Hannah Prömper (Research Assistant)

Children in daycare centres should be able to develop in the best possible way, regardless of their linguistic, cultural or social background. The aim of the interdisciplinary joint project "Diversity in daycare centres as a pedagogical challenge: promoting the skills of children and professionals through Programme-Wide Positive Behaviour Support" is to design and evaluate an effective and practical concept that supports pre-school educational institutions in this task.

The project focuses on the educational framework concept "Program-Wide Positive Behaviour Support" (PW-PBS) from the USA and the "Pyramid Model" based on it. This is to be adapted for daycare centres in Germany for the first time and supplemented with further aspects in order to subsequently implement and evaluate it in practice.

Five sub-projects will each focus on different aspects of the Pyramid Model.

• Sub-project 1: Organisational, process and personnel development
• Sub-project 2: Development of children's emotional-social skills
• Sub-project 3: Development of the quality of linguistic interaction
• Sub-project 4: Development of children's precursor skills in written language and maths
• Sub-project 5: Developing the co-operation and diversity skills of staff

Sub-project 5:
This sub-project focuses on the educational professionals and their co-operation and diversity skills. The promotion and development of these are evaluated, among other things, depending on the implementation quality of the adapted and expanded "Pyramid Model", which is based on a PW-PBS framework concept.

Researchers from the educational sciences, pedagogy, social sciences and special needs education at the universities of Oldenburg, Vechta and Hanover are cooperating in the joint project DivKids-PBS. The Lower Saxony Ministry of Science is funding the project for three years with 770,000 euros.

Link to the website of all DivKids-PBS sub-projects