Right to the quality:: evaluation of teacher continuing training at pre-school education sector in Spain

The pre-school education is a key stage as an entrance door to the educative system and as a base for physical, social, affective and moral development of children from 0 to 6 years old. A good pre-school education is a children's right, and needs professionals who have a solid and updated training. This means that it is necessary to complement the initial training with a wide and diversified offer of continuous training. This article presents the results of a research about the quality of teacher continuous training at pre-school education in Spain. The investigation, which was made during year 2006, was financed by the Tripartite Foundation for Continuous Training (Fundacion Tripartita para la Formacion en el Empleo) within the frame of the Training Complementary Actions. The research tries to evaluate the state of teacher continuous training at pre-school education sector in two fields. On the one hand, training implementation level it is described such as culture, motivation and initiatives towards training -either workers' initiatives, or school's initiatives-. On the other hand, training results are evaluated regarding to satisfaction, learning, pedagogical suitableness and transfer of results; the evaluation systems used by the training organizations are analyzed as well. The final results allow us to issue proposals aimed to different agents who are implicated into teacher continuous training.