Ensuring Kindergarten Readiness in Southwest Virginia with the Unified Virginia Quality Birth-to-Five System (VQB5)
To prepare all children for kindergarten, Virginia’s early childhood system must ensure that all children have quality teaching and learning experiences that meet their unique needs. In response, Virginia has developed the Unified Virginia Quality Birth-to-Five System (VQB5) to measure and improve the quality of all publicly-funded birth-to-five classrooms and support families in choosing quality programming across program types.
Research shows that stimulating and supportive interactions between teachers and children and effective use of quality curricula promote children’s holistic learning and development, resulting in improved school readiness. VQB5 leverages these indicators to help educators measure and improve their classrooms.
Interactions. This standard measures the quality of teacher-child interactions and instruction in a developmentally appropriate way, as measured by the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS).
Curriculum - This standard measures the use of a comprehensive curriculum in alignment with Virginia’s Early Learning and Development Standards to ensure that all areas of learning and development are being covered in developmentally appropriate ways.
An important feature of VQB5 is that measurement and improvement are connected and ongoing. VQB5 programs have many opportunities to reflect on and adjust their progress during the year using a continuous quality improvement cycle.
EO has been selected as the Ready Regions Southwest lead, and in that capacity, we coordinate VQB5 at over 200 publicly funded sites with nearly 600 classrooms and 1,500 early childhood educators.
Ready Regions Southwest is one of nine regions within the Ready Regions network. Ready Regions provides unprecedented levels of coordination, accountability, and family engagement for early education programs in every community in the Commonwealth.
Although EO is identified as the Ready Regions Southwest lead, we partner with school divisions, social and human services, quality improvement networks, ECCE programs, and other organizations involved in Virginia’s public-private early childhood system.
