The challenges of, and guidelines on, building socioemotional competences in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) are likely to remain at the forefront of European policy and practice for the foreseeable future. Through collaboration between ECEC centres and academic institutions in Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, and Portugal, the Erasmus+ project “Implementing Positive Behaviour Support in Early Childhood Education and Care” (PBS-ECEC) aimed to develop and promote a Programme-Wide Positive Behaviour Support (PW-PBS) framework to help build children’s socioemotional competences in a socially inclusive environment and prevent challenging behaviours in the early years. Key project activities included supporting educators´ professional development and coaching for effective practices. Among other relevant products, and building on the expertise and knowledge gathered throughout the project, the essential and final output of the PBS-ECEC project involved the production of a Policy and Strategy Toolkit for Implementing a Program-Wide Positive Behaviour Support Approach in ECEC. This toolkit, structured to include different levels of governance, from distal to proximal levels of policy and service delivery, aims to engage and guide policymakers and professional teams in the successful and sustainable implementation of PW-PBS in ECEC settings across Europe, encompassing relevant strategies and actions. Therefore, the present communication aims to (1) provide a detailed account of the methods of development and validation of the toolkit by an international, multidisciplinary team through an iterative, multi-stage, multi-methods process involving a diversity of key educational stakeholders from the four countries, and (2) succinctly describe the toolkit’s seven recommendations and characterise their central elements, discussing their significance in the European ECEC context in the promotion of socioemotional competences and positive behaviours. These recommendations are grounded in the paramount importance of professional development, parental involvement, collaborative practices, leadership roles, and curricular emphasis on socioemotional learning, thus constituting a pathway that supports school districts, school clusters, and ECEC centres to effectively and sustainably implement the PW-PBS framework.

Keywords: ECEC, educational policies, SEL, professional development, PW-PBS.