytelling. In play. In everyday moments of connection – most of which happen at home.

The sector’s push for stronger standards and professionalization is not wrong. It is incomplete As long as the conversation remains anchored in what happens inside centres, it will leave the majority of South Africa’s youngest children out of frame.

Improving ECD is not only about strengthening systems upward—it is also about strengthening relationships outward, into homes, communities, and everyday interactions that shape who a child becomes.

The strength of any ECD system is measured not only in policy frameworks or compliance rates, but in the number of children who are seen, heard, and meaningfully engaged from their very first years of life.

And that begins not only in centres—but in conversation.