Beyond Structural Quality: The RIGHTS Framework for Child-Rights-Responsive Quality in Early Childhood Education

Abstrak

Quality in early childhood education and care (ECEC) is still commonly represented through structural indicators such as staff qualifications, child-to-adult ratios, facilities, curriculum documentation and administrative compliance. These conditions matter, but they do not by themselves show whether children are listened to, included, protected, responded to or supported when a concern has been identified. This conceptual-policy article develops the RIGHTS Framework as a child-rights-responsive approach to ECEC quality. A directed conceptual synthesis was conducted across four source groups: international child-rights instruments, established ECEC quality, participation and rights-oriented monitoring frameworks, evidence on process quality and integrated early-years services, and current Indonesian education and child-protection policy. Concepts were first clustered by substantive meaning; the mnemonic RIGHTS was assigned only after six domains had been derived. The framework comprises Responsive relationships, Inclusion and non-discrimination, Genuine participation, Harm prevention and safeguarding, Tracking and follow-up, and Shared responsibility. RIGHTS is explicitly multilevel and multi-method: it distinguishes child-facing interaction, organisational safeguards, continuity and accountability, and ecological or interprofessional support, while treating children's rights as a normative lens across the whole system rather than as an end-point. Twenty-four candidate indicators are proposed for empirical validation, with evidence drawn from observation, children's perspectives, records and procedures, family input and interprofessional coordination. The framework is not presented as a validated scale and should not yet be used to produce high-stakes composite scores. Its contribution is to connect structural conditions, process quality, rights, safeguarding and follow-up in a single testable architecture for quality improvement.