The SAGE Handbook of Early Childhood Policy 9781473926578

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The SAGE Handbook of

Early Childhood Policy

The SAGE Handbook of

Early Childhood Policy

Edited by

Linda Miller, Claire Cameron, Carmen Dalli and Nancy Barbour

SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP SAGE Publications Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B 1/I 1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road New Delhi 110 044 SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd 3 Church Street #10-04 Samsung Hub Singapore 049483

Editor: Jude Bowen Editorial Assistant: Colette Wilson Production Editor: Rudrani Mukherjee Copyeditor: Sunrise Setting Proofreader: Sharon Cawood Indexer: Martin Hargreaves Marketing Manager: Dilhara Attygalle Cover Design: Wendy Scott Printed in the UK

Introduction, Conclusion and Editorial Arrangement © Linda Miller, Claire Cameron, Carmen Dalli and Nancy Barbour 2018 Chapter 1 © Nora Milotay 2018 Chapter 2 © Venita Kaul and Shipra Sharma 2018 Chapter 3 © Nicole Klinkhammer and Birgit Riedel 2018 Chapter 04 © Jytte Juul Jensen 2018 Chapter 05 © Yoshie Kaga 2018 Chapter 06 © Lynn Ang 2018 Chapter 07 © Hui Li and Jingying Wang 2018 Chapter 08 © Jacqueline Jones 2018 Chapter 09 © Helen May 2018 Chapter 10 © Jennifer J. Chen 2018 Chapter 11 © Cynthia Adlerstein and Marcela Pardo 2018 Chapter 12 © Teresa T. Harris and Nkidi C. Phatudi 2018 Chapter 13 © Martin Woodhead, Jack Rossiter, Andrew Dawes and Alula Pankhurst 2018 Chapter 14 © Michelle J. Neuman 2018 Chapter 15 © Peter Moss 2018 Chapter 16 © Eva Lloyd 2018 Chapter 17 © Christopher P. Brown 2018 Chapter 18 © Diane Horm, Noreen Yazejian, Portia Kennel and Cynthia D. Jackson 2018 Chapter 19 © June O’Sullivan 2018 Chapter 20 © Merle Allsopp, Hloniphile Dlamini, Lucky Jacobs, Seeng Mamabolo and Leon Fulcher 2018

Chapter 21 © Sonia Jackson and Katie Hollingworth 2018 Chapter 22 © Naomi Eisenstadt 2018 Chapter 23 © Mary Eming Young 2018 Chapter 24 © Michel Vandenbroeck 2018 Chapter 25 © Katarzyna Gawlicz 2018 Chapter 26 © Mere Skerrett 2018 Chapter 27 © Anne B. Smith† 2018 Chapter 28 © Emily Seulgi Lee and Shin Ji Kang 2018 Chapter 29 © W. Steven Barnett and Milagros Nores 2018 Chapter 30 © Sandra Mathers and Katharina Ereky-Stevens 2018 Chapter 31 © Jan Peeters and Brecht Peleman 2018 Chapter 32 © Christine Woodrow and Frances Press 2018 Chapter 33 © Dawn Tankersley, Mihaela Ionescu and Zorica Trikic 2018 Chapter 34 © Sharon Lynn Kagan, Rebecca E. Gomez and Jessica L. Roth 2018 Chapter 35 © Claire Cameron, Carmen Dalli and Antonia Simon 2018 Chapter 36 © Carmen Dalli, Nancy Barbour, Claire Cameron and Linda Miller 2018

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers. At SAGE we take sustainability seriously. Most of our products are printed in the UK using FSC papers and boards. When we print overseas we ensure sustainable papers are used as measured by the PREPS grading system. We undertake an annual audit to monitor our sustainability.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017934341 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-4739-2657-8

Contents List of Figures ix List of Tables xi Notes on the Editors and Contributors xiii Introduction: Exploring the Landscape of Early Childhood Policy Linda Miller, Claire Cameron, Carmen Dalli and Nancy Barbour PART I THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN RESEARCH, POLICY AND PRACTICE: REGIONAL AND COUNTRY CASE STUDIES 1

Scientific Advice, Policy Formation and Early Childhood Education and Care in the EU: The Intersection of Research, Policy and Practice Nora Milotay

2

Early Childhood Policies in India: A Historical Analysis Venita Kaul and Shipra Sharma

3

An Incomplete Revolution? Changes and Challenges within German Early Childhood Education and Care Policy Nicole Klinkhammer and Birgit Riedel

4

A Danish Perspective on Issues in Early Childhood Education and Care Policy Jytte Juul Jensen

5

The Relationship between Early Childhood and Primary Education in France and Sweden: A Policy Focus Yoshie Kaga

6

7

8

1

17

19

32

49

71

87

Early Childhood Policy in East Asia and the Asia Pacific Region, with Reference to Myanmar Lynn Ang

108

Implementing Free Early Childhood Education in a Completely Privatised Market: A Case Study of Hong Kong Hui Li and Jingying Wang

120

US Early Childhood Policy: Towards a More Coherent Early Childhood Policy in the US Jacqueline Jones

133

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Documenting Early Childhood Policy in Aotearoa New Zealand: Political and Personal Stories Helen May

151

10

Early Childhood Policy in China Jennifer J. Chen

165

11

Highlights and Shadows in ECEC Policy in Latin America and the Caribbean Cynthia Adlerstein and Marcela Pardo

180

PART II EQUITABLE EARLY CHILDHOOD SERVICES: INTERVENTION TO IMPROVE CHILDREN’S LIFE CHANCES 12

13

14

201

Equitable Early Childhood Services: Intervention to Improve Children’s Life Chances in South Africa Teresa T. Harris and Nkidi C. Phatudi

203

Scaling-up Early Learning as a Sustainable Development Priority: A Case Study of Ethiopia Martin Woodhead, Jack Rossiter, Andrew Dawes and Alula Pankhurst

219

Doing More with Less: Innovations in Early Childhood Development from Low-resource Contexts Michelle J. Neuman

236

15

What Place for ‘Care’ in Early Childhood Policy? Peter Moss

16

Early Childhood Education and Care: Poverty and Access – Perspectives from England Eva Lloyd

256

268

17

School Readiness Christopher P. Brown

287

18

Educare: A Model for US Early Childhood Services Diane Horm, Noreen Yazejian, Portia Kennel and Cynthia D. Jackson

303

PART III EXTENDING PRACTICE: THE ROLE OF EARLY CHILDHOOD SERVICES IN FAMILY SUPPORT

321

19

A Childcare Social Enterprise: The London Early Years Foundation Model June O’Sullivan

323

20

Supporting Young HIV-AIDS Survivors and Disabled Children in Family Households in Rural South Africa: The Isibindi Model Merle Allsopp, Hloniphile Dlamini, Lucky Jacobs, Seeng Mamabolo and Leon Fulcher

338

Contents

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21

Children in Care in Early Childhood Sonia Jackson and Katie Hollingworth

354

22

Community-based Family Support: Lessons from Sure Start Naomi Eisenstadt

369

23

The Role of the Health Sector in Promoting Well-being in Early Childhood Mary Eming Young

384

PART IV  PARTICIPATION, RIGHTS AND DIVERSITY

401

24

Supporting (Super)Diversity in Early Childhood Settings Michel Vandenbroeck

403

25

Challenges of Practicing Democracy in Polish Preschools Katarzyna Gawlicz

418

26

Te K¯ohanga Reo: Early Childhood Education and the Politics of Language and Cultural Maintenance in Aotearoa, New Zealand – A Personal–political Story Mere Skerrett

433

27

Children’s Rights and Early Childhood Education Anne B. Smith†

452

28

The Lives of Refugee Children: A Korean Example Emily Seulgi Lee and Shin Ji Kang

467

PART V  FUTURE DIRECTIONS FOR EARLY CHILDHOOD POLICY

483

29

Costs and Benefits of Early Childhood Education and Care W. Steven Barnett and Milagros Nores

485

30

Quality of Early Childhood Education and Care for Children under Three: Sound Foundations Sandra Mathers and Katharina Ereky-Stevens

504

The Competent System at the Intersection of Research, Policymaking and Practice Jan Peeters and Brecht Peleman

522

The Privatisation/Marketisation of ECEC Debate: Social versus Neoliberal Models Christine Woodrow and Frances Press

537

31

32

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33

34

35

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ISSA’s Quality Framework: An Invitation to Policy Dialogue for Building Integration and Alignment in ECEC Systems Dawn Tankersley, Mihaela Ionescu and Zorica Trikic

551

Creating a New Era of Usable Knowledge: Enhancing Early Childhood Development through Systems Research Sharon Lynn Kagan, Rebecca E. Gomez and Jessica L. Roth

566

The Development of a United ECEC Workforce in New Zealand and England: A Long, Slow and Fitful Journey Claire Cameron, Carmen Dalli and Antonia Simon

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Closing Comments: Future Directions for Early Childhood Policy Carmen Dalli, Nancy Barbour, Claire Cameron and Linda Miller

Index

605

616

List of Figures   3.1 Participation rates for children 0–3 and 3–6 in East and West Germany, 1950–2015, in %   3.2 Participation rates of under 1, 1- and 2-year old children in West Germany, 2006–2015, in %   3.3 Development of employment rates of women with young children 2006–2015 in Germany (difference in percentage points)   4.1 Model for pedagogical tasks in ECEC centres   6.1 UNICEF East Asia and Pacific region map   8.1 Early childhood funding streams   8.2 Birth through 8 continuum 12.1 Map of South Africa 13.1 Early childhood services: attendance by poverty quintiles (Young Lives urban sample, 2006) 13.2 Enrolment in kindergarten, O-Class and child-to-child, 1999/2000 to 2014/15 13.3 ECCE enrolment to 2014/15 and projection to 2019/20, based on ESDP V plans 13.4 Net enrolment rate (NER) in O-Class, by region, 2011/12 to 2014/15 13.5 Share of O-Class enrolment, by region and age, 2014/15 13.6 Grade R uptake in South Africa over 10 years 13.7 Inequalities in access to ECCE across 20 countries 14.1 Children in the richest households tend to have more books in the home than children in the poorest households 14.2 Vast majority of children in low-income countries are not enrolled in pre-primary education 14.3 Access to early childhood programs varies by family income 14.4 Organizational structure of Jamaica’s Early Childhood Commission 14.5 Public expenditure on pre-primary education by region 18.1 Map of Educare schools 18.2 Educare model: theory of change 18.3 Educare operating revenue by source 18.4 Comparison of US birth to age 5 programming 19.1 The LEYF impact model 19.2 Leadership model 20.1 Characteristics of relation child and youth care 23.1 Development of the brain’s structure and function 23.2 Essential interventions of nutrition, health, education and social protection for young children 26.1 Graphic by Robyn Kahukiwa – Oriori Series 28.1 Educational attainment in North Korea 31.1 The competent ECEC system

55 57 58 75 111 138 141 204 223 224 225 226 227 230 231 239 240 240 246 248 306 308 310 316 328 330 349 387 395 449 477 525

List of Tables   2.1 Rites of passage and rituals in ayurvedic paediatrics: exemplifying childhood samaskaras and their importance as milestones of development 38   4.1 Male staff and male pedagogues as a percentage of all staff in different types of centres, 2013 78   4.2 Three early childhood institutional logics based on Danish pedagogues’ understandings 80   7.1 Proposal for new kindergarten teacher salary 128   7.2 Current operating items accepted for fee revision purposes 128   8.1 National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) 10 Quality Standards 140 10.1 Major goals for basic universality of preschool education from 2009 to 2020 170 10.2 Number of kindergartens (public and private), number of kindergarteners (public and private) and gross enrolment rate in three-year ECE (2009–2015) 173 12.1 Policy documents associated with the Universal Right of Children to Early Childhood Development 207 12.2 Examples of current early childhood programmes in South Africa 210 16.1 English early childhood service system up to 1997 272 16.2 English early childhood service system in 2010 275 19.1 Hybrid spectrum 326 21.1 Number of children in care in England by age 357 21.2 Total average time between entry into care and adoption in England (years and months) 359 21.3 Number of children adopted in England by age 365 22.1 Impact evidence, 2005: findings for subgroups of families in Sure Start areas compared to families living in comparably disadvantaged non-Sure Start areas 376 26.1 M¯aori enrolments 441 26.2 Te Arap u¯ M¯aori 444 26.3 Glossary 448 28.1 North Korean refugees in Korea by age 471 28.2 Immunization rates of local Chinese children, North Korean refugee children, Biboho children residing in China 474 29.1 ECEC expenditure as percent of GDP by country OECD 487 29.2 Percent in education, ages 3–5 488 29.3 Features, outcomes and benefit–cost analysis (2014$) of the Perry Preschool, Abecedarian and Chicago Child–Parent Center (CPC) programs 492 32.1 Overview of early childhood provision in Australia 539 35.1 Ministry responsible, service types, age attending and occupational titles in England and New Zealand 588 35.2 Numbers of childcare workers (England) and ECE teachers and home-based educators/co-ordinators (New Zealand) 589 35.3 Annual income comparison, England and New Zealand 591 35.4 ECEC union membership in New Zealand 596 35.5 Union membership among childcare workers in England 2012–2014, numbers and percentage 598

Notes on the Editors and Contributors THE EDITORS Linda Miller  is Emeritus Professor, Early Years at The Open University, Milton Keynes, England. Her most recent research focuses on professionalisation of the early years workforce. She is a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Early Years Education (Routledge) and former book reviews editor. She has published widely in co-edited and single authored books and in national and international journals. She is series editor for the Critical Issues in the Early Years series, and her recent publications include International Perspectives in the Early Years (co-editor, Claire Cameron, Sage, 2014). Claire Cameron  is Professor of Social Pedagogy at Thomas Coram Research Unit, UCL Institute of Education, University College London. She has carried out many studies, including cross-national studies, of the children’s and social care workforce and care and education services for children and young people. Her recent publications include International Perspectives in the Early Years (co-editor, Linda Miller, Sage, 2014) and Educating Children and Young People in Care: Learning Placements and Caring Schools (co-authors, Graham Connelly and Sonia Jackson, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2015). Carmen Dalli is Professor of Early Childhood Education and Director of the Institute for Early Childhood Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. Her research covers issues of quality, professionalism and ethical practice in early years education and seeks to reveal how policy and pedagogy intersect in impacting children’s experiences in group-based early childhood settings. She has published widely in the field of early childhood teacher professionalism and has a particular interest in group-based early childhood education and care settings for children aged under 3years. She is joint editor (with E. J. White) of the Springer series Policy and Pedagogy with Under-three Year Olds: Cross-disciplinary Insights and Innovations. Her recent publications include Research, Policy and Advocacy in the Early years (co-editor Anne E. Meade, NZCER, 2016), and, also in the aforementioned Springer series, Under-three Year Olds in Policy and Practice (co-editor E. J. White, Springer, 2017). Nancy Barbour is Professor Emeritus, Early Childhood Education at Kent State University, Kent, Ohio and currently Professor of Early Childhood at James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia, United States. Her research has focused on the preparation of the early childhood workforce, particularly within child development laboratory schools in university settings. She is on the editorial board of Child & Youth Care Forum, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, and Early Education and Development. She is a book series editor for the European Early Childhood Education Research Association (EECERA) series, Towards an Ethical Praxis in Early Childhood: From Research into Practice. She has written for national and international journals, most recently on workforce development and early

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childhood accreditation systems. She has a newly published, co-edited book on child development laboratory schools, The Future of Child Development Laboratory Schools: Applied Developmental Science in Action (co-editor Brent McBride, Routledge, 2017).

THE CONTRIBUTORS Cynthia Adlerstein is an early childhood teacher with a Master’s in Education and a PhD in Social Sciences. She is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Education of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and consultant in early childhood education for the Ministry of Education of Chile, UNESCO and several non-profit foundations. Her research and teaching interests relate to children’s citizenship and social justice. She was awarded the Linda Volosky Prize (2016) by Chile’s National College of Educators, for relevant contribution to researchinformed policymaking in early childhood education. Her recent publications include Pedagogías para habitar el jardín infantil. Construcciones desde el Modelamiento del Ambiente Físico de Aprendizaje (MAFA) (Ediciones UC, 2016), and Estado del arte y criterios orientadores para la elaboración de políticas de formación y desarrollo profesional de docentes de primera infancia en América Latina y el Caribe: Proyecto Estrategico Regional Sobre Docentes (co-author Marcela Pardo, OREALC-UNESCO Santiago, 2016). Merle Allsopp is a child and youth care worker with 35 years of experience in the sector. She started her career as a front-line worker, and served as the Director of a children’s home for five years. For the past two decades she has worked for the National Association of Child Care Workers (NACCW), most of this time as Director. Throughout her career she has championed the development of child and youth care workers in South Africa. She has been involved in all aspects of the development of the profession, writing training material, policy development, advocacy for child and youth care work qualifications in tertiary education, developing models for the appropriate deployment of child and youth care workers, and serving two terms on the Professional Board for Child and Youth Care. She holds a Master’s degree in child and youth care work from the University of South Africa and edits South Africa’s regular publication Child and Youth Care Work. Lynn Ang  is Reader in Early Childhood at UCL Institute of Education, University College London. Her expertise includes international early years policy, the early years curriculum, issues of diversity and equality, and early childhood care and education across cultures, particularly in Southeast Asia and the Asia Pacific region. Lynn is particularly interested in the informal and formal contexts of children’s learning and development, and the ways in which socially relevant research and advocacy for children are translated into practice and policy. She has extensive methodological experience in evaluation research, systematic reviews, ethnography, qualitative and participatory methods. Lynn was Principal Investigator of a seminal study on a systematic analysis of early childhood development and peacebuilding policies in 14 conflict-affected countries (Burundi, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, DRC, Ethiopia, Liberia, Myanmar, Pakistan, the State of Palestine, Sierra Leone, Somali, South Sudan, Uganda and Yemen) (UNICEF, 2015). She has worked on several research grants from major funding bodies including UNICEF, the British Academy, the National College for Teaching and Leadership (NCTL) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Lynn is also a supervisor of Master’s and Doctoral students.

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W. Steven Barnett is Board of Governors Professor and Director of the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) at Rutgers University. He is a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association and a member of the National Academy of Education. He earned his PhD in Economics at the University of Michigan, and his research applies economic analysis to issues of early care and education policy and practice. His research includes studies of the effectiveness and economics of early care and education, including seminal benefit–cost analyses of the Perry Preschool and Abecedarian programmes, randomised trials of alternative approaches to early education, and evaluations of state and national policy in the United States and abroad. Christopher P. Brown  is Professor of Curriculum and Instruction in Early Childhood Education and a Fellow in the Priscilla Pond Flawn Regents Professorship in Early Childhood Education, University of Texas at Austin. His research centres on how early childhood education stakeholders, across a range of political and educational contexts, respond to policymakers’ high-stakes standards-based accountability reforms. Such work has led to empirical, theoretical and practitioner-oriented publications on such topics as high-stakes standards-based accountability reform in early childhood, early learning standards, pre-kindergarten assessment, prekindergarten alignment with elementary school, school readiness, culturally relevant teaching, kindergarten within a standardised education system, neoliberal reform, teacher education and professional development. Jennifer J. Chen is Associate Professor and Coordinator of the graduate programme of Early Childhood and Family Studies in the College of Education at Kean University, New Jersey, United States. She earned her EdD in Human Development and Psychology from Harvard University Graduate School of Education. Contributing more than 50 scholarly publications to the fields of education and psychology, her areas of scholarship include child development, early childhood policy, parenting styles and practices, and pedagogical practices in the United States, Hong Kong and China. Jennifer’s most recent publications include a book entitled Connecting Right from the Start: Fostering Effective Communication with Dual Language Learners (Gryphon House, 2016) and a co-edited volume entitled, Early Childhood Education Policies in Asia Pacific: Advances in Theory and Practice (co-editors, Hui Li and Eunhye Park, Springer, 2017). A former Fulbright Scholar in Hong Kong, she is also the former President of the New Jersey Association of Early Childhood Teacher Educators. Andrew Dawes  is Associate Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cape Town and Research Associate with Young Lives at Oxford. His expertise includes the development indicators for measuring children’s wellbeing, prevention of child maltreatment and violence to young children, and evaluations of interventions to improve developmental outcomes for children in poverty. He led the development of the South African Early Learning Outcomes Measure (ELOM), a culture-fair instrument for the measurement of programme outcomes on motor, language, cognitive, numeracy and social development in children aged 50–69 months. He works with Young Lives in Ethiopia and on longitudinal analyses of the effects of poverty and inequality on learning outcomes in adolescence. Hloniphile Dlamini started her journey in the field of child and youth care in 2003 and has worked in a number of different settings, including secure care centres, places of safety and courts, working with young people in conflict with the law. She obtained her degree in Child and Youth Development in 2006 at Durban University of Technology. She then diverted to community work in 2009 when she joined the National Association of Child and Youth Care

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Workers and worked as an Isibindi Mentor. Hloniphile is currently working as Provincial Program Manager for Gauteng Province, South Africa, monitors over 60 sites and supervises a team of 54 mentors from various programmes, ensuring that child and youth care practice is demonstrated and skills are well transferred. She co-wrote the chapter, Isbindi Family-Oriented Child and Youth Care Practices in Child and Youth Care Practice with Families, edited by Leon Fulcher and Thom Garfat (The CYC-Net Press, 2015). She will be pursuing her Master’s degree in Child and Youth Care. Naomi Eisenstadt became the first Director of the Sure Start Unit in 1999 after a long career in charities. The Unit was responsible for the government’s commitment to free nursery education places, the national childcare strategy, and programmes aimed at reducing the gap in outcomes between children living in disadvantaged areas and the wider child population. After Sure Start, Naomi spent three years as the Director of the Social Exclusion Task Force, working across government to address the needs of excluded groups. Since retiring from the Civil Service, Naomi has chaired the Camden Equalities Commission, the Milton Keynes Child Poverty Commission, and published Providing a Sure Start: How Government Discovered Early Childhood (Policy Press, 2011) and several articles relevant to child development and child poverty. She is a trustee of four charities and is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Oxford Department of Education. Naomi has also had a key role advising the Scottish Government on poverty. She was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Open University in 2002 and became a CB in the 2005 New Year Honours. Katharina Ereky-Stevens is Researcher in the Department of Education at the University of Oxford. She is part of the Families, Effective Learning and Literacy (FELL) research group. Her main research interests are the quality of early years education and care, child–caregiver interactions and the relationship between early childhood education and care (ECEC) quality and children’s development. She has worked on a number of research projects on early childhood education, including the Families, Children and Childcare project (FCCC), the Effective Pre-School, Primary and Secondary Education project (EPPSE), a Viennese Transition to Childcare project (WIKI), and is currently working on the collaborative EU-funded project Curriculum and Quality Analysis and Impact Review of European Early Childhood Education and Care (CARE). She was involved in writing several research reviews, including a recent Sutton Trust review of the research on quality of ECEC for children under 3, and implications for policy and practice. Leon Fulcher, MSW, PhD is an international consultant with more than 40 years’ experience in the social work and child and youth care fields – in North America, Europe, the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region – as a practitioner, manager, educator, researcher, scholar and writer. He chairs the Board of Governors for The International Child and Youth Care Network at www.cyc-net.org. As a founder member of TransformAction International (www.transformaction.com), he engages with an international network of child and youth care workers, supervisors, managers, educators and others about cross-cultural practices, activity-based learning, practice recording, research and evaluation, and educational opportunities for carers. Publications include: Group Care for Children & Young People Revisited (2006) with Ainsworth; Quality Care in a Family Setting: A Practical Guide for Foster Carers (2008) with Garfat; A Child and Youth Care Approach to Practice (2011) with Garfat; Residential Child Care: Making a Difference (2012) with Smith and Doran; Making Moments Meaningful in Child & Youth Care Practice (2013) with Garfat and Digney; Sisters of Pain: An Ethnography of Young Women Living in Secure Care (2013) with Moran; Child and Youth Care Practice with

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Families (2015) with Garfat; Residential Child and Youth Care in a Developing World: Volume 1 – Global Perspectives (2016) with Islam; and Residential Child and Youth Care in a Developing World: Volume 2 – European Perspectives (2017) with Islam. Katarzyna Gawlicz is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Education at the University of Lower Silesia, Wrocław, Poland, where she educates future preschool and elementary school teachers. Her academic interests include early childhood education and care with a focus on children’s participation and democracy; democratic education; the use of action research with teachers in transforming educational practice; and Foucault-inspired analysis of power relations in preschools. She is currently involved in a research project on free democratic schools in Poland. Rebecca E. Gomez is Program Officer in Education at the Heising-Simons Foundation, focusing on grantmaking in early childhood. Prior to joining the Foundation, she conducted early childhood education policy research for a variety of organisations in the United States and internationally, including serving as an Assistant Research Professor at the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University and the National Center for Children and Families at Teachers College, Columbia University. Rebecca’s research interests include the influence of consolidated approaches to governance of early childhood systems in the United States, and domestic and international approaches to professional development and workforce systems. She is co-editor of the volume Early Childhood Governance: Choices and Consequences (Teachers College Press, 2015) and has authored a number of journal articles and chapters examining professional development policies and systems in the United States and internationally. Teresa T. Harris is Professor of Early and Elementary Education and Academic Unit Head of the Early, Elementary, and Reading Education Department, College of Education, James Madison University (JMU), Harrisonburg, Virginia, United States. Following a 2010 Fulbright Scholarship with the University of Pretoria, South Africa, she was named the Early Childhood Education Department’s first Research Associate for her work in supporting the research endeavours of members within the department. Since that time, Teresa has continued collaborations with her colleagues to examine the quality of early childhood teacher education programmes, practices and policies. She also works to support equity and social justice through UNESCO’s International Teacher Education Network and JMU’s International Cultivating the Globally Sustainable Summit (see www.jmu.edu/summitseries). Katie Hollingworth is Researcher at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, UCL IOE. Her main area of interest is research with children and young people in public care and leaving care, for which she has been conducting research for 10 years. Major studies in this field include a large five-country cross-national research project on the post-compulsory educational pathways of young people leaving care (YiPPEE), an evaluation of a new model of working with adolescents in and on the edge of care and comparative studies on the education of youth in care for the Leverhulme Trust. She has authored a number of papers in this area and contributed to an edited book, Young People Transitioning from Out-of-home Care (Mendes and Snow, eds., 2016, Palgrave Macmillan). Diane Horm  is the George Kaiser Family Foundation Endowed Chair of Early Childhood Education and Founding Director of the Early Childhood Education Institute (ECEI) at the University of Oklahoma at Tulsa. Prior to this, she served as Professor of Early Childhood Education, Director of the two campus Child Development Centers, and Associate Dean of Human Science and Services at the University of Rhode Island. She received her PhD in

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Family and Child Development at Virginia Tech and has a 30-year history of conducting applied research in collaboration with early childhood programmes serving young children growing up in poverty. Through the ECEI, she currently leads several research projects, including the Tulsa Educare Implementation Study, a multi-site RCT evaluation of Educare, and a longitudinal study designed to follow Educare graduates through age 8. Her research has been published in Child Development, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, Early Education and Development, and NHSA Dialog. Mihaela Ionescu is an early childhood education expert with a PhD in Educational Sciences. She is the Program Director of ISSA (International Step by Step Association), a membership association that connects professionals and organisations working in the field of early childhood development (www.issa.nl). She has been working for the last 20 years as a researcher in the education field, as an education policy developer, trainer and manager of programmes aiming to improve the quality of early childhood education and care services. At ISSA, she is primarily involved in strategic planning and in coordinating programmes and resource development aimed at providing equitable and high quality early childhood services in countries from ISSA regions, by strengthening and supporting ISSA members’ capacity to work with professionals, parents, administrators and policymakers. Over the years she has worked as an international consultant for UNICEF and World Bank projects in countries in the CEE/CIS region. Cynthia D. Jackson  is the Senior Vice President of the Educare Learning Network at the Ounce of Prevention Fund. She received her Master of Science in counselling and health education from the University of North Texas and Bachelor of Science in community and school health education from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As Senior Vice President, Cynthia works with senior leadership to implement the mission and strategic plan for the Ounce of Prevention Fund, specifically leading the work of advancing centre-based quality. She oversees Lead Learn Excel, an instructional leadership professional development initiative. In collaboration with the Buffett Early Childhood Fund and Educare Learning Network of schools, she guides the Educare Learning Network through high quality innovative early childhood practice, research and policy efforts. Prior to joining the Ounce, Cynthia was National Director of Training and Technical Assistance for Healthy Families America at Prevent Child Abuse America. Sonia Jackson is Emeritus Professor at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, UCL Institute of Education, University College London. She has led numerous research studies on the health and education of children and youth in out-of-home care, including the EU-funded YiPPEE project, and has published extensively on these and related topics as well as on her other main research interest, preschool childcare. Recent co-authored books are People Under Three: Play, Work and Learning in a Childcare Setting (Routledge, 3rd edition, 2015); Improving Access to Further and Higher Education for Young People in Public Care (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2014) and Educating Children and Young People in Care: Learning Placements and Caring Schools (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2015). In addition to her academic work, she is active as an advocate for disadvantaged children and a member of organisations that promote their wellbeing. In common with some of her earlier studies, her current research on the youngest children in foster care explores an overlooked subject crossing conventional subject boundaries. Lucky Jacobs began his child and youth care career in 1998 as a volunteer teacher at Thutong Ya Bana Special School in South Africa for children living on the streets, with no prior experience of

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working with children. Driven purely by passion and personal energy he spent two years at this centre learning child behaviour ‘on the hoof’. In 2001 he trained as a professional foster carer and became foster parent to a young teenage boy. This training opened his eyes to the world of child and youth care and he was privileged to lead the very first team of 12 community-based child and youth care workers as a project manager when the Isibindi programme was first launched in his community in 2003. A year later he was appointed assistant mentor to supervise two additional teams of community-based child and youth care workers for five years, facilitating many special programmes with groups of young people. Thereafter he became a trainer and assessor and moved into training in 2008 to train newly recruited child and youth care workers, leading to the award of the Further Education & Training Certificate in Child Care Work, the minimum qualification required to work with children in South Africa. In 2013, Lucky joined the government institution known as Lerato Place of Safety as a child & youth care supervisor in charge of the child care unit. Jytte Juul Jensen  has been Associate Professor and Senior Researcher at VIA, Pædagoguddannelsen, Aarhus, Denmark. She has for many years been training pedagogues, the early years professionals, and her latest research project is on Danish pedagogues’ understandings of Danish practice in early childhood services. She has undertaken a wide range of crossnational work, including research, and given numerous lectures and papers at international conferences in many European countries, as well as outside Europe. Jacqueline Jones is currently the President and CEO of the Foundation for Child Development. She served as the first Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy and Early Learning in the US Education Department. Previously, she was the Assistant Commissioner for the Division of Early Childhood Education in the New Jersey State Department of Education. For over 15 years Jacqueline served as Senior Research Scientist at the Educational Testing Service in Princeton. She is a board member on the National Academies’ Board on Children, Youth and Families and served on the National Academy of Sciences committee that produced Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8: A Unifying Foundation (2015). She attended Hunter College of the City University of New York (CUNY) and earned a Master’s and PhD from Northwestern University. Yoshie Kaga  is Programme Specialist in early childhood education and care (ECEC) at UNESCO, Paris. Since 1998, Yoshie has supported various ECEC projects around the world to strengthen early literacy development, gender-sensitive early childhood practices, ECEC policy, governance and workforce development. She is currently managing the Survey of Teachers in Pre-primary Education (STEPP) Project, implemented in the Dominican Republic, Ghana, Namibia, the Philippines, Togo and Viet Nam. Her publications include Caring and Learning Together: A Cross-national Study on the Integration of ECCE within Education (Kaga, Bennett and Moss, UNESCO, 2010) and Investing against Evidence: the Global State of Early Childhood Care and Education (Marope and Kaga, eds., UNESCO, 2015). She has a Master’s in Social Anthropology of Development from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and a PhD in Education from the UCL Institute of Education, University College London. Sharon Lynn Kagan  is the Virginia and Leonard Marx Professor of Early Childhood and Family Policy and Co-Director of the National Center for Children and Families at Teachers College, Columbia University, and Professor Adjunct at Yale University’s Child Study Center. Scholar, pioneer, leader and advocate, she has helped shape early childhood practice and

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policies in the United States and throughout the world. She has worked on early childhood programmes and policies in over 70 countries in seven regions of the world and is recognised internationally and nationally for her accomplishments related to the care and education of young children, authoring over 200 articles and 13 books. She is the only woman in the history of American Education to receive its three most prestigious awards: the 2004 Distinguished Service Award from the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), the 2005 James Bryant Conant Award for Lifetime Service to Education from the Education Commission of the States (ECS), and the Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Prize in Education. Shin Ji Kang serves as Associate Professor in the Department of Early, Elementary, and Reading Education and Fellow of the Center for Interdisciplinary Study of Terrorism and Peace at James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia. She is a critical praxis researcher attempting to bridge the divide between practitioners and researchers. She has two major foci in her educational research: teacher beliefs and refugee education. While learning about teacher spirituality and efficacy beliefs, she has endeavoured to better understand teachers’ lives. Another thread of her scholarship on refugee education emerged from critical and spiritual consciousness on her identity in relation to global society. She is currently working with North Korean refugee students and South Korean service providers to address diversity and justice. An example of her research can be found in the recent article: Postcolonial Reflection on the Christian Mission: The Case of North Korean Refugees in China and South Korea (Social Sciences, 2016, 5(4), 67). Venita Kaul  is currently Professor Emerita Education and Executive Chairperson of the Advisory Committee of the Centre for Early Childhood Education and Development (CECED), Ambedkar University Delhi. Prior to this assignment she was Professor and Director of School of Education Studies and Founder Director of CECED, Ambedkar University Delhi. Her past assignments also include Senior Education Specialist in the World Bank and Professor and Head of Department of Preschool and Elementary Education at the National Council of Educational Research and Training, New Delhi. She has led several Education projects within and outside India and been on several national and international committees. She has a PhD in Psychology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and has several national and international publications in Education and Child Development to her credit. Portia Kennel  is a Senior Advisor to the Buffett Early Childhood Fund, having previously served as Senior Vice President, Program Innovation, at the Ounce of Prevention Fund and Executive Director of the Educare Learning Network in the United States. She has more than 25 years of experience designing, implementing and scaling effective, research-based early childhood education and family support programme models. In 2000, she created the first Educare School in Chicago to serve young children from birth to 5 years old. As the Executive Director of the Educare Learning Network, she led the national expansion of the Educare model to a diverse range of communities. Her work is grounded in an understanding of early childhood development, teaching practices, family systems and clinical issues related to working with families in low-income communities. She holds a Master’s degree in social work from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is a ZERO TO THREE Fellow. Nicole Klinkhammer  works as Senior Researcher at the International Center Early Childhood Education and Care (ICEC) at the German Youth Institute in Munich. Currently, the focus of her work is quality development and assurance within early childhood education and care (ECEC) systems, especially with regard to aspects of governance. In her PhD at the University of

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Halle-Wittenberg she did a discourse analysis on the changing construct of childhood within German early childhood education policies. After studying political science, sociology and educational science at the University of Bonn and the University of Aalborg, Denmark, she held a fellowship and worked as a research associate at the German Youth Institute. From 2004 to 2008 she worked on a variety of projects concerning the conceptual development and flexibilisation of ECEC services, and from 2008 to 2012 held a postgraduate fellowship of the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation. Emily Seulgi Lee is a doctoral student at the University of Georgia, pursuing her PhD degree in the Department of Educational Psychology. She graduated from Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia with a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Educational Studies. Emily has worked closely with North Korean refugee students in South Korea as a programme coordinator, implementing after-school intervention programmes that provided aide in the North Korean students’ acculturation process. Her work, Preparing for Reunification: Yeomyung School’s North Korean refugee remedial education program, was featured at the Annual Conference for Association for Childhood Education International in 2015. Her current research interests include using social network analysis to explore the role of friendships and clique memberships in child development. More specifically she is interested in understanding the importance of interpersonal relationships in the socialisation/acculturation process of minority students (immigrant students, international students, refugees, etc.) in elementary school. Hui Li, PhD, is Associate Professor of Early Childhood Education (ECE) at the University of Hong Kong, where he is the Director of the Master of Education (MEd) programme and Coordinator of the MEd (ECE) specialism. His research interests lie in early Chinese literacy, developmental psycholinguistics, early childhood curriculum and pedagogy, and educational policy. He has published more than 160 academic works including books, book chapters and journal and conference papers. He is the co-associate editor of Journal of Research in Childhood Education, as well as editorial board member of Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, Early Education and Development, International Journal of Child Care and Education Policy, and International Journal of Early Years Education. Eva Lloyd is Professor of Early Childhood in the Cass School of Education and Communities at the University of East London. She is Director of UEL’s International Centre for the Study of the Mixed Economy of Childcare (ICMEC), which she co-founded in 2007 with Professor Helen Penn. Eva’s research focuses on early childhood policy, in particular the marketisation and privatisation of early childhood provision and its relationship to child poverty and social exclusion. She has published widely on this topic, including a 2014 evidence review of the links between early childhood provision and poverty for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, an independent British development and social research organisation (http://roar.uel.ac.uk/3865/). In the course of her career Eva has gained extensive experience of early childhood policy articulation and evaluation processes, collaborating with policy makers in the UK and beyond. Her background is in psychology and she also spent 15 years working for children’s NGOs. In 2013, Eva was awarded an Honorary OBE for services to education. Seeng Mamabolo is a Sesotho-speaking person who stays with Xhosa speaking people, who began her journey as a residential child and youth care worker in 1996 with Bethany Children’s Home in Mthatha, Eastern Cape. After completing a Diploma in Child and Youth Care from the University of South Africa in 2003, she began working for the National Association of Child Care Workers in 2006 as an Isibinidi Mentor. In 2009, Seeng became an Isibindi Senior Mentor

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in the Eastern Cape Province and then went on to obtain a BTECH degree in Child and Youth Care in 2014 from Durban University of Technology. In 2016 Seeng began working as a Provincial Programs Manager for the Eastern Cape Province and has also facilitated child and youth care training in Zimbabwe. Sandra Mathers is Researcher at the University of Oxford. Her main research interests are the quality of early years education and care, and the relationships between quality and children’s development. Sandra’s research is strongly policy-focused and she has led a number of largescale government evaluations of early childhood initiatives. Her most recent research studies have considered whether disadvantaged children receive comparable quality early years provision to those from more advantaged backgrounds, and explored the early years experiences of children in care. Sandra is currently leading the development and implementation of an early years professional development intervention designed to improve children’s oral language skills, which is being tested as part of a randomised controlled trial. Helen May is an Emeritus Professor of Education and former Dean of the University of Otago College of Education (2006–2011) New Zealand as well as an Adjunct Professor at the Victoria University of Wellington. She has been involved in advocacy and advisory roles covering a range of early childhood policy initiatives. She is the author of a number of books and papers on the history, politics and pedagogy of early years education. Nora Milotay is Policy Analyst at the European Parliamentary Research Service, working on issues of European social policy at the Economic Policies Unit. A historian by training, she holds a BA Hons from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, an MA from the Central European University, Budapest and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. After having worked on several aspects of education policy in Hungary and for many years at the European Commission, from 2010 onwards she has built up European policy cooperation within the field of early childhood education and care that has gained an increasingly important role within the Europe 2020 strategy. She lead the thematic working group of member states’ experts on early childhood education and care (ECEC) within the Open Method of Coordination (2012–14) that has prepared a proposal for a quality framework in ECEC in 2014. With a background in both research and practice, her focus is on the intersection of research, policy and practice. Peter Moss is Emeritus Professor of Early Childhood Provision at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, UCL Institute of Education, University College London. His interests include early childhood education and care; the workforce in children’s services; the relationship between care, gender and employment; the relationship between early childhood and compulsory education; social pedagogy; and democracy in children’s services. Much of his work has been crossnational, in particular in Europe. He has been coordinator of the European Commission Childcare Network and of the International Network on Leave Policies and Research; editor of the multi-lingual magazine Children in Europe; and co-editor of the book series Contesting Early Childhood. Recent books include Loris Malaguzzi and the Schools of Reggio Emilia (coedited with colleagues from Reggio Emilia, Routledge, 2016); Transformative Change and Real Utopias in Early Childhood Education (Routledge, 2014); Radical Education and the Common School: A Democratic Alternative (with Michael Fielding, Routledge, 2011); Early Childhood and Compulsory Education: Reconceptualising the Relationship (as editor, Routledge, 2013); and Social Pedagogy and Working with Children and Young People: Where Care and Education Meet (edited with Claire Cameron, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2011).

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Michelle J. Neuman  is Program Director for Early Childhood Development at Results for Development (R4D), a global non-profit organisation, in Washington, DC. She has faculty affiliations with the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Victoria, British Columbia. Throughout her career, Michelle has taken a comparative approach to study policies and programmes for young children around the world. Her recent research focuses on strategies to strengthen and support the early childhood workforce globally and on financing early childhood programmes in low- and middle-income countries. In her previous roles at the World Bank, the Open Society Foundation, UNESCO and the OECD, she led analytical work and provided technical guidance to government officials to inform the design and implementation of early childhood systems. She has an undergraduate degree from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and a PhD in Politics and Education from Columbia University. Milagros Nores  is Co-Director of Research at the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER). She earned her PhD in Education and Economics at Columbia University and an EdM in Educational Administration and Social Policy from Harvard University. She previously worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Taubman Center in Public Policy, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Her expertise and interests are in early childhood development, data-driven policy development, evaluation design, economics, cultural diversity and English language learning. Milagros’ current research includes an early childhood study in Colombia, a study on parent–child educational practices for minority children in the United States and evaluations of West Virginia’s and Seattle’s preschool programmes. She also participated in the seminal benefit–cost analyses of the Perry Preschool programme. Milagros also supports the work of various organisations working in Latin America and Asia. June O’Sullivan is Chief Executive of the London Early Years Foundation (LEYF), a social enterprise which currently runs 38 nurseries across 11 London boroughs. She is also an inspiring speaker, author and regular media commentator on Early Years, Social Business and Child Poverty. June is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Director of Early Arts, Trustee of London Hostels Association, Non-Executive Director of Social Enterprise UK, and Founding Member of International Early Years. June was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2013, for her services to London’s children. She was awarded the Social Enterprise UK Women’s Champion Award in November 2014 and in February 2015 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Middlesex. June is a published author, with an Master’s in Primary and Early Childhood Studies and an MBA from London South Bank University. Alula Pankhurst was Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at Addis Ababa University. He joined Young Lives as Ethiopia Country Director in 2009. His role involves coordinating Young Lives research work in Ethiopia and leading on topics including urban relocation, child work, early marriage and violence against children as well as early childhood. Alula has also worked in the Wellbeing in Developing Countries project at the University of Bath, and is also a lead researcher for WIDE, a longitudinal study of community change in rural Ethiopia. He has co-edited books on Children’s Work and Labour in East Africa (2015), The Rights of Children in Ethiopia (2016) and Change and Transformation in Twenty Rural Communities in Ethiopia (2017). Marcela Pardo holds a Bachelor’s degree in Anthropology and a Master of Arts in Educational Psychology, Early Childhood. She is Associate Researcher at the University of Chile’s Center for Advanced Research in Education, and coordinator of its Early Childhood Education area.

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Her research comprises studies on early childhood teachers’ professional identity, as well as policies for early childhood teachers’ initial preparation and professional development. Her recent publications include Estado del arte y criterios orientadores para la elaboración de políticas de formación y desarrollo profesional de docentes de primera infancia en América Latina y el Caribe. Proyecto Estrategia Regional Sobre Docentes (with Cynthia Adlerstein, OREALC-UNESCO Santiago, 2016); and Improving the Quality of Early Childhood Education in Chile: Tensions between Public Policy and Teacher Discourses over the Schoolarisation of Early Childhood Education (with Christine Woodrow, International Journal of Early Childhood 46(1), 101–115, 2014.). She gratefully acknowledges funding from PIA-CONICYT Basal Funds for Centers of Excellence Project FB0003. Jan Peeters is the Director of VBJK, Centre for Innovation in the Early Years, at Ghent University (Belgium). He was involved in international policy-oriented research commissioned by the European Commission Directorate-General for Education and Culture: Competence Requirements in Early Childhood Education and Care, (2009–2011), and the Study on the Effective Use of Early Childhood Education and Care in Preventing Early School Leaving (2013–2014). He was the promoter of the Eurofound research Working conditions, training of ECEC workers and quality of services – A systematic review (2013–2015), about the link between Continuous Professional Development and Quality of Early Childhood Education and Care and outcomes for children. He is an expert in policy advocacy and was consultant in five UNICEF projects, to increase the quality of ECEC in CEE/CIS countries (2012–2017). He is co-editor of a book Pathways to Professionalism in Early Childcare Education and Care (Routledge, 2016) and the author of many articles on professionalism, diversity and policy in ECEC. Brecht Peleman is Junior Researcher and Project Manager at the Centre for Innovations in the Early Years (VBJK) and the Department of Social Work and Social Pedagogy (Ghent University). His research topics concern experiences of children in general and more specifically of those living in a vulnerable situation transitioning to school; quality in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC); and professionalisation. Brecht was a member of the research team of the Eurofound study Working conditions, training of early childhood care workers and quality of services – A systematic review (2013–2015). Brecht is also involved in projects about pedagogical coaching, the transition to pre-primary education, school-aged childcare and family day care. He has developed several training tools to support ECEC practitioners. Nkidi C. Phatudi  is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Early Childhood Education, College of Education at the University of South Africa, Pretoria. The position requires her to provide leadership and vision to the department so that it remains relevant in pursuance of early childcare development research and education. She supervises postgraduate students and is responsible for English First Additional Language pedagogy. She participated in the EU–Department of Higher Education (DHET) funded project involving universities around the country. Consequently, she produced open educational resource (OER) learning materials. She is the treasurer of the South African Research Association for Early Childhood Education (SARAECE) and has a Special Interest Group (SIG) in the association for mother tongue learning group. She has contributed the chapter Restoring Indigenous Languages and the Right to Learn in a Familiar Language: A Case of Black South African Children in Children’s Rights and Education: International Perspectives (Peter Lang, 2013). Frances Press is Professor, Early Childhood Education in the School of Teacher Education, Charles Sturt University, Australia. She has a long-standing interest in early childhood policy

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and its impact on the quality of the education and care services provided to infants and young children, including the experiences of children and families. Frances, along with her colleague Christine Woodrow, has written extensively on the impact of the marketisation of early childhood education and care in the Australian context. Birgit Riedel  is Head of the Education and Provision of Services of the Welfare State for Children Section at the German Youth Institute in Munich. The current focus of her work is on developments of policy and governance in ECEC services and how they impact on inequalities between children of different socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds. Another strand of her work comprises international comparative analyses of childcare systems and policies. More recently she has been involved in research on refugee children’s access to ECEC. Birgit studied Political Science in Vienna where she worked as Researcher at the European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research. She was involved in international projects focusing on various areas of welfare state reform such as care for the elderly, civic engagement and early childhood education and care. Jack Rossiter  joined Young Lives at the University of Oxford in 2015 as an Education Research Officer working on Ethiopia. Prior to joining Young Lives he was a civil servant and ODI Fellow in the Ministry of Education, Ethiopia, with specific responsibility to support the development of the country’s fifth Education Sector Development Programme. He has previous experience in a large NGO and as a consultant in the private sector. Jack is interested in the policy links between Young Lives’ research and implementation through the Ministry of Education. Currently, Jack is involved in the delivery of Young Lives’ third Ethiopia school survey and Young Lives’ research support to the Ministry of Education to improve the design and implementation of pre-primary education in Ethiopia. Jessica L. Roth is the Research Assistant to Sharon Lynn Kagan at the National Center for Children and Families (NCCF) at Teachers College, Columbia University. Jessica holds a Bachelor of Arts in Narrative Psychology from New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, with a minor in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Studies. In her time at NCCF, she contributed research and analysis in a number of areas including the cultural content of early learning and development standards, Migrant and Seasonal Head Start programmes, international early childhood systems and infrastructure, and children’s transition from preschool to kindergarten. Shipra Sharma  is currently Senior Project Associate with the Centre for Early Childhood Education and Development (CECED), Ambedkar University Delhi. Prior to this she was associated with Pratham Delhi Education Initiative. She has a Master’s degree in Human Development and Childhood Studies from Lady Irwin College, Delhi University. Currently she is leading the technical assistance unit in CECED for providing technical policy and programme-related support on Early Childhood Education (ECE) to the states of West Bengal, Rajasthan and Maharashtra. Specific areas of support include developing evidence-based strategies for the capacity building of functionaries of the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS); curriculum restructuring and reviewing preparation of training modules and conduct of evidencebased training in the area of ECE with a view to bridge the gap between research and practice. Antonia Simon is a researcher and programme leader of the MSc Systematic Reviews for Social Policy and Practice. She has extensive experience of undertaking and managing mixed-methods

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research projects involving children and families. She has over 20 years’ experience of analysing official statistics, administrative, cross-sectional and longitudinal data. Additionally she leads systematic review projects. Most recently, she led a research study examining the provision and usage of childcare in Britain (ESRC funded). Her research interests include the childcare and social care workforces, ECEC provision and usage, and child health and wellbeing, including food and poverty. Mere Skerrett of Ng¯ai Tahu, Ng¯ati M¯ahuta, Ng¯ati Unu, Ng¯ati Pikiao and Ng¯ati P¯akeko tribal groupings, (Indigenous to Aotearoa/New Zealand), is an enthusiastic supporter of the regeneration of indigenous languages, having dedicated much of her career to establishing and working in K¯ohanga Reo (M¯aori language nests) and Kura Kaupapa M¯aori (the schooling extension of K¯ohanga Reo). She is also interested in equity issues as they relate to M¯aori as T¯angata Whenua (the people of the land), women’s issues, children’s rights and social justice. She is also an applied linguist and keen to grow the spaces at the interface between indigenes and their colonial counterparts in counter-colonial contexts. A recipient of numerous awards, her most recent is the Te P¯a Harakeke Award of commitment to K¯ai Tahu (South Island tribal grouping) wh¯anau and leadership in te reo M¯aori in 2015. She is currently a Senior Lecturer, Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Anne B. Smith†, Emeritus Professor at the University of Otago College of Education, passed away after a short illness not long after she submitted her chapter for this Handbook. She had a long and distinguished career spanning four decades of research and vigorous policy advocacy for children and their families in Aotearoa/New Zealand. She founded the Children’s Issues Centre at the University of Otago New Zealand and was its Director from 1995 to 2006. She was the recipient of numerous research and community awards. Her books include Understanding Children and Childhood: A New Zealand Perspective (5th edition, Bridget Williams Books, 2013); and (with colleagues) Children’s Voices, Research Policy and Practice (Pearson, 2000); What does it mean for children to be citizens? International perspectives; Learning in the Making: Disposition and Design in Early Education (Sense Publishers, 2010); and Children’s Rights: Towards Social Justice (Momentum Press, 2016). Dawn Tankersley, Ed.D., has worked as an early childhood education consultant and program specialist for the International Step by Step Association (ISSA) and for Open Society Foundations/Institute (OSF/OSI) for the last twenty years as a trainer, program advisor, researcher, and materials developer in Central/Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and South America on the topics of quality early childhood care and education, respect for diversity, bilingual education, and social justice. She is the lead author on many of ISSA’s materials pertaining to the ISSA Principles of Quality Pedagogy as well as ISSA’s recent publication, A Quality Framework for Early Childhood Practice in Services for Children Under Three Years of Age. Zorica Trikic  is a Psychologist and holds a Master’s degree in Education and Human Resources Development. She has more than 25 years’ experience in the early years sector, working with children, parents, communities, educators, early childhood development professionals and policymakers with a special focus on the most vulnerable groups, especially Romani children. She has experience in developing training and professional development programmes, with a special focus on quality in early childhood services, respect for diversity and social justice issues. She has also participated in the development of different policy reports and by-laws, as well as in international working groups. Since 2014, Zorica

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has been Senior Program Manager at ISSA (International Step by Step Association) where she is in charge of several ISSA initiatives such as Embracing Diversity, the early childhood development response to immigrant and refugee crises, and building the capacity of home visitors through Supporting Families for Young Children’s Wellbeing: Resource Modules for Home Visitors. Michel Vandenbroeck is Head of Department of Social Work and Social Pedagogy at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences of Ghent University, Belgium (http://www.ugent.be/pp/ swsp/en). In collaboration with the Centre for Innovation in the Early Years (www.vbjk.be), he conducted many innovative projects, including professional development projects on diversity in early childhood care and education. His current research is on family policies and early childhood education policy and practice, with a particular focus on issues of diversity and processes of inclusion and exclusion. The voices of children and families with migrant histories and families living in poverty in both childcare and kindergarten are a recurrent theme in his studies. Jingying Wang is a PhD student at the University of Hong Kong, where she is studying educational policy development and implementation in Chinese societies. Her research interests lie in early childhood education, primary education and the sociology of education. Martin Woodhead is Emeritus Professor of Childhood Studies at The Open University, where he was based from 1977–2013 and pioneered interdisciplinary teaching in Childhood and Youth Studies. International policy studies in early childhood has always been one of his specialist interests, beginning with a major report for the Council of Europe in the 1970s. More recently he was Special Advisor to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, in preparation of General Comment 7: Implementing Child Rights in Early Childhood (2005) and led on the preparation of the topic guide ‘Early Childhood Development: Delivering Intersectoral Policies, Programmes and Services in Low Resource Settings’ (2014). Martin joined the Young Lives study based at the University of Oxford in 2005 and has contributed to the development of child-focused survey methods, qualitative research, early childhood and school-based research, including the work reported in this handbook. Martin’s extensive publications can be found at http://oro.open.ac.uk/view/person/mw24.html. Christine Woodrow is Senior Researcher in the Centre for Educational Research at Western Sydney University, Australia. Her work is keenly focused on issues associated with quality early childhood education in local, national and international contexts. Using this lens she conducts research on leadership, professional identity, pedagogies for equity, parent engagement, early childhood provision in high-poverty communities and analysis of policies that frame these endeavours. She has led a number of research projects focused on equity and community capacity building in outer western Sydney and in highly disadvantaged contexts in northern and central Chile. Much of her policy analysis work is undertaken in collaboration with Frances Press, with whom she has written a number of articles on the commodification of early childhood and its implications for children, families and the community. Noreen Yazejian is Senior Research Scientist at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH). She received her PhD in Educational Psychology at UNC-CH. She has extensive experience conducting large-scale, multi-site research and evaluation studies exploring questions about early education quality and children’s outcomes, particularly for children living in poverty. Her research focuses on

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early childhood programme evaluation, including work related to models of programming birth to 5, quality rating and improvement systems (QRIS), home visiting and professional development. Her research has been published in Child Development, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, Early Education and Development, Social Policy Report and NHSA Dialog. Mary Eming Young,  MD, DrPH, is a pediatrician and specialist in global health and child development. For the past three decades, she has worked at the World Bank, guiding efforts in international public health and child health and development. Currently, she is Director of Center for Child Development at the China Development Research Foundation and Adjunct Professor of Pediatrics at University of Hawaii Medical Center. During her tenure at the World Bank, she led global efforts to inform world leaders and policymakers about Early Childhood Development (ECD). Her recent publications include: Converting the Science of Early Human Development into Action: Closing the Gap between What We Know and What We Do in The SAGE Handbook of Early Childhood Research (Sage, 2015); Addressing and Mitigating Vulnerability Across the Life Cycle: The Case for Investing in Early Childhood for the UNDP Human Development Report (UNDP, 2014); The Role of the Health Sector in Early Childhood Development (2013) in The Handbook of Early Childhood Development Research and Its Impact on Global Policy (OUP, 2013; contributor to The Lancet series on Early Child Development in Developing Countries, (2007).

Introduction: Exploring the Landscape of Early Childhood Policy L i n d a M i l l e r, C l a i r e C a m e r o n , Carmen Dalli and Nancy Barbour

This Handbook draws together recent and current research and analytical commentaries relevant to the field of early childhood (EC) policy. Since the turn of the twenty-first century EC policy has become an area of increasing priority for governments globally, and this volume makes a contribution to understanding the scope, scale and diversity of approaches taken by different jurisdictions. The chapters are authored by established policy scholars and authoritative policy actors as well as emergent policy researchers. In inviting contributors for this Handbook we had a number of objectives. We wanted to ensure the Handbook was truly ‘global’ in that it represented perspectives from across the world and beyond the global ‘north’. Second, we were concerned to reach beyond established figures in the field of early childhood research and give space to emerging talent, such as recent doctoral researchers and architects of innovative practice. For us as editors, ‘policy’ is what happens in practice as much as what is written in policy documents. Third, we wanted

to question what ‘Early Childhood Education and Care’ (ECEC) actually means – and ‘looks like’ – in different parts of the world and thus open up discussion and thinking about ECEC services and their purposes, such as support for families in communities, and to consider emerging issues such as ‘superdiversity’, the increasing ‘marketisation’ of ECEC services and the impact of supranational organisations – like the OECD – on global discourses about ECEC. For these reasons we adopted a range of methods in finding contributors. Some authors were known to us as colleagues, as coresearchers or as members of the broader early childhood community whose work we had encountered in our professional lives, including at international conferences, often as keynote speakers. Others we deliberately sought out as well-known authors working on major trends and key areas of interest in ECEC. We asked some early career researchers whose work we felt should be reaching a wider audience. We also made sure that we located

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experts who were writing about the gaps we discovered in the ECEC policy literature. As a result, we have a very rich global representation of ideas, practices, theoretical perspectives, experiences and debating points relevant to the development of early childhood policy. No doubt there will still be some omissions but we are delighted that early childhood policy and practice in all continents (beyond Antarctica) are represented in the Handbook. Countries in Asia such as Myanmar (Ang), Hong Kong (Li and Wang), China (Chen), South Korea (Lee and Kang), Pakistan (Neuman) and India (Kaul and Sharma) are represented either as case studies or within thematic regional discussions. From Africa we have important discussions of Ethiopian and South African early childhood and family support practices (Woodhead, Rossiter, Dawes and Pankhurst; Harris and Phatudi; Alsopp, Diamini, Mamabula, Jacobs and Fulcher). There are six chapters principally or partly concerned with early childhood policy and practice in North America (Jones; Brown; Horm, Yazijian, Kennel and Stringfellow; Barnett and Nores; Mathers and Ereky-Stevens; Kagan, Gomez and Roth), and, again, they raise issues of cross-country learning or set the reported research in comparative contexts. In all chapters, the issues discussed stimulate ideas for other countries worldwide. Two contributions address the South American context: Adlerstein and Pardo, whose focus is on Latin American and Caribbean countries; and Neuman, whose discussion of low- and medium-resource countries includes Zanzibar and Jamaica, as well as Kyrgyzstan and Pakistan, thus contributing further to the discussion in Asia. Europe is a significant leader in terms of early childhood policy and practice and that is reflected in the Handbook, with 14 chapters represented here, discussing policy (Milotay) and practices from Poland (Gawlicz) to England (Cameron, Dalli and Simon; Eisenstadt; Moss; Mathers and Ereky-Stevens; Lloyd; O’Sullivan; Jackson and Hollingworth) and from France and

Sweden (Kaga), Denmark (Jensen), Germany (Klinkhammer and Riedel) and Belgium (Vandenbroeck; Peeters and Peleman). Finally, we are pleased to include five chapters from countries in Oceania covering developments in Australia and New Zealand (Woodrow and Press; May; Cameron, Dalli and Simon; Skerrett; Mathers and Ereky-Stevens). Some chapters are highly international such as those by Young; Tankersley, Ionescu and Trikic; and Smith, which defy classification by continent. All contributors were asked to reflect, where possible, on the applicability of their findings in other country, or resource contexts. We have sought to combine chapters outlining results of major empirical studies with others that are authoritative literature reviews, collaborative descriptive accounts, models of policymaking and the relationships of policy with research and practice. This variety reflects the variable state of research and policymaking across countries, and the varying ways in which new knowledge is acquired and adopted in action. Each chapter in the Handbook stands as a work in its own right; as editors we cannot guarantee complete coherence across the book and the authors are solely responsible for the views expressed. Readers will find that some chapters present interestingly different takes on similar topics, for example what ‘early childhood services’ or ‘readiness for school’ might mean in different cultures and contexts. We believe this range of perspectives enables a comprehensive and balanced approach.

Why Early Childhood Policy? Growing Participation in ECEC Why a Handbook on Early Childhood Policy? Since the turn of the new millennium participation rates in early childhood services have mushroomed all around the world

Introduction: Exploring the Landscape of Early Childhood Policy

with a corresponding expansion of early childhood services, albeit in different forms and of varying quality. In the global ‘north’, changes in social, economic and labour market conditions since the 1980s have transformed the way that families structure their lives, making shared care between home and ECEC services the new context of children’s lives (Dencik, 1989; Singer, 1993). OECD (2016a) figures show that across its member states around 35% of children aged 0–2 years participate in some form of ECEC with a mean average rate increase of five percentage points between 2006 and 2014. For children aged 3 to 5 years, the average enrolment rate is 83.8% across all OECD countries, with some countries having a near universal enrolment rate of 98% or above. Such growing participation rates create challenging policy demands on governments and civil societies to provide the necessary infrastructural arrangements that support the provision of high quality ECEC services.

The Early Years as the Foundation for Later Well-Being The expansion of enrolment, especially for the younger age groups, stems also from a strengthening discourse of the importance of the earliest stages of life for subsequent development, as many chapters in this Handbook show (see also Rebello Britto, Engle and Super, 2013). The OECD (2012) Starting Strong ‘toolbox’ refers to the potential for better child well-being, better foundations for lifelong learning, more equitable child outcomes, more female labour market participation and so reductions in family poverty, and better social and economic development in societies – all as a result of young children’s participation in high quality early childhood education and care services. Beyond the OECD, early childhood development and quality lifelong education is a significant target (Goal 4) among the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (United

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Nations, 2016). Early education that prepares children for primary school, especially for children who are most at ‘risk of being left behind’ (p. 220), is seen as a cost-effective strategy for eliminating disadvantage and contributing to economic and societal development (Woodhead, Rossiter, Dawes and Pankhurst, this Volume). Governments thus increasingly see ECEC as an investment for the future, tied to economic growth and well-being as well as the development of human capital.

ECEC as Investment for Economic Productivity This link between children’s care and education and the economic productivity of nations has made the provision of ECEC a national and global priority, shifting responsibility for very young children out of the private space of the family to the public and global space. Rebello Britto et  al. (2013) describe this global trend as ‘positive and promising’ (p. 3) but argue that the situation for a majority of young children and families globally ‘is not good’ (p. 3), as we will see in some of the chapters that follow.

Diverse Range of ECEC Services The increasingly diverse and complex socioeconomic and political contexts of ECEC services is very evident in this Handbook. Some chapters describe innovative approaches to these issues, including reaching marginalised children and families. Others suggest that low resource does not necessarily mean low quality ECEC, although when resources are low deciding priorities is a challenge. It is clear that some obstacles remain to achieving equitable services, in particular for low-income families and in lowmiddle-income and ‘fragile states’ defined by the OECD (2016b) as susceptible to political and economic instability, where policy frameworks have insufficient capacity

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or are slow to develop. Challenges to policy frameworks are also evident in more economically and politically stable countries, with many reporting major shifts in the ECEC policy landscape through a massive increase in privately owned EC services creating what some call a mixed economy of childcare. In both cases a common theme is the call for systemic approaches to policy, whether this be government-led or in partnership with private providers.

Aim of the Handbook In this Handbook we have aimed for an international and global reach which, although not comprehensive, aims to bring critical attention to the nature of ECEC policy and its relationship to research, service provision, and practice. Simpson and Connor use the term ‘policy literacy’ (2011, p. 2) to argue that it is essential for those committed to working both with and for ECEC services to achieve an awareness of policy and its implications for services and practice in order to understand its impact on the lives of children and families. This would include asking key questions such as: Whose interests does a particular policy ultimately serve? Whose viewpoints are represented (or ignored)? What are the alternatives? How can existing policy be challenged? What is included and what is missed out? (Simpson and Connor, 2011). Our aim is that by including multiple perspectives, this Handbook enables readers to take a critical perspective to some of these questions.

Organisation of the Handbook Content preview The Handbook is organised into five Parts. Part I highlights the important relationships between research, policy and practice. As we have noted already, policy interest in ECEC has been growing worldwide and

chapters in Part I document policy levers and drivers for improving services through 11 country or regional case studies. Chapters in Part 1 serve to remind us of significant common concerns across markedly different local contexts: about quality of services and equity of access; about cost and affordability; and about the balance in focus between care and education in the services on offer. They also highlight that shifts in policy directions are strongly embedded in societal views of children and childhood, as much as they also reflect the political, historical and economic realities that vary tremendously across different regions of the globe, and sometimes within country borders. Part II addresses critical issues related to ensuring that equitable and high quality ECEC services are accessible to vulnerable children and their parents across different cultures and contexts. We see that national policy frameworks are an important tool for creating enabling spaces for the development and implementation of ECEC services but also that innovative, localised and lowresource interventions have an important role to play. The chapters cover well-established models of ECEC and new initiatives. Themes across chapters include the ‘schoolification’ of ECEC, ECEC as investment in human capital, the funding challenge, and lack of intersectoral coordination. Part III examines various ways in which ECEC services perform an important function in supporting families. From South Africa we look at how the Isibindi model is working within the communities to help rebuild family life in the face of multiple losses caused by HIV/AIDS. The model of integrating the concepts of care, support and upbringing, as well as broad-based education as a framework for ECEC, is one at the heart of Children’s Centres in England. Chapters in Part III also discuss the position of children in foster care, and the importance of monitoring and supporting good health as a foundation for children’s all-round development.

Introduction: Exploring the Landscape of Early Childhood Policy

Part IV presents perspectives on participation, rights and diversity in ECEC. Young children have participation rights through the UNCRC (United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child), to which almost all countries worldwide are signatories. However, signing and enacting policy to ensure these important rights for children are not the same. Social, economic and cultural climates have influenced how the UNCRC has been interpreted and how countries have responded to the needs of children and families. Likewise, there has been growing recognition of the increasingly diverse societies that we live in and the need for ECEC practice to reflect the diversity of childhoods in order to foster social cohesion. Finally, Part V, ‘Future Directions for Early Childhood Policy’, explores the knowledge needed to enact informed policy development and protect and improve the lives of children and families. Chapters in Part V explore the economic benefits of ECEC, the lack of access to services for the very youngest children, the possibility of a common framework to define the quality of ECEC services, and whether traditional research agendas and methods will garner the kind of data we need to make informed policy decisions.

Part I The relationships between research, policy and practice: regional and country case studies Part I is made up of 11 regional or country case studies of ECEC policy spanning six continents: Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, South America and Oceania. Collectively, they highlight the important relationship between research and policy and the role of socio-political and historical forces in shaping that relationship. A number of discourses connect the chapters, including the focus of ECEC policy on the early years as a time to promote children’s overall health

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and well-being as well as readiness for school; a time of investment for later economic well-being; a time of promise as well as vulnerability. Instrumentally positioning children as beings-yet-to-become, these discourses compete with others that view children as rights-bearers and ‘citizens now’, influenced by the global child’s rights movement and the policy initiatives of supranational organisations like the World Bank and UNESCO. The discourse of quality, and its frequent competitor quantity, appears in each chapter, accompanying concerns about who pays, in what proportion and with what gain. Chapter 1 takes us to the policy formation context within the European Union. Milotay offers an ‘insider’ view of ‘evidence-based’ policymaking with ECEC policy as the main example. Unpacking the complexity of the term ‘evidence-based’, Milotay explains that the process of evidence-based policymaking is more complex than a strictly linear relationship between evidence and policy. She argues for more nuanced understandings such as ‘evidence-aware’, ‘evidence-informed’, ‘evidence-inspired’ policymaking, and that there may be no clear ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ path to follow. Chapter 2 illustrates the complexities of ECEC policymaking in the very different social and geo-political context of India. Positioning current policy developments against a critical historical analysis of ECEC provisions across this vast and diverse country, Kaul and Sharma highlight the locally designed and nationally implemented Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) programmes as the dominant model of ECEC in India. With an improved economy, in contemporary India young children are increasingly positioned as a human resource and as rights bearers, yet the majority of them are still affected by poverty and inadequate health and educational services. In the context of this challenging policy–practice divide, the authors argue for an overall policy infrastructure that goes beyond the single-window approach of ICDS

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and delivers quality, affordable ECEC that meets rising parental expectations for quality education. Returning to the global ‘north’, in Chapter 3 Klinkhammer and Riedel argue that Germany has undergone a fundamental shift of social policy from a familialist welfare approach to a focus on social investment and growing human capital – including female labour market participation and seeing children as future citizens. The policy shift has resulted in an instrumental discourse about ECEC as the ‘catch-all’ solution to increasing female labour market participation, and improving the educational chances of children, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds. The authors question the hidden price of the policy shift as undermining the three traditional principles of German ECEC provision: a balance of upbringing (Erziehung), education (Bildung) and care (Betreuung). Germany’s disappointing PISA ranking in 2005 is credited with contributing to an increasing schoolification within ECEC. They emphasise the need to be vigilant against the social investment ideology and the accompanying ‘institutionalisation’ of children, proposing that the social-­pedagogical tradition of ECEC in Germany can be a useful alternative. In Chapter 4, Jensen offers a case study of an integrated, universal approach to early childhood education and care in Denmark, and illustrates a distinctively Danish app­ roach to conceptualising practice, as seen through practitioners’ interpretations of videos of practice in three countries – England, Hungary and Denmark. Jensen uses the metaphor of a ‘mud-child’ to envision the Danish ideal of a child as an active co-participant in ECEC services, who is free, active and ‘can find expression most readily outdoors’ (p. 79). However, Jensen finds that this ideal is under threat from a policy-led invasion that is elevating the status of more prescriptive intervention programmes and perhaps sidelining the professional judgement of highly trained practitioners.

In Chapter 5 Kaga provides a comparative analysis of the relationship between ECEC and primary school policy in Sweden and France through the lenses of globalised discourses about ECEC and different views of children and childhood. Kaga’s reflections on the impact of globalised educational evaluations such as PISA on workforce policies in Sweden provide a link back to themes introduced in Chapter 3. In Chapter 6 the focus shifts to East Asia and the Asia Pacific region which includes countries which the OECD (2013) classifies as ‘fragile’. Ang offers a critical examination of the role of supranational organisations like the United Nations, the World Bank, UNESCO and UNICEF in making services for children a worldwide policy priority. She challenges us to contemplate how constructions of children’s place in the world reflect cultural and societal worldviews and the need for debate around such constructions and their implications at the level of children’s lived experience. Focusing on Myanmar as a case study, Ang highlights that ECEC policy is a multi-­ dimensional issue and poses considerable structural as well as conceptual challenges, particularly in resource-limited fragile nations; she argues that equitable ECEC policy requires innovative approaches and continued open debate. Remaining in Asia, Chapter 7 takes us to Hong Kong and the challenges faced by the government in introducing three years of free early childhood education in a completely privatised market. Li and Wang provide a fascinating insight into how different economic ideologies shape perceptions of what is possible, fair and equitable, not only conceptually but also at the level of policy infrastructure and practical implementation, to ensure what they call the ‘3A2S’ framework: affordability, accessibility, accountability, sustainability and social justice of early childhood education services. Li and Wang explore the likely challenges to the implementation of the new policy as its financial implications play out in practice; they call for ongoing monitoring and evaluation of its impact.

Introduction: Exploring the Landscape of Early Childhood Policy

Chapter 8 shifts us geographically to the United States and focuses on historical and more recent ECEC policy as it relates to children under 5 and families living in poverty; the chapter documents changing attitudes and subsequent policy responses over time. Whilst recognising the achievements of some key early intervention programmes such as the Perry Preschool Project, Head Start and Early Head Start, Jones critiques a fragmented system at federal, state and city levels which has resulted in ‘conflicting multiple regulatory systems, separate technical assistance systems, disconnected research agendas, overlapping segmentation of the populations to be served, and wide variability in state certifications [for teachers]’ (p. 141). She argues for a more coherent approach to early childhood services to address the needs of young children and their families. In Chapter 9 we change continent to Oceania and a first-person account of policy advocacy and change in Aotearoa New Zealand. As a long-time activist, ex-­childcare worker, university professor and policy actor, May traces the shifts in EC policy in this small and innovative country which was among the first to move away from a split system of care and education provision and subsequently developed an EC curriculum document – Te Wh¯ariki – that has drawn worldwide attention. Along the way, May shows that in New Zealand, as elsewhere, issues of systemic quality infrastructure continue to be a concern, with recent changes to regulations relating to staff qualifications, and ongoing privatisation of the ECEC sector being contemporary challenges. Returning to East Asia, Chapter 10 is a wide-ranging account of the evolving nature of ECEC policy in China – including the supplanting of the one-child policy with a two-child policy from January 2016. We get a sense of the challenges faced by central and local governments in building a strong infrastructure for quality ECEC provision that is equitably accessible to all children in a country as vast and as populous as China,

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including large expanses of impoverished rural areas. In the new social context of the two-child policy, the expected increase in the number of children is likely to further exacerbate existing issues of quantity and quality of ECEC services. Chen argues for a strengthened policy infrastructure, increased funding allocations, a focus on quality assurance and making social equity a top priority. Part I concludes with a chapter by Adlerstein and Pardo (Chapter 11) analysing the ‘highlights and shadows’ in ECEC policy in Latin America and the Caribbean. Echoing the situation in many other countries, the highlights include the enthusiastic pursuit of strategies to expand ECEC services, strongly supported by supranational organisations; the expansion of coverage of both formal and community-based services, and growing enrolment figures; as well as the development of curricular frameworks and teacher education models. Among the shadows are fragmented policy responsibilities across different governmental agencies, a split-system model of ECEC provision with welfare-style ‘care’ settings for 0–3-year-olds, and a more learning-focused and schoolified provision for 4–5-year-olds, negatively impacting on playful and holistic approaches. Adlerstein and Pardo call for the breaking down of ‘bureaucratic silos’ and ‘service duplication’, and the need to build a systematic database for ­evidence-based policymaking – again a frequent plea across the chapters.

Part II Equitable Early Childhood Services: Intervention to Improve Children’s Life Chances The chapters in Part II are generally framed in terms of intervention programmes to provide education and care, preferably of high quality, to vulnerable and disadvantaged children and their families. Preparation and ‘readiness for school’ is an underlying theme

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and for Brown (Chapter 17) is the main focus. We see what this means in diverse contexts through case studies illustrating different approaches to early intervention ranging from a bold project in Ethiopia where the expansion of education has been from a very low base (Woodhead et al., Chapter 13) to an account of a well-established programme in the United States (Horm et al., Chapter 18). Such diversity illustrates how equitable services in ECEC can mean very different things in different country contexts; for example, terms such as ‘preschool’, ‘preprimary’, ‘readiness for school’ ‘workforce training’ are differently conceived and ­interpreted – as indeed are the terms ‘education’ and ‘care’. Equity issues are raised around gender, private and public services, and the life chances of children from lowand high-income families. The type, extent and quality of services are closely linked to resources and policy action and inaction but the challenges of evaluating outcomes and impact remain. The first two chapters in this Part feature South Africa (Harris and Phatudi) and Ethiopia (Woodhead et  al.). In Chapter 12, Harris and Phatudi acknowledge that South Africa is a country with a legacy of inequity due to the apartheid system which marginalised its majority population and excluded them from ECEC and primary education programmes. Their chapter focuses on the implications of both community-based initiatives and national policies. Intervention strategies include home visiting in rural areas, parent support focused on health, nutrition and educational stimulation, and training for ­ practitioners/community workers. The authors critique five early childhood programmes featuring innovative approaches but note the challenge of evaluating outcomes and of taking these programmes to scale. In Chapter 13, Woodhead, Rossiter, Dawes and Pankhurst report on an ambitious project in Ethiopia which is part of a larger Young Lives Project (2010) to scale up early learning across the country via ECEC programmes.

Starting from a very low base the goal is to move from around 25% enrolment in 2013 to 80% by 2020. The authors name the challenges facing ECEC services: ensuring good governance, sufficient resources, well-trained and remunerated teachers and quality, age appropriateness and child-centred curricula and pedagogy. The message from Neuman in Chapter 14 is that in developing countries, young children who would most likely benefit from quality early childhood development opportunities are the least likely to receive them. Three policy challenges have global resonance: reaching the most disadvantaged with quality services; building bridges across sectors; and filling the funding gap. Neuman profiles innovative solutions to providing ECEC in four developing countries: Kyrgyzstan, Zanzibar, Jamaica and Pakistan, thus offering an optimistic outlook contending that low cost does not necessarily mean low quality. The historical split in many countries between education and care is described in Chapter 15 by Moss as ‘bequeath[ing] a dysfunctional legacy’ (p. 256); intersectoral coordination is seen as a key factor in achieving quality in ECEC. The chapter asks, ‘What place for “care” in early childhood policy’? and is framed through the contrasting cases of England and Sweden. Sweden has a fully integrated early childhood system staffed by graduate pre-school teachers and qualified assistants with opening hours that support working parents. Parental fees are a small percentage of the public funding. The chapter explores why, in England, despite the efforts of a Labour Government between 1997 and 2010, integration stalled and confusion continued over the terms childcare and education in policy documents, in the press and in general usage. The chapter concludes by offering four policy points as a basis for discussion. Poverty and low-income families are not just the province of developing and lowresource countries. In Chapter 16, in a case study of ECEC in England, Lloyd offers an analysis of barriers that hinder access to

Introduction: Exploring the Landscape of Early Childhood Policy

ECEC for children growing up in poverty and a critique of the policy instruments for delivery. The chapter details three policy rationales for the justification of ECEC in England: social mobility reflected in publicly funded services; economic wellbeing; and social justice to eliminate inequalities, underachievement and to support inclusion. Lloyd identifies the challenges for equitable access to quality provision arising from the increasingly marketised early childhood system and highlights the need to revisit the role and location of ECEC within social welfare provision. In Chapter 17, Brown offers a comprehensive account of school readiness as it has evolved in the United States. He critiques four frameworks through which school readiness can be understood: nativist, empiricist, social constructionist and interactionist. Unpacking the complexity of the construct he recognises ‘the multiple factors that affect children’s growth and learning across all of their developmental domains during childhood and later life’ (p. 287). Whilst acknowledging that large numbers of children enter school lacking the academic and/or social skills needed for later school success, the chapter concludes that school readiness is being narrowly framed by policymakers and other stakeholders and needs to be rethought in the context of cultural and global contexts. Chapter 18 closes Part II with an ‘insider’ view of Educare, a comprehensive early childhood education programme model in the United States designed to meet the needs of young children and their families who live in poverty. The authors, Horm, Yazejian, Kennel and Stringfellow, include a co-founder of the programme, an administrator and two evaluators. The Educare programme builds on the well-established Head Start programme but with enhanced funding. The chapter describes a range of strategies to effect policy changes that support best practices in early childhood education at the city, state and national levels which could provide insights for countries in the earlier stages of programme development. These include: the

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power of public–private partnerships, disseminating research and identifying policy barriers. The authors end on a cautionary note, that funding and systems are needed to support programme coherence, quality and access.

Part III Extending practice: the role of early childhood services in family support The chapters in Part III examine, in various ways, the contribution of early childhood services to addressing social disadvantage and in particular the role of services in supporting families to do so. It is increasingly recognised that to realise the aim of supporting early childhood development as a ­holistic, multidimensional phenomenon, embracing health, cognitive and social development, and children’s place as citizens of communities, services must engage with families. It is no longer enough to focus just on cognitive outcomes through education at age 3 or 4; nor to provide ‘care’ that suits labour market participation. Young children benefit most when services are integrated, and offer, in addition, critical advice and support that challenges, encourages and guides what happens in the home environment too. In Chapter 22, Eisenstadt documents an important, perhaps seismic, shift in English policy for young children and families: the introduction by government of area-based integrated care, education and support services aimed at families with young children living in areas of acute social disadvantage, but open to all to avoid stigmatisation of attendees. A national evaluation found that these programmes took a long time to develop, and were subject to changes of governmental direction, but did show benefits for children and positive effects on parents’ behaviour to support children’s development. Young, in Chapter 23, focuses on the role of health services in promoting children’s wellbeing. She analyses the neuroscientific

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background to a well-known epithet in educational research and policy, that early adversity predicts poor health outcomes, and that caring, responsive adults, who foreground communication skills, can do much to alleviate disadvantage if they engage with young children and their parents. She advocates a ‘life course health development model’ (p. 386), which, in much the same way as the English programmes Eisenstadt describes, address early development from multiple angles, combining health promotion, education and social protection. O’Sullivan puts the theory into practice in Chapter 19. She describes a new, social enterprise model of ‘childcare’ which explicitly addresses social disadvantage, by offering nearly half their places free of charge and by having high expectations of all children and of home learning. Knowing that previous research had shown that childcare practitioners often unwittingly had a negative bias against parents living in poverty, O’Sullivan’s model puts considerable emphasis on a curriculum of stretching, encouraging and celebrating learning, literacy, language and the expressive arts, all in contexts of nurturing friendship across settings representing high levels of cultural and socio-economic diversity. In Chapter 20, Allsopp, Dlamini, Jacobs, Mamabolo and Fulcher discuss their work to develop family support practices in South Africa in the particular context where high levels of illness and death of parents through HIV/AIDS, leave the care of children to peers and grandparents. The chapter discusses the work of a community-based care and protection initiative by childcare workers, called Isibindi (Courage), in providing lifespace, in situ counselling, practical help with daily activities, and play. Through ‘being, interpreting and doing’ (p. 350), Isibindi workers enable carers and communities to work through grief, take responsibility for their health status, and for children’s rights to schooling, and for practising parenting without physical chastisement of children.

In all these examples, there are common principles: of the importance of meaningful adult–child and child–child relationships; of the power of formative early development; and of children ‘owning’ their learning through play and discovery. Also evident is the crucial importance of the highly skilled, finely tuned judgements of practitioners to facilitate both optimal development and family engagement. Among the most disadvantaged groups of children are those who have been abused and neglected and are looked after by the state. In Chapter 21, Jackson and Hollingworth discuss the extreme paucity of information about the social and educational lives of young children in such alternative care, which in England is family-based foster care. Such care is often highly unstable, as young children can be either adopted or returned to birth parents. Despite this being a crucial developmental period, the quality of children’s experience is often given little attention over and above being ‘safe’. The authors attribute much of this compartmentalised thinking to conceptual, practical and policy splits between ‘care’ on the one hand and ‘education’ on the other – splits which have been endemic in the early childhood education and care sphere, while children clearly need both to thrive. By including these examples of family support in wider contexts than just children attending early education and care services, we can begin to imagine alternatives and possibilities for reconfiguration and conceptual translation.

Part IV Participation, Rights and Diversity The United Nations issued a sea-changing document in 1989 after many years of deliberation. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) took a clear stand about the rights of all children in terms of provision, protection and participation

Introduction: Exploring the Landscape of Early Childhood Policy

throughout the document’s 54 articles. Several of the UNCRC articles (e.g. 12, 13 and 14) specifically speak to children’s rights to have their own perceptions, opinions and thought processes, while articles 29 and 30 address children’s right to both language and religious diversity. With the addition of General Comment 7 from the Committee on the Rights of the Child in 2005, the specific needs and concerns of children from birth to age 8 were spelled out, making the document more clearly inclusive of young children and their particular characteristics. The image of young children that emerges from the reading of these documents is clearly one that considers the rights of children as actors, as individuals with agency, as decision-­makers and as forces to be reckoned with in their own lives. The UNCRC provides a solid foundation for the collection of chapters in this Part that look at participation, rights and diversity. Each chapter has examined children’s rights to be recognised, respected, protected and educated. And all of the chapters examine the diverse contexts in which we live. In Chapter 27, Smith provides an in-depth discussion of the ways that UNCRC principles can be used to support services and policies for young children. She notes the challenges UNCRC presents to previously held notions regarding children’s abilities to fully engage in discourse, idea sharing and other ways of expressing and constructing knowledge. She urges the reader to consider the paradigm of Childhood Studies, a more holistic approach to ECEC, as the pathway to supporting and enacting children’s rights. The history of how M¯aori children have lost access to their language through colonialism and educational policies that do not respect their culture and heritage gives yet another perspective on children’s rights. In Chapter 26, Skerrett provides a fascinating history of the demise of the M¯aori language in New Zealand and the beginnings of the K¯ohanga Reo movement to revive and save the language. She shares how a non-linguist

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missionary, Thomas Kendall, created a phonology of the M¯aori language in the 1800s that provided the basis for a tool for early childhood teachers, many years later, to work with young M¯aori children. Still needed are policies that support the co-existence of both English and M¯aori languages in educational settings at all levels. Vandenbroeck takes yet another view of language learning in ECEC settings and what he calls ‘(super)diversity’ in Chapter 24. He cites the example of classrooms where multiple languages are present, rather than just one or two languages, as an opportunity for pedagogy rather than as a problem to overcome. He challenges a common misunderstanding that suggests there is some knowable norm to which children and families must conform for group-based learning or family support. He warns against the myth of homogeneity while working with children in classrooms or families in support settings. Instead he urges teachers and support group facilitators to view the increasing heterogeneity in ECEC services and families as a platform for understanding and appreciating differences. Woven throughout the UNCRC document is the subtle expectation that democracy will prevail in the settings in which children live, and in Chapter 25 Gawlicz describes both theoretical and educational practices that embody democratic principles (e.g. Dewey, Bloom, Malaguzzi) as well as actual democratic practices in Poland. As with any theory in practice, the social and political context colours how and what is practised. Gawlicz tells the story of ECEC in a Poland that has previously focused on school readiness and behavioural approaches, predicated on an image of the child as having limited agency and coming to education without previous funds of knowledge. Gawlicz offers an analysis of interviews with teachers who are attempting to embrace democratic practices and explores their ability to overcome obstacles to this end. In Chapter 28, Lee and Kang’s discussion of conditions for North Korean refugee

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children challenges so many of the rights of children stated in the UNCRC: to be safe and cared for, to get an education, to be with their families, to have a homeland, among others. The authors tell the tale of children who move from one repressive country to another searching for relief, only to be denied the right to live and be educated as future citizens in those countries. They note the challenges of social connections, food and exploitation. From an ecological systems perspective, their discussion can be seen to highlight the absence of those outer, protective social circles of people that most children take for granted. The issues in the chapter – that seem so critical – are overshadowed by the world’s attention on the nuclear threats posed by North Korea. Meanwhile, there are clearly humanitarian threats of which we all should take note.

Part V Future Directions for Early Childhood Policy The chapters in Part V take us a step back from the case studies, examination of specific interventions, the inclusion of family support and the rights and participation of children, and bring us to some questions about what we need in order to engage in policymaking to improve the lives of all children and families. As in Part I, the complexity of policy development is the theme that links the different chapters in this section. A series of questions about the process of developing informed and relevant policy are engendered: Who gets to inform policymaking? Are all perspectives represented in the process? Do we have the information necessary to help develop policies for young children or are there areas of research needed? Are there infrastructures to be developed in order to engage in the kind of necessary work to improve the lives of families and children around the world? More specific questions emerge as a result of reading individual chapters. What do we

know about the dimensions of quality in ECEC settings? Have we done the research necessary to identify those dimensions across cultures? Across various economic exigencies? Across the age range of children attending services? Do we have the kind of ECEC workforce to support quality across the age ranges? Do the European Quality Framework and ISSA Quality Framework identify these qualities? Or do we need to develop a framework for considering the many variables defining various policy arenas? There are both process (e.g. appropriate child–adult interactions, curricular choices) and structural (e.g. number of children in the preschool group, professional development of the ECEC professional) issues to consider. Policy and practice related to children from birth to age 3 has been a neglected area. Two chapters in this Part take on the complex process of ensuring that access to high quality services for these very young children is an important focus of policy agendas. In Chapter  33, Tankersley, Ionescu and Trikic explore five key policy levers and how they can be used to strengthen the quality of programmes for young children, particularly those under 3 years. They do this by examining how the European Quality Framework on Early Childhood Education and Care (EQF) was strengthened by ISSA’s development of a Quality Framework for Early Childhood Practices in Services for Children under Three Years of Age. Through the development of this document, they fostered dialogue around quality and policy development for the very youngest population. Mathers and Ereky-Stevens, in Chapter 30, comprehensively review international research on the impact of ECEC for children under 3 years of age. They find clear and important benefits of attendance at high quality early childhood settings, especially for cognitive learning, language skills, and – for socially disadvantaged children in particular – social and emotional development. They highlight that the significant features of high quality provision are: warm and

Introduction: Exploring the Landscape of Early Childhood Policy

responsive adults who offer meaningful relationships and are focused on communicative skills; rich and complex play with peers; and opportunities for much physical activity. The policy implications focus on issues of access for children aged at least 2 and upwards, and high quality practitioner preparation and their ongoing learning. In Chapter 29, Barnett and Nores take a slightly different approach to the consideration of quality by examining both the costs and benefits of providing high quality ECEC services. They argue that economic research has strong evidence to suggest that public investments (i.e. provided through public policy) yield high rates of return. In other words, there is powerful evidence to support the fact that provision of high quality services to young children, particularly from socially disadvantaged homes, results in positive lifelong impacts. The emphases in their message are recurring themes in this Handbook: the importance of government policy and provision that focus on the quality of children’s experiences; and the quality of practice by practitioners. The authors suggest that there is often a failure to translate knowledge about quality into policy and practice. Woodrow and Press provide a different economic analysis of the provision of ECEC services in Chapter 32, as they explore the debate between ‘privatization/marketization’ and public investment in child-care services in Australia. They document the transformation of ECEC in Australia from publicly funded not-for-profit community-based services to a predominantly market-driven model of provision largely dominated by a publicly listed company called ABC Learning. They discuss the ‘spectacular’ failure of this company, the government response and the subsequent emergence of an alternative social venture model. They reflect on whether the framing of ECEC services as part of the agenda of women’s right to participation in the workforce has had the unintended consequence of supporting the marketisation of childcare as a policy solution.

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It is not possible to have high quality ECEC programme without a high quality ECEC workforce. For decades, the field has struggled to define both whether ECEC is/ is not a profession and what the professionalisation of the workforce might look like in terms of policy and practice. In Chapter 35, Cameron, Dalli and Simon compare the integration of the care and education workforces in New Zealand and England, looking at the struggles in terms of policy, politics and lack of political will to invest in early childhood. In part, this is a reflection of the origins of ECEC as a service for very young children – seen as the responsibility of the private domain of the family. It also reflects the connection of ECEC work to the work of women and its historically low status. The New Zealand workforce is highly integrated with unified training for work with children aged 0–5 years and pay parity with primary school teachers, yet even in this ‘good news’ context, there are signs of retrenchment in policy that remind us of the need for sector advocacy to maintain the gains achieved. This is certainly an example of the vicissitudes of policy. In Chapter 34, Kagan, Gomez and Roth offer a comprehensive view of ECEC research foci and traditions over the years, looking for guidance that will make the research to policy pathway smoother and more productive. They acknowledge the significant contributions the social sciences have made toward informing policy development. Noting both the valuable contributions and the ongoing debates in the field, they propose a systems approach to research that will bring important sectors together and lead more logically to policy development. The authors note the perennial difficulty that scientists have had in communicating their work in an understandable, translatable form to those who develop policy. Similar disconnects between research and policy are noted by Peeters and Peleman in Chapter 31. They take this one step further and focus on practice as well. The lack of

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common language across these sectors, they say, makes these necessary connections difficult. They offer an example of how these connections can be made through looking at increasing the quality of the ECEC workforce.

Conclusion It is clear from our broad review of the contents of this Handbook that a wealth of experience and expertise is contained within the chapters. In collating this sweeping account of the key arguments of the Parts, we have identified what we see as some important themes that signal the preoccupations of governments and communities within particular contexts, or matters that have captured global consciousness. We have identified issues of principled debate (such as public vs private ownership of ECEC services) and others where the concern is more operational than principled (like breaking down bureaucratic silos). In doing so, our hope is that this volume contributes to a better understanding of the scope and limitations of policy in ECEC and offers opportunities for crossnational learning and discussion. All the chapters show that ECEC policy is not something that happens in closeted offices separate from people’s lived reality; often it arises from that lived reality. Policy may be the product of sustained advocacy or the response to a sudden situation that requires immediate attention. Policy can also arise from big-picture drivers and global movements; or from ideological shifts in local contexts. Policy is dynamic and affects services and lives. It creates change, some of which is not always intended. ‘Policy’ also exists in the non-written and non-­ bureaucratic form, represented by what happens in practice and by established traditions of practice. Policy can come about without the proper investigation or vetting that it deserves. For all these reasons, ECEC policy

is complex and challenging and deserves our careful attention. Contemplating this complexity, it is also very clear that we are in no way ‘out of the woods’ with regards to endemic issues of quality, equity and funding across different settings of all kinds: cultural, socio-­ economic, political. Moreover, there are new challenges of privatisation/marketisation; increased expectations of returns on investment and calls for accountability; a heightened discourse of schoolification and links to global assessment measures. The issue of human capital development is moving in strongly to change the big picture of ECEC policy, leading to a more instrumental view of what ECEC services should be doing. These all compound existing complexities and are worthy of further consideration as they may point to future directions in early childhood policy. We will return to these and other themes in the concluding chapter of this Handbook. We invite you now to delve into the Handbook and engage in your own reflections.

References Dencik, L. (1989). Growing up in the postmodern age: On the child’s situation in the modern family, and on the position of the family in the modern welfare state. Acta Sociologica, 32(2), 155–80. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). (2012). Starting Strong III- A Quality Toolbox for Early Childhood Education and Care. Paris: OECD. Retrieved from http://www.oecd.org/edu/ school/startingstrongiii-aqualitytoolboxforearlychildhoodeducationandcare.htm Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). (2013). How do early childhood education and care (ECEC) policies, systems and quality vary across OECD countries? Education Indicators In Focus, 11. Retrieved from http://www.oecd.org/education/ skills-beyond-school/EDIF11.pdf

Introduction: Exploring the Landscape of Early Childhood Policy

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). (2016a). PF3.2: Enrolment in childcare and pre-school. OECD Family Database. OECD – Social Policy D ­ ivision – Directorate of Employment, Labour and Social Affairs. Retrieved from http://www.oecd.org/ els/family/database.htm Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). (2016b). States of Fragility 2016: Highlights. Retrieved from https://www.oecd.org/dac/conflict-fragilityresilience/docs/Fragile-States-highlights2016.pdf Rebello Britto, P., Engle, P. L., & Super, C. M. (Eds) (2013). Handbook of Early Childhood Development Research and Its Impact on Global Policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Simpson, G., & Connor, S. (2011). Social Policy for Social Welfare Professionals: Tools for Understanding, Analysis and Engagement. Bristol: The Policy Press. Singer, E. (1993). Shared care for children. Theory & Psychology, 3(4), 429–49. United Nations. (2016). The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2016. New York: United Nations. Retrieved from http:// unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2016/The%20 Sustainable%20Development%20 Goals%20Report%202016.pdf Young Lives Project. (August, 2010). Young Lives Policy Brief 9. Early Childhood Education and Care as a Strategy for Poverty Reduction: Evidence from Young Lives. Oxford: Department of International Development, University of Oxford.

Part I

The Relationship Between Research, Policy and Practice: Regional and Country Case Studies

1 Scientific Advice, Policy Formation and Early Childhood Education and Care in the EU: The Intersection of Research, Policy and Practice1 Nora Milotay

The theory of science advice2 The field in which research, policy and practice intersect makes a very important contribution to policy design. It is a field that everyone, in particular policymakers, enthusiastically refer to as an essential element of efficient policymaking. However, it remains a rather uncharted territory as it is shaped by very complex institutional and legal frameworks. Moreover, the wider cultural context, the institutions, the individuals involved, all strongly influence how the dialogue between these three fields develops. This chapter will give insight into this ‘uncharted territory’ by looking into European-level early childhood education and care (ECEC) policy formation in the context of education policy and in the wider context of the current scientific advice mechanism in the EU. The ideas of evidence-based policymaking and scientific advice are attempts to explain and arrange structures around the

interactions between research, policy and practice. The concept of evidence-based policymaking has been (re)invigorated since the beginning of the second millennium. The concept maintains that the decision-making element of the policy process should be based, at least in part, on sound and transparent evidence (Sutton, 1999). This concept of evidence-based policy attempts to reduce uncertainty and risk in policy decisions by basing them on ‘hard data’ about whether the proposed course of action will bring about a desired effect (Bulmer, Coates & Dominian, 2007). Evidence-based policy has become a mantra ever since, seen as an attempt to reclaim policies and strategies from the impact of prejudice. However, an evidence-based approach to policymaking is never straightforward. Narrow interpretations which rely on a strictly linear relationship between evidence and policy have in turn been criticised. More nuanced understandings of evidence-based policy, such as ‘evidence-aware’, ‘evidence-informed’

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or even ‘evidence-inspired’ policymaking, argue that in cases where the scientific base is uncertain or contested, there may be no clear ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ path to follow (Holmes & Clark, 2008; Nutley, 2003; Owens, Petts & Bulkeley, 2006). The concept of science advice goes a step further and delves more into the practice of evidence-based policymaking. It covers all processes and structures aimed at providing scientific knowledge and information to the attention of policy- and decision-makers (EPRS, 2016). Scientific advice in itself is a field of academic study, generating new theories and conceptual models to explain the complex relationship between science and policymaking in different situations and contexts. (OECD, 2015/1, p. 42). Bridging the gap between researchers and policymakers to improve the decisionmaking process is a widely recognised challenge (for example, Nutley, Davies & Tilley, 2000). This is particularly the case when there is no clear and unambiguous evidence accepted by all actors. ‘The boundaries between science and policy or politics are constantly being renegotiated as part of the political process’ (Sarewitz, 2004, p. 386). The policy-making process is not linear and ‘it must be understood as a political process as much as an analytical or problem solving one’ (Sutton, 1999, p. 32). In these situations it is particularly important to know who produces knowledge, and how, and why they do so and, subsequently, how that knowledge interacts with the policy process. Knowledge means assimilated information and the understanding of how to use it. It also involves negotiation. The complex relationship between research and policy is a two-way street: research feeds into policy but policy in turn shapes research agendas. Research is used to varying degrees in policymaking in different countries, dependent on different organisational dynamics, such as the quality and timeliness of the research, the background and attitudes of researchers and research users, the existing

formal and informal links between researchers and research users, and the organisational culture (Fazekas & Burns, 2012, p. 13). The attempt to de-politicise, whereby important decisions are delegated to expert committees and thus removed from the political negotiation table, can prove problematic (p. 14). Policymakers have a huge role in both defining the policy questions and putting them onto the political agenda. However, they remain individuals who are ‘limited’ by their own beliefs, world-views and the parameters of their specific organisation. Therefore, the human and broader cultural factors are hugely important in the interaction between research and policy, and the political negotiation is an organic part of the process. Consequently, the ways in which policy learning and policy development happen, and the role of knowledge in this process varies across different systems (Burns, Köster & Fuster, 2016; Fazekas, 2010; Fazekas & Burns, 2012). Expert knowledge is increasingly important in the agenda-setting process. Therefore, in certain contexts expertise moves over time beyond policy ‘informing’ and leads to policy ‘forming’ (Neuman, 2012, p. 612). This fusion puts organisations and experts responsible for knowledge production in a far more powerful position. Here, certain organisations, such as the OECD, can gain the upper hand by both defining problems and suggesting solutions. In the field of education, for example, the international arena is becoming more influential in this respect, all the more so as international players now have access to cross-national data and have more room for experimentation. In this regard, another aspect of policymaking that deserves greater attention is implementation and its associated dynamics. Taking greater account of the human factor, such as behavioural insights, in decisionmaking can help in this. Identifying psychological and social influences on behaviour, and accordingly constructing policies that work with them, require a more empirical and experimental approach to policy design

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(WDR, 2015, p. 5). The World Development Report distinguishes three principles of human decision-making: thinking automatically; thinking socially; and thinking with mental models (culture). ‘Achieving social change in a situation where mental models have been internalised may require influencing not only the cognitive decision making of particular individuals but also social practices and institutions’ (WDR, 2015, p. 12). For example, building trust between disruptive children and non-disruptive ones changes the mental model and produces better outcomes for the disruptive ones, than the results of the disruptive ones who were in the control group (Algan, Beasley, Vitaro & Tremblay, 2013). While there is increasing interest in using behavioural findings for policy design, there are still many shortcomings to the method, such as bias in projection to the future or the influence of the social environments in which people take decisions (Wilsdon & Doubleday, 2015, p. 154). We do not know much about the unintended consequences of ‘nudges’ (i.e. choice architectures, designs of the environments in which people make choices) with which behavioural governance works. Whilst we can experiment with them in isolated settings, we might miss elements that could, however, prove influential in real settings (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008).

Science advice in the European Union The scientific advice mechanism within the EU is rather complex because it serves a very diverse community of 28 Member States, plus the EFTA countries (Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Switzerland) and it addresses very specific needs ranging from ‘providing strong scientific advice in an accessible format; informing the development of longterm policies as well as providing advice during emergencies and crises; and providing advice proactively through foresight

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activities and reactively at the request of policy makers’ (EPRS, 2015, p. 1). The European scientific advisory mechanism has worked over the years with a broad range of institutions: external (e.g. individual researchers, academic bodies), mandated permanently or temporarily (e.g. national or European agencies, or ad hoc expert groups) or internal (e.g. internal research centres, or internal expert bodies that analyse evidence). The latter often works through informal channels. During his second term of office (2009– 14), José Manuel Barroso, the President of the European Commission, appointed a Chief Scientific Advisor, Professor Ann Glover (2011–14). She was a member of the Bureau of European Policy Advisers (BEPA), an inhouse think tank of the European Commission that was supposed to advise the President and the European Commission on political, societal and economic issues. The Chief Scientific Adviser was to provide scientific advice and foresight on the future concerning science, technology and innovation as well as to create networks with other scientific advisory bodies in Europe and beyond. This was an important attempt to move towards aligning the different mechanisms and procedures of scientific advice within the EU and strengthen its excellence and independence. The activities of the Chief Scientific Advisor were, however, highly criticised by some and the position was abolished during the new Commission, led by Jean-Claude Juncker. Drawing on the lessons learned, seeking to further align the EU’s scientific advisory mechanism, the new Commission replaced BEPA with the European Political Strategy Centre (EPSC), an in-house think tank that only reports to the President of the Commission. The Joint Research Centre (JRC) that has evolved since 1957 from a nuclear research centre to an in-house science service of the Commission, attached to the Directorate General Responsible for Research (DG Research), has now been linked to the whole of the Commission, indicating that the JRC supports the whole organisation with

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its knowledge and expertise. Finally, a new Scientific Advice Mechanism (SAM) has been put into place. The latter replaces the Chief Scientific Advisor with a High Level Group (HLG) of seven distinguished scientists who were nominated through a multilayer and multi-stakeholder procedure. The new mechanism also contains the establishment of a secretariat that is at DG Research and not only provides administrative support to the HLG but also collects all the available evidence from JRC and from any other Commission services, as well as from the outputs of the Horizon 2020 research programme of the EU. Finally, the newly established Platform of Science Academies should also ensure the transmission of high-quality and independent scientific advice. Thus, with the introduction of the SAM, the Chief Scientific Advisor has been replaced by seven experts in the HLG, and there is an administrative secretariat that is intended to mainstream all the existing evidence on a given topic and provide administrative support to the HLG. The main operating principles of this mechanism are: excellence, independence, accountability and efficiency (EPRS, 2016). While the institutional framework has seemingly improved on the practical level, from a policy-making perspective, many issues still need to be addressed. Apart from the institutional challenges, issues emerge around the interdisciplinary character of the evidence and advice needed. Also, the integration of soft, qualitative data (including the social and cultural context) might pose challenges. In relation to that, the broad and shifting interpretations of knowledge in our modern hyper-connected world also add to the complexity of the process of evidence-based policy design. Finally, the roles and also culture of people and institutions who commission advice, produce advice and those who take decisions might overlap or merge, a fact which influences the process and its outcomes (OECD, 2015/1, p. 5).

The OECD suggests ways in which mechanisms should be further developed at national and international level (OECD, 2015/1, p. 42). One of the points it raises is building societal trust in science advice for policymaking, and that within this framework the advisory processes need to be as open and as inclusive as possible. It also claims that international organisations should play an important role within that process. In this context the EU has a huge potential, not only by supporting empirical research through the Horizon 2020 programme, but also by channelling the research outcomes into policy. It seems, however, that it is so far more successful in channelling research and advice that is directly linked to the policymaking process. In areas such as education – a soft policy area3 with no binding legislation – ad hoc studies, but particularly peer-learning and peer-review processes, seem increasingly to move centre stage in policymaking. This is a very difficult and complex process as it brings together different models of governance, knowledge and learning (Fazekas & Burns, 2012). Simultaneously, due to the fact that peer-learning and peer-review are processes in place that involve a group of people on a regular basis for a longer time (approximately two years on average), trust and transparency have an important role to play in it and can contribute to successful outcomes. In this process, there is also a genuine back and forth, a real dialogue between research and policy. Consequently, the European process can impact more national-level policymaking and can lead to more successful forms of implementation. To date, the outcomes of the research programme tend to be less directly integrated into policy thinking. With the new scientific mechanism there is a chance that creating a stronger dialogue between research and policy will be accomplished more on a Commission level. However, it is still not clear how the SAM will collect evidence from existing expert groups, agencies etc. The organisation and

Scientific Advice, Policy Formation and ECEC in the EU

the layers of the mechanism are too complex. At the same time, the newly established system definitely shows a deeper understanding of the importance of the process (i.e dialogue between research and policy) itself, and of the way the dialogue and cooperation are organised between research, policy and practice.

ECEC in the European policy arena The main aim of the European-level action in the field of ECEC has been to put ECEC on the education agenda. Currently, there are many debates about the future of education, and about the ways in which we need to ‘rethink’ the ‘old’ education paradigm (Biesta, 2016; OECD, 2016). Therefore, there is a niche, a possibility, for innovation and for structural changes. Despite disagreements concerning education’s shape and form in the future, there is a strengthening tendency to have a holistic way of looking at it. There is a recognition that education should not only focus on cognitive, but also on social, emotional and physical development. Moreover, the new education discourse encompasses not only formal learning, but also learning within non-formal and informal environments and the idea that learning happens everywhere, at any stage in an individual’s life. ECEC falls, at least partially, outside the confines of the compulsory education system. Despite an increasing recognition of the educational value of ECEC since the 1960s, ECEC systems remain often fragmented. In more than half of the systems, responsibilities for the governance and funding rest with two ministries, and also there are divisions between the administration and governance at both central and local levels. Nevertheless, in an increasing number of countries, close to half of them (Eurydice and Eurostat, 2014; OECD, 2015/2) see governance rest with the education ministry, a fact which shows the

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increasing understanding of the educational values of ECEC in practice. Moreover, having the governance in the education ministry facilitates the design, implementation and funding of the initiatives in ECEC that aim at increasing their educational input. Education is a soft policy area, very much guided by the principle of subsidiarity at European level. There is no binding legislation and only a few tools are available to genuinely influence policies in the Member States: programmes like Erasmus+ in education and training and Horizon 2020 in research; political cooperation, such as under the Europe 2020 Strategy, the European Union’s tenyear growth strategy (including the European Semester4), and the Education and Training 2020 Strategy; and finally the Open Method of Coordination. The Europe 2020 Strategy covers all policy sectors and two out of the five headline targets concern education: early school leaving and tertiary graduates.5 The ET 2020 Strategy deals exclusively with education and identifies four main priority areas for intervention: quality and efficiency, lifelong learning and mobility, equity and citizenship, and, finally, innovation and creativity. Within these four strategic areas it defines indicators and targets in order to emphasise the most important areas of intervention. The main benchmarks are: early school leaving, tertiary graduates, participation in ECEC, low achievement in basic skills, employment rates of recent graduates, mobility, and adult participation in lifelong learning. The Open Method of Coordination allows Member States (through their representatives) to participate in peer-learning, peer-review, peercounselling and to define common objectives, develop reference tools, including indicators and benchmarks for policy development and monitoring. There is, therefore, only guidance at the European level. Due to the soft nature of education policy at the European level, there are many forces and players at different levels pushing and pulling before a consensus is forged that is accepted at political level. Soft policymaking,

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as a complement to hard policymaking, in a centralised environment depends strongly on soft elements such as flexible resources, selforganisation and mobilising commitment (Burns & Köster, 2016). Policymakers need to provide an environment with the necessary and sufficient conditions for the development of soft factors. For instance, enabling good communication and flow of information between stakeholders is just as important as providing sufficient autonomy and flexible resources to stakeholders (Burns & Köster, 2016, p. 226). In an increasingly complex education system we need governance structures that can handle complexity (Fazekas & Burns, 2012). Because ECEC was a new field of cooperation at the European level and fell outside the confines of education and training proper, there was room to design the process of policy development in a new, more unusual way. Already at the launching phase, i.e. the drafting of the agenda-setting Communication, several stakeholders, experts and international organisations could be on board as they were already in the same boat, addressing similar issues in ECEC. This resulted in the drafting of a Communication on ECEC that had very broad support across very different players both across the Member States and internationally. It was based on the latest research evidence and was politicised, negotiated and settled, resulting in a broad consensus among the European Commission, Member States and beyond, including international organisations. In the next phase, after the Member States had endorsed the agenda, the thematic working group under the auspices of the European Commission, Directorate General for Education and Culture (DG EAC) with the task of responding to the agenda set in the Communication, continued this trend. This was partly due to the membership of the working group, and partly to its working methods. It is important to note, that at the time, when the group was active (2012– 14), many elements of the working method counted as unique but have since been rolled

out to the other working groups also at DG EAC. Given the diverse governance methods of the Members States in ECEC, two people per country were invited to the group, either from the two relevant ministries or from the relevant ministry or agency and the research world. Members were nominated by the ministries and counted as their voices. In parallel with these developments, a stakeholder group was set up with 55 members, mainly European (e.g. Eurochild, Save the Children, International Step by Step Association) but also some international organisations, including UNESCO, UNICEF and the World Bank. This group was not only working on issues of early childhood but also on issues of early school-leaving, as this helped to link the two and bolster the argument that solid, good quality ECEC helps to prevent early school-leaving. The two groups were supposed to work in parallel but due to some institutional restraints, such as the fact that the names of the members of the working group could not be made public, they have not worked physically together. Moreover, as the working group’s activities were not intended to go public before its output was finalised, the dialogue between the two groups was mediated by the European Commission. Finally, due to the lack of European research evidence that was highlighted while drafting the Communication, several research projects were launched that fed into the policy-making process. These included issues related to the quality of ECEC (as highlighted in the Communication) and to its importance and input into the education process (the competences of the workforce, the importance of ECEC in social inclusion). The thematic working group worked for two years within the Open Method of Coordination and produced a proposal for a European Quality Framework on ECEC. The working method mainly consisted of collecting existing research and renegotiating this knowledge base with the members of the group, drawing on their experience from

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practice and policy. The format was a mixture of in-depth seminars with readings from the most-up-to-date academic literature and presentations from leading academics from around the EU, and peer-learning activities. The latter consisted of three to four day visits to a selected number of EU Member States so as to observe in-depth their ECEC system, and to be able to consult researchers, policymakers and practitioners on the ground. At this event, around three more Member States also introduced their systems from the perspective of the topic that was the focus of that particular peer-learning activity. For example, in Denmark where the main focus of the peer-learning activity was workforce development, the systems of Estonia, Greece and Portugal were also described. The peer-learning activities were prepared and accompanied by background documents describing the focus topic in depth in the host country, as well as by focused questionnaires on each participating Member State. The questionnaires were prepared by the thematic working group members based on the in-depth seminars and follow-up discussions on what the main focus of the policy learning should be. The final output of the group is a quality framework proposal (Working Group on ECEC, 2014) that can embrace all the different systems of ECEC across Europe and create a common language among them. This, in turn, allows not only for mutual learning in a European context but also for bringing together all the relevant players, including researchers, policymakers, practitioners from the education, social, health and family sector to develop a strategy together in the field in a national, regional or local context. The framework can be used for scaffolding. As it contains guidance in five main areas (access, workforce, curriculum, evaluation and monitoring, governance and funding) that help to develop the quality of ECEC systems, it allows for very different starting points and strategies for development. It also implies multi-stakeholder and multi-level

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involvement along the lines that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’, and that policy work on ECEC quality should be guided by child development. The framework proposal’s four main transversal principles are relevant for all the five areas covered. They are: (1) the central focus on the strong and competent child as a partner in the learning process; (2) the importance of partnership between services and families; (3) the concept of a competent system, not only of a competent individual; and (4) the strong focus on process quality. In sum, the work within the Open Method of Coordination was characterised by the involvement of a great number of players and ‘innovative ways’ of using them, such as a stronger cooperation of relevant sectors at national level, among relevant directorates general at the European Commission, deeper involvement of the stakeholders. Because of the lack of European evidence a lot of direct research was commissioned and then used for the development of the final policy output, and dialogue was carried out with international organisations which had concerns and approaches similar to those of the European Commission. The direct involvement of practitioners – apart from the visits during the peer-learning activities – has still remained the biggest challenge. This is particularly strong in ECEC as the field and the workforce are not professionalised enough, thus practitioners often do not have access to policymaking individually or through representative organisations. Moreover, the more emphasis is placed on scientific data as the main evidence, the less practitioners can be involved (except for maybe local authorities, etc. that are responsible for governance). There are, however, ever more attempts to professionalise the ECEC workforce. In this endeavour, turning members of the workforce into self-reflective practitioners, who often have higher education degrees and are involved in research, is a prevalent approach. Action research is, for example, a way of involving the workforce in both research and policy design.6

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ECEC as the disruptive innovator in the education field and beyond As seen above, the European policy-making process in the field of ECEC in recent years has addressed many challenging issues in the dialogue and cooperation between research, policy and practice. It has built up a sustainable process of policymaking that has had an impact at national level. It has managed to address interdisciplinarity, combine hard and soft data, and has started to address more thoroughly the human factor in policymaking while addressing the issue of incentives and implementation of policies. The main, longerterm aim has been to put ECEC on the education agenda, to recognise the entire phase of ECEC as part of the education process. Our education systems, at any point in time, reflect our society in its diversity, its ingrained values. Currently, education systems are more decentralised and less hierarchical, more interdependent and self-regulated. They are now characterised by multi-level governance where the links between multiple actors operating at different levels are more fluid and open to negotiation (Burns & Köster, 2016). These features of current education systems put issues of complexity and its management, and the associated issue of trust, at the heart of the education policy-making process. ECEC is a new field in education, still not considered by many as part of education, but it has great potential in introducing innovative ways of linking research, policy and practice, as well as in education governance, by addressing how knowledge is produced and governed. If we look at the main elements of the OECD’s study on how to govern education in a complex world (Burns & Köster, 2016), we can see that the EU’s policy work in the field of ECEC corresponds to the main criteria, both in terms of the process (i.e. work in the thematic working group) and of the final output (i.e. the framework proposal). This

study emphasises the importance of an effective governance system that takes a holistic system approach with long-term vision and strategic thinking. It works with many stakeholders in an open dialogue and focuses on the process and, within that, on capacity building. As a result, it helps all actors to acquire and use knowledge for successful policy implementation. It also combines the ideas of vertical and horizontal accountability, as the latter allows for more transparency and the development of ownership. European policy cooperation and policymaking in ECEC have focused on the process in the first place and not on structures, and they have created a process with the involvement of many relevant players. That work brought about an open, flexible framework proposal, a modern governance framework that can be used in diverse contexts to develop policies in ECEC and that combines the ideas of vertical and horizontal accountability. It generated a Europe-wide, even international, network of policymakers, researchers, experts and practitioners in ECEC. This network, in turn, created trust among its members that has allowed further work and ensured sustainability as well as long-term thinking. The process was participatory, based on an open dialogue. It allowed the investigation of issues of capacity building as well as simultaneously building capacity in ECEC, as it was mainly focusing on the exchange of information and the creation of knowledge and policy among all participating players. It contributed to the development of a competent system, where capacity was not only built at European level. The European process also triggered capacity building at national level, which then encouraged further local-level capacity building. This process also helped to discover real data gaps in the ECEC field and point to the use, misuse or non-use of data. In some of the areas where research or data gaps were identified, new research was commissioned at European level. The outcomes of this research were integrated into the

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final framework proposal. Thus, needs were defined in a realistic and timely manner and were based on system vision. The framework proposal has a comprehensive whole-system approach to ECEC because the five areas that are tackled are interdependent. The European policy process that has brought together research, policy and practice has helped to digest and reach consensus on what is useful knowledge for policy in the European ECEC arena. In a way, policymakers validated existing research against their policy experience and the practice they have observed in the different Member States. Finally, the whole process allowed for long-term strategic thinking about the field. Policymaking at the European level allows for some kind of freedom, ‘out of the box’ thinking and at the same time the promotion of certain agendas that might be difficult to promote at certain times at national level. Setting the policy agenda is hugely important and a big step in strategic thinking. It is essential at this stage that research, knowledge, including politicised negotiation, and consensus building, are involved in this process. For their inclusion then builds ownership and will help the subsequent implementation of policy. This is why the way in which the issue, the agenda is initially set at the European and international level is so important. No less significant is the question of how it is transmitted to the national, regional and local level, and what kind of knowledge steers the system at European and national level. It is a debated starting point – for example, how much quantitative, PISA-like, data should form the premise on which agendas are set in ECEC? The corresponding discussion that was launched at European level has influenced the work of the OECD on its planned surveys concerning ECEC staff and early learning outcomes. One of the studies commissioned by the European Commission was a first step towards linking ECEC to the school system by investigating how quality ECEC

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can address lower levels of underachievement and early school-leaving (European Commission, 2014). This study suggested four driving principles for a balanced education system: efficient, equitable, cohesive and responsive to diversity. If the ECEC field is designed according to the quality framework proposal, it corresponds to these principles and, thus, can impact the currently existing education system, too. In fact, it can function as a ‘disruptive innovator’ that produces fundamental changes in the education sector both in terms of process and content.7 First, it targets children who are outside the education system (i.e. in several Member States, parts of ECEC are not considered to be part of the education system and are not governed by the authorities responsible for education), but, second, its methodology, both in terms of pedagogical approach (holistic) and in the way it designs policy in a complex system, can be later rolled out to schools. It is an open, flexible system that focuses on the quality of the process in the first place and promotes the integration of care and education for the whole ECEC phase, from birth to the first year of primary school. Whether there is a niche, an opportunity for this innovation remains to be seen. Currently, ECEC features increasingly in the education discourse. But European policy cooperation in ECEC is still work in progress, so it remains a question whether this process will really manage to bring about a paradigm shift in ECEC and, thus, potentially in the later stages of compulsory education. In any case, we can see that it was easier to develop this policy in an experimental space, beyond the confines of the Member States’ policy spaces at EU level. The ECEC Quality Framework Proposal (Working Group on ECEC, 2014) has been translated into several languages and has served as a trigger for the organisation of national events around it with diverse stakeholders upon its release in many Member States. Thus, it has served as a ‘meeting place’ based on a consensus and it delivers a coherent, homogenous and transferable language

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not only among ECEC relevant sectors, but also among different Member States and different cultural contexts. The relatively open process that brought it about has also allowed for the development of ownership across sectors and actors. Its afterlife – how it will not only lead to a (hopefully upward) convergence of systems but maybe also to the development of more tangible indicators and benchmarks, and even, if necessary, legislation – will give room to further evaluation of the policy process so far. Finally, as for the broader context beyond the confines of ECEC and education policy, the new science advice process in the EU is developed along similar innovative lines that attempt to handle complexity and strive simultaneously for independence and excellence. The question is how the broader policy-making and stakeholder world can be integrated into this process, so that there is real ownership and consensus behind policy decisions, which then hugely help the implementation process. We can see that the more complex the scientific advisory mechanism is, the more challenging it becomes to develop consensus and develop evidencebased policy that responds to diverse needs. The flatter and more participatory the mechanism, the more the policy will be backed up by the ownership of larger groups and, thus, can be easier to implement. There is a growing body of literature that discusses the democratisation of the scientific advice process (Stirling, 2015). It emphasises the importance of the involvement of both civil society and broader public opinion. This is then all the more important, as the broader public’s understanding of the issues will impact the influence of the scientific advice and the policy itself (Madelin, 2015). Finally, science is only one type of evidence; big data, new methods like randomised control trials, can also have a big influence, or the recent growing understanding of the importance of behavioural insight (Wilsdon & Doubleday, 2015). While the latter still requires a great deal of clarification in its methodology, it has

a huge potential to alter the eco-system of expertise.

Conclusions In sum, to make evidence-based policymaking and the scientific advice mechanism sound and efficient at European level, the very complex nature of the intersection of the space of policy, research and practice needs to be embraced in terms of actors, culture and geography. This chapter has explored these issues in the particular case of education policy and ECEC and has shown that ECEC has the potential to act as a ‘disruptive innovator’ both in terms of the policy process and the content of the education system. ECEC has been operating, at least in part, outside the confines of the current compulsory education system in most countries. Through its efforts to become part of education, ECEC systems can lead to a change in the school education discourse, in the policy-making process, on the one hand, and in the education process itself, on the other, including curriculum, assessment, etc. The European policy process, which was put into place after the European Commission issued an agenda-setting Communication on ECEC, introduced innovative methods, both in the policy process as well as in the nature of its final output – the quality framework proposal. The latter is an open and flexible structure that can serve as a ‘meeting place’ for the very diverse actors in ECEC that contribute to the development of the field. It allows for an on-going dialogue (process) among research, policy and practice at any point in time across countries, as well as for developing policies and strategies. In terms of the content of the framework proposal, it puts emphasis, for example, on the need for an age-appropriate curriculum, or on ‘care’ alongside ‘education’, and points to the significance of formative and diagnostic assessment; all of which are becoming important in the school education system too.

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Consequently, the ECEC discourse and methodology can provide tools for the school education system in these areas. As for the policy process introduced in the particular case of ECEC, the chapter has shown that European and international policy cooperation with the involvement of a wide range of actors, such as policymakers, researchers and practitioners from different sectors, such as education, health and justice, can impact the ways in which policy, research and practice are linked and governed at national, regional and local level. The European or international context can accommodate out-of-the box thinking and processes, and, if these can be linked to bottom-up demand, they then trickle down into national policy-making systems. As a result, they have the potential to develop more effective policy learning and policy formation mechanisms at national, regional and local level. Moreover, the process that led to the creation of the ECEC quality framework proposal and the process(es) that is triggered at national level by the finished proposal can stimulate policy experimentation (Burns et al., 2016). This experimentation process is vital for the development of tailor-made, local solutions for policy challenges.

 3   4 

 5 

 6 

 7 

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means knowledge production and it needs to go through the hurdle of interpretation and legitimisation by experts (expertise) so that it transforms into evidence for policy. See the following section, ‘ECEC in the European policy arena’. In order to support Member States in the implementation of the targets of the Europe 2020 Strategy that Member States have translated into national targets and growth-enhancing policies, the European Commission has set up a yearly cycle of economic policy coordination, called the European Semester. Each year, the European Commission undertakes a detailed analysis of EU Member States’ programmes of economic and structural reforms and provides them with recommendations for the next 12–18 months. The exact headlines are: reducing the rate of early school-leavers below 10% and at least 40% of the 30- to 34-year-olds should complete thirdlevel education. Most recently, for example, the BRIC Erasmus+ project (2014–17) that involves preschool teachers, young children and parents in exploring democratic engagement in public and civic spaces. The term of disruptive innovation is used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically first by designing for a different set of consumers in a new market and later by lowering the prices in the existing market.

Acknowledgement

References

I would like to thank Tracey Burns, Harry Ballan and Daniel Beer for their valuable inputs in the preparation of this chapter.

Algan, Y., Beasley, E., Vitaro, F., & Tremblay, R. (2013). The long-term impact of social skills training at school entry: a randomized controlled trial. Working Paper, Paris: Sciences Po. Biesta, G. (2016). Good education in the age of measurement: on the need to reconnect with the question of purpose in education. Paper presented at the Working Group meeting on the quality of childhood on What constitutes good education and what are the roles of measurement and evaluation in it, European Parliament, Brussels, 26 April. Bulmer, M., Coates, E., & Dominian, L. (Eds.). (2007). Evidence based policy making. In H. M. Bochel and S. Duncan (Eds.), Making

Notes  1  Disclaimer: The content of this document is the sole responsibility of the author and any opinions expressed therein do not represent the official position of the European Institutions.   2  In this article, science is conceptualised in its broadest sense and includes the social sciences, humanities, hard and soft data. It can be used interchangeably with the term research. Research

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policy in theory and practice (pp. 87–103). Bristol: Policy Press. Burns, T., & Köster, F. (Eds.). (2016). Governing education in a complex world. Educational Research and Innovation series. Paris: OECD Publishing. Burns, T., Köster, F., & Fuster, M. (Eds.). (2016). Education governance in action: lessons from case studies, Educational Research and Innovation series. Paris: OECD Publishing. Council Conclusions. (2009). Council Conclusions of 12 May 2009 on a strategic framework for European cooperation in education and training (‘ET 2020’) (OJ C119 of 28.5.2009). Brussels. Retrieved from http:// eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri =CELEX%3A52009XG0528(01) European Commission (2011). Communication from the Commission: Early childhood education and care: providing all children with the best start for the world of tomorrow, COM(2011) 66 final. Brussels. Retrieved from http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/ CS/TXT/?uri=celex:52011DC0066 European Commission (2014). Study on the effective use of early childhood education and care in preventing early school leaving. Brussels: European Commission. EPRS (European Parliamentary Research Service). (2015). Scientific advice for policymakers in the European Union, Briefing. Brussels: European Parliamentary Research Service, June. Retrieved from http://www. europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/ document.html?reference=EPRS_BRI(2015) 559512 EPRS. (2016). Understanding innovation, Briefing. Brussels: European Parliamentary Research Service, February. Retrieved from http://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document. html?reference=EPRS_BRI(2016)573968 Eurydice and Eurostat. (2014). Key data on early childhood education and care in Europe. 2014 edition. Eurydice and Eurostat Report. Brussels: European Commission. Fazekas, M. (2010). International policy learning and learning capacity: the case of Hungarian vocational education and training. Hertie School of Governance Working Papers, No. 49, March. Fazekas, M., & Burns, T. (2012). Exploring the complex interaction between governance

and knowledge in education. OECD Education Working Paper, 67. Paris: OECD Publishing. Holmes, J., & Clark, R. (2008). Enhancing the use of science in environmental policy-making and regulation. Environmental Science & Policy, 11(8), 702–11. Madelin, R. (2015). Science as the fuel of the public policy machine. In J. Wilsdon and R. Doubleday (Eds.), Future directions for scientific advice in Europe (pp. 26–32). Cambridge: UK Centre for Science and Policy. Neuman, E. (2012). Quantifying quality: the construction of Europe and the road to policy learning. European Educational Research Journal, 11(4), 609–15. Nutley, S. (2003). Bridging the policy/research divide: reflections and lessons from the UK. Keynote paper presented at Facing the future: engaging stakeholders and citizens in developing public policy. National Institute of Governance Conference, Canberra, Australia, 23–24 April. Nutley, S., Davies, H. T. O., & Tilley, N. (2000). Getting research into practice. Public Money & Management, 20(4), 3–6. OECD. (2015/1). Scientific advice for policy making: the role and responsibility of expert bodies and individual scientists. OECD Science, Technology and Industry Policy Papers, No.21, Paris: OECD Publishing. OECD. (2015/2). Starting Strong IV: Monitoring quality in early childhood education and care. Paris: OECD Publishing. OECD. (2016). Trends shaping education 2016. Paris: OECD Publishing. Owens, S., Petts, J., & Bulkeley, H. (2006). Boundary work: knowledge, policy and the urban environment. Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, 24(5), 633–43. Sarewitz, D. (2004). How science makes environmental controversies worse. Environmental Science and Policy, 7(5), 385–403. Stirling, A. (2015). Power, truth and progress: towards knowledge democracies in Europe. In J. Wilsdon and R. Doubleday (Eds.). Future directions for scientific advice in Europe (pp. 135–53). Cambridge: UK Centre for Science and Policy. Sutton, R. (1999). The policy process: an overview. Overseas Development Institute

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Working Paper, 118. London: Overseas Development Institute. Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2008). Nudge: improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Wilsdon, J., & Doubleday, R. (Eds.). (2015). Future directions for scientific advice in Europe. Cambridge: UK Centre for Science and Policy. Working Group on Early Childhood Education and Care under the auspices of the

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European Commission. (2014). Proposal for key principles for a Quality Framework for Early Childhood Education and Care. Retrieved from: http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/education_culture/repository/education/policy/ strategic-framework/archive/documents/ececquality-framework_en.pdf World Development Report: Mind, society, and behavior. (2015). Washington, DC: International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The World Bank.

2 Early Childhood Policies in India: A Historical Analysis Ve n i t a K a u l a n d S h i p r a S h a r m a

Introduction: The Challenge of Being ‘India’ India is unique in being the world’s largest democracy with a federal structure of 29 states or provinces and seven union territories, collectively known as the Republic of India. India’s predominant challenges are its socio-demographic features, primarily its scale and its diversity. The scale comes from its population of 1.3 billion (Census of India, 2011) and the diversity from the co-existence of 2000 ethnic groups, 29 official languages (and many dialects), and from the fact that all the religions of the world are represented in the country. The population size enables India to be proud of its demographic dividend: it has the largest workforce of young people globally. Underlying this pride, however, are concerns which continue to hover on the national horizon regarding the skills of its young workforce, their nutritional and health status, and their employability. These

concerns may originate from, among other factors, the persisting inadequacy of the health and educational support systems available to the large majority of Indian children in their early childhood years, which are the formative years for life (Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000). Cumulative evidence from neuroscience and research in child development and economics unequivocally confirms the critical importance of investing in the early childhood years, since these lay the foundation for lifelong learning and development, and health and overall well-being throughout the life span (Young, 2002). The overall development of children is a product of nature and nurture, with the psychosocial environment playing as important a role as genetics in influencing how they will develop as adults. Since nurturing environments are critical to a child’s early development but often not adequately available to children, good quality Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) – particularly for socially disadvantaged children – can

EC policies in India: a historical analysis

be a significant intervention and therefore a vital provision. The issue in India is: do all Indian children have access to an optimal early learning and development environment in these significant years? We begin to address this question with a brief review of the current scenario of ECCE in India in terms of existing policies and provisions. In this context, we discuss the stages of development and expansion of the flagship Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) in India, which is perhaps the largest integrated public sector programme of its kind in the world for children below 6 years. We then proceed with a more critical and retrospective examination of the historical journey of ECCE through some significant socio-political phases in India’s journey that have influenced and led to the current context. The chapter, which derives from an extensive literature review supplemented with primary research and direct policy experiences of the authors, concludes with a summary discussion of key issues that are relevant to the future planning of ECCE in this vast and diverse country.

Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) in India: the Current Context Currently India has approximately 158 million children below 6 years of age (Census of India, 2011), of which an estimated 70 million are between the ages of 3 and 6 (Ministry of Women and Child Development, 2011–12). Flowing from the commitments made in Articles 39 and 45 of the Constitution of India (Government of India, 1950), formulated after India’s independence from British rule, there has been a clear and consistent recognition by the government of the need to cater to the educational needs and integrated development of all children below the age of 14 years. Over the years this commitment has been reflected, to some extent, in the

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government’s efforts to ensure a supportive and enabling policy and programmatic framework for ECCE. If we were to begin from what is current and then journey backwards, the most significant development in the field of ECCE in the last few years has been the approval of the National Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) Policy (NECCEP) (Ministry of Women and Child Development, 2013b). This is the first policy directed exclusively at young children below 6 years. It provides a vision for ECCE which is to ‘promote inclusive, equitable and contextualized opportunities for promoting optimal development and active learning capacity of all children below 6 years of age’ (emphasis added) (p. 8). The term Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE), as used in India, is consistent with alternative terminologies used internationally such as Early Childhood Development (ECD) or Early Childhood Care and Development (ECCD) or Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC). Optimal early childhood development requires that children have access to: (1) appropriate, affordable, diverse and nutrientrich food; (2) appropriate maternal and child care; (3) a safe, stable, nurturing environment and opportunities to learn and play; and (4) adequate health services and a healthy environment including safe water, sanitation and good hygiene (UNICEF, 2016). In 2013, India also revised its National Policy for Children (Ministry of Women and Child Development, 2013a), first formulated in 1974 (Ministry of Education and Social Welfare, 1978). The 2013 revision defines the ‘child’ as up to 18 years of age and, in consonance with the NECCEP (Ministry of Women and Child Development, 2013b), also provides for ‘universal and equitable access to quality Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) of all children below six years of age …. through a long term, sustainable, multi-sectoral, integrated and inclusive approach …. for the overall and harmonious development and protection

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of children’. Although currently ECCE has been omitted as a fundamental right of every Indian child in the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act (RTE) 2009, (Ministry of Human Resource Development, 2009), which covers children only from 6 to 14 years, ECCE is referred to in Section 11 of the same Act which directs all states or provinces of India to endeavour to make provision for preschool education of satisfactory quality for all children from 3 to 6 years, to prepare them for school. Additionally, Article 45 of the Indian Constitution (Government of India, 1950) has been amended to articulate the states’ commitment to endeavour to provide early childhood care and education for all children below 6 years of age. These provisions, though enabling, do not allow ECCE to be a legal entitlement of every child below 6 years and the latter has therefore become an issue of protest and advocacy for the ECCE community and civil society (Law Commission of India Report 259, 2015). This vision of ECCE in India is, as noted earlier, clearly in consonance with the international perspective presented by UNESCO (2016) which defines early childhood as the period from birth to 8 years and describes it as ‘a time of remarkable brain growth, these years lay the foundation for subsequent learning and development’ (UNESCO, 2016). However, despite this broad consensus across international and national visions of ECCE, some differences do exist. In India the policy defines ECCE as up to 6 years of age and not 8 years as internationally advocated. This early childhood stage is further sub-divided conceptually into two segments: children below 3 years, particularly the first 1000 days, during which nutrition, health care and early psycho-social stimulation are areas of priority, and children aged 3 to 6 years in which preschool education additionally becomes an important intervention. In terms of programmes and provisions, since 1975 India has had the privilege of designing and implementing the world’s

largest publicly sponsored integrated programme for children below 6 years, known as the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS). This programme provides an integrated package of six services for holistic child development in a life-cycle mode for pregnant and lactating women, for children from birth to 6 years of age, and for adolescent girls. The six services are: supplementary nutrition; immunisation; health check-ups; referral services; preschool non-formal education for 3- to 6- year-olds; and nutrition & health education. These services are delivered through a single window approach by 1.3 million ECCE centres across the country, known as anganwadi centres. Each centre is run by a local woman worker and a helper; in total the anganwadi centres serve over 102 million beneficiaries from across India (Ministry of Women and Child Development, 2015) including over 82 million children below 6 years, and over 19 million pregnant and lactating women. However, issues of equitable access and quality of services persist, often raising the debate of scale versus quality (World Bank, 2004). The other major provider of ECCE in India is the private sector which has shown steady expansion in the last few decades. This expansion has likely been facilitated by a sharp decline in the population below the poverty line, and the liberalisation and emergence of the market economy. Recent data on private schooling indicates that approximately 40% of children in rural India are enrolled in private schools and the numbers are constantly increasing (Kaul et al., 2017). Since data on the urban scenario is not available due to the absence of any regulatory mechanisms for private schools, or requirement for registration, this estimation of privatisation may yet be a gross under-estimation. While utilisation of private schooling and health services are becoming the preferred choice of most parents and caregivers, the concern is that the quality of provision is not necessarily better than that of public services

EC policies in India: a historical analysis

(Kaul et al., 2017). We will come back to this discussion later in the context of issues and challenges.

The highs and the lows of ECCE provisions Overall, over the last three decades, the policy framework and provisions in India for ECCE, and for children as a whole, have been supportive and enabling, and have translated into positive impact in terms of reaching out to all children below 6 years. However, the India story is notably one of periodic spurts in growth and development nurtured by good, well-intentioned policies and provisions, but accompanied by significant challenges in implementation of the programmes. For example, there has been progress in overall child development indicators, with infant mortality rates halved between 1990 and 2012 down to 44 per thousand births. Similarly, child survival rates have improved with mortality for under-5-year-olds reduced to 56 per thousand in 2012 as compared to 126 per thousand in 1990. Literacy rates have also improved with the Net Enrolment Ratio (NER) now enhanced to 99% for primary education, with a distinct reduction in school dropouts. However, it is significant that 60% of children who drop out of school tend to do so prior to Grade 3, between 6 to 8 years of age. Malnutrition rates, though improved, are still higher than those of sub-Saharan Africa with nearly 48% of children under age 5 classified as stunted, denying them the opportunity to grow and develop to their full physical and cognitive potential (UNICEF, 2016). Access to ECCE has also expanded with currently almost every village possessing an anganwadi, as evidenced in a recent three-state longitudinal study (India Early Childhood Education Impact Study, Kaul et al., 2017). The authors recall heart-warming anecdotal experiences of turning up unannounced at anganwadis in remote areas of

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the country and finding young children being fed a free hot cooked meal; this is no mean achievement, given the sheer scale of India’s territory. Over the last decade, the demand for early education has also been visibly expanding. Available data on enrolment and participation in Early Childhood Education (ECE) programmes indicate that about 64.5% of 3-year-olds and 76.3% of 4-year-olds in rural India are attending preschools or anganwadis (Annual Status Education Report, 2013). This excludes the urban population for which there is no data and which, if estimated, can significantly enhance the percentage of children attending ECE programmes. The flip side however is that although ICDS is in principle designed to provide comprehensive services including ECCE, in practice in many provinces it serves at best as a nutrition programme (Kaul et al., 2017; World Bank, 2004). With the rise in parental aspirations, parents who can afford it are transferring their 3- to 6-year-old children to private preschools, or in some cases to government primary schools as underage enrolments since they consider these to be better ‘education’ providers for their children (Kaul & Chaudhary, 2015). While more than 70% of children below 6 years are currently in anganwadis and private schools, the recent IECEI study revealed that the large majority of these children in rural India are entering primary school with very weak conceptual or linguistic foundations (Kaul et al., 2015). There are also gender differences in preschool/primary school participation trends amongst children aged 4 to 7 years, with higher proportions of boys enrolled in private institutions and vice versa. Most children from the lowest wealth quintile (51%) attend Anganwadi centres (AWCs), while most children in the highest wealth quintile (62%) attend private facilities (Ministry of Women and Child Development, 2014). The quality of preschool education is also a major issue across public sponsored anganwadis and affordable preschools wherein the pedagogy is dominated either by rote memorisation and age-inappropriate

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formal teaching or a minimalist curriculum of songs and rhymes. There are a few good practices but these are almost miniscule in number (Kaul et  al., 2017). The scope for universal outreach with quality and equity is thus still a long way off.

The Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) Journey: From Pilot to Scale The establishment of the ICDS in 1975 has been a major initiative in India, given its scale and comprehensive design, and therefore deserves a fuller discussion of its long and historical journey, from the stage of piloting to that of universalisation (Kaul et al., 2009). It is also important to understand the complexity of the process of operationalisation of this integrated ‘single window’ programme for child development and ECCE. After India became a republic in 1950, the Planning Commission was established under the Prime Minister to initiate a formal mechanism of cyclic planning for the country across all sectors at five-year intervals. This process has led to the development of 12 fiveyear plans to date over the 70 years of India’s independence from Britain. The current plan – the Twelfth Plan (Planning Commission, GOI, 2013) – is technically valid till 2017, but the new political dispensation in 2014 replaced the Planning Commission by what is known as the NITI Aayog, an acronym for the National Institute of Transforming India, a kind of think tank for the government. Since the five-year plans are perhaps the best sources of information for analysing the shifts over time in the government’s approach to provisions for children, the following section provides a brief review of ECCD provisions within the five-year planning cycles, starting from the time of the initiation of the ICDS programme in the Fifth Five Year Plan (1974– 1979). (All of the Five Year Plan (FYP) documents are accessible from the website:

http://planningcommission.gov.in/plans/planrel/fiveyr/welcome.html.) As we reflect on the journey of ICDS, what is commendable is the scientific and formative approach adopted for initiating this ambitious programme in the public sector, an approach that was perhaps unprecedented in the social sector in India.

The First Five Years (1975–1980): Establishing the Model ICDS was initiated in 1975 as a pilot project in 35 administrative clusters of villages. The first five years were essentially spent on trialling and establishing the model of an effective multi-sectoral community-based programme, based on a spirit of volunteerism. Its formative approach is reflected in the significant research and evaluation component of the initiative which was built into the design of the programme. A compilation of evaluation studies conducted on ICDS has been published (National Institute of Public Cooperation and Child Development (NIPCCD), 2009a) with the results showing programme amendments based on the evidence from the evaluations. One example of a mid-course change to the programme design was the introduction of more intensive needs-based training to compensate for the lack of available educated women to work in the programme and the consequential need to reduce the eligibility qualifications of workers. Similarly, convergence mechanisms were built into the design of the programme to ensure comprehensive services and support from across sectors.

The Second Five Years (1980–1985): Expanding and Strengthening Institutional Capacity In the second five years of its existence, i.e. in the early 1980s, the ICDS focused on strengthening and expanding the health infrastructure

EC policies in India: a historical analysis

and institutional capacity, especially with a view to reducing the incidence of polio and malnutrition. This period saw the introduction of the concept of ‘at risk children and mothers’, based on empirical evidence of endemic infant mortality and morbidity and severe malnutrition. Some weaknesses addressed included the inefficient and inadequate supply of food items, incomplete identification of severely malnourished children and weak integration in service provision at the centre level.

Next Phase (1985–1997): Consolidation of Services and Improvement of Quality In the next phase, the focus shifted to expanding the coverage of services to children below 3 years, possibly due to the detection of high levels of malnutrition in these critical early years for development. There was also some emphasis on the improvement of service quality through renewed efforts to improve coordination and convergence, strengthen training programmes and improve facilities such as water and sanitation in Anganwadi centres (AWCs). However, with priority given to child survival rather than development, the health and nutrition components of the ICDS received more attention than preschool education; unfortunately this imbalance persists to this day. The largest challenge in the ICDS has therefore been to ensure that all six services mentioned earlier get equitable treatment and maintain balanced quality.

Last 20 Years to Date (1998–2017): Universalisation of Services The period of the early and late 1990s which corresponds to the Eighth and Ninth Five Year Plans of the Government of India (1992– 2002), was marked by a shift in emphasis to seeing children as a national resource, with high priority accorded to the universalisation of ICDS and policies and programmes for

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child survival and development. This led to a rapid expansion of services with the original norm of one centre per 1000 population being reduced to one centre per 400–800 population. The result was the establishment of 1.3 million anganwadis or centres across even the remotest parts of India, largely in rural areas. This is a creditable achievement in enhancing access, though neglect of the urban poor and the quality of services remain serious issues.

Revisiting the historical context of ECCE in India: A critical analysis We now delve briefly into a critical analysis of the vision for ECCE in India from a historical perspective, beginning from what was traditionally a socio-cultural construct embedded in Indian scriptures and tradition. We trace the re-emergence of ECCE through the British colonial period and the postcolonial phase right through to more recent neoliberal shifts in the policy environment all the way to what is currently an approved National ECCE Policy of the Government of India (NECCEP, 2013). We argue that the current ECCE policy is mediated by shifting policy paradigms. Initially conceived as a welfare measure for poor children immediately after India’s independence, ECCE subsequently became a vehicle for the recognition of children as a national asset and a policy mechanism for human resource development. More recently the focus on ECCE has become part of an ongoing discourse about children’s rights, positioned as a service to which every child has a fundamental right.

Integrated ECCE: The Concept and its Legacy The concept of ECCE as an integrated provision for supporting children’s all-round development in the early years is culturally not new to India. Since the Vedic era, the

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Ayurveda, which is part of one of the four Vedas or earliest religious scriptures of India developed thousands of years ago, has been guiding early childcare practices, with one of its eight branches clearly dedicated to the care of children. Interestingly, even as early as in the Vedic times ‘the approach to knowledge and understanding of childcare in Ayurved[ic texts] is holistic. The biological, psychological, sociological, and cultural approaches are seen as mutually inclusive’ (Kapur, n.d.). Operationally, the Vedas view both mother and child as a symbiotic unit and emphasise samaskaras, or rites of passage, along with prescribed developmental approaches and childcare practices. Based on the age of the child, these samaskaras sequence the optimal physical and psychological progress in each phase of the life cycle of the child, marked by distinct developmental milestones (Khalakdina, 2011). Evidence of this cultural lineage, which was exclusively home- and family-based and passed on from one generation to the next, is manifested in the rich repertoire of infant and child games and lullabies, massages, children’s folk stories, rhymes and riddles and folk toys which have been part of childhoods in India. It is intriguing to see the correspondence of the samaskaras stages (Table 2.1) with modern

scientific thought and knowledge regarding childcare and development. An example is the Annaprashan, or weaning, at 6 months which is completely synchronous with the current emphasis on exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months of life. Traditional folk toys such as spinning tops, flutes and pouring earthenware vessels were evidently designed to demonstrate basic scientific principles to the child in the play mode. Infant games were largely what we may consider sensorimotor in nature in consonance with the Piagetian developmental stage, and the rhymes, riddles and stories which children enjoy served to immerse them in a rich language environment. While some remnants of these practices may still be visible in extended families, the changes in family structures and the trend towards nuclear families has resulted, unfortunately, in this lineage steadily becoming extinct and being replaced with technology and more modern childcare practices (Ray, 2015).

Postcolonialism and the Emergence of Institutionalised ECCE Any analysis of the shift from this traditional legacy towards the institutionalisation of ECCE

Table 2.1 Rites of passage and rituals in ayurvedic paediatrics: exemplifying childhood samaskaras and their importance as milestones of development Samskara

Development period

Assessment

Jatakarma Namakarana Niskramana

After birth 10th, 12th or 100th day Fourth month

Rooting and sucking reflexes Appropriate period for general examination of infants 1.  Macular fixation and papillary adjustment 2.  Reaction to sounds 3.  Head control 1.  Appearance of first tooth 2.  Functioning of digestive system 3.  Proper time for weaning Examination and care of anterior fontanelle A type of active immunisation (yukti krtabala) initiated with external trauma 1.  Fit for education 2.  Assessment of intellect

Annaprashanna 6–10 months

Chudakarana Karnavedhana Upanayana

1–3 years 6–8 months 6–8 years

Source: Kumar (1999)

EC policies in India: a historical analysis

in India cannot be undertaken without reflecting on the aftermath of colonisation of India by the British empire and its impact on the socio-cultural life of Indian society, particularly in the context of education: In countries such as India with more than 5,000 years of rich tradition in the human arts and sciences, the experience of colonization by other countries whose traditions were at extreme variance with their own was onerous across all the dimensions of human existence. It was in the area of education, however, that the efforts of colonizing powers were concentrated, in order to secure the acculturation of future generations and, thus, to continue domination by the colonizing state. (Gupta, 2006, p. xi)

Clear evidence of the focus on the acculturation of the Indian population by the colonising state – Britain – is the Minute of Lord Macaulay (1835) in which he emphasised the need to move away from the use of vernacular language to English as the language of instruction. He stated: We must at present do our best to form a class … Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect … and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population. (Macaulay, 1835)

The history of education in India, including that of early childhood education, needs therefore to be seen from a lens of both cultural domination, and to an extent, missionary zeal for religious conversion, for both of which literacy was a prerequisite. As an illustration, the concept of schooling, or of any institutionalised programme for children under 6 years, was not in the Indian consciousness at all prior to British rule (Table 2.1). Even for older children it was practised in the guru-shishya tradition of ‘mentor–mentee’ engagement marked by complete obeisance to the guru as a source of knowledge and wisdom. However, this Indian tradition, as documented, was available to only a select few in the population and there was no concept of universal schooling or

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provisioning – the introduction of which has been perhaps a key positive impact of colonisation. The ‘curriculum’ was similarly more closely related to the immediate context and informed largely by the need for preparation for adult roles and skills. The setting up of an institutionalised system and the emphasis on English and literacy led to the distancing of the curriculum – including in many cases through the language of instruction – from real-life contexts; the latter continues to be an issue even today. With regard to ECCE, the care of the child under 6 years was traditionally within homes and the approach to it was prescribed as lalayat or indulgent child rearing with free play, exploration and choices characteristic of a small child’s daily life. This resonates with some aspects of developmentally appropriate practice today. The emergence of ECCE as an organised endeavour came in some time in the eighteenth century, during the time of British occupation, through the setting up of infant schools. These were seen largely as ‘attempts at moral and spiritual redemption of the natives, particularly native Christian’ (Kaur, 2006, emphasis added). Furthermore, in the nineteenth century European missionaries came to India and introduced the concept of kindergarten or preschool education with a focus on the teaching of English and literacy. This western influence continued to be at work when in the early twentieth century Maria Montessori visited India at the invitation of Mahatma Gandhi and conducted training programmes about her philosophy and pedagogy at several locations in India. Her structured pedagogy and materials were enthusiastically replicated by some programmes catering to elite families, despite the exorbitant cost involved, and Montessori Schools gained popularity for younger children (Kaul, 1992). The colonial influence on the content, language and pedagogical processes used within preschools and schools continues to a large extent even today. This is reflected in the location of English as the priority language in the

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hierarchy of spoken languages in the country, signifying its dominance as a language of power and social mobility and its privileged status even as a medium of instruction. The introduction of English in the system during the colonial period was met with enthusiasm from the middle class who were eager to learn the skill and increase their chances of securing government employment during British rule. However, Vijayalakshmi and Babu (2014) have argued that the pedagogy used to teach English ‘mainly for education and administration’ was a ‘literature based system’ (p. 2) which has meant that techniques like memorisation or rote learning became institutionalised and these have unfortunately continued to a considerable extent in the existing Indian education system (Kaul et al., 2017). In the domain of ECCE, as in education as a whole, another example of cultural dissonance between western thought and Indian belief systems is the clear divide evident between the current policy prescriptions for pedagogy informed by Euro-western theorists, such as Piaget and Vygotsky, and actual classroom practices. These again reflect the cultural dissonance with the pan-Indian understanding of process of learning as ‘handed down’, or as a process of knowledge transmission from teacher to taught, rather than that of co-construction. This disconnect is evident between teacher education curricula based on western child-centred philosophies and pedagogies, and the actual teaching practices in preschools by trained teachers, which continue to be teacher-centred and influenced by their own beliefs and past experiences of the learning process (Gupta, 2006). According to Mallory and New (1994) the disciplinary orientation of child development itself is a very Euro-western concept which emphasises the individualistic nature of optimal development, based upon a set of developmental skills that are deemed appropriate and accountable in the white middleclass communities of Europe and the United States (Gupta, 2006). This child development

discourse has tended to adopt a normative stance to development and clearly not taken cognisance of the concept of ‘multiple childhoods’ (Balagopalan, 2011; 2014) and the need to address social and cultural diversity in context, which is a key challenge in India.

The Emergence of Neoliberal Political Reforms and Their Impact A third strain of influence on the provision of ECCE has been the liberalisation of the economy in the 1990s and emergence of the neoliberal discourse of market forces. Joseph (2007) has commented that in India as in the west, with the slowing down of the high rate of economic growth, expansion of the public sector and increasing public expenditure on social services, the welfare state seemed to be in a crisis .… This provided the ideological space in which neoliberal theories gained wide legitimacy. (p. 3213)

An immediate impact of this shift has been the rapid expansion of private investment in the domain of both ECCE and school education. Through the 1990s and into the early parts of this decade, the opening up of external support by the World Bank, Department for International Development (DFID) and other international agencies also contributed to this shift in the education sector with suggestions of voucher systems, public private partnerships, channelling corporate social responsibility and other such innovations to encourage private-sector participation in health and education while promoting school choices. However, the Indian state has not completely abdicated its responsibility. Major schemes like ICDS, the universal midday-meal provision for all children from 6 to 14 years in public schools; subsidies in the form of textbooks, uniforms and shoes; subsidised higher education in universities, among others, continue and reflect a concurrent commitment by the government to its role as a welfare state. Alongside this, there has been some effort at social engineering by

EC policies in India: a historical analysis

introducing a clause to Section 21 of the Right to Education Act (2009) which requires all recognised and well-established private schools, who have been given land on subsidised rates, to admit 25 percent of children from the lower socio-economic sections of society at preschool level or grade 1, whichever is the entry stage. There are state variations in the implementation of the clause and the jury is still out in terms of its impact on promoting social equity. However, with the position of privilege accorded to English as the medium of instruction and with the reduction over the years in the percentage of the population below the poverty line and rising parental aspirations for quality education, the private sector is steadily overtaking government provisions even in rural and remote areas (Kaul et  al., 2017). An entirely new sector of affordable private preschools and schools is now emerging as a viable alternative, especially for those parents transiting into the middle class. State governments are increasingly outsourcing the management of schools to international and national-level private agencies, expecting them to ‘turn these around’. Since ECCE is largely in the private sector, or is part of the ICDS with very limited investment in the public domain, public private partnerships are still in a nascent stage.

Shifting Policy paradigms: From Welfare to Development to Child’s Right The Welfare Approach We noted earlier that in 1914 Montessori’s concept of pedagogy for preschool children, a distinctly western model, was introduced in India and, on Mahatma Gandhi’s advice, indigenised for children from marginalised communities by Gijubhai Badheka, a well-known educationalist. This development can be considered to mark the genesis

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of the welfare approach to ECCE. Badheka’s adaptation of Montessori’s pedagogy was further expanded by Tarabai Modak, another Gandhian, in the form of Bal Mandirs or children’s temples, initially in urban and later in tribal areas of Maharashtra. Tarabai Modak also conceived the idea of an anganwadi (translated as ‘courtyard play centre’) since she believed that with the tribal population geographically dispersed over a large area, if children cannot come to the centre, the centre can come to the children! (Nutan Bal Shikshan Sangh, 2016). Many years later anganwadi has become the designated name for centres under the ICDS programme (Kaul, 1992; Khalakdina, 1998). Around this time Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of basic education, which focused on humanistic and holistic education, also gathered momentum and led to the establishment of the Kasturba Gandhi National Memorial Trust, a social welfare organisation. This organisation set up many centres to train women to work in rural pre-basic education centres, which subsequently became known as balwadi or children’s gardens, again derived from a European model, this time Froebel’s kindergarten. As we move into the post-independence era, an analysis of the 12 five-year plans through the ECCE lens offers interesting insights into the inter-sectoral planning process and the evolving shifts in vision, perception and ideologies about children over time. India’s independence from British rule in 1947 marked the beginning of India as a socialist democratic state, adopting and enacting a constitution which in its ‘Directive Principles of State Policy’ clearly spelt out the promotion of the welfare of its people as its primary concern. More specifically, Article 39 of the Constitution of India (Government of India, 1950) pledged that children would be given ‘opportunities and facilities to develop in a healthy manner and in conditions of freedom and dignity’. Articles 39 and 45 of the Constitution emphasised the state’s responsibility in ensuring health, education and general welfare, especially of children.

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However, the focus of the government during its First Five Year Plan (1951–1956) as an independent nation was on building its industry and infrastructure and it took some time before the State effectively took on social welfare responsibilities. Instead, the government adopted the strategy of seeking the support of voluntary agencies to organise activities in child welfare, seeing them as more experienced providers of these services. In 1952 the government’s serious intention vis-à-vis child welfare was reflected when it established the Indian Council for Child Welfare (ICCW), a national-level organisation to mobilise voluntary activity in all aspects of child development. This was followed by the establishment of the Central Social Welfare Board (CSWB) in 1953 as ‘an interface between the resources of the government and the energy and outreach of the voluntary sector’ (CSWB, 2016). It was promoted as an initiative to assist and mobilise the support of voluntary organisations (VOs) in the provision of social welfare services, especially for women and children. In 1954 the Board launched the Welfare Extension Projects (WEP) to reach out to the rural population with a more comprehensive programme that comprised a crèche, provision of supplementary nutrition and pre-school education to children, and craft training and social education for women (Indira Gandhi National Open University, 2006). The experience of these balwadi programmes began to contribute to the growing belief in the need for and concept of a more integrated approach to child development. The next step in the government becoming more proactive and directly engaged in child welfare occurred during the 1960s, when the government took on an increased role in service delivery and policy formulation. Many factors and events contributed to this shift. Primary among these was India’s emerging status as a more self-reliant nation, during the first two five-year plans (1951–1961) which was an intensive period of infrastructural development – such as irrigation, power and transport systems and the development of basic industries. The lesson that emerged from

the government’s serious but limited engagement with child welfare was the need for the country to adopt a longer term perspective on development and approach to planning. The Third Five Year Plan a decade later (1961–1966) stands out as significant since it was in this phase that child welfare emerged as a clear policy focus for the government. The third plan clearly stated: It has been decided that all welfare programmes should have a pronounced child welfare bias .… child welfare service would be organised not only for the handicapped but also for the normal children. At the field level, an integrated approach would replace the dispersed services …. (3rd FYP, para 39)

The Child as a Human Resource It was during the Fifth Five Year Plan (1974– 1978) that a clear shift was indicated in the government’s vision from the child as a recipient or beneficiary of welfare measures towards that of the child as a national resource. Largely governed by an economic and instrumental perspective, rather than a humane or human rights one, the child was now positioned in policy documents as a potential human resource. This is evident in the emphasis put on measures of children’s development and in the adoption of an integrated approach to early childhood services, specifically the ICDS (1975). In recognition of this vision, in 1985 the government established the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD website, n.d.) and shifted the Department of Women and Child Development into it from its previous location in the Department of Social Welfare. This reflected the acknowledgement at policy level of the importance of early childhood care and education as an input for the development of human resources. A similar articulation is evident in the formulation of the National Policy for Children in 1974 which was perhaps the first policy document articulating the needs of children (Childline India, 2016). This policy recognised children to be a supremely important

EC policies in India: a historical analysis

asset for the country. The stated goal of the policy was to work towards ensuring that the constitutional provisions for children were implemented from birth and throughout a child’s period of growth. It committed to comprehensive health and nutrition programmes for children along with free and compulsory education until the age of 14 years. It asked for special attention to children from contexts of marginalisation and social disadvantage, thus adopting a very comprehensive approach. It also sought protection of children from abuse, neglect, cruelty and exploitation. The Eighth Five Year Plan (1992–1997), which saw a significant expansion of the ICDS, also resulted in the adoption of a National Nutrition Policy in 1993 and the development of two National Plans to provide guidelines for the ‘survival, protection and development of children’. Both the National Plans emphasised the need to improve community awareness, participation and monitoring, as well as the convergence of pre-school education with primary schooling to ensure a smooth transition. ECCE, seen as a part of elementary education, was included in the National Policy on Education (1986) (Ministry of Human Resource Development, 1986) which for the first time introduced the term Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) in the Indian context. The policy emphasised investment in ECCE for the holistic development of young children and recommended child-oriented play that fosters individuality. It discouraged in no uncertain terms formal teaching-learning of the 3Rs (reading, writing and arithmetic) at the early childhood stage since that would create unnecessary pressures on children to learn what they are not ready for. The policy also highlighted the importance of establishing daycare services and preschools attached to primary schools to enable young girls and women from poor families engaged in the care of younger children to be free to attend school or earn additional income respectively. The inclusion of ECCE as part of education policy was perhaps also influenced by

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international commitments, since around this time the historical Jomtien Conference (World Conference on EFA, Jomtien, 1990) on Education for All (EFA) identified ECCE as the first goal to be achieved, with the rationale that ‘learning begins from birth’ (WCEFA Inter-Agency Commission, 1990, p. 36). This conference led to the entry of external aid in education through large-scale externally-funded, bilateral and multilateral, primary education projects with multi-donor partnerships. Each of these partnerships brought in several innovations in the form of decentralised district-based and contextualised planning, emphasis on the marginalised communities and closer linking of ECCE with primary education through synchronising of opening and closing hours and academic calendar and relocation of anganwadis to primary schools. These projects also introduced more joyful pedagogical methods to early primary grades. In 2006, the subject of ECCE in the rules of the business of the government was shifted from the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) and located in the newly created Ministry of Women and Child Development (MWCD), itself upgraded from a department within MHRD. Unfortunately this shift led to an undermining of the importance of preschool education, with greater priority being given to health and nutrition. While along with ICDS, there had been some grant-in-aid schemes from the government for promoting voluntary initiatives in ECCE – some even leading to innovative and contextualised models – these were closed down with the rationale that government resources should not be duplicated. As a result, the ICDS/ Anganwadi centre, with its standardised ‘one shoe fits all’ design, became the sole model for ECCE in the public sector, with complete disregard for India’s wide socio-cultural diversity. In 2013, possibly due to budgetary constraints, a grant from the education sector for innovation in ECCE was also withdrawn, which was indeed a setback for quality improvement of ECCE at the state level.

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Overall, a clear shift in perspective from welfare to development can be traced in federal policy documents. However, with child development and education being a joint responsibility between states and federal governments, and implementation of services resting largely with the states, the resources allocated and quality of implementation remained minimalist with little regard for children’s legitimate entitlements in the context of social equity and justice (World Bank, 2004). The impact of the shift from welfare was possibly more evident in the rapid expansion of the ICDS with the government’s resolve to universalise services, although with inadequate attention being given to maintaining quality. Within the tradition of volunteerism that has characterised the Indian EC sector, as discussed earlier, the ‘development’ approach thus remained largely in a ‘welfare’ mode in terms of provision, and the target population of beneficiaries increasingly began to narrow down to only the most marginalised and voiceless sections of society. This welfare approach continues to be visible in the way that early childhood services are run by largely untrained or inadequately trained service providers, the poor physical infrastructure and facilities of the services, and the minimalist curriculum leading to inequitable access with minimal quality. This scenario applies to both school education and ECCE, thus widening rather than narrowing socialequity gaps.

Movement towards a Rights Perspective With India’s ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1992 and strong civil society advocacy, in 2009 the Federal Government enacted the RTE, making elementary education a fundamental right of every child. However, this legislation omitted from its ambit children under 6 years, thus reversing the already existing commitment of the Constitution of

India (Article 45, 1950) which required all states to provide education for all children under 14 years of age. As we noted earlier, until then the phrase ‘up to 14 years’ within the Constitution was interpreted as inclusive of children under 6 years. The reason for the omission was perhaps the dearth of resources in the government exchequer relative to those that would be required to meet children’s entitlements in terms of quality standards. Another factor could have been the issue of conflict of ‘ownership’ of the responsibility for the sector, since the policy brief for ECCE was under a different ministry. Subsequently, in response to civil society advocacy an enabling clause was included in the RTE (Clause 11), indicating that ‘with a view to prepare children above the age of three years for elementary education and to provide early childhood care and education for all children until they complete the age of six years, the appropriate Government may make necessary arrangement for providing free pre-school education for such children’. It is important to note that unlike school education, this clause remains at the level of ‘may make’ and is still not a legal right of every child, so that failure on the part of the government to provide ECCE cannot be challenged in court. Further, responding to demand from the states and civil society, in 2012–13 the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) established a highlevel Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE) to consider the feasibility of extending RTE to children from 3 to 6 years, of which the senior author of this chapter was a member (MHRD, 2011). However, its report and recommendations were not pursued by the government. In the meanwhile, the Ministry of Women and Child Development that had the nodal responsibility for ECCE, asserted its ownership of the subject of ECCE by formulating the National Policy on ECCE, which was approved and notified in 2013. This policy was accompanied by a National Curriculum Framework and Quality Standards for ECCE which has

EC policies in India: a historical analysis

been a significant landmark. However, the enforcement of standards is still problematic given the shortage of capacity in the system. In response to the concerns regarding children not receiving their entitlements, in 2014 the National Law Commission of India issued a report on early childhood development, making a strong plea for ECCE to be declared a right of the child under 6 years (Law Commission of India Report 259, 2015). At the time of writing this chapter, this plea remains unanswered. The goal of universal ECCE has now become part of a new set of transformative and universal goals outlined in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) developed by the United Nations General Assembly in September 2015. The SDGs reaffirm ECCE as one of the target indicators of education stating: ‘By 2030, ensure that all girls and boys have access to quality early childhood development, care and preprimary education so that they are ready for primary education’ (United Nations SDGs, 2015). As a signatory to these goals, India now faces the next generation of challenges – both financial and systemic – that emanate from this indicator. Due priority to the indicator will only be realised if ECCE is truly acknowledged as a fundamental right of every child under 6.

Conclusion: Emerging Issues for ECCE policy in India Despite a favourable policy framework and the availability of the world’s largest integrated programme for children under 6 in the country and steady progress in the participation of children in public and private ECCE programmes, the current status of child development indicators in India does not provide much cause for celebration. We conclude by reflecting on some key issues specific to ECCE policy development and implementation which emerge from this review and which need to be addressed as priorities.

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Integrated Concept of ECCE and the Single-Window Approach through ICDS The basic concept of ECCE as an integrated provision, while important from the perspective of the holistic well-being of the child, introduces its own complexities and challenges for planning and implementation. ECCE, being multi-sectoral and multi-dimensional in nature, has to take into account: (a) the holistic and cumulative development of the child along the continuum from birth to 6 or 8 years and respective stage-specific priorities; and (b) within each sub-stage, different domains of the child’s development including health, nutrition, cognitive and psychosocial development and/or early education. This requires the comprehensive planning and multidimensional delivery of services for children from birth to 6 years. This is what is currently expected from the ICDS through a single-window mode and with a single service provider – a local woman worker and her helper – who are expected to be multi-skilled. The ICDS experience is that this single-window approach significantly compromises on quality since each service, whether health, nutrition or early education, requires domainspecific expertise, and this cannot be guaranteed through a multi-purpose worker. The challenge becomes even greater in a country of India’s scale and contextual diversity. The multi-sectoral nature of ECCE, and thereby ICDS, also often leads to constant shifts in priority at the higher policy levels from nutrition to health to preschool education, as is visible even in the review of policies and programmes from one five-year plan to another. This lack of consistency and continuity in comprehensive attention to all domains is a limiting factor in meeting desired outcomes. It calls for a need to revisit the ICDS model and explore new possibilities for the delivery of expert services by the relevant departments, while maintaining co-ordination through the ICDS to ensure universal coverage of all six

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services. The World Bank (2004) has suggested that this kind of convergence is more possible at decentralised levels and is also less costly due to the elimination of duplication of effort and expenditure and more balanced implementation.

Need for Contextualisation and Flexibility Despite India’s scale and diversity, the ICDS operates through a centralised ‘one shoe fits all’ design across the country with limited flexibility. It is thus not able to accommodate to contextual differences such as local dialects, diverse parental expectations and aspirations and state and regional diversity. There is also limited institutional capacity, at the decentralised levels, to be able to accommodate to contextual variations, even if the policy was to allow for it.

Focus on Promotion of Quality along with Scaling Up The most remarkable feature of the ICDS as a programme for ECCE is that it is now universally available across the length and breadth of India. While it has thus gone to scale, it has not adequately addressed the challenges of quality, diversity and institutional capacity. As a result, these centres are often perceived as nutrition centres and not associated with spaces for early education or learning. This is resulting in the large-scale migration of children to fee-charging private schools, leaving only the poorest, who have a limited voice, to avail themselves of the ICDS services (Kaul et  al., 2017). There is therefore a need to introduce a more targeted, need-based and contextualised approach for the anganwadis to support the communities at the margins and to ensure that the goals of social equity are addressed. The design of the programme needs to be flexible and responsive to these requirements.

Limited Community Awareness of ECCE The Indian Early Childhood Education Impact Study (Kaul et al., 2017) highlights the need for creating greater parental awareness regarding what is developmentally appropriate quality ECCE. This awareness would help to regulate the nature of parental demand, which at present tends to be swayed by the rote and repetitive learning encouraged by private schools. The serious deficits in the quality of the services of the public-sponsored anganwadis adds to the misperceptions. In the absence of alternative models of good quality and accessible preschools, parents are diverted towards affordable private preschools which are also not of a desirable quality in terms of developmentally appropriate practices. Community awareness accompanied by quality enhancement of services is thus critically needed to inform parents’ understanding of quality education and strengthen community ownership of the programme, both of which are key factors in the success of any intervention programme for children.

References Balagopalan, S. (2011). Introduction: Children’s lives and the Indian context. Childhood, 18(3), 291–297. Balagopalan, S. (2014). Inhabiting ‘childhood’: Children, labour and schooling in postcolonial India. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan. Census of India. (2011). Office of the registrar general & census commissioner. Government of India. New Delhi: GOI. Retrieved from http://censusindia.gov.in/ Central Social Welfare Board (CSWB). (2016). Historical perspective. Retrieved from http:// www.cswb.gov.in/index1.asp?linkid= 230&langid=1 Childline India. (2016). National Policy for Children 1974. Retrieved from http://www. childlineindia.org.in/national-policy-for-children1974.htm

EC policies in India: a historical analysis

Das, S., & Kundu, P. (2014). Public investment in young children in India. Working Paper. New Delhi: Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability. Retrieved from http:// www.nationalacademies.org/hmd/∼/media/ Files/Activity%20Files/Children/iYCG/ IndiaPresentations/Das/­K unduPaper.pdf http://www.nationalacademies.org/hmd/∼/ media/Files/Activity%20Files/Children/iYCG/ India-Presentations/DasKunduPaper.pdf Government of India. (1950). The Constitution of India. New Delhi: GOI. Retrieved from http://lawmin.nic.in/olwing/coi/coi-english/ coi-4March2016.pdf Gupta, A. (2006). Early childhood education, postcolonial theory, and teaching practices in India: Balancing Vygotsky and the Veda. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU). (2006). DECE-1: Organizing child care services – Block 7: Organizing a child care centre. New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Open University, School of Continuing Education Joseph, S. (2007). Neoliberal reforms and democracy in India. Economic & Political Weekly, 42(31, August 4–10), pp. 3213– 3218. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/ stable/4419870 Kapur, M. (n.d.) Child care in ancient India: A life span approach. Retrieved from http://ipi. org.in/texts/others/malvikakapur-childcaresp.php Kaul, V. (1992). Early childhood education in India. In G. A. Woodill, J. Bernhard, and L. Prochner (Eds.), International handbook of early childhood education (pp. 275–292). New York and London: Garland Publishing. Kaul, V., & Chaudhary, A. B. (2015). Continuing ECE impact: Achievements of children at age 7 (Unpublished report). Delhi: Centre for Early Childhood Education and Development, Ambedkar University, Delhi. Kaul, V., Kak, M., & Menon, S. (2009). India’s Integrated Child Development Services: A case study of scaling up. Unpublished paper. Kaul, V., Bhattacharjea, S., Chaudhary, A. B., Ramanujan, P., Banerji, M., & Nanda, M. (2017). The India Early Childhood Education Impact Study. New Delhi: UNICEF. Kaul, V., Sharma. S., Chaudhary, A. B., & Sharma, S. (2015). Annex 4: Case Study – India. In S.

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Manji, C. Arnold, & S. Gowani, How are we doing and how we get it right for children? Evolution of the roles of the public and private sector in Early Childhood Care and Education in efforts to achieve EFA Goal 1. Background Paper for the EFA Global Monitoring Report 2015, Education for All 2000–2015: Achievements and challenges (pp. 26–37). UNESCO. Retrieved from http://unesdoc.unesco.org/ images/0023/002324/232458e.pdf Kaur, B. (2006). Gathering the destitute child: A case study in India. In H. May, B. Kaur, & L. Prochner, Nineteenth century missionary infant schools in three colonial settings: The experience in India, New Zealand, and Canada. Paper presented at Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education: research, theory and practice – 14th conference: Decolonizing/ Anti-colonial Early Childhood Research and Practice, University of Waikato, Rotorua, New Zealand, 30 November – 4 December. Retrieved from https://education.waikato. ac.nz/research/files/default/9G_Baljit_Kaur.pdf Khalakdina, M. (1998). Early childhood care and education in India: A perspective. In M. Swaminathan (Ed.) The first five years: A critical perspective on Early Childhood Care and Education in India (pp. 163–194). New Delhi: Sage. Khalakdina, M. (2011). Human development in the Indian context: A socio-cultural focus, Volume II. New Delhi: Sage. Kumar, A. (1999). Child health in ancient India. Indian Medical Sciences Series. Delhi: Sri Sadguru Satguru Publication. Law Commission of India, Government of India. (2015). Report No. 259: Early Childhood Development and legal entitlements. Retrieved from http://lawcommissionofindia.nic.in/ reports/Report259.pdf Macaulay, T. B. (1835). Minute on Indian Education. Retrieved from https://www.wwnorton. com/­college/english/nael/victorian/topic_4/ macaulay.htm Mallory, B. L., & New, R. S. (Eds.) (1994). Diversity and developmentally appropriate practices: Challenges for early childhood education. Early Childhood Education Series. New York: Teachers College Press. Ministry of Education and Social Welfare, Government of India. (1978). Integrated Child Development Services Scheme. New Delhi: GOI.

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Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India. (1986). National Policy on Education. New Delhi: GOI. Retrieved from http://www.ncert.nic.in/oth_anoun/ Policy_1986_eng.pdf Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India. (2009). The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act (RTE). New Delhi: GOI. Retrieved from http:// eoc.du.ac.in/RTE%20-%20notified.pdf Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India. (2011). Status Report on the Work of the CABE Committee on ‘Extension of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act 2009 to Pre-school Education and Secondary Education’. Retrieved from http://mhrd.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/ document-reports/RCFCE.pdf Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India. (n.d.). Human resource: Key to development. Retrieved from http:// pib.nic.in/focus/fomore/hrd.html Ministry of Women and Child Development, Government of India. (2011). Annual Report. New Delhi: GOI. Retrieved from http://www. wcd.nic.in/sites/default/files/AR2011-12.pdf Ministry of Women and Child Development, Government of India. (2013a). National Policy for Children. New Delhi: GOI. Retrieved from http://wcd.nic.in/sites/default/files/ npcenglish08072013_0.pdf Ministry of Women and Child Development, Government of India. (2013b). National Early Childhood Care and Education Policy (NECCEP). New Delhi: GOI. Retrieved from http://icds-wcd.nic. in/schemes/ECCE/ecce_01102013_eng.pdf Ministry of Women and Child Development, Government of India. (2014). Rapid Survey on Children (RSOC) 2013–2014. New Delhi: GOI. Retrieved from http://wcd.nic.in/issnip/National_ Fact%20sheet_RSOC%20_02-07-2015.pdf Ministry of Women and Child Development, Government of India. (2015). Annual report. New Delhi: GOI. Retrieved from http://www. wcd.nic.in/sites/default/files/AR2014-15.pdf National Institute of Public Cooperation and Child Development, Government of India. (2009a). Research on ICDS: An overview (1986–1995): Volume 2. New Delhi: GOI. Retrieved from http://nipccd.nic.in/reports/icdsvol2.pdf

National Institute of Public Cooperation and Child Development, Government of India. (2009b). Research on ICDS: An overview (1996–2008): Volume 3. New Delhi: GOI. Retrieved from http://nipccd.nic.in/reports/icdsvol3.pdf Nutan Bal Shikshan Sangh. (2016, Nov 13). About us. Retrieved from http://www. nutanbalshikshansangh.org/About.aspx Planning Commission, Government of India (GOI). (2013). Twelfth Five Year Plan (2012–2017): Volume III Social Sector. New Delhi: Sage. Ray, S. (2015). 9 Traditional Indian games and toys on verge of extinction. India Times, 25 June. Retrieved from http://www.indiatimes. com/culture/who-we-are/9-traditionalindian-games-and-toys-on-the-verge-ofextinction-233953.html Shonkoff, J. P., & Phillips, D. A. (Eds.). (2000). From neurons to neighborhoods: The science of early childhood development. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. UNESCO. (2016). Early childhood care and education. Retrieved from http://en.unesco. org/themes/early-childhood-care-and-education (15 November 2016). UNICEF. (2016). Early childhood education. Retrieved from http://unicef.in/Whatwedo/ 40/Early-Childhood-Education (15 November 2016). United Nations. (2015). Sustainable Development Goals: Goal 4 – Quality Education. Retrieved from http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/education/ Vijayalakshmi, M., & Babu, M. S. (2014). A brief history of English language teaching in India. International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications, 4(5), May. World Bank. South Asia Regional Office. (2004). Reaching out to the child: An integrated approach to child development. Oxford: Oxford University Press. WCEFA Inter-Agency Commission. (1990). Meeting basic learning needs: A vision for the 1990s. Background document. World Conference on Education for All: Meeting Basic Learning Needs, Jomtien, Thailand, 5–9 March. Young, M. E. (Ed.). (2002). From early child development to human development: Investing in our children’s future. Washington, DC: The World Bank.

3 An Incomplete Revolution? Changes and Challenges within German Early Childhood Education and Care Policy Nicole Klinkhammer and Birgit Riedel

Introduction: Shifting discourses in German Welfare policies – the social-investment turn For several decades German family policy was based on the paradigm that caring for young children was the foremost responsibility of the family. Over the last 20 years a transformation of policies has occurred, suggesting that this paradigm is no longer determining the political direction. By the end of the 1990s it was apparent that the policies and intervention programmes of the German welfare state, once classified as a prototype of a ‘conservative-corporative’ and ‘familialist’ welfare regime (cf. Esping-Andersen, 1990; Leitner et  al., 2008), were noticeably insufficient in offering appropriate solutions to emerging socio-political challenges. In particular, declining birth rates, a rising female labour market orientation and economic changes fostered a critique of the

male-breadwinner model1, which was the basis of the familialist regime. This model implies a clear gender division of male breadwinning and female home-based care for smaller children (cf. Ostner 2006, 2010, p. 212). Influenced by the social investment strategy within welfare policy (cf. Esping-Andersen et al., 2002; Giddens, 1998) – which gained considerable influence in European policy orientations around 2000 – a discourse arose about the economic as well as social importance of activating and promoting human capital. At the core of this approach was the political support of female labour market participation and child-oriented investments. Early childhood education and care (ECEC) became one main instrument for achieving those goals and for implementing the social investment strategy within family policy. Embedded in the same social investment paradigm, the child as future citizen-worker (cf. Hendrick, 2010; Lister, 2003; Olk, 2007)

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moved into the centre of political attention. Based on the assumption that children’s ability to build up human capital was determined during the first years of life, early education turned into a prerequisite for a successful competitive knowledge economy and, on the individual level, for overcoming social disadvantage (cf. Esping-Andersen, 2002). In Germany as well as in other countries, highquality early education began to be regarded as ‘the “silver bullet” to improve the educational chances of children, especially for children from deprived families’ (Hübenthal/ Ifland, 2011, p. 116). Investing in children’s long-term educational attainment, in turn, was seen as a way to enhance society’s overall prosperity. The dominance of this future orientation, in combination with the strong emphasis on economic profit by efficiently aligning social policy instruments, has attracted critiques from different scholars (cf. Deeming/ Smyth, 2015; Evers, 2008; Klinkhammer, 2010; Lessenich, 2008; Morel/Palier/ Palme, 2012; Saraceno, 2015). At the same time, this approach has triggered a long overdue economic and social modernization within the conservative German welfare state paradigm. The social investment discourse, strongly promoted in EU policy documents2, gained ground in Germany after the transition from a conservativeliberal to a red-green coalition government in 1998 and can be traced particularly to the Agenda 2010 launched in 2003 by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. This led to fundamental shifts in various policy fields including labour market, family and education policies. By 2005 the concept of a sustainable family policy favouring the norm of the dual-earner family dominated the political agenda, replacing the conservative policy of promoting the male-breadwinner model. In the realm of education, the disappointing results recorded in the PISA studies became the second policy driver behind an ambitious ECEC policy. Again in 2005,

reforms started to push for the expansion of ECEC settings for children under the age of 3 and for reframing ECEC services as settings with an explicit educational mandate. The hitherto unassailable concepts of a ‘family childhood’ and a ‘family-oriented’ motherhood lost their power within policy discourses, replaced by concepts generated by the social investment discourse in which childhood was increasingly aligned with early education and motherhood with being employed at least part-time, and increasingly from the time that a child turned one year (cf. Klinkhammer, 2014). This chapter discusses the different reforms that have been implemented within the last two decades. An empirical overview of current ECEC and labour participation figures follows to illustrate the fundamental shift within German society. Since the German welfare state has been a conservative prototype, this shift can be appraised – in many ways – as a ‘revolution’. We then argue that this revolution has remained incomplete and that it also includes risks for children. First, the reforms have been counteracted by other reforms, or their consequences offset by unchanged policy structures (e.g. in taxation), resulting in the new norm of the dual-earner model and equal participation in the labour market mainly working for highly educated women. Second, the massive expansion of ECEC services has not so far resulted in equal participation patterns for vulnerable children relative to their more affluent peers. Third, while educational outcomes for (disadvantaged) children are dependent on high quality services, enhancing the quality of ECEC services has largely been ignored during the phase of expanding services. Fourth, an even more fundamental critique can be formulated from a children’s rights perspective: Are we observing an economic rationalization of early childhood, with detrimental effects on children and parents? In summing up the chapter we discuss the main aspects of the ‘incomplete’ revolution in German ECEC policy.

Changes and Challenges within German ECEC policy

Policy triggers and policy measures in family and early education policies: Review of developments over the last two decades

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new guiding principle in family policy was established (cf. Ostner, 2010, p. 223ff.). The expansion of ECEC services and children’s universal right to participation were major building blocks in this policy. Up to then, ECEC policies in (West) Germany had almost exclusively focused on (half-day) kindergarten provision for children aged A New Public Responsibility between 3 and 6 years. Due to the strong for the Early Years breadwinner family model, basically all Though most of the relevant reforms disother types of care arrangements – for chilcussed in this chapter occurred after 2001, dren under the age of 3; all-day-care for the decisive change in policy discourse from kindergarten children; or care arrangements which they emerged had already started in for school children in the afternoon – were the 1990s – more specifically, in 1998, when assumed to be the responsibility of mothers the first red-green government came into (cf. Klinkhammer, 2014, p. 149ff.; Oliver/ power. After 16 years of a conservative govMätzke, 2014, p. 174ff.). Hence, at the turn ernment there was a great social willingness of the century the ECEC field was essentially for reforms, especially within family and a split system: while kindergarten attendance ECEC policy. Inspired by the social investfor children aged 3 to 6 years was widely ment discourse which reigned within the accepted, since the late 1970s it also had been political bodies of the EU, Chancellor formally recognized as the first ‘elementary’ Gerhard Schröder pushed the idea of activatstage of the educational system, and a legal ing social policies according to the slogan entitlement since 1996, public childcare for ‘promoting and demanding’ (cf. Lessenich, children under 3 years was still viewed as 2008, p. 85f.; Nullmeier, 2014, p. 13f.). With an ‘emergency solution’ for families in need the so-called ‘Agenda 2010’ Schröder initiof a second income. In practice, however, ated a series of labour market reforms and the demand for childcare places was conpromoted a change of course in family policy stantly on the rise. Thus, in the new policy along with the main EU strategies, such as climate, where the comprehensive supply of the Barcelona targets.3 This change of course ECEC services was pivotal and figured as a was necessary to complement the idea of the kind of catch-all solution, non-kindergarten Agenda 2010, which was mainly driven by ECEC options suddenly found a new social the goal of increasing the employability of acceptance: ECEC would help to overcome every capable adult. For the first time in the educational inequalities, enhance the birth post-war period of (West) Germany, this rate, encourage women to take up employemployment paradigm included mothers of ment and reduce poverty all at the same time. very young children. Under the new frameIn Ostner’s (2010, p. 213) words: ‘the new work of a ‘sustainable family policy’ the policy model conceives children as society’s government underlined the economic benefit future assets, seeks to encourage childbearof childcare and supporting measures for ing by supporting parents to be workers reconciling family and work (cf. and attempts to reduce families’ poverty by Klinkhammer, 2010, p. 213f.; Leitner et al., boosting mothers’ employment’. 2008). With this radical paradigm shift in The first important reform in this family policy, the conservative male-­ ­ context was the Day Care Expansion Act breadwinner model was noticeably weak(‘Tagesbetreuungsausbaugesetz’,TAG), which ened and the basis for promoting the ‘adult/ came into force in 2005 and for the first time regulated a demand-oriented expansion of dual-earner model’ (cf. Lewis, 2002) as a

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ECEC services for children under the age of 3. One main merit of this law was that the category of ‘demand’ was concretized (§ 24 Social Security Code VIII).4 It led to local authorities being required to provide a childcare place for every parent who was either employed or participating in initial or on-going education, or in a qualification programme for reintegration into the labour market. Additionally, a demand was deemed to exist when the child’s well-being could not be ensured by parents. The youth offices within the municipalities were obliged to regularly monitor the demand and evaluate the achieved status of the expansion (cf. Scheiwe, 2009, p. 190f.; Wiesner, 2004, p. 450f.). The aim was to offer 230,000 new places in institutional ECEC settings and family daycare by 2010. Despite the TAG putting significant political pressure on the states and municipalities to increase the supply of ECEC services, the pace of expansion was slow and made only minor progress – at least in relation to the constantly increasing demand among parents (cf. Bien/Riedel, 2006; Rauschenbach et  al., 2007). In response, just three years later, in 2008, the Child Care Funding Act (‘Kinderförderungsgesetz’, KiFöG) was adopted and introduced an individual entitlement to a childcare place for every child aged 1 and 2 years by August 2013. The timeline of the policy gave local authorities a five-year lead-up period in which to expand ECEC services and prepare for the entitlement. During this period, parents’ access to and demand for childcare was closely monitored in yearly surveys. The expansion target defined by the federal government was to provide places for 35% of children under 3 years or a total of 750,000 ECEC places. Locally varying demand, however, was taken into consideration, so that the municipalities could determine the pace of the expansion. Although the financing of the expansion of childcare places was outside the responsibility of the federal government, the government did provide an extra budget to support the Länder and municipalities. Nevertheless, the legal

entitlement put the municipalities under enormous pressure as it became mandatory for them to ensure that ECEC was available for all children from the age of 1 whose parents applied for a place – regardless of the employment or training situation of the parents. It is not surprising that the parliamentary discussions of the law were very controversial (cf. Klinkhammer, 2014, p. 444ff.). Besides financial aspects, the paradigm shift towards ‘externalizing’ childcare was harshly criticized and the family policy discourse experienced a ‘re-ideologization’ (ibid.). In particular, the conservative wing within the Christian Democratic Union, which was then part of the government, was opposed to what they considered the new ideal in family policy. Basically, a conflict arose between proponents of childcare within the family and those of ‘third-party’ care (Fremdbetreuung) (cf. Gerlach, 2010, p. 233). One outcome of this conflict was the introduction, as of August 2013, of a childcare allowance (Betreuungsgeld) of between €100 and €150 per month payable to parents who did not make use of publicly subsidized childcare places. This policy proposal was advanced by the conservative element within government on the rationale that the childcare allowance would support the freedom of choice for parents; it was intended to strengthen the conservative breadwinner model within family policy. However, empirical analysis shows that this plan was only partly successful (cf. Alt et  al., 2015). Though this instrument was widely rejected by many within the government, its implementation symbolized the compromise the conservatives were willing to make for acceptance of the implemented legal right for childcare (cf. Klinkhammer, 2014, p. 459ff.).5 Hence, the childcare allowance illustrated the power struggle over contradictory policy orientations in childcare and family policies. Nevertheless, the paradigm shift, and with it a profound break within the established childcare traditions, was accomplished (cf. Oliver/Mätzke, 2014).

Changes and Challenges within German ECEC policy

The change within childcare traditions was reinforced by parallel reforms of the parental leave scheme. Between 2001 and 2014 the scheme, as one central instrument of family policy, was revised three times. The driving idea behind these reforms was to support an emancipated and modernized family model where parents equally share paid work and unpaid care (cf. Ostner, 2010, p. 223). Until the first reform in 2001, a three-year leave scheme operated which supported the conservative family model of one caring parent at home, who received a relatively low parental allowance6, within the first two years of the child’s life (cf. Dienel, 2002, p. 109; Gerlach, 2010, p. 196). But by the end of the 1990s, it was almost exclusively mothers who made use of this leave scheme. In the new policy context politicians were anxious to encourage more fathers to take it up. Hence, the leave reform of 2001 aimed to create better opportunities for parents to be on parental leave and at the same time work part-time (up to 30 hours per week), thus helping to reconcile family life with work (cf. ibid., 232ff). However, the 2001 reform did not go far enough with the level of financial support it provided. On 1 January 2007, the threeyear parental leave scheme was replaced by a 12-month income-related model (plus two months for the parent not having taken parental leave before), similar to the Scandinavian parental leave schemes.7 The 2007 reform provided increased incentives for mothers and fathers to re-enter the labour market at an early stage in parenthood and thus to stay at home for a shorter period.8 This approach was reinforced by another reform of the parental leave schedule in 2014. At the time of writing, with the parental allowance ‘plus’ version (Elterngeld-Plus) parents have the possibility to return to the labour market and simultaneously make use of the parental allowance for a longer time.9 With this policy change, the government intended to once more make this leave scheme more flexible with regard to a fair reconciliation of family and work for both mothers and fathers (cf. BMFSFJ, 2015a).

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A New Emphasis on Early Education While, as mentioned before, the kindergarten was formally recognized as an educational institution as early as in the 1970s, the educational mandate within kindergarten did not come to the fore until the year 2000. Until then, the care motive was the dominant rationale within ECEC policy, despite the more holistic socio-pedagogical approach mandated by the Social Code Book VIII (Achtes Sozialgesetzbuch) in 1990. The socio-pedagogical approach is based on the understanding that upbringing (Erziehung), education (Bildung) and care (Betreuung) are inseparable and that children are nurtured best when the three principles are kept in balance. With the social-investment ideology reshaping the political agenda, and new neuroscientific findings highlighting the importance of the early years for human capital building (Carneiro/Heckmann, 2003; Halfon et al., 2001; Hannon, 2003), early education was suddenly in the spotlight of educational policy. Initiated by the sobering results of the first PISA study (2001), the function of ECEC became a matter of debate, with discussions focusing on the perceived need for earlier and more targeted educational support for children to make more efficient use of children’s learning potential, and to break the negative cycle between children’s low school attainment and their family’s social and cultural background. In the debate, ECEC settings were assigned a pivotal educational role but were also criticized for not being well equipped for the task. What followed was a series of measures which restructured the field of ECEC and strengthened the profile of ECEC institutions as educational settings. Between 2002 and 2006 curricular guidelines were introduced in all 16 states. Although broadly formulated in the nature of recommendations, the guidelines introduced a new element of hierarchical direction and standard setting in a field which until then had been highly decentralized, and characterized

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by a low level of regulation that had allowed a high degree of autonomy to the (mainly not-for-profit) providers. On the national level, in 2004 all states adopted a common Curricular Framework (cf. JMK/KMK, 2004) as a national baseline for the pedagogical work of ECEC settings. The framework set out the main educational goals and principles as well as domains for development, such as language development, social and personal skills, motor development or early numeric skills; yet, it reinforced the holistic approach and a social-constructivist approach to learning (cf. Gisbert, 2004). The framework does not set specific learning targets or skills that children must acquire by a certain age; in this way the ECEC framework is fundamentally different to the curriculum at the compulsory school level. The ECEC framework pays particular attention to language development, and various national and state programmes have been launched to support learning in this domain. One major reason for this is the growing number of children with an immigrant background for whom German is not the first language. Consequently, there have been increased efforts to foster children’s language acquisition and development in ECEC. A number of model projects, as well as large-scale programmes funded by the Federal Ministry for Family, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth (BMFSFJ), have focused either on pull-out interventions in small group settings or, more frequently, on integrated approaches with embedded learning activities and language modelling (cf. Egert/ Hopf, 2016). In addition, language tests have been established in 14 out of the 16 Länder. The idea is to assess children’s need for additional language support measures early enough to respond to them before they enter school. Having reviewed the profound changes in family and ECEC policies, we now move to examine their impact on children and families, and the opportunities and risks presented by these developments. We focus first on the

impact of the policies on parental participation in the labour market, and on children’s participation in ECEC services. We also ask whether the educational turn in ECEC is more than rhetorical.

Changing labour market participation patterns of women and ECEC participation: the empirical evidence In this section we present empirical data which demonstrate the changes that have reshaped the texture of German society in the last few decades. In particular, since the beginning of the century ECEC services have expanded with unprecedented speed and have marked a fundamental shift from private to public responsibility in the upbringing of children. In the same period, mothers’ employment patterns have undergone considerable change and point to a more continuous involvement in the labour market. Finally – as a more gradual development – the division of childcare work in the first few years of children’s lives is finding a new balance between mothers and fathers. Altogether these developments are likely to reflect the structuring and normative power of family and social policy measures, which influence parents’ considerations and decisions concerning labour market participation and childcare arrangements. It has to be remembered, however, that even more than 25 years after German reunification, both parts of Germany carry the inheritance of two different political systems which have also shaped ECEC provision. In the German Democratic Republic (GDR) (East Germany), childcare services were a means to promote women’s equal participation in the labour market. At the same time, the comprehensive system of publicly organized and supervised childcare services set up in the 1950s was a means for the State to manage the education of children as early as

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possible. By the end of the 1980s, the GDR had the highest rate of provision for preschool children in the world, covering 70% of children from birth to 3, and practically all children from 3 to 6 (cf. Ostner, 2010, p. 224ff.). All services were full-day and cost-free to parents. The system was highly centralized; most services were state-run and 100% state-funded. Workplace-based facilities also played an important role. Less than 3% of services were run by independent notfor-profit providers (cf. Klinkhammer, 2014, p. 156ff.). By way of contrast, the Federal Republic (FRG) (West Germany) maintained a familialist tradition which considered childcare as first and foremost the responsibility of mothers and prevented the expansion of ECEC services particularly for the youngest age group of 0 to 3 years. While from the late 1960s onwards the kindergarten became established in the FRG as a half-day provision to support – rather than to substitute for – family education, public care for under-3-year-olds maintained its negative stigma well into the

new century (cf. ibid., p. 149 ff.). With the exception of big cities, crèches were nearly non-existent. They were only accepted as a makeshift solution for those families who were reliant on the mother’s income to make ends meet. This image persisted even at a time when the clientele in fact was increasingly educated and well-off. Therefore, when we speak of a paradigm shift and revolution in childcare ideology we have to be more precise – these statements only hold true for West Germany. Figure 3.1 illustrates the long-term development of ECEC in East and West Germany for the age groups 0 to 3 years and 3 to 6 years. With regard to the latter, both parts of the country have reached more or less full coverage with participation rates of 97% and 96% respectively. In West Germany the entitlement to a childcare place from the age of 3 years – introduced as one side-effect of German reunification – triggered the first wave of ECEC expansion during the 1990s. With regard to the 0 to 3 age group, ECEC

100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 1950

1960

0–3 years West

1970

1980

1990

0–3 years East

2002

2006

2011

3–6 years West

2013

2015

3–6 years East

Figure 3.1 Participation rates for children 0–3 and 3–6 in East and West Germany, 1950– 2015, in % Source: Tietze et al., 2013; Statistical Offices of the Länder, various years

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provision declined in the East and remained marginal in the West throughout the 1990s (cf. Evers et al., 2005). Zooming in on developments since 2000, the quantitative expansion of ECEC places became a national policy project. While prior to the new century Germany had operated a firmly decentralized approach to childcare policies, with the main responsibilities and funding attached to the local level of the municipalities, the commitment to improve provision for children aged under 3 years went along with a move towards multi-level responsibility. For the first time leadership and financial support for the expansion of childcare came from the federal government, while policymaking and planning of new services remained the responsibility of municipal and district-level authorities. Typically the voluntary welfare providers participated actively in the decision-making process which strengthened their compliance and co-operation with the new ECEC policies (cf. Riedel, 2009). Starting from a still relatively low level of provision in 2005, nationally the overall number of places more than doubled from 286,900 in 2006 to 693,340 in 2015. Expansion was particularly significant in West Germany where the numbers of children enrolled in ECEC services (including centre-based ECEC and family daycare) more than trebled over that ten-year period from 137,667 to 477,480. Progress, however, did not occur evenly over the country. Beyond the East–West disparity there remain vast regional variations in levels of childcare provision, with generally higher provision and attendance in cities and economically affluent regions and lower provision in rural and poorer areas (cf. Hüsken, 2011; Riedel et  al., 2011). According to the established structure of ECEC providers, expansion was more or less equally carried forward by public and independent not-for-profit providers. To boost ECEC provision several Länder opened up funding for private for-profit providers as well. To some extent, and mainly in the big cities, for the first time private

for-profit providers began to play a more prominent role though their overall share remained modest (cf. Riedel, 2009). Moreover, the considerable financial investments which were required for ECEC expansion – shared among federal, state and local level – were calculated on the basis that around 30% of the new ECEC places should be created in the less costly sector of family daycare. This plan, however, did not eventuate since it proved difficult to recruit adequate numbers of childminders, and many local authorities were reluctant to promote this usually less qualified form of childcare. As a result, the overall share of family daycare remained well below the initial expectation; in 2015 family daycare accounted for 14% of all ECEC places. Parents took up the newly created ECEC places eagerly, and yearly parental surveys showed that demand for places grew along with the growing availability of places. While the first parental survey in 2005 identified an overall parental demand figure of around 35% nationwide, in 2015 the demand was estimated at 43% (cf. BMFSFJ, 2015c). Hence, it appears that – in line with the expansion of services – it became increasingly normal to send a child to an ECEC setting, itself creating an increased momentum of parental demand (cf. Bien/Riedel, 2006). Figure 3.2 further differentiates ECEC attendance by children’s ages. The following picture emerges from 2015 data: public education and care remain low in children’s first year of life, whereas 36% of 1-year-old children and 61% of 2-year-olds attend public childcare. A comparison of these figures with figures of parental childcare preferences further shows that during their child’s first year parents articulate a strong preference to care for their child in the family. Unmet demand for ECEC places is highest for 1-year-old children. These findings may reflect: first, the opportunity offered by the parental leave regulation to stay at home during the child’s first year of life with relevant financial compensation; and second, a structural ‘care gap’

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60 50 40 30 20 10 0 2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

under 1

2011

1 year old

2012

2013

2014

2015

2 years old

Figure 3.2 Participation rates of under 1, 1- and 2-year-old children in West Germany, 2006– 2015, in % Source: Statistical Offices of the Länder 2006–2014, own calculations

that results from the fact that kindergartens usually take in children from the age of 2, whereas services for younger children are still scarce in many parts of Germany. The longstanding differences in the level of services in East and West Germany also reflect two very different experiences of women in the labour market. In the former GDR, full-time employment of mothers, with the exception of one ‘baby year’ after childbirth, was the norm, and can still be detected in current patterns – though we also find some measure of convergence with the Western part of Germany. In West Germany, by contrast, social policy measures supported long work interruptions after childbirth and part-time employment which were the predominant way to reconcile the two worlds of paid employment and motherhood, and to adjust to the very limited access to childcare services. Labour market participation increased for West German mothers during the 1990s, with a parallel decrease in the East as a direct consequence of reunification and the high rates of unemployment that followed. More recently, however, both parts of the country have witnessed an increase in active labour market participation which

has been particularly significant for mothers with children below school entrance age. Figure  3.3 compares mothers’ participation rates in 2006 and 2012 according to the age of their youngest child. The emerging pattern of high uptake of parental leave and return to work with rising age of children can be found in East and West Germany alike, yet in East Germany mothers return to the labour market on average one year earlier than their West German counterparts. As is known from other countries, reentry also varies with the number of children in the family and mothers’ level of education. 56% of mothers with the highest educational level (university degree or equivalent) return to their job when the child is between 1 and 2 years old. This workforce participation rate is reached by women with the lowest educational level (no, or lowest, school leaving certificate) only when the youngest child is 10 years and older. For children between the ages of 2 and 3 years, 71% of mothers with the highest educational level are back at work compared to 56% of mothers with a medium educational level and 22% with a low educational level (BMFSFJ, 2014a, p. 33). While most mothers return to work on a part-time

Change in employment rate 2006–2015 (percentage points)

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20 18 16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0 –2 –4 –6 –8 –10

16.5 13.0 11.3

10.6

10.2

9.5 7.5

7.3

6.8 4.5

–6.0 < 1 year 1–2

2–3

3–4

4–6

6–8

8–10

10–12

12–15

15–18

Total mothers

Mothers with youngest child at the age of …

Figure 3.3 Development of employment rates of women with young children 2006–2015 in Germany (difference in percentage points) Source: Mikrozensus-Sonderauswertung f203_006, Berechnung Prognos AG

basis, mothers’ full-time work is closely associated with short work interruptions after childbirth. The recently abolished childcare allowance has not altered the pattern significantly; while it existed it was mainly used in two different ways: firstly by well-off parents, where mothers stayed at home with their babies, or opted for private care arrangements such as having an au-pair. Secondly, it was used by lower income groups for whom the money was a welcome top-up of their family income. In regions with lower ECEC provision the cash option was also taken up to a higher extent (cf. Alt et  al., 2015). Moreover the findings indicate that the childcare allowance worked to entrench the traditional family model which assigned the task of childcare exclusively to the mother, thus reinforcing the gender division of labour and postponing mothers’ re-entry in the labour market (ibid.). In contrast to the highly differentiated maternal employment decisions, children

have less impact on fathers’ labour market participation. Nonetheless, since the introduction of the parental leave reform in 2007 there has been an observable trend of more fathers taking up parental leave and reducing their working hours to share the care of their young children. In 2013, every third father (32%) was taking parental leave, with the overwhelming majority (78.2%) doing so for a period of two months (cf. BMFSFJ, 2015b, p. 52). Fathers who take advantage of parental leave on average have higher educational levels and hold higher positions in their job. Simultaneously, fathers in East Germany take up parental leave more often than fathers in West Germany. While the higher labour market participation of mothers has not generally led to an equal involvement of fathers in childcare, for the more progressive parts of society it has resulted in a moderate re-balance of paid and unpaid work between parents. If fathers take up parental leave mothers return to their job

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at an earlier age of the child. At the same time fathers spend more time with their children even after the leave and are more likely to work fewer hours per week on their job (WZB, 2014). Data from the recent timebudget study point to a similar direction (cf. Meier-Gräwe/Klünder, 2015).

Incomplete revolution: for whom, and why? New disparities and Challenges New Disparities Within the social investment discourse ECEC attendance was thought to fulfil two main functions in relation to children. It was expected, first, that participation in ECEC would boost all children’s development and skills. Second, it was considered to particularly benefit children who received little educational stimulation in their home environment; for these children ECEC was expected to reduce inequalities in (later) educational outcomes. A precondition for these effects was the redefinition and reconfiguration of ECEC services as educational institutions – or what has been described as the ‘educational turn’ (Eßer, 2014, p. 37) in ECEC (cf. A New Emphasis on Early Education, above). In this context of high expectations from participation in ECEC, the issue of equal access became crucial. While ECEC access was seen as potentially compensating for a less favourable family background, it followed that without access to ECEC children would miss out on important learning opportunities and might therefore be at a double disadvantage. At least on the level of political rhetoric it was an important aim to reach out to disadvantaged children and promote their access to ECEC. As part of this rhetoric, families from a low socio-economic status (SES) background were morally sanctioned for not using ECEC services as early as possible.

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Turning to empirical evidence, however, while for children aged 3 to 6 years, kindergarten attendance is more or less a universal part of children’s expected educational biography, for children aged 0 to 3 years social disparities in childcare use remain a persistent feature of German ECEC. Studies consistently report that lack of participation in ECEC services by these young children remains associated with: lower parental educational background; lower family income; or families on income support programmes, and with a migrant background (e.g. FuchsRechlin/Bergmann, 2014; Geier/Riedel, 2008). Until the introduction of the universal right to ECEC this age-discriminating effect could be attributed to the regulated and restricted access to ECEC places, which up to August 2013 gave priority access to women who were either in employment or in any kind of professional training. Both these characteristics were more likely for women with higher educational levels and more attractive job prospects. Mothers with low income prospects due to their lower qualification, in turn, tended to stay at home with their children for a longer period. As Schober and Stahl (2014) calculated, around half of the observed disparities in childcare attendance could be attributed to differences in the employment status of mothers. The introduction of the universal entitlement to a childcare place from the age of 1 year was aimed to redress this situation. However, while it is still too early to make a full assessment of the effect of this policy, various studies which have begun to analyse the development of childcare use in the course of the expansion period are suggesting that, contrary to expectations, the higher level of ECEC provision is not increasing accessibility for children from diverse backgrounds nor reducing inequalities between vulnerable children and their more affluent peers. Instead, while participation rates have increased for all social groups they have done so to a different extent and at a different pace (cf. Alt et al., 2012, 2014) with children from

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the educated middle class profiting most from service expansion. For example, based on recent analyses of AID:A survey data, Alt et  al. (2014) found that between 2009 and 2013/2014 participation rates for children aged 0 to 3 years from mothers with the lowest educational level increased from 15% to 19%. In the same period participation rates for children from families with a high educational background increased from 37% to 47%. By way of contrast, participation rates for children from migrant family backgrounds were able to catch up to some degree, though they still lagged behind participation rates for their non-migrant peers. In particular, those children who do not speak German in their family environment continue to be heavily under-represented in ECEC services before 3 years of age (cf. Autorengruppe Bildungsberichterstattung, 2016). Over the years there has been a heated debate about whether supply-side or demandside factors are primarily responsible for shaping patterns of childcare use, and the degree to which these patterns mirror the cultural and habitual dispositions, preferences and childcare attitudes of parents. Geier and Riedel (2008), who included parents’ educational beliefs and preferences in their analysis, found that parents’ beliefs and socioeconomic circumstances interacted in different ways depending on the age of the child. While for children below age 1 who attended public childcare the mothers’ employment status appeared as the only relevant factor determining childcare use, for 2- and 3-yearold children parents’ considerations tended to be more complex and to include cultural and educational beliefs as well. Beyond differences in parental aspirations, however, recent parental surveys indicate that parents from different social and cultural milieus are not in the same position to realize their demand for public childcare (cf. Alt et  al., 2014). Additionally, structural barriers like a regional scarcity of places and an uneven spread among wealthy and poor areas (cf. Riedel et al., 2011); the high cost of services

(cf. Meiner, 2014); the lack of available information; or long waiting lists for places, still play an important role in access to ECEC. The inadequacy of existing services which do not meet parents’ needs with regard to opening hours or quality standards may be another reason for deciding against the use of ECEC. Last but not least, little is known about the criteria and strategies that service providers apply when making child-admission decisions. Where ECEC places are still scarce it has to be assumed that parents with more financial, social and cultural resources are in a stronger position to negotiate access with providers. Beyond these issues, a national study on childcare has suggested that social selectivity also plays a part with regard to access to good quality ECEC (cf. Tietze et al., 2013). The study found that ECEC services with a high concentration of children with a migrant background experienced lower levels of pedagogical quality, as measured by established quality instruments (CLASS, ECERS). This is particularly alarming because there is a tendency for childcare services to become highly segregated. Educational statistics published in 2016 (cf. Autorengruppe Bildungsberichterstattung, 2016) show that more than one-third of children from a nonGerman-speaking home attend a kindergarten where the majority of children do not speak any German, or speak only a little German at home. In metropolitan areas such as Berlin, Frankfurt or Munich this even applies to more than half of children with a non-German family language. While this mirrors segregated living areas in the big cities, it is reasonable to assume that segregation in ECEC services is aggravated by parental choice strategies. Well-off parents with high educational levels make considerable efforts to choose a good quality service for their child. Another issue signalled by this finding is that we still have limited knowledge of which kind of quality benefits which group(s) of children. We still discuss quality as a uniform concept in the sense of ‘one way fits

Changes and Challenges within German ECEC policy

all’. More recently, however, arguments have been raised that German ECEC pedagogy is mainly tailored to a middle-class habitus and tends to devalue the different experiences, knowledge and cultural and linguistic inheritance of an increasingly heterogeneous child population, thereby ignoring every child’s right to full participation in ECEC (cf. BMFSFJ, 2014b).

The Neglected Challenge of Quality There is unequivocal evidence in international research that educational outcomes for children are dependent on high quality services (e.g. Barnett, 2011; Lesemann, 2009; Melhuish et  al., 2015). Though all children benefit from high quality in ECEC, it is the most vulnerable ones who benefit the most (e.g. Lazzari/Vandenbroeck, 2012; Sylva et al., 2011). Burchinal et al. (2009, p. 3) have argued that: ‘at least for those who are from low-income families, children benefit from higher-quality care overall in both their language and social skills, but larger benefits tend to accrue when quality is in the good to high range’. Additionally, Burchinal et  al. (2009) have emphasized that it is not just that high quality promotes a positive development of children; if ECEC provisions are of poor quality it is more likely that they actually have a negative impact (cf. ibid). In recent years, these messages from international research have led to several studies, programmes and initiatives that have tried to raise (political) awareness of the importance of assessing and improving quality on all levels of the ECEC system (cf. EU, 2014; OECD, 2012, 2015; Urban et  al., 2011).10 When looking at this system, high quality can be characterized by the structure-process model, in which quality can be analysed from three dimensions, namely: the structural input; the process; and the output (cf. Esch et al., 2006; Kalicki, 2015). It is assumed that these dimensions have an effect on each other

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and thereby constitute quality. Thus, achieving high quality implies having a framework that includes particular conditions with regard to the qualification of staff, the group size and the child:staff-ratio (structural quality), which also have an effect on what happens in the settings, like the interaction between child and staff or the activities of children (process quality). The children’s well-being, their experiences in the ECEC setting and educational competences can be part of the outcome dimension. Therefore, quality is a multi-dimensional, dynamic and complex construct that unfolds best within a ‘competent system’ that is ensured by sustainable, effective policies and adequate public investment (cf. Urban et al., 2011, p. 23ff.). Since the late 1990s there have been several national as well as regional initiatives within the states (Länder) to support processes of quality development within ECEC settings. In 1999, the Federal Family Ministry promoted a National Quality Initiative, which focused on the development of methods for assessing and improving quality within the different parts of the ECEC sector (cf. BMFSFJ, 2003).11 The initiative developed and tested quality criteria and suitable methods for their internal and external evaluation. However, at the end of the day neither the quality criteria nor the developed methods had any binding power on the ECEC field. So, while the initiative arguably started a nationwide debate about quality, in reality the effect on quality improvement within ECEC services was low. Nevertheless, one downstream effect of the debate has been that over the years all ECEC providers (Träger) – who are mainly responsible for quality assurance and d­evelopment – have developed their own quality management systems (cf. Diller et al., 2005; Esch et al., 2006; Stöbe-Blossey, 2010).12 Due to the short supply of ECEC places, and the immense efforts that were necessary to reach the quantitative targets, the question of how to manage and enhance the dynamics of the expansion of services has dominated the political agenda. Public

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budgets have been allocated to create new places rather than invested in improving the quality of places. While there is nothing to indicate a worsening of ECEC quality during the expansion period, there have been more and more critical voices, mainly from the ECEC sector itself, pointing to structural problems of inadequate quality and insufficient funding of ECEC. Furthermore, monitoring reports of the sector illustrate the considerable differences in structural quality features between different German states (Länder), and between East and West German ECEC in particular (cf. Autorengruppe Bildungsberichterstattung, 2016, p. 64; Bertelsmann, 2016). The main ‘problem areas’ can be identified as pertaining to: staff qualification; child:staff ratios (also because of a shortage of qualified staff); equitable access (despite the legal entitlement); and the affordability of places (see previous section, ‘Changing Labour Market Participation Patterns’ on p. 54). Striking are the remarkable differences between the states with regard to quality indicators like the ratio of staff to children. For children under the age of 3, for example, this varies between 1:3.1 in Baden-Württemberg and 1:3.6 in Northrhine-Westphalia to 1:5.1 in Hamburg and 1:6.5 in Saxony. There is the same picture for children over the age of 3, where the range goes from 1:7.7 in BadenWürttemberg to 1:14.4 in Mecklenburg Western Pomerania (cf. Bertelsmann, 2016, p. 24). Looking at the existing difference between the states and the (partially) inadequate conditions within the field, it is doubtful whether ECEC settings are able to ensure equal and fair educational chances for all children. This thesis is also supported by several studies which have illustrated that the quality of Germany’s ECEC settings is only moderate and has only slightly advanced in the last few years – despite the introduction of curricula and pedagogical frameworks (cf. Tietze, 1998; Tietze et al., 2013). Another aspect that was in focus within the last couple of years is the qualification level

for staff in ECEC. Linked to the increased expectations and responsibilities imposed on ECEC settings, there has been vigorous discussion about reforming the existing system of the pre-service training for educators. While a consensus exists that a better theoretical foundation is needed, it is still controversial what should be the adequate place and educational level of training. So far, the state-recognized educators who make up the overwhelming majority of the childcare profession are trained in vocational colleges at post-secondary school level. The recent Bologna Process has opened up the opportunity for the introduction of early childhood studies in Germany and this has triggered the development of numerous new graduatelevel courses, including the development and spread of ECEC university courses (cf. Rauschenbach/Riedel, 2016; Thole/Cloos, 2006). However, how the graduates of the new study routes fare on the labour market, remains to be seen. Up to now, the proportion of ECEC staff with academic qualifications is a marginal 5% throughout Germany (cf. Autorengruppe Bildungsberichterstattung, 2016). In sum, the improvement of quality remains a major challenge and requires efforts on all levels of the ECEC system (cf. Urban et  al., 2011). In order to achieve a ‘competent system’ that offers fair chances to all children – regardless of their family, migration or social background – quality needs to be improved with regard to structural aspects and pedagogical issues, as well as with regard to questions of governance and funding. Taking the challenge of improving quality seriously, in 2014 a new national quality initiative was set in motion aimed at developing national goals for the improvement of the ECEC sector over the next decade. Led by the Federal minister for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth, and in collaboration with the 16 state ministers, an agreement was reached on an obligatory policy process for achieving these goals and for financing quality improvements (cf.

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BMFSFJ/JFMK, 2014). A working group with representatives from the federal ministry as well as the state ministries was set up to elaborate quality goals and thereby reach a consensus about the further steps in this process. In November 2016, the working group published an interim report that, for the first time, bundles recommendations on shared dimensions and objectives of quality, their content and the financing of the implementation of the quality improvements.13 Furthermore, a political declaration on a stronger financial commitment of the federal government was stated (BMFSFJ/JFMK, 2016). The working group is expected to prepare a proposal on the further design and implementation of the process of quality improvements in the different fields of the ECEC sector by spring 2017 (BMFSFJ, 2016). If these quality goals reach a concrete and binding status (e.g. in the form of a national law), they have the chance to build the basis for substantial quality enhancement within the ECEC system.

The Hidden Price of the Reform As noted earlier, one key result from the social investment policies in ECEC is an ongoing institutionalization of (early) childhood (BMFSFJ, 2014b). with a growing number of children attending ECEC at an earlier age, and for longer hours per week. This has implications for the type of childhood that children experience, with some arguing that children and childhood are now the subject of constant surveillance, with the ongoing monitoring of development leading to the standardization of childhoods (e.g. Hübenthal/Ifland, 2011; Kelle/Mierendorff, 2013). In scientific discourse as well as on a political level, various strands of critique have been articulated in this context. One major critique is formulated from a children’s rights perspective. While acknowledging the necessity of putting a higher emphasis on children’s learning and

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of reforming early childhood education, some have argued that recent developments in ECEC policy risk neglecting childspecific needs ‘in favour of an economic rationalization of early childhood education’ (Hübenthal/Ifland, 2011, p. 121). This position argues that rising demands for more efficiency and a new orientation towards child outcomes put at risk the particular rationality and pace of children’s individual learning and development processes. From this perspective any form of testing, and assessments which compare children’s performance against predefined norms, or targeted measures to speed up school-readiness, are considered at least ambivalent and in tension with children’s own interests. Rather, following the proponents of this alternative discourse, children’s right to free and unconditional space and time for playing and exploring should be emphasized. Given the longer hours children are spending in ECEC institutions it is paramount to strengthen the opportunity for children to participate in the ‘here and now’ of the ECEC setting (ibid., p. 122) and for children to be accepted as co-producers of a shared culture and of the everyday practices of the setting (cf. Klinkhammer, 2010). Another strand of critique points to the fact that the social investment ideology also implies increased pressure on parents who are increasingly addressed as the first and most relevant agents in the upbringing and education of their children. Within this ideological position parents are seen as responsible for ensuring the best possible educational opportunities and learning environments for their children, including choosing high-quality ECEC services for them. Moreover, German studies also show that there is a growing popularity of music courses, baby swimming and the like among German middle-class parents hoping to support their children’s development (cf. Müller/Spieß, 2009). As Oelkers and Lange (2012) argue, the concept of parental ‘responsibility’ thereby serves to

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mobilize parental action, yet if parents fail to conform to the expectations, they run the risk of being morally stigmatized. This is the case for parents from a low SES background who do not send their children to ECEC, or who do not succeed in choosing good quality care and education. This, however, ignores the fact that parents are in an unequal position to buy in and/or negotiate high-quality services for their children. Finally, given the scarcity of places, parents’ possibilities for negotiating the hours, the quality and the content of the care and education of their children are often quite limited. This also implies that it is very often the pedagogical staff who define what good childhood means for children.

Conclusion: An incomplete revolution? In the chapter we have argued that the modernization of the familialist German welfare state has remained incomplete: while the social investment discourse served as a trigger for change, its key messages were only carried through in policy in an incomplete form. On the one hand, the last decade has seen an influx of highly educated women into the labour market with a corresponding increase seen in the ECEC participation rates of young children. As a result, young children now spend longer hours in childcare institutions than in previous years. This has evoked criticism about the dominance of economic reasons behind recent reforms and the unidirectional pressure on families to adapt to the demands of the labour market (cf. Ostner, 2006, 2010). In the period under discussion there was very little effort to make the labour market more adaptable to the needs of families with small children, and therewith support a more family-oriented reconciliation of family and work. It would appear therefore that the issue of flexibility was interpreted

and implemented by politicians and companies in ways that did not necessarily advantage children and families. Furthermore, our discussion shows that German family and ECEC policies have been far from straightforward. Not surprisingly they have often been criticized for moving ‘two steps forward, one step back’ (Müller/ Wrohlich, 2014). While the West German federal government and Länder have long promoted the idea of ‘choice’ for mothers of young children to stay at home or enter employment, tax regulations and inbuilt incentives in social security payments still prevent (married) women from picking up employment, and mothers continue to express a preference for part-time work. Thus, what has been sketched out as a new gender contract in the social investment discourse remains out of reach: economic resources have not been redistributed between men and women, nor has the gendered division of unpaid care work changed. Finally, the promise to sustainably combat the existing inequalities between children and provide them with a better start in life by directing higher investments to ECEC has not been pursued as a political priority. Instead, the overwhelming impression is that a purely economic reading of ECEC in the policy discourse has prevailed where the main preoccupation has been with activating female labour potential. Likewise, disparities in children’s access to ECEC have yet to be tackled and the focus on quality of ECEC services remains unattended to. Arising from the social investment ideology outlined above, these issues constitute potential risks for the well-being of children and families. Looking to the future of ECEC policy planning in Germany, it is clear that these issues need to remain at the forefront of government attention. It would thus be desirable if the longstanding socio-pedagogical tradition of ECEC in Germany was strengthened since it represents a sound basis for fostering the holistic development of children and the social inclusiveness of ECEC.

Changes and Challenges within German ECEC policy

Notes    1  There were remarkable differences between East and West German family policy and therewith the politically favoured family concept. Going back to the political ideals of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), policies in East Germany supported the dual-earner model which facilitates the labour market participation of men and women, being a parent or not (cf. Ostner, 2006). ‘[T]he East German regime nearly from its start expected women to be both workers and mothers’ (Ostner, 2010, p. 221).    2  A key role can be ascribed to the Lisbon Strategy which laid the foundation for a new discourse on European social policy (cf. Scherb, 2012). By 2010 the Union wanted to become ‘the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustained economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion’ (Rodriques, 2002, p. 298, emphasis in original). The strategy basically relies on Giddens’ concept of the ‘Third Way’ in social policy (cf. Giddens, 1998, 2000; Klinkhammer, 2010, p. 208ff.).   3  ‘In 2002, at the Barcelona Summit, the European Council set the targets of providing childcare by 2010 to at least 90% of children between 3 years old and the mandatory school age and at least 33% of children under 3 years of age’ (European Commission, 2008).   4  In Germany, the responsibility for ECEC is divided between the federal government, the 16 ­Länder (states) and municipalities/local authorities. Responsibility for providing a statutory framework setting forth universally binding objectives and principles rests at federal level. These terms are given in Social Code Book VIII (Sozialgesetzbuch, SGB VIII) – Child and Youth Welfare. The ‘Länder’ are responsible for specifying the obligations arising from the Social Code Book VIII by means of executive legislation. At local level municipalities are responsible for the planning, implementation and bulk of funding of ECEC s­ ervices.    5  Among experts, the Betreuungsgeld was seen very critically (cf. Beblo, 2015; DJI, 2014; Hurrelmann, 2015; Ott, 2015; Sell, 2015). In 2015 the Federal Constitutional Court toppled the care benefit with the argument that the federal government does not have the legislative power for regulating this kind of family policy measure (cf. Bundesverfassungsgericht, 2015).   6  Parents received up to €306 maximum a month. This allowance was linked to income levels, and was rather low, so that over the years fewer and fewer parents were able to make use of this ­payment.   7  The stay-at-home parent receives a wagereplacement allowance which is about 67% of

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the average income earned within the 12 months before the child was born (at least €300 up to a maximum of €1,800). Furthermore, it is still possible to be employed up to 30 hours per week.    8  Whereas the amount and the subscription period of parental allowance was radically changed, the legal entitlement for a three-year period of parental leave remained the same. Parents who want to care for the child beyond the period of the first 12 respectively 14 months can make use of the parental allowance. Related to the allowance are legal regulations like a protection against dismissal, for example. However, the caring parent will not receive any financial support during this time.    9  When both mother and father each work for 25 to 30 hours a week and at the same time take care of their child, they can claim four additional months of parental allowance (cf. Bäcker et al., 2015).  10  Though an international discourse on the quality of ECEC can be traced back to the end of the 1990s (e.g. European Commission, 1996), it can be argued that this discourse just recently has intensified and become more powerful.  11  The initiative consisted of five projects each developing quality criteria and methods for assessing quality within a certain field of ECEC: (1) services for children under 3, (2) kindergarten (children 3 to 6 years), (3) services for school-age children, (4) the situation-approach to pedagogical work, and (5) the work of municipalities and providers (cf. Fthenakis et al., 2003; Preissing, 2003; Strätz et al., 2003; Tietze/Viernickel, 2002).  12  This was reinforced by new regulations that were introduced by the TAG in 2005 (see section ‘A New Public Responsibility for the Early Years’); these obliged ECEC providers to regularly evaluate the quality of their settings.   13  The report covers nine different quality areas: (1) a needs-based supply of ECEC services, (2) content-related challenges, (3) a good staff:child ratio, (4) qualified staff, (5) strengthening ECEC leadership, (6) spatial design of settings, (7) education, promotion of development and health, (8) quality development and assurance in daycare, and (9) governance of the ECEC system. Due to its importance and with regard to the complexity of the federal system, the topic of financing was discussed in a separate chapter.

References Alt, C., Berngruber, A., Hubert, S. (2014). Trotz Ausbau kein Platz? Zum Einfluss von Einstellungen und soziodemografischen Faktoren

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weiterentwickeln und finanziell sichern. Zwischenbericht 2016 von Bund und Ländern und Erklärung der Bund-Länder-Konferenz. Available online: http://www.fruehe-chancen.de/ fileadmin/PDF/Fruehe_Chancen-/BundLaender-Konferenz/Zwischenbericht_mit_ unterschriebener_-Erklaerung.pdf Bundesministerium für Familie, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend (BMFSFJ) (2003). Perspektiven zur Weiterentwicklung des Systems der Tageseinrichtungen für Kinder in Deutschland. Zusammenfassung und Empfehlungen, Berlin. Available online: http://www.bmfsfj. de/RedaktionBMFSFJ/Internetredaktion/PdfAnlagen/gutachten-perspektiven-zurweiterentwicklung,property=pdf.pdf Bundesministerium für Familie, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend (BMFSFJ) (2014a). Dossier Müttererwerbstätigkeit. Erwerbstätigkeit, Erwerbsumfang und Erwerbsvolumen 2012. Berlin. Bundesministerium für Familie, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend (BMFSFJ) (2014b). 14. Kinder- und Jugendbericht, Bericht über die Lebenssituation junger Menschen und die Leistungen der Kinder- und Jugendhilfe in Deutschland. Berlin. Bundesministerium für Familie, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend (BMFSFJ) (2015a). ElterngeldPlus – Wie Arbeitgeber und Eltern profitieren. Berlin. Bundesministerium für Familie, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend (BMFSFJ) (2015b). Familienreport 2014. Leistungen, Wirkungen, Trends. Berlin. Bundesministerium für Familie, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend (BMFSFJ) (Ed.) (2015c). Fünfter Bericht zur Evaluation des Kinderförderungsgesetzes. Berlin. Available online: http://www. bmfsfj.de/BMFSFJ/Service/publikationen, did=214056.html Bundesministerium für Familie, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend (BMFSFJ) (2016). Qualität in der Kinderbetreuung weiterentwickeln. Aktuelle Meldung. Konferenz “Frühe Bildung”. Available online: https://www.bmfsfj.de/-bmfsfj/aktuelles/ alle-meldungen/qualitaet-in-der-kindertages betreuung-weiterentwickeln/112490 Bundesverfassungsgericht (2015). Keine Gesetzgebungskompetenz des Bundes für das Betreuungsgeld. Pressemitteilung Nr. 57/2015 vom 21. Juli 2015. Available online: http://www.­b undesverfassungsgericht.de/ SharedDocs/­P ressemitteilungen/DE/2015/ bvg15-057.html

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Esping-Andersen, G., Gallie, D., Hemerijck, A., Myles J. (Eds.) (2002) Why we need a new welfare state. Oxford University Press. Eßer, F. (2014). Kindertagesbetreuung im Kontext sozialpädagogischer Professionalität. In: Betz, T., Cloos, P. (Eds.) Kindheit und Profession. Konturen und Befunde eines Forschungsfeldes. Weinheim: Beltz Juventa, pp. 36–48. European Commission (2008). Childcare Services in the EU. Available online: http:// europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-08592_de.htm (04.05.2016) European Commission Network on Childcare and Other Measures to Reconcile the Employment and Family Responsibilities of Men and Women (1996). Quality Targets in Services for Young Children. Proposals for a Ten Year Action Programme. Available online: http:// www.fruehe-chancen.de/fileadmin/PDF/ Archiv/ec_childcare_network_quality_targets_ in_services_for_young_children_1996.pdf European Union (EU) (2014). Proposal for Key Principles of a Quality Framework for Early Childhood Education and Care. Report of the Working Group on Early Childhood Education and Care under the auspices of the European Commission. Available online: http://ec.europa.eu/education/policy/strategic-framework/archive/documents/ececquality-framework_en.pdf Evers, A. (2008). Investiv und aktivierend oder ökonomistisch und bevormundend? Zur Auseinandersetzung mit einer neuen Generation von Sozialpolitiken. In: Evers, A., Heinze, R.G. (Eds.) Sozialpolitik – Ökonomisierung und Entgrenzung. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, pp. 229–249. Evers, A., Lewis, J., Riedel, B. (2005). Developing child-care provision in England and Germany: Problems of governance, In: Journal of European Social Policy, Vol.15, pp. 195–209. Fthenakis, W.E., Hanssen, K., Oberhuemer, P., Schreyer, I. (Eds.) (2003). Träger zeigen Profil. Qualitätshandbuch für Träger von Kindertageseinrichtungen. Weinheim, Basel, Berlin: Beltz. Fuchs-Rechlin, K., Bergmann, C. (2014). Der Abbau von Bildungsbenachteiligung durch Kindertagesbetreuung für unter Dreijährige – zwischen Wunsch und Wirklichkeit. In: Maaz, K., Baumert, J., Neumann, M. (Eds.) Herkunft und Bildungserfolg von der

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Vorschule bis zur Universität: Forschungsstand und Interventionsmöglichkeiten aus interdisziplinärer Perspektive. Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft, Sonderheft, pp. 95–118. Geier, B., Riedel, B. (2008). Ungleichheiten der Inanspruchnahme öffentlicher frühpädagogischer Angebote. Einflussfaktoren und Restriktionen elterlicher Betreuungsentscheidungen. In: Roßbach, H.-G., Blossfeld, H.-P. (Eds.) Frühpädagogische Förderung in Institutionen. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, pp. 11–28. Gerlach, I. (2010). Familienpolitik. Ein Lehrbuch: Wiesbaden, VS Verlag. Giddens, A. (1998). The third way. Cambridge: Polity Press. Giddens, A. (2000). The third way and its critics. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gisbert, K. (2004). Neue Bildungsinhalte. In: Wehrmann, I. (Ed.) Kindergärten und ihre Zukunft. Weinheim, pp. 138–148. Halfon N., Shulman E., Hochstein M. (2001). Brain development in early childhood. UCLA Center for Healthier Children, Families and Communities Policy Research Center, Policy Brief, No. 13, pp. 1–4. Hannon, P. (2003). Developmental neuroscience: Implications for early childhood intervention and education. In: Current Paediatrics. No. 13, pp. 58–63. Hendrick, H. (2010). Late modernity’s British childhood: Social investment and the disciplinary state. In: Bühler-Niederberger, D., Mierendorff, J., Lange, A. (Eds.) Kindheit zwischen fürsorglichem Zugriff und gesellschaftlicher Teilhabe, 1. Band„ Ungleiche Kindheiten, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, pp. 43–71. Hübenthal, M., Ifland, A. (2011). Risks for children? Recent developments in early childcare policy in Germany. In: Childhood: A Journal of Global Child Research, Vol. 18, H. 1, pp. 114–127. Hüsken, K. (2011). Kita vor Ort. Betreuungsatlas auf Ebene der Jugendamtsbezirke 2010. München. Available online: http://www.dji.de/ betreuungsatlas/Betreuungsatlas_komplett.pdf Hurrelmann, K. (2015). Debatte um das Betreuungsgeld: Falsche Anreize für eine moderne Familienpolitik? In: ifo Schnelldienst, Vol. 68. Jg., No. 11, pp. 7–10. Jugendministerkonferenz (JMK)/Kultusministerkonferenz (KMK) (2004). Gemeinsamer

Rahmen der Länder für die frühe Bildung in Kindertageseinrichtungen. Beschluss der Jugendministerkonferenz vom 13./14.05.2004 & Beschluss der Kultusministerkonferenz vom 03./04.06.2004. Available online: http:// www.kmk.org/fileadmin/Dateien/veroeffentlichungen_beschluesse/2004/2004_06_03Fruehe-Bildung-Kindertageseinrichtungen.pdf Kalicki, B. (2015). Pädagogische Qualität und Qualitätssteuerung: Konzepte und Strategien. In: Kalicki, B., Wolff-Marting, C. (Eds.) Qualität in aller Munde. Themen, Positionen, Perspektiven in der kindheitspädagogischen Debatte. Freiburg, Basel, Wien: Herder Verlag, pp.12–22. Kelle, K., Mierendorff, J. (Ed.) (2013). Normierung und Normalisierung der Kindheit. Weinheim und Basel: Beltz Juventa. Klinkhammer, N. (2010). Frühkindliche Bildung und Betreuung im Sozialinvestitionsstaat – mehr Chancengleichheit durch investive Politikstrategien? In: Bühler-Niederberger, D., Mierendorff, J., Lange, A. (Eds.) Kindheit zwischen fürsorglichem Zugriff und gesellschaftlicher Teilhabe, 1. Band „Ungleiche Kindheiten”. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, pp. 205–228. Klinkhammer, N. (2014). Kindheit im Diskurs. Kontinuität und Wandel in der deutschen Bildungs- und Betreuungspolitik. Marburg: Tectum Verlag. Lazzari, A., Vandenbroeck, M. (2012). Literature review of the participation of disadvantaged children and families in ECEC services in Europe. In: Bennett, J. (Ed.) Early childhood education and care (ECEC) for children from disadvantaged backgrounds: Findings from a European literature review and two case studies. Study commissioned by the Directorate General for Education and Culture. Brussels: European Commission. Leitner, S., Ostner, I., Schmitt, C. (2008). Family policies in Germany. In: I. Ostner, C. Schmitt (Eds.) Family policies in the context of family change: The Nordic countries in comparative perspective. Opladen: VS Verlag, pp.175–202. Lesemann, P. (2009). The impact of high quality education and care on the development of young children: Review of literature. In: Eurydice (Ed.) Early Childhood Education and Care in Europe: Tackling social and cultural

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inequalities, Brussels, pp. 17–49. Available online: http://eacea.ec.europa.eu/education/ eurydice/documents/thematic_reports/ 098EN.pdf Lessenich, S. (2008). Die Neuerfindung des Sozialen. Der Sozialstaat im flexiblen Kapitalismus. transcript: Bielefeld. Lewis, J. (2002). Gender and welfare state change. In: European Societies, Vol. 4, No. 4, pp. 331–357. Lister, R. (2003). Investing in the citizen-workers of the future: transformations in citizenship and the State under new labour. In: Social Policy/Administration, Vol. 37, No. 5, pp. 427–443. Meier-Gräwe, U., Klünder, N. (2015). Ausgewählte Ergebnisse der Zeitbudgeterhebungen 1991/92, 2001/02 und 2012/13. Ed. by Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung e. V. (HBS). Gießen. Available online: https://www.boell.de/sites/ default/files/e-paper_1509_zeitbudgeterhebungen_kluender.pdf Meiner, C. (2014). Jeder nach seinen Möglichkeiten. Zur finanziell ungleichen Belastung von Familien durch Kindertagesbetreuung in Nordrhein-­Westfalen. Forschungsverbund DJI/TU Dortmund. Melhuish, E., Ereky-Stevens, K., Petrogiannis, K. (2015). A review of research on the effects of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) upon child development. Report of Curriculum Quality Analysis and Impact Review of European Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) (CARE). No. 61331. Available online: http://ecec-care.org/fileadmin/careproject/Publications/reports/new_version_ CARE_WP4_D4_1_Review_on_the_effects_ of_ECEC.pdf Morel, N., Palier, B., Palme, J. (2012). Towards a social investment welfare state? Ideas, policies and challenges. Bristol, Chicago: The Policy Press. Müller, G., Spieß, K.C. (2009). Informelle Förderangebote – Eine empirische Analyse ihrer Nutzung in der frühen Kindheit. In: Roßbach, H.-G., Blossfeld, H.-P. (Eds.) Frühpädagogische Förderung in Institutionen. Sonderheft 11 der Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft. Wiesbaden, pp. 29–46. Müller, K.-U., Wrohlich, K. (2014). Two steps forward one step back? Evaluating contradicting child care policies in Germany. DIW

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Riedel, B. (2009). Local Governance. Ressource für den Ausbau der Kindertagesbetreuung für Kinder unter drei Jahren. Explorative Studie in drei Kommunen und einem Landkreis. München: DJI-Material. Riedel, B., Hüsken, K., Fuchs-Rechlin, K. (2011). Kita vor Ort: DJI-Betreuungsatlas nimmt regionale Ungleichheiten unter die Lupe. In: FORUM Jugendhilfe 3/2011, pp. 38–41. Rodriques, M.J. (2002). The new knowledge economy in Europe: A strategy for international competitiveness and social cohesion. Cheltenham, Glos: Edward Elgar. Saraceno, C. (2015). A critical look to the social investment approach from a gender perspective. In: Social Politics, Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 257–269. Available online: http:// sp.oxfordjournals.org/content/22/2/257. abstract Scheiwe, K. (2009). Slow motion: Institutional factors as obstacles to the expansion of early childhood education in the FRG. In: Scheiwe, K., Willekens, H. (Eds.) Childcare and preschool developments in Europe: Institutional perspectives. Houndsmill, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 180–195. Scherb J. (2012). Lissabon-Strategie (LissabonProzess). In: Bergmann, J. (Ed.) Handlexikon der Europäischen Union. 4. Aufl. BadenBaden: Nomos Verlag. Available online: http:// www.europarl.europa.eu/brussels/website/ media/Lexikon/Pdf/Lissabon_Strategie.pdf Schober, P.S., Stahl, J.F. (2014). Trends in der Kinderbetreuung – Sozioökonomische Unterschiede verstärken sich in Ost und West. DIW Wochenbericht No. 40. Sell, S. (2015). Das Betreuungsgeld als Instrument einer mehrfach fragwürdigen “Kompentsationsökonomie”. In: ifo-Schnelldienst, Vol. 68.Jg., No. 11, pp. 11–13. Stöbe-Blossey, S. (Ed.) (2010). Kindertagesbetreuung im Wandel: Perspektiven für die Organisationsentwicklung, Wiesbaden: VS-Verlag. Strätz, R., Hermens, C., Fuchs, R., Kleinen, K., Nordt, G., Wiedemann, P. (2003). Qualität für Schulkinder in Tageseinrichtungen: Ein

nationaler Kriterienkatalog. Weinheim, Basel, Berlin: Beltz. Sylva, K., Melhuish, E., Sammons, P., SirajBlatchford, I., Taggart, B. (2011). Pre-school quality and educational outcomes at age 11: Low quality has little benefit. In: Journal of Early Childhood Research, Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 109–124. Thole, W., Cloos, P. (2006). Akademisierung des Personals für das Handlungsfeld Pädagogik der Kindheit. In: Diller, A., Rauschenbach, T. (Eds.) Reform oder Ende der Erzieherinnenausbildung? Beiträge zu einer kontroversen Fachdebatte. München: DJI, pp. 47–77. Tietze, W. (Ed.) (1998). Wie gut sind unsere Kindergärten? Eine Untersuchung zur pädagogischen Qualität in deutschen Kindergärten. Neuwied/Kriftel/Berlin: Luchterhand. Tietze, W., Viernickel, S. (Eds.) (2002). Pädagogische Qualität in Tageseinrichtungen für Kinder. Ein nationaler Kriterienkatalog. Weinheim, Basel, Berlin: Beltz. Tietze, W., Becker-Stoll, F., Bensel, J., Eckhardt, A.G., Haug-Schnabel, G., Kalicki, B., Keller, H., Leyendecker, B. (2013). Nationale Untersuchung zur Bildung, Betreuung und Erziehung in der frühen Kindheit (NUBBEK). Berlin: Das Netz. Urban, M., Vandenbroek, M., van Laere, K., Lazzari, A., Peeters, J. (2011). Competence Requirements (CoRe) in Early Childhood Education and Care: Final report. Public open tender EAC 14/2009. Cass School of Education and University of Ghent, Department for Social Welfare Studies, London and University of East London. Available online: https:// d o w n l o a d . e i - i e . o r g / D o c s / We b D e p o t / CoReFinalReport2011.pdf Wiesner, R. (2004). Das Tagesbetreuungsausbaugesetz. In: Zentralblatt für Jugendrecht. Kindheit – Jugend – Familie, Vol. 91, No. (12), pp. 441–452. WZB (2014). “Mehr väterlicher Familiensinn”, Pressemitteilung vom 22.07.2014. Available online: https://www.wzb.eu/de/pressemitteilung/mehr-vaeterlicher-familiensinn

4 A Danish Perspective on Issues in Early Childhood Education and Care Policy Jytte Juul Jensen

Introduction This chapter builds mainly on a research project on how trained staff understand Danish pedagogical practice, which I carried out, supplemented by relevant literature studies. The aim is to make visible the special Danish contribution to the field of early childhood education and care (ECEC), pedagogic work and professional understanding, viewed from an international perspective. One part of the research is a qualitative study where focus groups of pedagogues (discussed later in this chapter) and others involved with pedagogic work are shown half-hour films of everyday life and practice in early childhood centres in England, Hungary and Denmark. Some findings from the qualitative study are presented combined with an analysis of the Danish pedagogic tradition which is under pressure both from neoliberal thinking – in terms of programmes and outcomes – and reduced economic

resources for the Danish welfare state, including those for early childhood centres. Another part of my research is an analysis of the early childhood system in Europe and especially in the three countries where the films were recorded. These countries represent three approaches to welfare: England the neo-liberal, Hungary the eastern European, and Denmark the Nordic welfare policy approach. The chapter begins with some contextual features of ECEC in Denmark looked at from a European perspective.

A Brief History of Danish ECEC Denmark has, together with the other Nordic countries, taken a particular approach to ECEC. The Nordic welfare state has been evolving for decades, and the history of the Danish early childhood system is characterized by ‘continuity rather than radical

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change’, which is Borchorst’s (2002) title for an English-language article about Danish early childhood services. Compared, for example, to Hungary with its radical political changes, Denmark has had a stable development maintaining many of the same features, which can be identified historically. Early on, Denmark overcame the split between a care and an education approach. As in many other countries, Denmark once did have two tracks. One, from the nineteenth century, was that of ‘asylums’ with a caregiving approach, where the centres took care of poor families’ children while their mothers were working. For this work, the staff did not need any education; it was enough to be a woman with a ‘good Christian heart’. Places at the centres were available full-time and free of charge. The other track was more learning-­ oriented, starting with the first kindergartens built on Fröbel’s ideas of freedom to explore and play including outdoor life. They served children from the upper and middle classes and children attended part-time. The thinking behind such kindergartens was that it was good for children to be in an environment stimulating their development. For this work the staff must be educated, and this was the foundation of the present-day Danish pedagogue education. Those two tracks still exist across the globe in many countries. But, from the beginning of the twentieth century, the two types of Danish centres started to merge, to create the basis for the integrated thinking that is still dominant and is one of the special features of Danish ECEC. Well into the twentieth century most children in early childhood centres were from families with low income, but as early as 1964 the universal approach based on this merging was stipulated in law. The centres, the law stated, were for all children, and state funding was given to all centres regardless of which children attended. A strong increase in places for children took place with the major expansion of the welfare state from the end of the 1960s, and today the universal principle

has become a reality. Since 2006, all children from six months old until they start obligatory school at the age of 6 years have a right to a full-time place in a centre. Moreover, all children have a right to a place in an out-ofschool facility until they are 10 years of age.

ECEC in Europe There are huge differences between early childhood systems in Europe. The organization, the aims and the daily work have, in each country, been developed on the basis of its specific political, economic and cultural history and context. How the system is understood depends on the view held of children, and on how the responsibility is divided between families and/or society regarding children. It depends on family policy, including views on women’s and men’s roles, as well as labour market conditions and employment policy. Oberhuemer, Schreyer and Neuman (2010, p. 9) state that ‘Since the early 1990s, these early childhood systems have been undergoing a series of transformations’.1 Two different developments have taken place: one in the eastern European countries after the fall of communism, which witnessed the closing of many centres for children under 3; and another in Western Europe, where early childhood services are high on the policy agenda, especially services for under 3s. The growing interest in early childhood services can also be seen in the EU with the Barcelona targets, where member states agreed the goal of providing places for at least 33% of children under 3 years and at least 90% of children from 3 years to obligatory school age. The growing interest in the early childhood field can also be registered in international organizations’ studies and recommendations, for example from OECD, UNICEF and Education International (OECD, 2001, 2006; UNICEF 2008; Education International, 2009, 2010).

A Danish perspective on issues in ECEC policy

ECEC systems – split or coherent The twin-track approach was, and is still, one of the most striking features of the early childhood system in Europe. The divide by orientation to care or learning was accompanied by a divide according to age: one part for children under 3 years and the other for children from around 3 years until obligatory school age. One exception is the coherent, integrated systems in the Nordic countries. Bennett (2003) analysed ‘the persistent division between care and education’ (p. 21); he talks about a dichotomy between the two fields and discusses the huge problems that this creates. In the Nordic countries and Slovenia a coherent early childhood system exists for children from around one year right through to obligatory school age. The services have their basis in the same legislation and belong to the same ministry, and in both, professionals, known as pedagogues in Denmark, are the key workers. It has for many years been recognized in the Nordic countries that children under 3 need the same types of centres as children over 3 years of age. Here reigns the view that the youngest children benefit from being in a public space for children. And the same pedagogic aims are set, taking into consideration the child’s age and maturity.

ECEC policy for children under three years Most EU countries have a guaranteed right for children to attend an early childhood centre, but policies vary across countries. Only Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Slovenia offer a place for children from around 1 year of age, and it is a full-time place. The split system produces big differences in coverage for children over and under 3 years. Most EU countries have high levels of provision for children over 3 years; but

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for children under three years there are far fewer places, and there is much variation between the member states. Denmark is at the top of the list for children under 3 years, with a coverage rate of around 75%; lowest are Poland and the Czech Republic with only 2%, and many other eastern European countries have a coverage rate around 10% except for Slovenia with almost 30% (Plantenga & Remery, 2009). Different child policy ideologies exist in Europe for children under 3. According to one perspective, it is considered to be a private or family responsibility; for example, in countries dominated by a neo-liberal economic policy it is considered the responsibility of the parents to find a place or an arrangement for their child, for which they pay. This is why in England and the United States a huge childcare market has grown up consisting of private, voluntary and independent institutions (Penn, 2011). By contrast, in the Nordic countries and Slovenia it is considered a role of the welfare state to make sure that there are enough childcare places, including for children under three. Here the universal principle exists with a place for each child regardless of their family circumstance, and much of the costs are funded from taxation. The view or image of the child is another feature embedded in policy, reflected in some countries in their maternity and parental policies. A number of European countries, for example Hungary, and many countries in eastern Europe, seem to consider it to be in the best interest of the child to be cared for by the mother during the early years; the child is deemed too ‘fragile’ to attend centres and cannot benefit from doing so. Conversely, the position taken in Denmark and Sweden is that the child is able from an early age to attend and participate in group life, which at the same time gives mothers the possibility to return to the labour market. The expansion of the Danish welfare state, including the increase in the number of places in ECEC for young children, is linked

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to the increase in women’s employment rate and gender equality. Denmark has one of the highest percentages of employed mothers in the world. Many mothers work full-time, and part-time workers are mostly employed over 30 hours per week. In an analysis of 20 countries, Denmark and then Sweden were identified as having the highest rates both for enrolment in ECEC for children under three years and for mothers’ employment (OECD, 2006). Many countries do not have nearly enough places for children whose mothers are working, so parents must find informal care. But there is now a strong increase in the number of places for the under threes in western Europe as the importance of ECEC places for this age group has been recognized – a view that has existed in Denmark and Sweden for a long time. Maternity and parental leave arrangements are, in Europe, closely woven together with the number of centres for children under three and both are important child policies, with the Nordic countries having the most generous policies. These policies determine how early childhood unfolds for the youngest children and how family life is organized. In all EU countries, parents have a right to leave to bring up their young children, but the details vary greatly in, for example, the length of the leave, the amount of salary compensation, parental rights to return to their job, and the availability and cost of centres (Moss, 2015).

ECEC for children over three Looking at the coverage rate and policy for children from 3 years to obligatory school age, it is now accepted that all children in this age group must have an ECEC place. Arguably, now the child becomes a citizen. Most countries have a very large proportion of children of this age range in early childhood centres. The services across countries

in Europe nevertheless differ in content. Some are oriented to the next stage of compulsory education, and seen as important for young children’s learning and development and essential as preparation for school and compulsory education; this has been termed a ‘pre-school’ approach (Bennett, 2003). Nordic services, on the other hand, have a pedagogic content which is much broader than the ‘pre-school’ approach. For instance, BUPL, the Danish Union of Early Childhood and Youth Educators, has developed a model of pedagogical work (see Figure 4.1) in the booklet on The work of the pedagogue: Roles and tasks (BUPL, 2006). The model identifies the following basic concepts and themes in pedagogical work with young children: socialization, care, learning and formation (dannelse in Danish; Bildung in German), as well as attention and development, and individualism and community. This indicates the broad Danish view on pedagogical work in ECEC and the roles and tasks of the pedagogues. I will briefly look at the ‘pre-school’ thinking in some other countries, which is very different from that in Denmark. Some countries, for example, refer to their early childhood centres as ‘schools’, such as the French école maternelle, the Spanish escuela de educación and the Italian scuola dell’infanzia. These schools for young children are mostly based in the ministry of education and many do not charge fees, just as in schools for older children. In some countries, they are physically situated in primary schools (e.g. Spain). From a Danish perspective, the thinking on subjects and organization in the classrooms of these schools, with their ‘pre-school’ approach, looks in many ways similar to that of the traditional compulsory school. In Oberhuemer, Schreyer and Neuman’s (2010) discussion of staff:child ratios, while the ratios are clearly hard to calculate and compare, it is striking that a number of countries have traditional school thinking and the compulsory school setting is used as a guideline with one teacher for one class. In the

A Danish perspective on issues in ECEC policy

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ATTENTION

SOCIALIZATION

CARE

COMMUNITY

INDIVIDUALISM

FORMATION

LEARNING

DEVELOPMENT

Figure 4.1 Model for pedagogical tasks in ECEC centres Source: BUPL, 2006, p. 8

French écoles maternelles, for children from 2½/3 to 6 years, the average staff:child ratio is one adult for 25.5 children. The same is the case in Greece, Portugal and Spain. Italy and Austria have one adult for 13 children. The three Nordic EU countries, Denmark, Finland and Sweden, have the highest staff:child ratios with around one adult for 5–7 children. Many schools for young children do not pay enough attention to the care-related part of ECEC, nor are they thought of as providing a childcare service while parents are at work; often they are only open for a short number of hours per day and are closed during school holidays. Bennett (2003) underlines and highlights that this neglect of the role of care is one of the big problems that arises from dividing children between centres for under and over 3 years of age. He also draws attention to the low priority given to children’s social interaction and children’s opportunities to follow through their own initiatives. Overall, a holistic and pedagogic approach to children is missing. Schoolbased centres are dominated by the teacher and have, from a Danish perspective, a traditional school-oriented approach.

In contrast to the ‘pre-school’ thinking in school-based ECEC services, the Nordic kindergartens build on a holistic view of the child and incorporate many objectives, including both broad pedagogic thinking and the caring discourse, the latter reflected in the fact that most centres are open all year and for around 10 hours per day.

ECEC in Denmark At the national level, ECEC provision in Denmark comes under one ministry, which has responsibility for the overall curriculum and regulation. Funding, organization and detailed regulation are the responsibility of the 98  municipalities or local authorities. Legislation states the holistic approach of early childhood centres, which ‘have a pedagogical, social and caring aim’ (Dagtilbudsloven, 2016). The pedagogic approach encompasses children’s development, well-being and learning and the possibilities of participating in inclusive communities; the social approach states that services are also for children in need of additional support for learning and care due

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to disabilities or neglect at home; while the caring approach acknowledges that children need to be taken care of while parents are at work. The three purposes are intertwined in all centres, as well as in family daycare where children, generally under three years of age, are cared for in the homes of family daycarers. The responsibility for implementing provision lies with the 98 municipalities. They must guarantee the required number of places. The majority of service providers are public/ municipal with 81% of the enrolled children; 16% are enrolled in private non-profit and 3% in private for-profit centres (Danmarks Statistik, 2014). The private for-profit sector is increasing. Some centres have become private as this gives them more freedom from municipal oversight of their daily work. The private centres receive the same public funding as other types of centres.

Funding and Parents’ Fees In 1919, Denmark was one of the first countries to give support to early childhood services through the national budget (Borchorst, 2002). The Danish approach has always been based on substantial public financing through taxation, with the money going directly to the centres. The municipalities pay around 75% of the running costs and parents pay the rest. There is an upper limit on parents’ fees, which also takes account of parents’ financial situation and the child’s need for a place: there are reductions for siblings and for lowincome families, and, for families with special needs, there may be no fee. Free early childhood centres are, at the moment, not on the political agenda in Denmark.

Enrolment Rates and Types of Centres All children are offered a place and this is the case all over Denmark. Many countries have

huge geographical differences in how many places there are available in different regions, and rural areas, in particular, have few places. The right to a place is linked to the individual child. Parents can send their children to centres or to family daycare. The universality principle reigns, and even though it has taken since 1964 to establish this system it is, from an international perspective, quite an achievement. Today, it is considered a cultural norm that children and even very young children attend a centre or family daycare. Services for children from 0 to 6 years consist of centre-based and family daycare provision. There are three types of centre-based services: vuggestuer (infant/toddler centres, for 0 to 3 years), børnehaver (kindergartens, 3 to 6 years) and aldersintegrerede institutioner (age-integrated centres, 0 to 6 years). The most common centre type is the ageintegrated centre, which has increased considerably since they started at the beginning of the 1970s. These centres can be organized in different ways, but it is most common to have mixed-age groups for children under 3 years and mixed-age groups for children over 3. Children in mixed-age groups are a rare sight in many other countries. In 2013, 97% of 3- to 6-year olds were enrolled in a public service, and 68% of children aged under 3. Only around 20% of children under 1 year are enrolled, mostly aged 10 to 11 months. For the 1- to 2-year old children, the enrolment rate is 91% (Danmarks Statistik, 2014), which is probably the highest percentage in Europe, indeed the world. Thirty-nine percent of enrolled children under 3 years are in municipal family daycare (ibid.), which is an integrated part of the Danish system of publicly funded ECEC services. It is regulated through national legislation (Dagtilbudsloven, 2016) and municipal requirements. Family daycarers are recruited, employed and paid by the municipalities, and they take care of children in the (daycarers’) homes. Here one can see that also in Denmark the view exists that it is good for

A Danish perspective on issues in ECEC policy

children to be in a home setting, as well as the view that in such settings young children do not need well-qualified professional workers. No formal education is required to become a family daycarer. Family daycare is most common in rural areas, but the volume of places has decreased over the years as centre-based facilities have expanded.

Staff education Staff Education in Europe Where there is a split system for under and over 3-year olds, there exists different educations and levels of qualifications for the staff. Core practitioners, those responsible for the group or the centre for children over 3 years, have in general a high level of education. Most leaders or group leaders have a bachelor’s degree. The rest of the staff have a lower level of education or no formal education. Education of staff in many countries is based on school-oriented thinking, where educated professionals are important for learning, while care and formation are missing. Most education only qualifies practitioners for work in centres for children over 3 years. The exception is the five Nordic countries, the Baltic states and Slovenia where the education also qualifies practitioners for work with children under 3 years. The Nordic countries and Slovenia are all countries with holistic thinking and understanding of the early childhood field, which is also reflected in the education of staff. In countries with a split system there are specific educational programmes for staff working with the under 3s and these are often characterized by a focus on care, health (hygiene) and nursing (changing nappies etc.). Future workers are often educated at vocational non-secondary level. Only in the Nordic countries, Slovenia and Spain is there a requirement that some of the staff

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are educated at bachelor’s degree level. Oberhuemer, Schreyer and Neuman (2010) write that an upgrading of the education for the youngest children is happening in Europe at the moment. Only a few countries do not demand that at least some staff have a bachelor’s level qualification either for working in services for the under 3s or the over 3s. Some countries have, by contrast, moved to an even higher level requiring a masters’ degree for some of the staff in ECEC services (ibid., p. 486). So far I have focused discussion on the core practitioners but co-helpers or assistants also work in ECEC. Some have formal qualifications, often vocational; others do not, as is the case for the Danish pedagogue cohelpers; only a few of them take a pedagogical assistant education, which is a vocational non-secondary education.

Staff Education in Denmark Pedagogues are the core practitioners in Danish early childhood centres with a bachelor’s degree (for further reading see Jensen, 2016). Pedagogues account for almost 60% of all staff in centres and the rest are pedagogue co-helpers. In an international comparison, the percentage of staff at bachelor’s level is very high, especially for work with children under 3 years. What is specific to Denmark is that it is the same training for working with the whole age range, from 0 to 6 years. In other countries more professions can be represented in the centres. Another specific feature is that pedagogues are also the leaders of the centres, most of them with some further education, for example with an additional diploma or master’s degree. Moreover, a relatively flat leadership structure is found in the centres, although this has begun to change recently because of the political system’s demand for documentation and assessment as well as new types of leadership.

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The Danish pedagogue education dates back more than 130 years to 1885, and was originally connected to the staff in the Fröbel kindergartens. This long tradition has built a special professional identity, which characterizes the pedagogic work in ECEC and other services. In 1992, three separate and specialized training programmes were merged into a more generalist one. The three were kindergarten, leisure time and social pedagogy educations, which were combined into a single three-and-a-half-year course of full-time study, which in 2001 was designated as being at bachelor’s degree level. In 2014 a new reform led to greater specialization: a common part of basic professional competencies (70 ECTS points) and a specialization part (140 ECTS points). ECTS stands for European Credit Transfer System and 60 points are gained for one year of fulltime study. Currently, the specialization areas are: 1 Early childhood pedagogy, aimed at pedagogic work with children between 0 and 6 years. 2 School and leisure time pedagogy, aimed at pedagogic work with school children and young people aged between 6 and 18 years. 3 Social and special pedagogy, aimed at pedagogic work with children and young people with special needs and adults with physical and mental disabilities or social problems (Bekendtgørelse, 2014).

As this indicates, the whole early childhood age range, from 0 to 6 years, forms one specialization. The generic competencies for all three areas are linked to the Danish welfare state institutions, and not only to early childhood services. Pedagogues also work together

with teachers in schools, especially in the first four grades and are the core staff in out-ofschool facilities and clubs. They work, too, in special needs provision for children, young people and adults, including residential services and day facilities for adults with severe disabilities and other services for adults (e.g. drug users, mentally disabled). They also do educational administration, consultancy work, training, etc., and are to be found working as family daycare supervisors.

Recruitment and male workers Pedagogue education is the most popular study programme in Denmark with 7,200 applicants in 2016, far ahead of applicants to study as schoolteachers, nurses or social workers. The education is the largest in Denmark with 5,300 enrolled in 2016 (the total population of Denmark is 5.6 million). The pedagogue education has been able to attract a relatively large number of male students, currently 22% of the total intake. But as seen in Table 4.1, relatively few male pedagogues work in early childhood centres; they prefer to work in other parts of the pedagogic field, with older age groups. Recruiting male pedagogues to ECEC centres has been on the agenda for many years and different strategies have been tried, but it has proved very difficult to shift the genderbiased early childhood field with its large majority of female staff. Currently, the 2014 pedagogue education reform has made gender a curricular issue, so all students must learn about gender issues. Another recent

Table 4.1 Male staff and male pedagogues as a percentage of all staff in different types of centres, 2013 Vuggestuer (infant/toddler centres, 0 to 3 years) Børnehaver (kindergartens, 3 to 6 years) Aldersintegrerede institutioner (age-integrated centres, 0 to 6 years) Source: * Danmarks Statistik, 2014; ** BUPL, 2014a, p. 17

Male staff*

Male pedagogues**

 9% 13% 13%

2.3% 6.3% 6.9%

A Danish perspective on issues in ECEC policy

example is that of five municipalities which, in different ways, have been engaged in attracting and retaining male pedagogues in their early childhood centres. The experiences are gathered in a handbook intended to inspire other municipalities: Diversity and Men: Inspiration for working with diversity and gender equality in ECEC centres (Wohlgemuth & Hviid, 2016). The five projects and the handbook were commissioned and funded by the former Ministry of Children, Education and Gender Equality. In autumn 2016, the Ministry launched a campaign for recruiting more male pedagogues into early childhood centres.

The Danish early childhood tradition and practice Pedagogues’ Understanding of Danish Pedagogic Practice In this section I turn briefly to some of the findings from the qualitative part of my research project (Jensen, 2011, 2015a). The background for the research was to find out Danish pedagogues’ understandings of core values in their daily work through the lens of looking at films of practice from other countries. The films were made in the European research project, Care Work in Europe (Cameron & Moss, 2007), and the method was inspired by Tobin and colleagues’ work, Preschool in Three Cultures (Tobin, Wu, & Davidson, 1989). The aim of the research is not the three countries’ practice per se, but to use the film as interview questions for Danish pedagogues to find out their ideals and values of good practice. The aim was to make visible the special Danish contribution to the ECEC field, the pedagogic work and professional understanding viewed from an international perspective. Not only does the Danish welfare state organize and support early childhood services far more than in other types of welfare states, but the content of the

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services is also in many ways different from elsewhere. The Danish pedagogues found contrasts in the practices filmed in the three countries, which they discussed critically and through this explained their understandings of good practice. At the same time they expressed an important appreciation that pedagogical practice can take place in many different ways. Some of the findings are characterized in the descriptions of children in my report: the head-body, the china doll, the mud-child. These are three different views of children that the Danish pedagogues see when watching daily practice in England, Hungary and Denmark. In the English practice they see a child viewed by English workers as a learning child (the head-body: the focus is on the head, rather than on the body as a whole), and in the Hungarian practice as the fragile child (the china doll). As a contrast they have an ideal of the Danish early childhood child as an active co-participant, a free, active and natural child who can find expression most readily outdoors (the mud-child is a metaphor for this ideal). By using the term ‘institutional logic’, I suggest that an overall logic governs the pedagogical practice, and the three logics, represented by the films, I have chosen to name ‘pre-school logic’, ‘family and care logic’ and ‘public childhood logic’. These concepts are derived from my analysis of the general and overall understanding of the Danish pedagogues and the other Danish informants who viewed the films. The logic represents the rationality that generally underpins the daily practice of the centres shown in the two films from England and Hungary, and in the Danish practice. The three institutional logics, and the themes which depict the logics, are shown in Table 4.2 – although the brief descriptions typical of tabular work may hide the subtleties of a qualitative study. Looking at films of practice from another country can be a good starting point for discussing one’s own values and ideals of practice. A discussion booklet addressed to pedagogues and

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Table 4.2 Three early childhood institutional logics based on Danish pedagogues’ understandings The English film

The Hungarian film

Pre-school logic

Family and care logic

Public childhood logic

2-year-olds Infant and toddler carer

0 to 6-year-olds Pedagogue

Everyday life chores

Child-initiated play Adult-organized activities Everyday life chores Community and cosiness Resourcefulness

Themes

General institutional logic

The age of the children 2- to 4-year-olds Profession’s understanding of Nursery nurse ‘preschool practice: the staff’s profile teacher’ Everyday life Adult-organized activities

Everyday life chores: mealtimes

A proper meal and good table manners Meal as assimilation into family life Everyday life chores: going to The potty: servicing the Small toilets: support for the toilet child, making the child resourcefulness (the child babyish manages itself) Adult-organized activities Structured activities for the Play and activities are mixed whole group of children and happen in small during most of the day groups Children’s bodies – The head-body: the The nice-body: the quiet and respectable corporealities disciplined child body trained child body Adults’ bodies – respectable Doing the job with few The nice, caring grandmother corporealities feelings involved type or nurse A real missus Tempo/rhythm/atmosphere Many shifts Quietness Quiet and peaceful Regularity Order

Playground Outdoor life outside the centre

Physical environments indoors Interaction between children and adults Oral communication Child view Welfare approach

The Danish film

Servicing the children. The institutionalized meal

A small garden with no natural plants Not shown in the film

A nice, green suburban lawn

One big group room Through learning

One big group room divided into play areas Through adults and objects

Dictating Head-bodies Neoliberal approach

Instructing China dolls Eastern European approach

pedagogue students has been published from my research where some of the themes are presented, as well as discussion questions and a web link to the themes in the three films (Jensen, 2015b).

Not shown in the film

Small toilets: support for resourcefulness (the child manages itself) Play and activities are mixed and happen in small groups The free and natural child body The bodily participating and expressive pedagogue Lightness and joy Absorption Life and the sound of children Uproar and humour Disorder and chaos Wild including nature and nature material Shown twice in the film To see and be seen by the surrounding society is important More and smaller rooms Through appreciative relationships Dialogue Mud-children Nordic welfare approach

The three logics are reflected in different aims and objectives for early childhood centres and different professional understandings. These manifest themselves in different priorities in the daily life concerning adult

A Danish perspective on issues in ECEC policy

organized activities, everyday life chores and child-initiated play. Each logic puts forward its understanding of the respectable child and adult corporeality. Corporeality – a word from the French phenomenological tradition – combines corpus (body) and reality and represents how the body is situated in a given context always linked to a certain reality. Each logic sets a certain tempo, rhythm and atmosphere. The control system, the oral communication and the interaction between children and adults alter. How big an age span there is in the groups of children reflects different views of learning. The logics are further seen in the material and the physical environment both inside and outside. The societal contexts for the three logics are different welfare approaches that depict different understandings of the aims and objectives of early childhood centres. The neoliberal welfare approach prevails in England, built on a private childcare market (Penn, 2011). An eastern European welfare approach rules in Hungary with a divided system, with separate services for children under and over 3 years, and few places for children under 3 years. Classic Hungarian family values exist, supported by three years of maternity leave, reflecting how it is considered best for the child to be with its mother until it is over 3 years of age (Brayfield & Korintus, 2011; Korintus, 2008). The Nordic welfare approach is predominant in Denmark, with its coherent and universal ECEC system for the complete age range of young children.

The Danish Early Childhood Tradition In the ‘preschool’ tradition that dominates early childhood centres for children between 3 years and obligatory school age, there is a narrow learning approach; the focus is on the ‘becoming’ child. In the holistic pedagogy approach in the Nordic countries, including Denmark, the focus is the ‘being’ child, with

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the right to be in childhood here and now, to live, to play and to experiment. Child-initiated play is of great importance for children’s development, learning and formation. Good child–child relations are crucial, as well as an equal relationship between adults and children, including the adults’ (appreciative relationships). The Danish holistic organizational principle is more attuned to civic society or the home than traditional school organization. The centres have their roots in civic society and women’s struggle for early childhood services, as evidenced by the fact that many non-profit independent centres still exist. The physical layout reflects a homelike informal atmosphere, with sofas and several smaller rooms. Everyday life chores, such as sharing meals and going to the toilet, are seen as important pedagogic work. Children’s resourcefulness, for example dressing and undressing, eating, laying the table, and so on, is an important pedagogical goal. Children can be mixed across ages as in a family setting with siblings, becoming good friends and learning from each other, and not just from adults. Children develop in relationships with other children and adults. Children have free access to move around in the different groups and areas of the centre, at least in the smaller centres and at certain times of the day. The daily life is pedagogically organized where child-initiated play, adult-organized activities and everyday life chores are fluently intertwined. The pedagogues and other staff must relate to the unique child with empathy, they must show liveliness and humour, and create an atmosphere of joy. Outdoor life in the playground as well as outside the centre has high priority. In many ways one can see the tradition of Fröbel continuing in the Danish centres: children being self-active learners; play, outside and in, as a serious activity for children and their development; kindergartens – literally, gardens for children – giving experience with nature; creative and cultural activities in focus, which has always been a strong part

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of the pedagogue education (Jensen, 2016). When people from abroad visit Danish centres they point out the importance of play in its own right; the informal homelike atmosphere; an equal relationship between children and adults; the participation of pedagogues in meals, activities, the sandbox, etc.; children exercising influence (lived democracy); no fixed curriculum and much more.

The Danish Early Childhood Tradition under Pressure This Danish tradition seems under pressure from an increasing policy focus on performance and competition in a globalized economy; all workers must be able to compete in the global market. The competitive state is on the agenda everywhere and has made its way into early childhood centres. Even young children must learn more and be tested from an early age, so that Denmark can be at the forefront of the world. Children are talked of as ‘future capital’. ‘Programmes’ have invaded Danish early childhood centres. Centres are required to work with prescribed special methods from prefabricated programmes, built on the assumption that science can find a formula to suit all children. The belief is that with national and municipal aims, and detailed management, children will learn more quickly and efficiently and thus be prepared for school and future working life. The pedagogue must follow precise manuals and formal instructions. Children now supposedly learn from a pedagogy of instruction. This contrasts strongly with the Danish early childhood tradition. If the pedagogue follows these programmes she must put aside her professional experience, her knowledge of each unique child and her skills of listening to the children. The democratic tradition is excluded. Children’s play and what occupies them is interrupted and instead the adults are in control. The worry is that such methods will create children

without empathy, curiosity and fantasy and without the joy of life. One could argue that the Danish emphasis on play, fantasy and democracy in early childhood centres is a tradition that has been successful in helping to create a country that is one of the richest, most equal and happiest in the world (Helliwell, Layard and Sachs, 2016). A cultural battle is happening and not all programmes come pre-prepared, for example one called KIDS states on its cover page that it has been developed to be used in a Danish cultural context and together with Danish pedagogues. The starting point is research in pedagogic quality and developmental psychology’s knowledge of how young children learn and develop. Pedagogic quality is defined in KIDS as children’s chances of having a good childhood, seen as a life period in itself and not exclusively as a preparation for school and adult life, as well as children’s opportunities to develop the skills and competencies that it takes to succeed in modern society. (Ringsmose & Kragh-Møller, 2014, my translation)

Denmark is also experiencing reduced funding for all of its welfare institutions, not only ECEC. There are more demands on the welfare budget, and some major political parties prefer tax cuts for the wealthy. The public sector, some say, takes too much of people’s income and more money should stay in their pockets. This lack of resources is clearly seen in the early childhood centres. During recent years, and especially since 2004, more and more tasks are required of staff by national government learning plans and other policies followed by municipalities. Yet, paradoxically, the staff:child ratio has declined, as has the proportion of qualified pedagogues among staff, both key factors for quality in early childhood centres and essential if centres are to fulfill the new expectations placed on them. Many of the new tasks demand highly educated staff. One example is from Dagtilbudsloven from 2004, that states that one of the goals of early years services is to mitigate the social problems of children with a difficult family background.

A Danish perspective on issues in ECEC policy

The pedagogical learning plans, often accompanied by new organizational changes, require, among other things, much documentation; language assessments and stimulation are required; collaboration with parents has, as always, been a high priority; physical, mental and aesthetic environmental assessments must be made from children’s point of view (a requirement in the learning plans); and the issue of time set aside for listening to children must be addressed. All this requires both the time and high professionalism of staff. The staff:child ratio in early childhood centres has declined by 10% from 2009 to 2014. Regardless of the type of centre, children are organized into groups, which are for children from 0 to 3 years and from 3 to 6 years. The staff:child ratio is higher for groups of children from 0 to 3 years than for groups for 3 to 6 years. In 2009 there were 3.2 children (0 to 3 years) per full-time pedagogic staff member; in 2014 this had risen to 3.5 children. For children aged 3 to 6 years there were 6.2 children in 2009 per full-time pedagogic staff member, rising to 6.8 children in 2014 (pedagogic staff member here means all staff working with children). BUPL calculated that, had the ratio remained constant from 2009 to 2014, 4,400 extra staff would be needed: 1,600 for 0 to 2-year-olds, 2,800 staff for 3- to 6-year-olds (BUPL, 2014b). Dalsgaard, Jordan and Petersen (2016) calculated the staff:child ratio in the 98 municipalities in 2014. This shows huge differences: one municipality with one of the highest ratios has 3 children (0 to 3 years) per staff member and 5.2 children (3 to 6 years) per staff member; while another municipality with among the lowest ratios has 5.4 children and 9.4 children per staff member respectively. Another example is new research (built on questionnaires to a representative sample) on the daily life in early childhood centres. Nearly 30% of almost 800 leaders report that three adults are only present at the same time for between 3 and 3½ hours per day in a group of ten children from 0 to 3 years, or a

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group of 20 children from 3 to 6 years. Staff are also alone with children at certain times of the day. Many are worried as they do not have time for something so basic as consoling children who are upset (FOA & Bureau 2000, 2015). The same report states that the leaders estimate that since 2011 the centres have on average lost 6.6 staff hours per week (with no change in the number of children); leadership and administrative tasks have increased by 4.5 hours per centre; and documentation tasks have increased by 1.5 hours per staff member. A centre with 10 staff has in this way lost around 26 hours per week from being together with the children (ibid.). The declining staff:child ratio has raised a discussion about national minimum standards. BUPL works for at the most 2.5 children per staff member for 0 to 3-year-olds and 6 children per staff member for 3- to 6-year-olds. Some political parties have also suggested national minimum standards. With the staff:child ratios continuing to decline, a national minimum standard seems a good solution. One effect of the economic constraints is that larger early childhood centres are built or small centres are closed or joined together, especially in bigger cities. Kragh-Møller and Ringsmose (2015) researched the implications of centre size for pedagogical quality. In this study, larger centres had over 100 children and the smaller ones fewer than 50 children enrolled; in the past, a more typical centre size was 60 to 80 children per centre. The main conclusion is that there are a range of challenges in larger centres for developing quality. There are challenges for relationships, the physical framework and children’s opportunities for learning and development through play and activities: three issues with a direct connection to children’s development and learning. Therefore, the study concludes that large early childhood centres with more than 100 children cannot be recommended. What do children themselves say? In the Kragh-Møller and Ringsmose study (2015), 60 children were interviewed and they said

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that they liked to attend their centres; here they have friends and time to play. They want kind staff who do funny things and do not scold! This corresponds very well to earlier research, for example Langsted (1994). Strikingly, children saw advantages in the smaller centres, where, among other things, they found it easier to get somebody to play with, and to get more help from staff to resolve conflicts. The other paradox is that the proportion of qualified pedagogues over a period of 10 years from 2004 to 2014 has declined in centres for children aged 3 to 6 years from 65% to 59%, and in age-integrated centres for children aged 0 to 6 years from 61% to 58%. The proportion of pedagogues in centres for children from 0 to 3 years has been stable at 55%. Research shows that highly qualified staff are of utmost importance for the quality in early childhood centres (BUPL, 2016). Another field of economic restraint is at the university colleges where pedagogues are educated. They too experience reductions, so, during the first semester, pedagogue students have, at the time of writing, on average only 10 hours of lessons per week, and this reduces further later on in their studies (Uddannelses- og forskningsministeriet, 2016). The pedagogue education is one of the professional bachelor’s programmes that receives the least money per student from central government; for example, the nursing study programme receives twice as much per student from central government.

underpinning ECEC for all children, and, as a public task, linked to gender equality and mothers’ employment. The practice is childcentred, believing that the best way to develop and learn is through the child’s right to play and experiment. Children shall be able to live their childhood here and now, but combined with a broad approach to learning orientated towards their future (school) life. Where is Denmark going? The welfare state still exists at a high level, with a continuing public commitment to universal access to services and funding, a high level of professionalism and an underlining of the child perspective, but this may be eroded by a lack of resources and programmes with prescribed manuals. A cultural battle is taking place in Denmark. Shall we see young children as the competitive state’s youngest soldiers or will we preserve the unique Danish pedagogic tradition? But a longstanding child-centered ECEC tradition with a strong professionalization is hopefully hard to overcome, and it is important in a globalized world to celebrate cultural diversity in the field of ECEC.

Note  1  Oberhuemer and Schreyer are working on a revision of their book (Oberhuemer et al., 2010) on professionalism in ECEC systems in the EU to be web-published in 2017. See project homepage: http://www.ifp.bayern.de/projekte/monitoring/ seepro-r_english.php

References Conclusion The long standing Danish tradition is to take a holistic approach to the whole ECEC field, from 0 to 6 years, integrating care and education; this is reflected in the fact that ECEC are based in the same ministry, are covered by the same Act and have the same pedagogical philosophy and professional staff. The Danish approach is linked to the Nordic welfare state

Bekendtgørelse om uddannelsen til professionsbachelor som pædagog. (2014). Bek. nr. 211 af 06/03/2014. København: Uddannelses- og forskningsministeriet. Bennett. J. (2003). Starting strong: The persistent division between care and education. Journal of Early Childhood Research, 1(1), 21–48. Borchorst, A. (2002). Danish child care policy: Continuity rather than radical change. In S. Michel & R. Mahon (Eds.), Child care policy

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at the crossroads: Gender and welfare state restructuring (pp. 267–285). New York: Routledge. Brayfield, A., & Korintus, M. (2011). Early childhood socialization: Societal context and childrearing values in Hungary. Journal of Early Childhood Research, 9(3), 262–279. BUPL. (2006). The work of the pedagogue: Roles and tasks. Retrieved from http://www. bupl.dk/iwfile/BALG-7X4GBX/$file/The%20 work%20of%20the%20pedagogue.pdf BUPL. (2014a). Percentages of members of BUPL. Børn & Unge. Forskning, September (24), 17. Retrieved from http://www.bupl.dk/ iwfile/BALG-9PFCZA/$file/BogU_forskning_24_2014_WEB.pdf BUPL. (2014b). Faktaark: Normeringer i 0–5 års daginstitutioner. Retrieved from http://www. bupl.dk/iwfile/BALG-9X7DV3/$file/FaktaarkNormeringer%202014.pdf BUPL. (2016). Pressemeddelelse: Flere pædagogiske krav og færre uddannede pædagoger (13 June). Retrieved from http:// www.bupl.dk/presse/pressemeddelelser/ f l e re _ p a e d a g o g i s k e _ k r a v _ o g _ f a e r re _ uddannede_paedagoger?opendocument Cameron, C., & Moss, P. (2007). Care work in Europe: Current understandings and future direction. London: Routledge. Dagtilbudsloven. (2016). LBK nr. 748 af 20/06/2016. København: Ministeriet for børn, undervisning og ligestilling. Dalsgaard, C. T., Jordan, A. L. T., & Petersen, J. S. (2016). Dagtilbudsområdet – kortlægning af kommunernes personaleforbrug og strukturelle vilkår. København: KORA. Also online: retrieved from http://www.kora.dk/ media/5431511/11123_dagtilbudsomraadet-kortlaegning-af-kommunernes-personaleforbrug-og-strukturelle-vilkaar.pdf Danmarks Statistik. (2014). Børnepasning mv. efteråret 2013. Statistiske Efterretninger 2014:2. København: Danmarks Statistik. Education International. (2009). Early childhood education in Europe: Achievements, challenges and possibilities. Report by Mathias Urban. Brussels: Education International. Education International. (2010). Early childhood education: A global scenario. Brussels: Education International. FOA & Bureau 2000. (2015). Daginstitutionernes hverdag 2015. Retrieved from http://

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pressemeddelelse.info/e10/parker/ pm/4a0f11b728c9ecda/mc87370/download/ d142a7_Daginstitutionernes_hverdag_2015.pdf Helliwell, J., Layard, R., & Sachs, J. (Eds.). (2016). World Happiness Report 2016. Retrieved from http://worldhappiness.report/ wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/03/HR-V1_ web.pdf Jensen, J. J. (2011). Understandings of Danish pedagogical practice. In C. Cameron & P. Moss (Eds.), Social pedagogy and working with children and young people: Where care and education meet (pp. 141–157). London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Jensen, J. J. (2015a). Hovedkroppe, porcelænsdukker og mudderbørn. Pædagogers forståelse af dansk daginstitutionspraksis. BUPL. Retrieved from http://www.bupl.dk/iwfile/ BALG-9RHFJ4/$file/Jytte_Juuls_rapport.pdf Jensen, J. J. (2015b). Hovedkroppe, porcelænsdukker og mudderbørn. En diskussion af pædagogers forståelse af dansk daginstitutionspraksis. BUPL. Retrieved from http:// www.bupl.dk/iwfile/BALG-9RQD36/$file/JytteJuul_Hovedkroppe_dukker_mudder_4korr.pdf Jensen, J. J. (2016). The Danish pedagogue education. In M. Vandenbroeck, M. Urban, & P. Peeters (Eds.), Pathways to professionalism in early childhood education and care (pp. 15–28). London: Routledge. Korintus, M. (2008). Early childhood education and care in Hungary: Challenges and recent developments. International Journal of Child Care and Education Policy, 2, 43–52. Kragh-Møller, G., & Ringsmose, C. (2015). Pædagogisk kvalitet i store og små institutioner. Aarhus, Denmark: Institut for Uddannelse og Pædagogik (DPU), Aarhus Universitet. Langsted, O. (1994). Looking at quality from the child’s perspective. In P. Moss & A. Pence (Eds.), Valuing quality in early childhood services (pp. 28–42). Gateshead: Paul Chapman Publishing. Moss, P. (2015) International Review of Leave Policies and Research 2015. Available at: http:// www.leavenetwork.org/lp_and_r_reports Oberhuemer, P., Schreyer, I., & Neuman, M. J. (2010). Professionals in early childhood education and care systems: European profiles and perspectives. Leverkusen Opladen, Germany: Verlag Barbara Budrich.

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OECD (2001). Starting Strong: Early childhood education and care. Paris: OECD Directorate for Education. OECD (2006). Starting Strong II: Early childhood education and care. Paris: OECD Directorate for Education. Penn, H. (2011). Gambling on the market: The role of for-profit provision in early childhood education and care. Journal of Early Childhood Research, 9(2), 150–161. Plantenga, J., & Remery, C. (2009). The provision of childcare services: A comparative review of 30 European countries. Brussels: European Commission’s Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities. G1 Unit. Ringsmose, C., & Kragh-Møller, G. (2014). KIDS: Kvalitetsudvikling i daginstitutioner. København: Dansk Psykologisk Forlag. Tobin, J. J., Wu, D. Y. H., & Davidson, D. H. (1989). Preschool in three cultures: Japan,

China, and the United States. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Uddannelses- og forskningsministeriet. (2016). Omfanget af planlagt undervisning og vejledning på de videregående uddannelser. Notat. Retrieved from http://ufm.dk/aktuelt/ pressemeddelelser/2016/filer/omfangetaf-planlagt-undervisning-og-vejledningpa-de-videregaende-uddannelser.pdf UNICEF. (2008). The child care transition: A league table of early childhood education and care in economically advanced countries. Innocenti Report Card 8. Firenze: UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre. Wohlgemuth, U. G., & Hviid, M. K. (2016). Mangfoldighed og mænd. Inspiration til arbejdet med mangfoldighed og ligestilling i dagtilbud. Esbjerg: University College Syddanmark. Retrieved from https://www.ucsyd.dk/ fileadmin/user_upload/160613_Mangfoldigheds_og_m%C3%A6nd_final.pdf

5 The Relationship between Early Childhood and Primary Education in France and Sweden: A Policy Focus Yo s h i e K a g a

Introduction Interest in the relationship between early childhood and primary education has intensified in recent years. With almost all children in Western Europe attending early childhood education and care (ECEC) programmes by the age of 4, there is increasing concern for primary education to be better linked with the preceding stage in the interest of improved educational transitions and outcomes. Thanks to the growing body of research linking ECEC to benefits in later school achievement, and to employment, economic development, gender and social equity, ECEC is now firmly on the policy agenda of national governments in Europe as well as international organisations, side by side with primary education. This chapter presents a comparative study of policy related to the relationship between ECEC and primary education in France and Sweden, with a focus on the period between 1989 and 2014. Using globalisation and the social construction of the child as key

framing concepts, the chapter compares policy changes over time, and the views and experiences of key stakeholders in ECEC and schooling regarding the relationship in both countries. The chapter shows that both countries have developed a strong relationship, but with different conceptualisations of how early childhood and primary education should relate to each other; with contrasting degrees of specificity in their ECEC provision vis-à-vis primary education; and with distinct auspices for early childhood services. It points out that while the two countries converge in the tendency of strengthening the educational identity of ECEC, they diverge in the degree to which ECEC is considered to have a distinct pedagogical identity vis-à-vis primary education.

The Issue Participation in ECEC services has grown significantly. More than a decade ago, most

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children in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries attended ECEC services for at least two years before primary school entry (OECD, 2001). In 2012, on average, 84% of 4-year-olds in OECD countries within the European Union participated in ECEC; and more than 90% of 3-years-olds in Belgium, France, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Spain and Sweden were enrolled in ECEC services (OECD, 2014). With a great majority of children now participating in ECEC, designing and supporting children’s positive transition from ECEC to primary education is an important issue for professionals and policymakers in both sectors. Moreover, its importance is accentuated by the growing body of research – disseminated actively by international organisations – demonstrating the positive effects of participation in quality ECEC on educational achievement, equity and system efficiency (European Commission, 2011; Eurydice, 2009; Hart & Risley, 1995; Heckman & Masterov, 2004; UNESCO, 2010), and by growing adherence to the discourse on lifelong learning starting from birth (European Commission, 2011). The issue itself is not new: the link between ECEC and primary education has been the subject of research, programme and policy initiatives for some decades (Kagan, 2013). But the attention to the issue has been rather sporadic (Kagan, 2013). Also, the issue is considered predominantly an ‘operational challenge’ needing a ‘smoothing out of difficulties’ (Bennett, 2013, p. 60), and generally limited as a concern to a couple of years around primary school entry. Thus, it has lacked a broader perspective that involves a questioning of the purposes, content and methods of the ECEC and primary education sectors and of how these relate to one another. For example, should ECEC provide school learning through environments and pedagogies similar to those used in primary school? Or, should primary school be aligned with ECEC to provide for children’s allround development and well-being?

The Study Design The chapter mainly draws from the comparative study on the relationship between ECEC and primary education in France and Sweden (Kaga, 2016). The study has used a conceptual framework that has drawn concepts mainly from two fields of literature – globalisation and the social construction of the child – to inform the analyses of policy changes as well as views and experiences of key stakeholders in ECEC and schooling regarding the relationship in both countries. The study employed a case study method involving policy and interview analyses. The policy analysis involved a review of more than 70 policy documents from France and Sweden that aimed at understanding and comparing the evolution of policy regarding the relationship, particularly between 1989 and summer 2014. The decision to analyse this specific period was based on the fact that both countries experienced policy developments that have had a particularly important impact on the relationship: in France, the year 1989 marked the introduction of Cycles d’apprentissage (learning cycles) which grouped the preschool and primary school years in successive learning cycles; and in Sweden, the movement toward integrating the administrative responsibility for ECEC within the education sector began in the late 1980s. The empirical analysis consisted of conducting semi-structured interviews with a comparable range of stakeholders from the two countries in order to understand and compare their views and experiences concerning the relationship. A total of 51 stakeholders – teacher, principal, inspector, teacher educator, policymaker, trade union representative, school psychologist and professional association representative – from France and Sweden were interviewed in 2012 and 2014. Of these, 24 were from France and 27 from Sweden. More than half of the interviewees had more than 30 years of working experience in the field of education, and therefore had professionally

The relationship between EC/primary education in France and Sweden

lived through the policy changes since 1989. The interview questions included: How would you describe the current relationship between ECEC and primary school? Has the relationship changed during your time in the education field – if so, in what ways, when, why and with what consequences? What are your views about these changes as well as the current relationship? To inform the policy and empirical analyses, the study used a conceptual framework that had drawn key concepts mainly from two fields of literature – globalisation and sociology of childhood – due to their potential to explain the cross-national similarities and differences in terms of the evolution of the relationship. With the globe emerging as a single space where particular education discourses are disseminated, globalisation could produce common forces that operate on countries, including France and Sweden. Globalisation potentially contributes to a reconceptualisation of ECEC and school, based on concepts it promotes, such as knowledge society, human capital formation, lifelong learning in its contemporary definition, and economic efficiency. This justifies the idea of ECEC as an instrument for school preparation and for the future workforce and economy, thereby pushing countries to adopt a school-readiness relationship. The conceptualisation of the child as a social construction – which reflects the social, economic, political and cultural circumstances at a given historical time and place – is key to the discipline of the sociology of childhood (Qvortrup, Corsaro & Honig, 2011). Applying the social construction of the child to the analysis of the relationship between early childhood and primary education could help explain the differences between France and Sweden with regard to their policy and the perspectives of stakeholders regarding the relationship. Recognising the image of the child as a result of the particular social, cultural and economic circumstances, traditions, routines and identities in which it is found, it could be expected that France and Sweden

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uphold different images of the child for ECE and primary education, influencing the two sectors and their relationship.

The early childhood and primary education contexts in France and Sweden Both France and Sweden have a long ­tradition – since the nineteenth century – of providing early childhood and primary education services. In France, the first salle d’asile, which is the precursor of the école maternelle (or preschool), was established in 1828; and the first crèche was set up in 1844. The salle d’asile was renamed école maternelle in 1848, and was integrated into the national education system in 1868.1 Primary education for children aged 6 to 13 years was free and compulsory as of 1882 (Eurydice, 2009/2010). In Sweden, the first crèche and kindergarten (barnträdgårde) were established in 1854 and in the 1890s respectively (Martin Korpi, 2007). Primary school ( folkskola) was introduced in 1842; and a decision was taken in 1895 to make three-year primary schooling the basis for further schooling, i.e. lower secondary education (Eurydice, 2009/2010). There are high rates of public provision of ECEC in both France and Sweden, particularly for the 3- to 6-year age group. However, France and Sweden display a number of differences in the way they govern ECEC. The statutory age for compulsory education is age 6 and 7 in France and Sweden respectively. France has a split system: the ministerial responsibility is divided between social welfare, which oversees care services for younger children aged 0 to 3 years, while education oversees early education services – called école maternelle – for older children aged 2/3 to 6 years2 as part of the public education system since the late nineteenth century. Sweden, by contrast, had an integrated system under social welfare

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for about five decades until the responsibility for early childhood services was transferred to education in 1996. The main form of ECEC provision in Sweden is preschool ( förskola), catering for ages 1 to 5 years, and preschool class ( förskoleklass) for 6-yearolds, provided on school premises. French école maternelle and élémentaire teachers are educated at master’s level through a unified initial teacher education programme, and therefore become qualified to work with children of ages 2/3 to 11 years. In Sweden, qualification and initial teacher education for preschool, preschool class and compulsory teachers are separate: to obtain a degree in preschool education takes three-and-a-half years of full-time study, while it takes four years of full-time study to complete the degree for teaching at the compulsory school level, with a specialisation in preschool class and grades 1–3. Prior to the 1970s, the issue of how ECEC and school should relate to each other was not of major policy concern in either country, mainly due to limited participation in ECEC. The French école maternelle was largely an ‘imitation’ of the école élémentaire. In Sweden, ECEC was defined as the cornerstone of the welfare state, catering holistically to children’s as well as parents’ needs. From the 1970s onwards, attention to the relationship between preschool and primary school education at the policy level emerged and increased. France ‘discovered’ the école maternelle as a strategy for combatting educational inequality and school failure in the 1980s, which increasingly accentuated the preparation-for-school function of the école maternelle. In Sweden, many projects on linking preschool and school were undertaken in the 1970s and 1980s; and the first ‘pedagogical programme’ for preschool was issued in 1987 by the ministry of social affairs, which brought preschool closer to primary school. As noted later in this chapter, a preschool curriculum document was not published till 1998 (Lenz Taguchi and Munkammar, 2003, p. 11).

A contrasting policy evolution in France and Sweden The analysis of policy documents between the period of the late 1980s and summer 2014 indicated a contrasting evolution in France and Sweden regarding the relationship between early childhood and primary education (Kaga, 2016). In France, the main policy since 1989 was the promotion of continuity of learning enabled by a schoolified école maternelle that prepared children for the école élémentaire; this peaked in 2008 but began to slow down afterwards. In 2013, the policy changed to that of halting schoolification and redefining the école maternelle as a sector independent from the école élémentaire. In Sweden, the policy has always been based on the definition of preschool as a unique form of school that applied holistic pedagogy. The government vision of integrating preschool in 1996 within education was that preschool would spearhead its approaches upwards into compulsory school. The policy evolution since 1996 simultaneously embodied bringing preschool closer to school (e.g. strengthening the pedagogical task of preschool, clarifying subject-related goals in the preschool curriculum in 2010) and reinforcing preschool as a specialised field (e.g. separating the preschool teacher degree from the school teacher degree in 2011). The following sections provide a comparative analysis of differences in the evolution of policy regarding the relationship between early childhood and primary education in France and Sweden, focused on four key dimensions – namely: governance, legislation, curricula and workforce.

Governance Central to understanding the relationship between early childhood and primary education is governance. In France the evolution of this relationship was embedded in the split early childhood education and care system,

The relationship between EC/primary education in France and Sweden

which originated in the nineteenth century, while in Sweden the evolution was embedded in the integrated system for children aged 1 to 6 years that was part of the social welfare sector until its transfer to the Ministry of Education in 1996. The divided arrangement in France resulted in the école maternelle – sharply distinguished from the under-3 services centred on care – becoming an integral part of the school system, and destined to align itself organisationally, programmatically and pedagogically with the subsequent stage of schooling, i.e. the école élémentaire. It could be said that the possibility of forging a ‘strong and equal partnership’ (OECD, 2006) between early childhood and primary education has been diminished, and even precluded, by virtue of the split early childhood system in France. In Sweden, the fact that ECEC was part of social policy between 1945 and 1996, and that the full-day daycare and half-day kindergarten services were brought together as an age-integrated provision called ‘preschool’ in 1975, gave rise to the preschool as a specific and coherent field, distinct from compulsory school and other educational institutions. Underlying the intention of the 1996 reform was Sweden’s aspiration to become a knowledge nation (kunskapsnation) through achieving lifelong learning starting from preschool. The government vision of integration was that of preschoolification – to be implemented through the curricula for preschool and school and preschool class – which was expressed in the words of then prime minister Göran Persson: ‘preschool should influence at least the early years of compulsory schooling’ (Martin Korpi, 2005).

Legislation From the legal perspective, there is a distinct pattern of evolution between the two countries in terms of the relationship between early childhood and primary education. In France, through a successive series of education laws,

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a relationship of schoolification, or primarisation, accelerated from 1989, with a trend in the opposite direction (moving away from a highly academic approach to a more holistic one that emphasised the child’s well-being and pleasure to learn in the école maternelle) from 2013 onwards. In Sweden, the legal changes since the 1990s have brought preschool closer to compulsory school, notably through the introduction of preschool class in 1998, entitlement measures in the 2000s and the adoption of the new Education Act in 2010.

France The 1989 loi d’orientation sur l’éducation reinforced the preparatory character of the école maternelle (Bouysse, 2007, p. 4), defining its objective as ‘to allow young children to develop the practice of language and the flourishing of their personality’, and emphasising its benefit for the later success of children. The 2005 loi d’orientation et de programme pour l’avenir de l’école further strengthened the notion of the école maternelle as preparation for school, describing it as ‘a first approach to the tools of basic knowledge, prepar[ing] children for the core education given by elementary school and teach[ing] them the principles of life in society’ (Eurydice, 2009/2010, p. 51). The most significant measure introduced by the 1989 law was the Cycles d’apprentissage, which grouped the years of schooling from the école maternelle to élémentaire into the following three pedagogical cycles, with the aim of promoting educational continuity between the two levels: • Cycle 1: Cycle des apprentissages premiers (first learning cycle), comprising the first, second and last year of the école maternelle (ages 2/3, 4, 5) • Cycle 2: Cycle des apprentissages fondamentaux (fundamental learning cycle), comprising the last year of the école maternelle and the first two years of the école élémentaire (ages 5, 6, 7) • Cycle 3: Cycle de consolidation (consolidation cycle), comprising the third, fourth and last year of the école élémentaire (ages 8, 9, 10)

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The last year of the école maternelle, or the grande section, was placed in both Cycle 1 and Cycle 2 with the intention of improving the links between the two different écoles. It was also to allow each child the time to learn at her or his own pace, since the learning objectives set for each cycle were to be attained in the course of three years. Importantly, working by Cycles would mean that the pedagogy of the école maternelle was to influence the teaching in the entire Cycle 2 and therefore of the first and second year of the école élémentaire. However, as described later in the chapter, the intentions of the Cycles were not realised and instead created the opposite effect of schoolifying the practices in the école maternelle, particularly in the grande section. Subsequently, the 2013 loi d’orientation et de programmation pour la refondation de l’École de la République was conceived to give new directions in the relationship. This reform followed after several years of critical assessment of the école maternelle – including the publication of the government report for the minister of education in 2011 (IGEN and IGAENR, 2011) – on the grounds that it was subjecting children to excessive academic demands and not promoting children’s well-being sufficiently. Thus, the 2013 law provided a definition of the mission of the école maternelle that included guidelines such as ‘favour the awakening of children’s personality’, ‘stimulate their sensorial, motor, cognitive and social development’, and ‘develop in each child the desire and pleasure to learn’. It also re-defined the Cycles so that the école maternelle was given an independent, full-cycle status.

Sweden The age of starting compulsory school was a recurrent political issue debated in the 1980s and 1990s in Sweden as well as in other Nordic countries (Martin Korpi, 2007, p. 49), where the age of school entry was 7 years – unlike France and a number of other European countries (the UK being the

obvious exception where children start at age 5), where children enter school at age 6. In 1998, Sweden legislated the introduction of preschool class (förskoleklass), a voluntary form of school attendance for 6-yearolds. The preschool class was conceived as a bridge between the two distinct cultures of preschool and compulsory school, with the intention that it would use the pedagogical approaches of both sectors while keeping the child’s holistic development as its overall aim (Kaga, 2007). Thus, this policy placed 6-year-olds in school without making it compulsory, while opening up possibilities for preschool pedagogy to enter and permeate the early years of compulsory school. The entitlement-related measures in the early 2000s not only enabled the preschool sector in Sweden to become widely accessible and affordable, but it also gave it greater recognition (Martin Korpi, 2007, p. 70). Universal entitlement to a place in preschool for children over the age of 12 months was legislated in 1995. In 2001, children of unemployed parents received the right to a place in preschool for three hours per day; a right that was extended in 2002 to children whose parents were at home taking care of another child. Also in 2002, the introduction of a maximum fee made preschool properly affordable; and in 2003, universal free preschool for 4- and 5-year-olds was legislated. Consequently, the preschool enrolment rate for children ages 1 to 6 increased from 68% in 2004 to 77% in 2005; for children aged 4 to 6 years, the participation rate was 95% (Martin Korpi, 2007). It can be said that these entitlement measures contributed to bringing a more equal relationship between ECEC and the school sector by increasing government investment in preschool education to make preschools affordable for all families. The measures also worked to elevate the policy status of the preschool sector within the education sector. Another significant legal change that impacted the relationship between preschool

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and school in Sweden was the adoption of the new Education Act (Bill 2009/10, p. 165) in 2010 which entered into force in July 2011. The change formally made preschool part of the school system, ‘with the aim of consolidating its status as the first step of the education system and of enhancing its quality and equivalence’ (Ministry of Education and Research, 2011, p. 1). Preschool officially became a distinct form of school, sharing common overall goals and the concepts of ‘teaching’ and ‘education’ with other forms of school, and being subject to new provisions for systematic work on quality as well as joint supervision to be undertaken by municipalities and the School Inspectorate. The new Act retains the holistic view and approach to the child and the important place of parents as the aim of preschool, but it also explicitly refers to preschool as preparing for continued education and laying the foundation of lifelong learning.

Curricula From the perspective of curricular changes, between 1989 and summer 2014, the relationship between early childhood and primary education in France and Sweden became closer but showed a different evolution. In France, there was a moving back and forth from a schoolified approach to a more balanced approach whereby the école maternelle asserted its specificity, while reinforcing and confirming its school identity and gradually establishing and consolidating language learning as the priority curricular domain. In Sweden, the curricular changes in 1988 and 2010 brought the preschool and compulsory education closer to each other, while safeguarding the pedagogical specificity of the preschool. However, in 2011, the compulsory school distinguished itself from the preschool by establishing a new curriculum that introduced centrally prescribed teaching content, which the preschool did not have.

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France Since 1989, the école maternelle has seen three curricula adopted – the 1995, 2002 and 2008 Programmes – and one proposed curriculum – the 2014 Projet de Programme.3 With the 1995 curriculum, the école maternelle acquired its first ‘curriculum’, or Programme, like the école élémentaire; prior to this it had only had orientations pédagogiques (pedagogical guidelines). Also, from 1995 onwards, the curriculum was no longer organised by domains of child development, but by domains of activities that reflected competences to be acquired at the end of each cycle and that constituted the reference for evaluation (IGEN and IGAENR, 2011, p. 59). The role of the école maternelle as a preparation for school was given increasing importance in the successive curricula, as shown in the prioritisation of language learning. In the 2008 curriculum, language learning became the most important focus, being given priority over other goals. In the mission statement, the first thing mentioned is that: ‘the purpose of the école maternelle is to assist each child, using approaches adapted to her/him, to become autonomous and to gain appropriate knowledge and competences so as to be successful in undertaking fundamental learning in the cours preparatoire (the first year of the école élémentaire)’ (IGEN and IGAENR, 2011, p. 58). The 2008 curriculum distinguishes itself from the preceding curricula by its brevity; and focuses on the content of learning to be gained by students and competences to be mastered at the end of the grande section (last year of the école maternelle). This suggests that the educational value of the école maternelle is essentially seen to reside in the final year of preschooling (IGEN and IGAENR, 2011, p. 59). However, the instrumental school preparation function of the école maternelle has receded in the 2014 proposed curriculum, which stated: ‘école maternelle is a caring school (une école bienveillante). Its principal mission is to nurture children’s desire to go to school to learn, grow and affirm themselves

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as unique subjects’ (http://cache.media. education.gouv.fr/file/Organismes/32/4/ CSP-_Projet_de_programme-recommandations_337324.pdf; p. 4, my translation). It is also intended to support pedagogical approaches that promote a harmonious development in an environment that is secure and rich in exploration. The emphasis on preparation for school in the grande section evident in the 2008 curriculum is corrected: it projects a conception of linkage between the maternelle and élémentaire based on the new Cycles through which children’s learning in the second cycle is to be informed by their experience throughout the first cycle, i.e. in the entire three years of the école maternelle (Project de Programme, p. 6). The different curricula featured children’s social development distinctly. In terms of ranking, this curricular domain was the first mentioned in the 1995 curriculum, while it went down to second in the 2002 curriculum, and slipped further to third place in the 2008 curriculum. As the importance given to children’s social development diminished, attention to language and literacy learning and to the school-readiness function of the école maternelle increased correspondingly. However, the 2014 proposed curriculum transformed this relationship again, this time making children’s social development a cross-cutting aim that would permeate all experiences at the école maternelle. Also of note were the changes of title given in the different curricula: it was ‘living together’ in the 1995 and 2002 curricula; ‘becoming a student’ in the 2008 curriculum; and ‘learning together for living together’ in the 2014 proposed curriculum. While ‘becoming a student’ was meant to emphasise the child’s state of ‘becoming’ (IGEN and IGAENR, 2011, p. 61) and familiarisation with the school environment, it conveyed an image of the child as an individual to be formed – to be a student knowing the expectations of the school and embodying its rules – rather than a person participating in the life of an ECEC institution (see IGEN and IGAENR, 2011, p. 23).

These changes in ranking and title do suggest the government’s intention to schoolify the école maternelle. By contrast, the 2014 proposed curriculum intended to move away from the schoolified approach of the previous curriculum by giving a central place to children’s social development (‘learning together for living together’) – which was firmly in line with the redefinition of the école maternelle as a ‘caring school’.

Sweden In the Swedish history of preschool, Lpfö 98 was the first real curriculum with legal provisions to establish pedagogical content in an ordinance. It was received with great enthusiasm by preschool staff; preschool had finally achieved the status of ‘education’ that it had long aspired to (Martin Korpi, 2007, p. 64). Preschool was clearly stated as the first step in lifelong learning and was to be enjoyable, secure and rich in learning for all children. Preschool was to provide care and stimulate development and learning. The curriculum was founded on the assumption that children are competent and constantly seeking to improve their understanding of their world (Lenz Taguchi and Munkammar, 2003, p. 19). The image of the child as competent invites an approach that takes listening to children seriously and builds on traditional preschool pedagogy; it was also inspired and reinforced by the Reggio Emilia approach, which over the last few decades has had great influence on the Swedish preschool (Martin Korpi, 2007, pp. 64–66). In the same year, 1998, the Curriculum for the Compulsory School (Lpo 94) was revised with a brief that incorporated preschool class and leisure-time centres. The revised version embraced a new view of children, knowledge and learning; the concept of teaching became replaced to a large extent – but not entirely – by learning, reflecting the notion of children as active in their own learning processes (Lenz Taguchi and Munkammar, 2003, p. 19). Other new features included the emphasis on alternative ways of self-expression and learning that went beyond reading and writing

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to include a focus on music, drama, body movement, drawing, painting and multi­ media. Other new concepts included: learning through play; creative activities; experimental and investigative learning; and care (Lenz Taguchi and Munkammar, 2003, p. 19). The two curricula – the Curriculum for the Preschool Lpfö 98 (Skolverket, 1998a) and the Curriculum for the Compulsory School, the Preschool Class, and the Leisure-time Centres Lpo 94 (Skolverket, 1998b) – apply the same structure and have shared views on fundamental values, learning and knowledge (Martin Korpi, 2005, p. 11). They are short framework documents and similar in length. They both emphasise the same fundamental values, notably: democracy, care and consideration toward others, solidarity and gender equality. However, the preschool curriculum uses the term ‘children’, whereas the compulsory school curriculum almost always refers to ‘pupils’. Additionally, the former refers to the use of ‘a pedagogical approach where care, nurturing and learning form a coherent whole’ (Lpfö 98), which is not found in the latter. The preschool curriculum has ‘goals to strive for’, without grades or individual child assessments, while the compulsory school curriculum has ‘goals to attain’, i.e. prescribed goals and outcomes for individual students. The emphasis of preschool is to nurture in all children a desire and curiosity for learning and confidence in their own learning, rather than acquiring a pre-defined level of knowledge (Martin Korpi, 2005, p. 11; Skolverket, 2004, p. 11). Moreover, the preschool curriculum does not address individual teachers, as in the compulsory school curriculum, but emphasises teamwork between teachers in preschool and between teachers and nursery nurses (barnskötare) to reflect the inseparability of care and education in preschool pedagogy (Martin Korpi, 2005, p. 11). Gradually, the need for revising the 1998 preschool curriculum became apparent: the goals were considered not well organised and some of them lacked clarity (Pramling Samuelsson & Sheridan, 2010).

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The government recognised that the pedagogical task of the Swedish preschool was becoming more important over the decade, and that this trend would continue (Ministry of Education and Research, 2011). In order to ‘rais[e] the ambition of preschool towards a more pedagogic task’ (Pramling Samuelsson & Sheridan, 2010, p. 221), the 1998 preschool curriculum was revised in 2010. The philosophy of the curriculum remained the same; and the distinction between the preschool and school curricula in terms of ‘goals to strive for’ (goals that children are to strive for, which do not prescribe outcomes that individual children are to attain) and ‘goals to attain’ (goals that children are supposed to attain at a certain age, which usually involve assessment of individual child performance4) respectively was maintained. However, there were also some important changes. First, the curricular goals related to language and communicative development as well as mathematics were clarified and extended; and the goals for natural sciences and technology were also clarified and increased in number. Second, a new section on follow-up, evaluation and development was introduced. It defined the aim of evaluation as obtaining ‘knowledge of how the quality of the preschool … can be developed so that each child receives the best possible conditions for learning and development’ (revised Lpfö 98, Skolverket, 2010, p. 14). This would entail – according to the ­curriculum – monitoring, documenting and analysing each child’s learning and development, and obtaining knowledge of ‘each child’s experience, knowledge and participation, as well as influence over and interest in the different goal areas’ (Skolverket, 2010, p. 14). Third, the main pedagogical responsibility for children’s development and learning was invested in preschool teachers within a working team which consists of preschool teachers and nursery nurses (barnskötare). Fourth, a new section on the responsibility of the preschool head was added, clarifying her position as the pedagogical leader and head

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of staff within the preschool (Ministry of Education and Research, 2011). As a result, the revised curriculum gave the preschool a strengthened school identity by the increased visibility of literacy, mathematics, science and technology in terms of content and goals; the addition of the new sections on evaluation and the responsibility of the preschool head – which were missing in the earlier version visà-vis the compulsory school curriculum; and the clear assignment of pedagogical responsibility to preschool teachers compared to assistants or nursery nurses. While preschool was brought closer to compulsory school through the 2010 preschool curriculum revision, the compulsory school, preschool and leisure-time centres received their own new curriculum (Lgr 11). The main purpose of developing a new school curriculum was to have a clearer curriculum document with new syllabuses and knowledge requirements for compulsory school (Ministry of Education and Research, 2008, p. 1) so as to strengthen central control over the education system and not to leave too much scope for choice and decentralisation.5 Thus, for the first time, compulsory school came to have centrally prescribed teaching content: 242 pages of syllabuses (in the English version) were added to the curriculum. Even though no prescribed teaching content was assigned to the preschool class (for 6-year-olds) in the new curriculum, the development of the new school curriculum marked a move toward centralisation in the provision of the compulsory school system, thus distinguishing it from the preschool which retained a traditional practice of decentralisation.

Workforce Looking through the lens of workforce policy, a distinct evolution is evident with regard to the ECEC–primary school relationship in France and Sweden. In France, policy developments concerning the early childhood and primary education workforce have done little

to change the relationship, as the fundamental workforce structure – namely the unified structure through which teachers are qualified to work with children ages 2/3 to 11 years and remunerated equally – has remained the same since 1921. In Sweden, the relationship became very close when an integrated initial teacher education programme was introduced in 2001, but was then distanced in 2010 when the integrated teacher education system became divided again, separating the degrees for becoming preschool and school teachers, and subjecting the former to fewer credit requirements.

France It is worth recalling that the initial education of the école maternelle and école élémentaire teachers has been unified in France since the end of the 19th century, and that the école maternelle teachers gained the same status and working conditions as their élémentaire counterparts in 1921. The training needs of école maternelle teachers have always been addressed less than those of teachers in the élémentaire, as teacher education in France has been more likely to cover disciplinary (or subject) didactics, which are not always appropriate for use in the école maternelle (IGEN and IGAENR, 2011, p. 181). The 1989 law (loi d’orientation sur l’éducation) stipulated the establishment of the IUFM (instituts universitaires de formation des maîtres), a teacher training institution that replaced the écoles normales. IUFM were attached to one or more universities, unlike the écoles normales. With this reform, the qualification of the maternelle and élémentaire teachers was raised to ‘bac+3’, i.e. they became qualified as a teacher when they obtained the baccalauréat (university entrance qualification) and licence (award following a three-year university degree course), and were successful in the teacher recruitment examination. They were now called professeurs des écoles, instead of instituteurs/institutrices. The reform was to ‘universitise’ the training institutions, but the

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balance between the maternelle and élémentaire training contents was not even a consideration. The 2008 reform of ‘masterisation’ of initial teacher education raised the qualification requirement even higher – from ‘bac+3’ to ‘bac+5’ – while doing away with IUFMs and asking universities to house initial teacher education. Again, the equilibrium between the maternelle and élémentaire training contents was a non-issue. The lack of recognition and knowledge concerning the école maternelle was symbolic in the communication made by the then Minister of Education, Xavier Darcos, in 2008. Responding in the Senate to the government’s decision to reduce the enrolment of under 3s in the école maternelle, he questioned the use of public funds to have teachers educated at master’s level when their function was essentially to give children their naps and change their nappies.6 From 2009 until the present, developments related to the ECEC workforce have had some positive tones for the école maternelle. The circular of 2009 opened the way to strengthening the supervision and continuous training offered to école maternelle teachers through its announcement of creating positions for inspectors specialised in the école maternelle – which had been abolished for some time. Another official text (Instructions pédagogiques: Enseignants du premier degré exerçant en classes et écoles maternelles7) issued by the Ministry of National Education in 2009 defined the specific competencies required for being teachers in the école maternelle. In 2013, specialised university institutions in charge of initial teacher education (called écoles supérieures du professorat et de l’éducation, or ESPE) were re-established, although this reform fell short of clarifying government thinking about the place of the école maternelle vis-à-vis that of the école élémentaire within the unified initial teacher education programme. Thus, seen from the perspective of workforce structure, the relationship between ECEC and primary school in France has been based on the école maternelle being regarded as an ‘appendix’

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to the école élémentaire, with less recognition as a field built on specific professional knowledge and practices.

Sweden Prior to 2001, Swedish preschool teachers and leisure-time pedagogues (who provide afterschool care and leisure activities for school-aged children within the school premises) underwent a three-year university-level pedagogical and practical training ‘focusing on learning methods, developmental psychology, family sociology and creative activities’ (Lenz Taguchi and Munkammar, 2003, p. 7). In 2001, a workforce reform was introduced that brought the training for all three categories of professionals (i.e. preschool teacher, school teacher and leisure-time pedagogue) together in one integrated three-anda-half-year initial training system. Other reforms, such as the 1996 administrative integration of preschool within education and the 1998 introduction of the preschool class, already supported collaboration and joint planning among these professionals, who worked under the same conditions – in ‘natural forms of work’ – in the school system (Bill 1999/2000:135). Moreover, being the first step in lifelong learning, preschool was considered to form part of society’s collective education and to improve children’s opportunities to achieve the goals of primary education (Bill 1999/2000:135). The integration of initial teacher education thus aimed to equip preschool and school teachers with a common set of skills that would lay the foundation for cooperation in the school system (Bill 1999/2000:135). Within the new integrated system, preschool and school teachers followed a three-and-a-half-year teacher education programme (with the exception of students planning to work with older children of ages 14–16 and 16–19) (Johansson, 2003). The programme aimed to create a teaching workforce with a shared professional identity and a common base of knowledge and skills. It should be noted that this system differed from

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the French initial teacher education, which trained teachers to work with children from the ages of 2/3 to 11 without much opportunity to gain any degree of specialisation in the école maternelle for those intending to teach this level. Students in the Swedish teacher education programme, by contrast, were able to decide their area of specialisation during the course of the programme, after having followed a common set of courses. A further change in the direction of aligning the preschool and school sectors occurred in 2010 when the preschool curriculum was revised with the result that pedagogical responsibility was suddenly explicitly placed on preschool teachers rather than assumed to be equally shared between preschool teachers and nursery nurses (barnskötare). This sudden departure from past practice unsettled the notion that ‘care’ and ‘education’ were intertwined and of equal importance. In addition, the new section on the responsibility of the preschool head clearly spelled out increased responsibilities in terms of pedagogical and management leadership, and served to elevate the vital importance of the position which now was to equal the position of school head. Meanwhile, since the 2000s Sweden was being confronted with declining results in PISA and PIRLS (Pramling Samuelsson & Sheridan, 2010). For example, PISA 2012 showed a sharp decline in the performance of 15-year-old students in reading, mathematics and science over the previous decade, ‘with more than one out of four students not even achieving the baseline Level 2 in mathematics at which students begin to demonstrate competencies to actively participate in life’; and ‘[t]he share of top performers in mathematics roughly halved’ (OECD, 2012, p. 3). The government partly attributed these negative results to the integrated teacher education system, in place since 2001, which was seen to not sufficiently equip school teachers with the necessary specialised knowledge and skills (Pramling Samuelsson & Sheridan, 2010, p. 223). Consequently, the government decided to re-introduce separate teacher education and

qualification frameworks, aimed at creating a ‘world-class education for preschool and school teachers’ to help Sweden ‘regain its position as a leading knowledge-based and industrialised country’ (Ministry of Education and Research, 2010, p. 1). The new degree structure for preschool and school teachers thus became hierarchical. The same duration of initial education period was retained for the preschool teacher degree as before, i.e. three and a half years, but the new primary school teacher degree was extended to four years. According to Pramling Samuelsson and Sheridan (2010), some university academics were critical of the proposal, particularly of the shorter duration of the new preschool teacher degree and the loss of an integrated approach to educating teachers across different fields. However, the government argued against extending the degree requirements for preschool teachers on the basis that the country was facing a preschool teacher shortage and this would be exacerbated by a longer pre-service teacher preparation programme.

Views and experiences regarding the relationship in France and Sweden As I noted at the start of the chapter, the analysis of policies that impact the relationship between ECEC services and schools in France and Sweden was supplemented in the original study (Kaga, 2016) by interviews with 24 and 27 informants from each country respectively. Analysis of the interview data suggested that there was, to some extent, convergence between the government position inscribed in the policy documents and the views and experiences expressed by the informants of the study. The strongest view expressed in the interviews about the ECEC–school relationship was about a trend toward schoolification in France. By contrast, in Sweden, the overarching trend was seen by the interviews to be

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a shift toward a more balanced relationship between the two educational settings, with the preschool seen to have strengthened its pedagogical function and asserted its pedagogical specificity vis-à-vis the compulsory school. In this section I discuss three major themes identified in the interviews, namely, schoolification, preschoolification and workforce structure.

Evolution of the Relationship as Described by Stakeholders Most of the 24 French interviewees expressed their concerns and critical comments about the trend to schoolification, such as the introduction of school-like evaluation in the maternelle and the diminished attention to training needs, especially those of the maternelle teachers. Many of them felt that the schoolification trend had been set in motion by the adoption of the 1989 education law that introduced the principle of Cycles d’apprentissage that linked the preschool and primary school years into successive pedagogical cycles. They were also cautious about giving a positive assessment of the 2013 education law and the 2014 proposed curriculum for the école maternelle mentioned above. They commented on a kind of ‘reform fatigue’ experienced by practitioners and scepticism about the government’s ability to provide appropriate resources for the necessary changes to take place at the practice level. Meanwhile, a minority of participants held different views on the current relationship: one teacher described the relationship as ‘two-way’, in which the maternelle programmed its activities in anticipation of the requirements in the élémentaire, and the élémentaire conceived its activities based on children’s experiences in the maternelle. Two participants (one teacher and one researcher) spoke of ‘no relationship’ between the two levels of education, emphasising the distinct nature of work carried out by the maternelle and élémentaire teachers.

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In Sweden, most of the 27 interviewees expressed satisfaction about how the relationship has evolved – unlike the French interviewees – saying how pleased they were with the preschool becoming closer to school and nurturing its specific pedagogical identity. Rather than school readiness, the notion of readiness for life appeared to dominate in the Swedish preschool context. Two interviewees working at school level talked about their experience of the relationship shifting from being school-readiness-oriented (e.g. how ECEC should ready children for schooling) to being ready-school-oriented (e.g. how primary schools should build on children’s prior experiences in ECEC) since around the mid-2000s. Although the overall assessment was that of a positive relationship between school and preschool, and of satisfaction, there was acknowledgement that the relationship was not totally equal (e.g. preschool teachers usually having lower salaries than school teachers) and not as strong as wished for (e.g. teacher collaboration was mainly limited to the last year of preschool to prepare the ground for children’s entry to preschool class). Two interviewees working at the government level pointed to the rise of the school-readiness discourse adopted by politicians since 2006 when a conservative government was elected. Some of the teacher educator/researcher interviewees raised concerns about emerging signs of schoolification and the prospect that the trend would continue in the near future.

Schoolification as a Common Phenomenon A converging tendency in both countries – reflected in the policy changes to some extent, and emerging in the views and experiences of stakeholders – was the phenomena of schoolification. The level of schoolification differs between France and Sweden. In the former, schoolification is a stronger, longer and more widespread trend which

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began accelerating in 1989. In the latter, schoolification practice emerged in the 2000s but has not spread to the same extent as in France. Nonetheless, Swedish teacher educator-researcher interviewees and some of the teacher interviewees were very sensitive to this phenomenon, opposing the encroachment of schoolified practices in the preschool. In France, the schoolification trend was criticised for its inappropriate imposition of the élémentaire methods on young children aged 2/3 to 6 years, its overemphasis on academic learning, its favouring of written evaluation inducing the ‘right answers’, and the excessive pressure exerted on children to be able to read and write too early. Other signs of schoolified practices were: increasing use of worksheets, arrangement of individual tables to face the blackboard, increasing expectations that children would sit still and listen to teachers for a long time, and understand and follow teachers’ instructions. In Sweden, some of the signs of schoolification expressed during the interviews were: the introduction of assessments, on the initiative of individual teachers themselves, in the preschool and preschool class to evaluate children’s level of literacy and mathematics; and preschool teachers emphasising the goals for literacy, mathematics, science and ­technology – featured as clarified goals in the 2010 revised preschool curriculum – at the expense of valuing all the goals equally. However, a minority of interviewees openly supported schoolification, favouring the notion of stimulating children’s literacy and numeracy development as much as possible and providing ever challenging tasks to young children – as supported by the latest brain development research – and advocating the effective teaching of a school-like attitude and behaviours (e.g. sitting still, being able to listen to and follow the teacher’s instruction) in the maternelle so as to facilitate teachers’ tasks in the élémentaire. Two interviewees – one holding a government position and another working as a primary

school principal – suggested that the importance of the acquisition of basic skills – reading, writing, counting – and the transmission of culture and knowledge was ever increasing in the school system due to the growing immigrant population in France. The school system, starting with the école maternelle, was considered to play an important role in facilitating the social and economic integration of immigrant children by equipping them with the necessary knowledge and skills from early on. Although no Swedish interviewees were in favour of schoolification as such, some acknowledged that the difference between preschool and school cultures posed pedagogical questions and challenges. One interviewee strongly supported more directed pedagogies from teachers in preschools through which to provide more guidance and direction to children than they actually receive. The French and Swedish interviewees pointed out different forces that they saw as leading to schoolification in their own countries. The French interviewees identified these forces as being: (1) the introduction of school-like evaluations, defined by a list of competences to be achieved by children, and requiring written evaluations to be made by the teacher; (2) increasing parental and societal pressure on children to be successful learners and future adults; and (3) insufficient and diminishing opportunities of training and pedagogical support for the école maternelle teachers. In turn, the Swedish interviewees suggested that the 2010 revised preschool curriculum might be one of the developments paving the way to schoolification. This was because the curriculum had clarified and reinforced the goals related to school subjects (i.e. literacy, mathematics, science and technology) as well as giving clearer and extended guidance on evaluation which explicitly requires teachers to know individual child progress to be able to assess the quality of the preschool environment and activities. There was also the view that the impact of PISA would likely lead to closer attention to

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preschool in the near future, and that a PISA debate might motivate certain people to ‘find’ children at an earlier age and require them to read by the start of the preschool class.

Preschoolification as a Common Point of Interest Another, somewhat unexpected, convergence between the countries was that of the increasing influence of preschool pedagogy in school – or ‘preschoolification’ of the compulsory school system. The policy analysis showed that this was an interest and concern in Sweden but not in France, though the issue came up in interviews in both countries. In Sweden the vision of ‘spearheading the influence of preschool into school’ was announced by the government in the 1990s and remains a rare example of a government’s clear position on the desired relationship between preschool and school. Some of the French interviewees said that the école élémentaire could usefully learn from the way the maternelle approaches the child and its pedagogical practices such as the use of group work, thematic projects, playful and experiential learning. Some also observed that the use of the ‘maternelle pedagogical approaches’, such as circle time and activity corners, was happening in the école élémentaire, but that this depended on the interest and initiative of particular teachers. In Sweden, preschool influencing school is considered to have happened through the curricular linkages, the actual work of some of the preschool classes, seminars and exposure to articles and reports, and the establishment of a Reggio Emilia network of preschool and school teachers. However, interviewees stated that school teachers would not admit that their pedagogical approaches were influenced by preschool, and would say that their practices have been influenced by experiences from other countries, higher education fields, or leisure-time centres which are integrated in the school premises. These observations suggest

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conflicting views held by those working in preschool and school about each other’s role in exerting pedagogical influences. Those working in the school sector held a hierarchical view of the preschool–school relationship in which pedagogical influences necessarily come not from below but from elsewhere. By comparison, those working in the preschool sector perceive the existence of an upward dynamic in the relationship through which pedagogical influences are brought from preschool to school.

Greatest Divergence Resides in Workforce Structure The interviews indicated that the unified workforce in France is an unquestioned feature of the national school system. Interviewees recognised teachers’ ability to work with both preschool and primary school ages as one of the strengths of the French education system and even a source of pride. There was an opinion that having teaching experience in both the maternelle and élémentaire was enriching for individual ­teachers, children and the entire teaching profession. To separate the teaching workforce into the maternelle and élémentaire workforce would be unthinkable and even undesirable, as it was seen to engender compartmentalisation and stagnation by preventing movement of teachers across the levels of education. However, three aspects became clear from the probing of questions. First, despite the system allowing teachers in France to work across different age groups, the tendency was for teachers to continue teaching within the same age group. In other words, the structural possibility of teachers crossing the border between early childhood and primary education has not resulted in many movements between the two sectors. Second, as several interviewees admitted, teaching in the école maternelle was very different from teaching in the école élémentaire. One of the interviewees explicitly said that, in practice, these were distinct professions.

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Third, and perhaps, most importantly, most of the interviewees admitted that the training needs specific to the maternelle were marginalised and met only insufficiently when the question about the place of the maternelle in the training content was posed. This suggests that this issue was perceived to be a rather insignificant one in the organisation of the workforce. In contrast, in Sweden – despite some regret over moving away from an integrated workforce – there is an overall support among the interviewees for the separate qualification and education structure for preschool and school teachers. The interviewees reported that the integrated workforce had the advantage of being a fuller realisation of the vision of lifelong learning, however it made the previous training too broad. By contrast, the training reform had enhanced specialisation and enabled teachers to go much deeper into questions and connect theory to relevant examples of practice from a particular area – it was more interesting for everyone. Politically speaking, the separatist reform was attractive to those concerned with competitiveness in the global economy and the declining place of Sweden in the PISA rankings: separating teacher education was considered to refresh the quality of education by strengthening the specialisation competences of teachers working with different age groups. From the perspective of teacher education and research, the separation was considered to work in favour of the preschool sector, which had become marginalised within the integrated training system, and which – through the separation of training – was offered the possibility of consolidating and asserting its own position and approaches vis-à-vis the primary education sector. Furthermore, the phenomenon of an increasing number of preschool teachers undertaking research in higher education institutions in Sweden – often supported by government funding – was acknowledged as a sign of optimism for enriched practices in preschools and for a more elevated status of

the preschool sector. It should however be noted that from a workforce perspective the relationship between preschool and school is not equal, as shown in the inferior salary and longer work hours of preschool teachers, and the shorter duration of initial teacher education programmes compared to that for primary school teachers.

Reflections on the influence of globalisation and the social construction of the child on the relationship As stated earlier, this chapter is based on a comparative policy study (Kaga, 2016) of the relationship between ECEC and primary education in France and Sweden. The analyses of the study were informed by a conceptual framework that drew on globalisation theory and the sociology of childhood due to their strong potential to explain crossnational similarities and differences. Through the promotion of key concepts (e.g. knowledge society, human capital formation, economic efficiency), globalisation potentially acts as a force for reconceptualising ECEC as an instrument for efficiently preparing children for school and the future workforce, thereby pushing countries to adopt a schoolreadiness relationship. Recognising the social construction of the child – a central concept for the sociology of childhood – as a reflection of the particular social, cultural, political and economic circumstances in which it is found, it can be expected that France and Sweden uphold distinct images of the child for ECE and primary education, influencing the two sectors and their relationship. This section provides reflections on the possible influences of globalisation and different social constructions of the child on the policy evolutions that have created the current relationships between ECEC and primary school in France and Sweden.

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Reflection on the Influence of Globalisation The policy and empirical analyses showed that the influence of key concepts promoted by globalisation is stronger in Sweden than in France. For example, in Sweden, there were more overt references to notions central to globalisation, including a stronger concern for international research such as PISA, and for how they are ‘assessed’ on a common international scale. Some interviewees attributed this differential impact between the two countries to different cultural attitudes regarding external influence: By comparison to France, Sweden is a small country keen on absorbing new trends and practices from outside; France, on the other hand, is a big country proud of its own culture and heritage, and traditionally disinterested in, or indifferent to, new trends and practices coming from outside. However, the policy and empirical analyses of the study demonstrated that France is not unaffected by globalisation; indeed, it is being influenced by key concepts promoted through globalisation, such as efficiency, and by other countries’ practices, to which France is paying more attention. France and Sweden converge in terms of their increased emphasis on literacy and language development, and trends toward making stronger curricular and evaluation alignments between the école maternelle/ preschool and the école élémentaire/school. Also, convergence is found with regard to the political support for talking about ECEC as readying children for school. Within this, however, there are important divergences. Increased societal pressure on children to achieve more and earlier in France – an effect of globalisation putting pressure on citizens’ competitiveness – is absent in Sweden. Here, instead of putting pressure on children, the concern for strengthening national competitiveness has been translated into reinforcing the specialisation of the education workforce. Moreover, the notion of efficiency in learning, which is associated with globalisation,

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has been the central concept driving education in France, while it is completely absent from the Swedish data. The relative absence of increased societal pressure on children in Sweden can be attributed to a societal consensus about safeguarding childhood as a ‘golden age’ and the high regard in which preschool is held in the public’s mind as a time for instilling higher order values – for example, about democracy, equality and equity (Pramling Samuelsson & Williams, 2016). Behind the policy of workforce specialisation in Sweden was the declining standing of the country in the PISA ranking (while France keeps its rank across the PISA surveys), but it resonates well with Sweden’s recognition of preschool as a legitimate and unique field of education and workforce professionalisation, which is not the case in France. Four interviewees suggested that the recent economic crisis in France was responsible for emphasising the notion of efficiency in the French education policy, including the école maternelle. The policy and empirical analyses of data from the two countries do not always support the hypothesis that globalisation explains the convergence of policy toward a ‘school-readiness’ relationship. Some of the data – such as the strengthening of the school-readiness function; the rise of efficiency concerns and school-like methods of evaluation in the école maternelle; growing pressure on children to learn and succeed academically in France; and the curricular alignment of preschool to school alongside the introduction of individual child assessments in preschool in Sweden – suggested the contribution of globalisation to an increased support for a school-readiness relationship in both countries. However, even when globalisation was the underlying force, certain policy reforms did not give way to a school-readiness agenda. For example, in Sweden, the 1996 administrative integration and the 2010 workforce reforms were part of a pro-globalisation strategy to enhance the country’s competitiveness, yet, both supported a balanced and equal relationship.

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The adoption of the new 2013 education law in France that defined the école maternelle as ‘a caring school’ took place when globalisation was advancing.

Reflection on the Influence of the Image of the Child The analyses of French and Swedish policy showed that the official view of the child in ECEC and school is most evident in the curricula. In the past, in both countries, the child was viewed as developing according to its own innate nature: ‘an essential being of universal properties and inherent capabilities whose development is viewed as an innate “natural” process – biologically determined, following general laws … [in] a standard sequence of biological stages that constitute a path to full realization’ (Dahlberg et  al., 2007, p. 46). However, in France, this view faded away in 1995 when the curriculum became organised for the first time by curricular domains, instead of child development domains. With the strengthening school identity, the école maternelle’s image of the child came to resemble that of the école élémentaire – the child as ‘student’ framed by school rules and valued for her/his academic performance – notably with the 2008 curriculum; however, the 2014 proposed curriculum suggests a different image, that of the child as having various needs and learning to live together with others – thus shifting to a more holistic view of the child as embedded in a socio-cultural context. The first preschool curriculum issued in 1998 in Sweden projects the child as active and competent, learning through relationships and interaction with others, which is also present in the 1998 revised school curriculum. This common view of the child across the different levels of education was in part inspired by Reggio Emilia’s approach to the child as a ‘rich’ and competent child (Martin Korpi, 2007). The 2010 revised preschool

curriculum and 2011 new school curriculum retain the same common image of the child. The interview analyses showed a range of responses from interviewees in both countries with regard to the image of the child held in ECEC and primary education. However, in France, the most frequent responses were around the differences in the image of the child according to the levels of education due to the child being at different developmental stages, and the child as increasingly defined as a ‘student’ as they get older. In Sweden, the dominant view was that the child was active and competent in both preschool and increasingly in school; at the same time there were difficulties in working with this image in school, where a strong teacher-centered tradition was seen to position the child as a passive, listening child. The different images of the child reported by interviewees in France and Sweden as characterising ECEC and school seem to have contributed to the diverging relationship between the two countries. According to the interview data, the different ways that the child was perceived in France and Sweden were due to the influence of tradition and culture, including those related to ECEC and school. The French individualist culture was not viewed as conducive to enhanced cooperation between the école maternelle and école élémentaire. In contrast, the Swedish democratic and egalitarian culture was more attuned to cooperation and teamwork between preschool and school, as well as to a pedagogical style that involves listening to children, and learning from each other – which is considered important in the Reggio Emilia approach. The hierarchical nature of the adult–child relationship in France, which supports adults’ directedness and authority, is closer to the traditional teaching approaches with children facing and listening to the teacher. It would also be in line with the view of the child projected by developmental psychology, which perceives the child as developing according to

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different stages in a linear fashion, gradually going from immaturity toward maturity. The impact of the image of the child on the relationship between ECEC and school seemed to operate more on the individual level than the policy level, since people’s accounts of the relationship appeared to be shaped by their particular world views and experiences, the positions in which they were employed and the kinds of physical and institutional contexts in which they worked. This is not to say that the image of the child as projected in policy was less important than the images held by individuals. The image of the child in the policy is one of the many influencing factors on how the relationship between ECEC and school played out; and the degree to which the policy’s image of the child has an impact may depend on a range of things, including the extent of policy centralisation or decentralisation, the processes and frequency with which individual stakeholders are exposed to the policy, and the manner in which the image is interpreted for, or communicated to, them. The interview analyses clearly showed that the Swedish interviewees were more at ease with the question about the image of the child in preschool and school than the French interviewees. Would having a better awareness about the social construction of the child, and about the kinds of image of the child one holds, possibly be of value? Reflecting upon the French interview analyses, a possible response is that it can free one from developmental psychology perspectives that prescribe the child as the developing child – as opposed to the developed adult. Developmental psychology is the most dominant discipline in education, especially ECEC (Woodhead, 2006); so, being aware of alternative conceptions of the child may contribute to expanding one’s horizon and give an opportunity to act and work otherwise. Thus, the image of the child embedded in particular policy documents could lead to diverse relationships at individual and local

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levels, and may open up possibilities for pursuing alternative visions of the relationship, which may be more constructive.

Conclusion This chapter has presented the key findings of a comparative study on the evolution of policy related to the relationship between ECEC and primary education in France and Sweden, with a focus on the period between 1989 and 2014. It has shown that in both countries a strong relationship has developed between the two sectors through changes in policy areas such as governance, legal provision, curriculum and workforce structure. However, the type of relationship differs, with France adopting a schoolification relationship until recently, and Sweden developing a more balanced relationship in which the specificity of the preschool is safeguarded and asserted vis-à-vis the primary school. There is some level of convergence between the two countries in the ECECschool relationship as understood in policy documents, and the views and experiences of key stakeholders regarding the relationship. While more satisfaction and optimism were expressed in Sweden regarding the relationship of the preschool to school compared to France, schoolification was viewed as a common phenomenon that exists in both countries, albeit at different levels. The focus on enhancing country competitiveness, strengthening specialisation in Sweden, and pressure for children to succeed and perform from an early age in France, could be interpreted as reflecting the forces of globalisation, which tend to promote schoolified approaches in ECEC. Meanwhile, the culture and tradition of ECEC, its historical roots and governance – evident in the view of the ‘child as student’ in the French école maternelle and ‘child as rich and active’ in the Swedish preschool – could be interpreted as

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giving rise to different visions and practices as to how ECEC and primary education should relate to each other.

Notes  1  www.inrp.fr  2  France has a policy of promoting the enrolment of disadvantaged 2-year-olds in the école maternelle as a way to give them a head start in early education and thereby to encourage education equity.   3  The 2014 proposed curriculum of the école maternelle was, after rounds of consultations, adopted, and took effect in September 2015.  4  See, for example, Skolverket (2004).   5  ‘Sweden unveils new school curriculum’. The Local, [online] 11 October 2010. http://www.thelocal.se/20101011/29540  6  « Sur la maternelle, Darcos en remet une couche » [On the maternelle, Darcos put again a diper English translation], l’express, 17 September 2008. http://www.lexpress.fr/education/sur-la-maternelle-darcos-en-remet-une-couche_569391.html 7  Instructions pédagogiques: Enseignants du premier degré exerçant en classes et écoles maternelles. NOR: MENE0900711C, RLR: 513-2, circular no. 2009-098 of 17 August 2009, http://www. education.gouv.fr/cid48696/mene0900711c. html (accessed 29 December 2016).

References Bennett, J. (2013). A response from the coauthor of ‘a strong and equal partnership’. In P. Moss (Ed.), Early childhood and compulsory education: Reconceptualising the relationship (pp. 52–71). London: Routledge. Bill 1999/2000:135. En förnyad lärarutbildning [A renewed teacher-education]. Stockholm: Utbildningsdepartement. http://www.regeringen.se/ 49b72c/contentassets/88d2a7b82c834a3790 ee8d0751f65487/en-fornyad-lararutbildning (accessed 26 April 2017). Bouysse, V. (2007). L’école maternelle française: de l’assurance au doute? Paris. Observatoire de l’enfance en France. http://ww2.acpoitiers.fr/ia79-pedagogie/IMG/pdf/Viviane_ Bouysse-4.pdf Dahlberg, G., Moss, P., & Pence, A. (2007, 2nd ed.). Beyond quality in early childhood education and care. London: Routledge.

European Commission. (2011). Communication from the Commission: Early Childhood Education and Care: Providing all our children with the best start for the world of tomorrow. COM(2011) 66 final. Brussels: European Commission. Eurydice. (2009). Tackling social and cultural inequalities through early childhood education and care in Europe. Brussels: European Commission. Eurydice. (2009/2010). Organisation of the education system in France, 2009/2010. European Commission. https://estudandoeducacao.files. wordpress.com/2011/05/franc3a7a.pdf Hart, B., & Risley, T. R. (1995). Meaningful differences in the everyday experience of young American children. Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes Publishing. Heckman, J. J., & Masterov, D. V. (2004). The productivity argument for investing in young children. Working Paper 5, Invest in Kids Working Group. Committee for Economic Development, 4 O ­ ctober, Ifo Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich, 6(2), 3–8. Inspection générale de l’éducation nationale (IGEN) and Inspection générale de l’administration de l’éducation nationale et de la recherche (IGAENR). (2011). L’école maternelle, rapport n° 2011-108, ministère de l’éducation nationale, octobre 2011. http:// media.education.gouv.fr/file/2011/54/5/2011108-IGEN-IGAENR_215545.pdf Johansson, I. (2003). Teaching in a wider perspective. Children in Europe, 5, 14–17. Kaga, Y. (2007). Preschool class for 6-year-olds in Sweden: A bridge between early childhood and compulsory school. UNESCO Policy Brief on Early Childhood No. 38. Paris: UNESCO. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0015/ 001508/150815e.pdf (accessed 21 August 2015). Kaga, Y. (2016). The relationship between early childhood and primary education in France and Sweden (PhD thesis). London: UCL Institute of Education. Kagan, S. L. (2013). David, Goliath and the ephemeral parachute: The relationship from a United States perspective. In P. Moss (Ed.), Early childhood and compulsory education: Reconceptualising the relationship (pp. 130– 148). London: Routledge.

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Lenz Taguchi, H., & Munkammar, I. (2003). Consolidating governmental early childhood education and care services under the Ministry of Education and Science: A Swedish case study. Paris: UNESCO. Martin Korpi, B. (2005). The foundation for lifelong learning. Children in Europe, 9, 10–11. Martin Korpi, B. (2007). The politics of preschool – intentions and decisions underlying the emergence and growth of the Swedish pre-school. Stockholm: Ministry of Education and Research. Ministry of Education and Research. (2008). Curricula with new syllabuses and knowledge requirements and a new grading scale. Fact sheet. U08.021, December. Stockholm. Ministry of Education and Research. (2010). Top of the class – new teacher education programmes. Fact Sheet. U10.009. March. Stockholm. Ministry of Education and Research. (2011). Status and pedagogical task of preschool to be strengthened. Fact sheet. U11.009. June. Stockholm. http://www.oxydiane.net/IMG/ pdf/Svezia_asilo.pdf (accessed 26 April 2017). OECD. (2001). Starting Strong I: Early Childhood Education and Care. Paris: OECD. OECD. (2006). Starting Strong II: Early Childhood Education and Care. Paris: OECD. OECD. (2012). Improving schools in Sweden: An OECD perspective. Paris: OECD. OECD. (2014). Indicator C2: How do early childhood education systems differ around the world? In Education at a Glance 2014: OECD Indicators. Paris: OECD. Pramling Samuelsson, I., & Sheridan, S. (2010). A turning-point or a backward slide: the

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challenge facing the Swedish preschool today. Early Years, 30(3), 219–227. Pramling Samuelsson, I. & Williams, P. (2016). The Swedish preschool system in transition. In C. Dalli & A. Meade (Eds), Research, Policy and Advocacy in the Early Years (pp. 96– 108). Wellington: New Zealand Council for Educational Research. Qvortrup, J., Corsaro, W. A., & Honig, M.-S. (Eds). (2011). The Palgrave handbook of childhood studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Skolverket. (1998a). Curriculum for the preschool Lpfö 98. Stockholm: Skolverket. Skolverket. (1998b). Curriculum for the compulsory school, pre-school class and leisure time centres Lpo 94. Revised 1998. Stockholm: Skolverket. Skolverket. (2004). Pre-school in transition: A national evaluation of the Swedish preschool. A summary of Report 239. Stockholm: Skolverket. Skolverket. (2010). Curriculum for the preschool Lpfö 98. Revised 2010. Stockholm: Skolverket. UNESCO. (2010). World Conference on Early Childhood Care and Education: Building the Wealth of Nations. Conference concept note. Paris: UNESCO. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/ images/0018/001873/187376e.pdf Woodhead, M. (2006). Changing perspectives on early childhood: Theory, research and policy. Paper commissioned for the EFA Global Monitoring Report 2007, Strong foundations: Early childhood care and education. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/ 0014/001474/147499e.pdf (accessed 31 December 2016).

6 Early Childhood Policy in East Asia and the Asia Pacific Region, with Reference to Myanmar Lynn Ang

Introduction The true measure of a nation’s standing is how well it attends to its children – their health and safety, their material security, their education and socialisation, and their sense of being loved, valued and included in the families and societies into which they are born. (UNICEF, 2007, p. 1)

The advocacy statement above by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF, 2007) serves as a poignant illustration of the recurrent focus on early childhood education and care (ECEC) in the worldwide political discourse. The rhetoric reflects a concern with the rights of children and their well-being, in the interests of sustaining a ‘strong and healthy nation’. What is evident is the powerful influence of public discourses on the positioning of children in familiar social practices such as education, childcare, health care and preschool, all of which play a significant role in shaping the daily realities and experiences of young children and families. Implicit in the

political rhetoric are beliefs and assumptions about children and childhoods; these societal constructions are fundamentally implicated in ECEC policies and practices. The discussion that follows offers an analysis of the issues and debates in the early childhood policy landscape internationally, and particularly in the East Asia and Asia Pacific region. It argues that the galvanising of children’s rights and advocacy by supranational non-governmental organisations (NGOs) has raised the profile of early childhood conspicuously, and initiated systemic shifts in the way children and childhoods are constructed in national agendas. However, arguably, the actual impacts on children’s lives and realities, particularly in fragile, lowincome developing countries are not necessarily perceivable or beneficial, presenting policy opportunities as well as dilemmas. The term ‘fragile’ is used here following the categorisation used by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

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(OECD, 2012) for countries that are susceptible to political and socio-economic instability. The chapter explores the policy drivers that have led to the prioritisation of services for children across countries in the East Asia and Pacific region, and critically evaluates the concept of ECEC as it is constructed at a supranational and national policy level amidst enduring structural inequities.

International Early Years Policy Public policy attention to young children’s care and education has increased substantially in recent years across both the global ‘South’ as well as ‘North’.1 This is reflected in stepped advocacy internationally for the importance of early childhood education, and government investment in educational interventions and services for young children and families (OECD, 2013; United Nations, 2015; United Nations Development Programme, 2013; UNESCO, 2014a, 2015). The role of supranational non-governmental agencies such as the United Nations, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the World Bank and United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) has been instrumental in influencing the development of macro-policies that place ECEC at the forefront of the political and policy domain. The 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (United Nations, 1989), ratified by the majority of governments internationally including those in East Asia and the Asia Pacific region, was seminal in ensuring that children’s rights are espoused at the core of civil society. In 2000, the integral role of ECEC was reinforced by the Dakar Framework for Action (UNESCO, 2000) at the World Education Forum. The Framework was a historic milestone in the campaign of governments to build capacity and improve ECEC, particularly in the developing world.

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The Framework was perceived to be highly influential in precipitating a proliferation of national policies and legal frameworks among countries in sub-Saharan Africa as well as Asia, to secure ECCE as a key policy goal (Neuman & Devercelli, 2012). This burgeoning policy landscape is inpart bolstered by cumulative research on the importance of this phase of life – from birth to preschool age – as critical and formative in laying the foundations for children’s subsequent success and achievement (Engle et  al., 2007, 2011; Heckman, Pinto & Savelyev, 2012; McCartney & Phillips, 2006; Walker et al., 2005). The advancement of interdisciplinary studies in neuroscience, developmental science and macroeconomics have supported arguments for improving equity, access and quality of early care and education (Shonkoff & Philips, 2000; Shore, 1997). The extant research has presented cogent and persuasive arguments about the long-term and lasting effect of quality ECEC which has strongly informed policy decision making, and prompted governments to make prudent investments in the sector. Concerted global advocacy bolstered by emerging research in the last two decades has therefore significantly raised the profile of ECEC in the policy as well as political arena. A series of high-level political engagements has strengthened the policy advocacy for ECEC. The World Bank Group Education Strategy 2020 (World Bank, 2011) emphasises early childhood as the critical phase in the human lifecourse that can demonstrably impact on later learning outcomes, and therefore the importance of early childhood as a priority policy agenda. The international report Education for All 2000–2015 (UNESCO, 2015) set out the direction of policy reform for ECEC, emphasising that governments need to ensure quality and equitable access to care and education services for young children. The report describes the global landscape in regards to early childhood policy: ‘As of 2014, many countries had developed explicitly multisector

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policies, or policies that serve as umbrellas covering several sectors. Seventy-eight countries report having adopted multisector ECCE policy instruments and 23 say they are preparing such instruments’ (UNESCO, 2015, p. 57). While further analysis of the comparative figures cited is required, the commentary provides a useful overview of the policy context where access to and participation in ECEC are being encouraged as major social and economic policy goals. To date, with considerable success as a result of global advocacy efforts, ECEC has been included in the latest United Nations 2030 agenda for sustainable development launched in September 2015. The call for early childhood as a priority agenda is explicit in goal 4: ‘Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all’ (United Nations, 2015, p. 18); target 4.2 further specifies: ‘By 2030, ensure all girls and boys have access to quality early childhood development, care and pre-primary education so that they are ready for primary education’ (p. 21). That early childhood was incorporated in the renewed global advocacy, and endorsed by governments internationally, could be said to denote a pivotal milestone for the international development world. The remarks by the Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon sum up the current political drive: ‘The Sustainable Development Goals recognize that early childhood development can help drive the transformation we hope to achieve over the next 15 years’ (United Nations News Centre, 2015). As the next section shows, this sustained focus on ECEC resonates across regions, including in East Asia and the Asia Pacific where policy development is fast evolving.

ECEC Policy in East Asia and the Asia Pacific Region East Asia and the Asia Pacific (Figure 6.1) is a vast region comprising more than 30

countries, with highly diverse ethnic, cultural and religious communities. Definitions of the region often vary in geographical and ethnocultural terms, but in general, the region is geographically demarcated as covering the Asian continent, and the part of the world near or around the Pacific Ocean including East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia and Oceania. A common classification of ‘East Asia and the Asia-Pacific’ used by supranational organisations offers a useful definition, encompassing 33 countries – ‘Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, China, the Cook Islands, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Fiji, Indonesia, Japan, Kiribati, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Macao (China), Malaysia, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia (Federated States of), Myanmar, Nauru, New Zealand, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, the Republic of Korea, Samoa, Singapore, Solomon Islands, Thailand, TimorLeste, Tokelau, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, and Viet Nam’ (UNESCO, 2015, pp. 316–317). Within this wide geographical area, the East Asia and the Asia Pacific region is marked by significant socio-economic disparities within and across countries. Comparative country-level datasets on education and socio-economic indicators such as pre-primary enrolment, literacy rates, education expenditure and child well-being show huge variations across the region. For example, as a high-performing developed country, Singapore is regarded as ‘a regional leader in training for early childhood professionals’ (UNESCO, 2015, p. 72), and stands in stark contrast to low-income, developing countries such as the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, where entrenched gender disparity with education participation rates persists (UNESCO, 2015). Public spending on early childhood programmes is also reported to be relatively low in many countries in the region with less than 5% of overall education expenditure on early childhood or pre-primary provision, compared to countries which spend a comparatively higher percentage on early

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Figure 6.1 UNICEF East Asia and Pacific region map Source: UNICEF (2016) Note: This map does not reflect a position by UNICEF on the legal status of any country or territory or the delimitation of any frontiers. Australia and New Zealand have not been shown in the map.

childhood services – such as Solomon Islands and New Zealand (World Bank, 2014). The OECD has a list of 47 ‘fragile’ states – classified as ‘home to an increasingly concentrated proportion of the world’s poor’ (OECD, 2012, p. 11) and more susceptible than others to social vulnerability, political and socio-economic instability, with several identified countries from the East Asia and Asia Pacific region. The report reveals a significant proportion of children and families in the region living within or at risk of multiple adversities such as poverty, conflict and emergency conditions. The series of UNESCO Education for All Monitoring Reports (UNESCO, 2010, 2014a, 2015) has consistently revealed that stark inequalities

exist regionally, especially among low- and middle-income countries (LAMIC), in terms of access to education and social protection for young children. A systematic review undertaken to inform an early childhood research agenda in the region also revealed that conflict and adversity, particularly in fragile states, exacerbate the stark social and economic disparities (Ang, 2014). A general consensus from published reports and emerging research is that pervasive social and economic gaps remain across the region. Amidst the wide demographic and socio-economic divergence, a key policy focus regionally is equitable access and delivery of quality early childhood education programmes and services, particularly

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for those who are most vulnerable, that is those who are living amid chronic socioeconomic deprivation and multiple adversities (UNESCO, 2014b; UNESCO and UNICEF, 2012). International advocacy has steered ECEC to the centre of policy development in many countries in East Asia and the Asia Pacific, not least because ECEC as a topic is seen to address global strategic priorities on sustainable development, eradicating poverty and creating a fair and just society (UNESCO, 2014b). As the World Bank states, ‘Investing in young children is one of the smartest investments a country can make to break the cycle of poverty, address inequality at the root, and boost productivity later in life’ (World Bank, 2016). In response to advocacy calls for ECEC, a plethora of national policies and legal frameworks on ECEC have been initiated in countries across the region. The Notes on Education For All on East Asia and the Asia Pacific (UNESCO and UNICEF, 2012) reported that several countries, including Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Pakistan and Thailand, have passed national policies or laws concerning early childhood. For instance, the Pakistan National Plan of Action 2013–16 (Pakistan Ministry of Education, Trainings and Standards in Higher Education, 2013) cites the Dakar Framework for Action (UNESCO, 2000) as having influenced policy developments at a national and provincial level on ‘(i) improving quality of education; (ii) early childhood education; (iii) access & equity; (iv) governance & management’ (Pakistan Ministry of Education, Trainings and Standards in Higher Education, 2013, p. 6). In Cambodia, a ‘National Policy on Early Childhood Care and Development’ was endorsed by a Council of Ministers in 2010 (Royal Government of Cambodia, 2010). The policy affirms the pivotal role of ECEC in addressing the wider issue of poverty: ‘Early childhood care and

development is a priority and indispensable element of Education for All (EFA) and Poverty Alleviation Strategy of the Royal Government of Cambodia’ (Royal Government of Cambodia, 2010, p. 1). Internationally and regionally, ECEC is therefore constructed in policy discourses in terms of anti-poverty and social equity measures, particularly in countries where inequities are more pronounced and where the human development index2 lags considerably behind others. Significantly, a strong rhetoric of ‘investment and returns’ permeates the policy discourse, as reflected in the World Bank’s statement of its education strategic policy that is informed by three strands: ‘Invest early. Invest smartly. Invest for all’ (World Bank, 2014, p. v). The World Bank’s policy rationale is evident: ‘when making investment decisions, government funding can increase the efficiency of investment in foundational skills’ (World Bank, 2014, p. 107). In addition, the supranational policy extols the high social and economic returns that can be realised through investment in ECEC and ‘the importance of high-quality government financed formation of foundational skills at early ages for both economic growth and equity’ (World Bank, 2014, p. 114). It is not surprising then that a similar rhetoric of investment is reflected in national policies in the region. For instance, in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, the policy document National Plan of Action (2005) shows a recurring rhetoric of investment in human capital. The focus of the policy is on ‘the significant task of providing quality education and training, as well as relevant human investment, in order to ensure the continued economic and social development needed’ (Lao People’s Democratic Republic, 2005, p. 15). Likewise, the national policy in Thailand offers the same familiar justification for investing in ECEC, with the policy unequivocally stating that ‘investment in the early childhood development can be economically justifiable in reducing future social

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problems and increasing learners’ knowledge and skills in later years’ (Office of the Education Council, 2013, p. 7).

Conceptual tensions Clearly, an overarching policy goal in the East Asia and Asia Pacific region is one of investment in ECEC for social and economic returns, with the promotion of ECEC seen as a catalyst for the wider purpose of social transformation. This drive is particularly pertinent for low-income developing countries in their progress towards building a ‘roadmap’ to achieve sustainable national development, and to respond to the needs of ‘vulnerable’ children and families. Yet, despite the apparent prominence of children and ECEC in national agendas, material and intrinsic challenges remain. It could be argued that, paradoxically, the construction of ECEC in macro-policy and global advocacy raises conceptual tensions about how children are viewed across cultural borders, and divisions between policy and practice. The role of children in the global advocacy discourse for ECEC is often visionary and couched within a rights-based discourse driven by the United Nations Conventions on the Rights of the Child (United Nations, 1989). For example, the call for global sustainable development by 2030 urges us to envision ‘A world which invests in its children and in which every Child grows up free from violence and exploitation’ (United Nations, 2015, p. 7), and the supra-national organisation UNICEF offers a globalised vision of the ideal childhood in ‘a world of peace, equity, tolerance, security, freedom, respect for the environment and shared responsibility’ (UNICEF, 2006, p. 85) where ‘no child is excluded or invisible’ (p. 85). The vision is predicated on optimism for the future that ‘one day all children will enjoy a childhood with full respect for their rights, their basic needs provided for, protected from violence,

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abuse, exploitation, neglect and discrimination, and empowered to participate meaningfully in all decisions that affect their lives’ (UNICEF, 2009, p. 3). But, while arguably, this visionary discourse offers much needed leverage in elevating the welfare of children onto the international political stage, especially for those living in conflict or adverse conditions, it also positions children as vulnerable beings, needing protection and on the margins of adversity. Invariably, such a discourse highlights the incongruity of framing children as ‘rights bearing individuals’ on the one hand, and subjects of vulnerability, and needing care and protection on the other. It raises debates about how childhood and ECEC are defined, what is meant by ‘children’s rights’, how this is construed in society and what this means in practice. These debates are particularly significant in some societies in the global South, and particularly in the East Asia and Asia Pacific region where a collective approach to rights through social and kinship ties might be prioritised over individual rights (Franklin and McKinnon, 2002). Similarly, constructions of ‘the child’ and ECEC are embroiled in relations of power and knowledge in the way childhood is conceptualised in different societies, and dominant policy discourses can often serve to conceal the hegemonic relations inscribed in these conceptualisations. Reflecting critically on the global status of ECEC in policy discourses therefore highlights the intrinsic tensions in our own adult constructions of children’s place in the world, between our social concern for the development of society and for children’s own interests, and how their present and future capacities as individuals can best be served in distinct culturally-sensitive contexts. Dahlberg and Moss (2005) argue that a critical analysis of policies is important to challenge the ‘dominant discursive regimes’ (p. 18) in practice as well as discourse. To work through these discourses, to examine how they ‘govern what can be said and what is treated as the truth in a particular time

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and place’ (p. 17), requires open discussion and debate. Significantly, the issue of the role of children and ECEC in national agendas also raises material and structural challenges in terms of policy implementation. Broader macro-social economic concerns such as domestic and external financial constraints, socio-economic instability and competing multiple policy objectives can raise tensions in a highly diverse national and global environment. In Malaysia, for instance, despite the legislation of an Education Act in 1996 and the introduction of a mandated national pre-school curriculum, global monitoring reports show ongoing challenges with equity issues in a largely unregulated and privatised early childhood sector. The limited or lack of registration of ECCE centres in Malaysia poses difficulties in monitoring access and participation rates, with particular challenges for children from minority ethnic groups. It would appear that while international calls for ECEC have moved the issue up the policy ladder, the proliferation of services in the private sector has exacerbated concerns at a structural level in maintaining robust governance and accountability. The issue of quality provision is compounded by the seeming reluctance of families, particularly in minority groups, to recognise the value of ECEC. As the report on the country states, ‘problems with equity and access continue for indigenous people and children with special needs. These problems are compounded in ethnolinguistic minority communities where children and other community members may not understand the content of their educational programmes’ (UNESCO and UNICEF, 2012, p. 25). In India, debilitating conditions such as a lack of or limited professional training, low teacher recruitment numbers and inadequate resources hinder efforts to raise the quality of ECEC, while access to services continues to be a problem for marginalised populations (UNESCO and UNICEF, 2012). Thus, despite international efforts to elevate

the cause of ECEC at a policy level, the actual impacts on the daily realities of children and families, and the effectiveness of programmatic practices, particularly for communities in developing countries, are not easily discernible or realisable. As the next section will show, the disparity between policy aspirations and operationalisation present both opportunities as well as challenges.

Myanmar: Policy Opportunities and Challenges This chapter has so far provided an overview of ECEC policy developments internationally as well as within the East Asia and Asia Pacific region. It has been argued that while over the last two decades, research and advocacy efforts by international organisations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), UNICEF, the World Bank and UNESCO have progressed the early childhood policy agenda, ongoing challenges are difficult to overcome. Despite the strong advocacy and policy drive, a stark disparity persists between policy aspirations and reality, inhibiting the creation of a sustainable ECEC governance system that is fair and equitable for all children. This argument is illustrated in this section with the case of Myanmar. Formerly known as Burma, Myanmar is a developing country in East Asia with an emerging early childhood sector. The country offers interesting exemplar of a multifaceted ECEC policy landscape that has evolved from the interplay of complex social, economic and political developments. Policy developments in Myanmar in recent years have witnessed the advancement of ECEC on the country’s national agenda. A policy statement by the Myanmar Department of Social Welfare (DSW) sets out the government’s vision and national strategy (2006–2015), which is to: (a) promote ECCE; (b) improve the all-round development of children aged

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0 to 8 years; and (c) modernise the information management system (Ministry of Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement, Department of Social Welfare, 2012). The subsequent introduction of a multi-sectoral Early Childhood Care and Development (ECCD) policy is a pivotal milestone in the prioritisation of young children and families (Republic of the Union of Myanmar, 2014). The policy outlines the government’s commitment to ECEC, stating that: ‘The Government of Myanmar places high priority on the development, education, health, nutrition and protection of young children, from conception to eight years of age. Successive Five-Year ECCD Strategic Plans will provide operational guidance for implementing this Policy over the next 15 to 20 years’ (Republic of the Union of Myanmar, 2014, p. 1). The country was recently reported to have introduced new legislation for one year of compulsory education before primary schooling for children reaching the compulsory school age of 5 years (Shaeffer, 2015; UNESCO, 2015). It is also apparent that supranational organisations have been instrumental in steering the country’s policy direction on ECEC. A UNESCO report revealed that national consultation meetings were undertaken in Myanmar to tackle the challenge of ‘providing education to out-of-school children’ (UNESCO, 2014b, p. 35) and enhance the education system to provide learning opportunities for marginalised communities. The notion of ‘investing in children’ lies explicitly at the heart of public policy for young children. For instance, the Myanmar EFA 2015 National Review Report identifies early childhood as a target area for public investment and capacity building (Ministry of Education, Republic of the Union of Myanmar, 2014) and the Myanmar National Social Protection Strategic Plan (Ministry of Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement, Department of Social Welfare, 2014) cites the international evidence on human capital theory as the underpinning policy driver

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promoting children’s interests and social protection. The policy states: The Myanmar Social Protection Strategic Plan recognizes that social protection should be child sensitive, recognizing international evidence that shows returns to investments are highest at the youngest ages … Physical and neural development occur very quickly at younger ages, and meeting children’s basic needs sets a foundation for later success in life (including educational performance and overall health status). In short, today’s children represent the future of Myanmar, and ensuring their wellbeing will contribute to long term growth and poverty reduction. (p. 9)

The refrain of ‘returns to investments’ from ECEC is clearly invoked in the policy discourse above as a means for longer-term benefits of national development and poverty reduction. It could be argued that, as with many countries in the region, the rhetoric of investment in, and high returns from, early childhood has worked surreptitiously to keep ECEC at the centre of national policymaking. Within this discourse, the role of ECEC takes on an instrumental purpose in the drive towards consolidating political will and strategically aligning ‘early childhood’ as a priority policy area. The country’s policy strategy on ECEC contributes to the notion that social transformation is best addressed by improving educational outcomes and well-being for the youngest. Arguably, this utilitarian model of ‘childhood’ is preoccupied with the outputs of care and education as a hegemonic ‘technicist’ discourse (Dahlberg and Moss, 2005), where children’s role and relationship with society are often conceptualised in ‘overly instrumental ways’ (p. 35). In the context of Myanmar, this has served to raise the profile of ECEC and to increase government investment in services, with the country reported to have made marked progress towards tackling its equity gaps (UNESCO, 2015). Despite the policy commitment, ECEC in Myanmar continues to face pressing difficulties from the ongoing lack of structural reforms and social and economic challenges.

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The UNESCO country programme 2013– 2015 report on Myanmar (UNESCO, 2013) revealed that critical challenges remain in terms of access to, and quality of, education for children and for the country’s diverse populations. In the Myanmar Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) (2009–2010) where data were collected from over 20,000 households, an estimated 40% of children in the richest households attended early childhood education compared to an estimated 7% among the poorest children. The Myanmar National Social Protection Strategic Plan (2014) reported a lack of access to early childhood education programmes, immunisation and health care, with children facing greater vulnerability to social protection-related risks as among the major challenges facing the country (Ministry of Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement, Department of Social Welfare, 2014). The Early Childhood Care and Development (ECCD) policy acknowledges the ‘scale of the quality challenges still to be faced’ (Republic of the Union of Myanmar, 2014, p. 42), with only a small number of services available and where a large percentage of the ECEC workforce remains untrained. Demographic changes in the country constitute a compounding factor. Research shows that with parents working longer hours and with more women in employment (Tin et al., 2013), the demand for childcare centres or preschools in Myanmar has grown and this has led to disparities in the quality of care and education provision in urbanised areas. Moreover, there are ongoing issues with access to education and welfare services for ethnic minority children and families and those living in remote areas, despite the prioritisation of ‘children living in poverty or in ethnic minority communities’ and other marginalised children (Republic of the Union of Myanmar, 2014, p. 74), as noted in the ECCD policy. More than 50% of children in urban areas access some form of ECEC compared to less than 10% of children in rural areas,

with survey figures indicating that pre-school attendance in urban areas is more than double that of rural areas (MICS, 2009–2010). The ECCD policy recognises that despite international aid, children’s health and nutrition are major concerns: ‘It is important to note that international donors including UNICEF, WHO and some International NGOs, are supporting health and nutrition initiatives, but the level of support for health has been low in comparison to other countries with similar challenges’ (Republic of the Union of Myanmar, 2014, p. 55). A further complicating factor is that after two decades of a military, socialist state, Myanmar is immersed in a highly politicised milieu as it transitions to a civilianised government. The country’s first general election in 2010 marked its newly emergent status as a democratic state. While the country has experienced social and economic growth in recent years, its political situation remains precarious. The development of public policies in regards to services such as ECEC continues to evolve amid tenuous structural fragility (Ang & Wong, 2015). Notwithstanding the considerable challenges, there appear to be simultaneous policy opportunities. For example, it is possible to interpret the recent increase in government support for improved infrastructure, governance and macro-level policies as key to alleviating economic and social vulnerabilities and as emerging signs of social transformation for children and families (Ministry of Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement, Department of Social Welfare, 2014). As mentioned earlier, the introduction of the Early Childhood Care and Development (ECCD) policy (Republic of the Union of Myanmar, 2014) signified a major step forwards, as did the country’s first five-year ‘National Comprehensive Development Plan’ (UNESCO, 2013). That the government has articulated its commitment to maintaining socio-economic stability and development suggests new policy directions are afoot. Nonetheless, the tension that the

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country continues to face is the realisation of policy aspirations for an early childhood sector that is largely resource-limited, and the need to prioritise competing national agendas (Ang & Wong, 2015).

Conclusion As this chapter has shown, ECEC systems and governance structures internationally and across the East Asia and Asia Pacific region are not uniform, and policy developments diverge considerably. Strong advocacy for the strengthening of public sector policies has been stepped up in recent years to engender social transformation, precipitated by dominant policy discourses to raise the profile of ECEC and advocate for better policies, governance and services (UNESCO and UNICEF, 2012). I would argue that national policy presents one of the strongest drivers yet of systemic change and social transformation in a country, but that effective governance and systems are essential for the successful implementation of policy and political aims. Just as important is the recognition of ECEC as a multi-dimensional issue; ensuring equitable ECEC requires innovative approaches and a wide range of policy responses. Additionally, it is important that ECEC as a shared global agenda continues to be openly debated, so as not to lose sight of children at the core of policy development and decision making.

Notes 1  The author recognises that there is no clear-cut categorisation of countries or country groupings. The terms ‘North’ and ‘South’ referred to here, do not present a neat polarisation of countries according to their wealth or poverty. References drawn on in this chapter have also tended to use different terminologies. However, in the context of this chapter, the terms are used as they are commonly known in the field of international development to denote the geographical and

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socio-economic orientation of countries which are generally considered low- to middle-income (the South) or rich and highly developed (the North). The terms are used in the discussion as operational definitions, while acknowledging their conceptual complexities and the need to problematise these labels in wider debates. 2  The Human Development Index (HDI) is a composite statistical indicator related to life expectancy, national income per capita, education and poverty levels (United Nations Human Development Report, 2014). The United Nations Human Development Programme ranks 188 countries according to their HDI, with countries at the lower end of the scale (towards 188) showing least progress in human development and well-being, with low life expectancy and inequality in terms of the distribution of health, education and income.

References Ang, L. (2014). Early Childhood and Peace Building in the Asia-Pacific Region: A Literature Review to Inform a Regional Research Agenda: Final Report. UNICEF. Retrieved from http:// www.arnec.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/ Peace-Bldg-Report-ref.pdf Ang, L., & Wong, L. (2015). Conceptualising early childhood care and development in fragile states: Understanding children and childhood in Myanmar. Global Studies of Childhood. Special Issue: Childhoods in Tibet and Myanmar, 5(4), 367–380. Dahlberg, G., & Moss, P. (2005). Ethics and politics in early childhood education. London: Routledge Falmer. Engle, P. L., Black, M. M., Behrman, J. R., Cabral de Mello, M., Gertler, P. J., Kapiriri, L., Matorell, R., Young, M. E., & International Child Development Steering Group. (2007). Strategies to avoid the loss of developmental potential in more than 200 million children in the developing world. The Lancet, 369(9557), 229–242. Engle, P. L., Fernald, L. C. H., Alderman, H., Behrman, J., O’Gara, C., Yousafzai, A., Cabral de Mello, M., Hidrobo, M., Ulkuer, N., Ertem, I., Iltus, S., & Global Child Development Steering Group. (2011). Strategies for reducing inequalities and improving developmental outcomes for young children in lowincome and middle-income countries. The Lancet, 378(9799), 1339–1353.

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Franklin, S. and McKinnon, S. (2002). Relative values: Reconfiguring kinship studies. Charlotte, NC: Duke University Press. Heckman, J. J., Pinto, R., & Savelyev, P. A. (2012). Understanding the mechanisms through which an influential early childhood program boosted adult outcomes. NBER Working Paper No. 18581. National Bureau of Economic Research. Lao People’s Democratic Republic. Ministry of Education Department of General Education. (2005). Education for All National Plan of Action 2003–2015. UNESCO. Retrieved from http://www.moe.gov.la/data/publications/ efa/efa%20lao%20version%20eng.pdf McCartney, K., & Phillips, D. A. (Eds.). (2006). Handbook of early childhood development. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing. Ministry of Education, Republic of the Union of Myanmar. (2014). Education for All 2015 National Review Report. Retrieved from http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0022/ 002297/229723E.pdf Ministry of Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement, Department of Social Welfare, The Republic of the Union of Myanmar. (2012). Developing Policies. Retrieved from http:// www.dsw.gov.mm/en/content/developingpolicies Ministry of Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement, Department of Social Welfare, The Republic of the Union of Myanmar. (2014). Myanmar National Social Protection Strategic Plan. Retrieved from http://www.socialprotection.org/gimi/gess/RessourcePDF. action?ressource.ressourceId=50377 Myanmar Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (2009–2010). Retrieved from https://mics-surveys-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/MICS3/ East%20Asia%20and%20the%20Pacific/ Myanmar%2C%20Republic%20of%20 the%20Union%20of/2009-2010/Final/ Myanmar%202009-10%20MICS_English.pdf Neuman, M. J., & Devercelli, A. E. (2012). Early childhood policies in sub-Saharan Africa: Challenges and opportunities. International Journal of Child Care and Education policy, 6(2), 21–34. Office of the Education Council. Ministry of Education. (2013). Early Childhood Care and Education in Thailand. Retrieved from http:// admin.e-library.onecapps.org/Book/1237.pdf

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). (2012). Fragile states 2013: Resource flows and trends in a shifting world. Retrieved from http://www.oecd.org/ dac/incaf/FragileStates2013.pdf Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). (2013). How do early childhood education and care (ECEC) policies, systems and quality vary across OECD countries? Education Indicators In Focus, 11. Retrieved from http://www.oecd.org/education/skills-beyond-school/EDIF11.pdf Pakistan Ministry of Education, Trainings and Standards in Higher Education. (2013). National Plan of Action 2013–2016: Achieving Universal Primary Education in Pakistan. MDG Acceleration Framework. Retrieved from http://educationenvoy.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/ National-Plan-of-Action_Pakistan1.pdf Republic of the Union of Myanmar. (2014). Myanmar Policy for Early Childhood Care and Development. Retrieved from http:// www.themimu.info/sites/themimu.info/files/ documents/Ref_Doc_Early_Childhood_Care_ Development_Policy_2014.pdf Royal Government of Cambodia. (2010). National Policy on Early Childhood Care and Development. Retrieved from http://www. nepcambodia.org/images/stories/Documents/Ministries/national%20policy%20 on%20eccd%20%20english.pdf Shaeffer, S. (2015). The demand for and the provision of early childhood services since 2000: policies and strategies. Background paper for EFA Global Monitoring Report 2015. Retrieved from http://unesdoc.unesco. org/images/0023/002324/232457e.pdf Shonkoff, J., & Philips, D. A. (2000). From neurons to neighborhoods: The science of early childhood development. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. Shore, R. (1997). Rethinking the brain: New insights into early development. Washington, DC: Families and Work Institute. Tin, H. W., Nonis, K. P., Lim, S. E. A., & Honig, A. S. (2013). Teachers’ perceptions of the importance of stories in the lives of children in Myanmar. Early Child Development and Care, 183(10), 1449–1467. UNESCO. (2000). The Dakar Framework for Action. Education for All: Meeting Our Collective Commitments. Paris: UNESCO.

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UNESCO. (2010). Education for All Global Monitoring Report: Reaching the Marginalized. Retrieved from: http://unesdoc.unesco. org/images/0018/001866/186606E.pdf UNESCO (2013) Myanmar. Country Programming Document 2013–2015, UNESCO Bangkok. Retrieved from http://unesdoc.unesco. org/images/0022/002237/223703e.pdf UNESCO. (2014a). Education for All Global Monitoring Report. Teaching and learning: Achieving quality for all. Paris: UNESCO. UNESCO. (2014b). Regional Report on Progress towards Education For All in Asia and the Pacific. Retrieved from http://www.unesco. org/new/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/ED/ED_ new/pdf/APA-GEM-2014-ENG.pdf UNESCO. (2015). Education for All Global Monitoring Report. Education for All 2000–2015: Achievements and challenges. France: UNESCO. Retrieved from http://unesdoc.unesco.org/ images/0023/002322/232205e.pdf UNESCO and UNICEF. (2012). Asia-Pacific End of Decade Notes on Education for All: Early Childhood Care and Education. Retrieved from http://www.uis.unesco.org/Library/Documents/ asia-pacific-end-decade-notes-efa-goal-1-earlychildhood-care-education-2012-en.pdf UNICEF. (2006). The State of the World’s Children 2006: Excluded and Invisible. Retrieved from https://www.unicef.org/sowc06/pdfs/ sowc06_fullreport.pdf UNICEF. (2007). Child poverty in perspective: An overview of child well-being in rich countries, Innocenti Report Card 7. Florence: Innocenti Research Centre. Retrieved from http://www. unicef.org/media/files/ChildPovertyReport.pdf UNICEF. (2009). The State of the World’s Children Special Edition: Celebrating 20 years of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Retrieved from https://www.unicef.org/publications/files/SOWC_Spec._Ed._CRC_Main_ Report_EN_090409.pdf UNICEF. (2016). UNICEF East Asia and Pacific Region Map. Retrieved from http://www. unicef.org/eapro/overview_7818.html United Nations. (1989). Convention on the Rights of the Child. Retrieved from http:// www.unicef.org/crc/

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United Nations. (2015). Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda For Sustainable Development. A/RES/70/1. Retrieved from https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/ documents/21252030%20Agenda%20for%20 Sustainable%20Development%20web.pdf United Nations Development Programme. (2013). The Millennium Development Goals Report 2013. Retrieved from http://www. undp.org/content/undp/en/home/mdgoverview.html United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report (2014). New York: United Nations Development Programme. Retrieved from http://hdr.undp.org/ sites/default/files/hdr14-report-en-1.pdf United Nations News Centre. (2015). Ban Kimoon’s speeches: Remarks at event on Investing in Early Childhood Development as the Foundation for Sustainable Development. Retrieved from http://www.un.org/ apps/news/infocus/sgspeeches/statments_ full.asp?statID=2744#.VwwcpNH2aUl Walker, S., Chang, S., Powell, C., & GranthamMcGregor, S. (2005). Effects of early childhood psychosocial stimulation and nutritional supplementation on cognition and education in growth-stunted Jamaican children: Prospective cohort study. The Lancet, 366(9499), 1804–1807. World Bank. (2011). Learning for All: Investing in People’s Knowledge and Skills to Promote Development. World Bank Group Education Strategy 2020. Washington: The World Bank. Retrieved from http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EDUCATION/Resources/ ESSU/Education_Strategy_4_12_2011.pdf World Bank. (2014). World Bank East Asia and Pacific Regional Report. Washington: The World Bank. Retrieved from https://www. worldbank.org/content/dam/Worldbank/ document/EAP/region/east-asia-pacific-atwork-full-report.pdf World Bank. (2016). Early childhood development: A smart beginning for economies on the rise. Retrieved from http://live.worldbank.org/early-childhood-developmenta-smart-beginning-for-economies-on-the-rise

7 Implementing Free Early Childhood Education in a Completely Privatised Market: A Case Study of Hong Kong Hui Li and Jingying Wang

Introduction Early childhood education (ECE) has become a national concern in Hong Kong since the turn of the new millennium. In Greater China (including Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan), many governments have significantly increased their attention and input to ECE provisions and have implemented some innovative and aggressive ECE policies. For example, in 2007 the educational authorities of Macau instituted a 15-year free education policy providing free access to 12 years of primary and secondary schooling as well as three years of free kindergarten education. Similarly, since 2010, a number of provinces in Mainland China have announced a ‘15-year free education policy’. By comparison, the Hong Kong government has confronted constant criticisms from both educators and the public for ‘not doing 15-year free education’ but only providing 12-year free education from primary through secondary education. Facing great social and

political pressure to introduce an additional three years of free kindergarten education, in 2013 the Chief Executive (CE) of Hong Kong promised to not let Hong Kong fall behind and accordingly set up a Free Kindergarten Education Committee (the Committee) to work on this initiative. After two years of study and planning, the Committee submitted a proposal to the CE in May 2015. Six months of scrutiny and follow-up amendments later, the CE announced the new free kindergarten education policy in his 2016 Policy Address on 13 January 2016. The new policy is due for implementation in the 2017/18 school year. This chapter is a case study analysing this policy through the ‘3A2S’ framework structured around the five principles of: Affordability, Accessibility, Accountability, Sustainability, and Social justice (Li, Wang & Fong, 2014). To contextualise the case study, we start with an overview of Hong Kong’s education system and the associated dilemmas related to the implementation of three years free ECE. We then analyse the new free ECE policy using the

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3A2S theoretical framework (Li et al., 2014), which looks into the affordability, accessibility, accountability, sustainability and social justice of ECE. Last, we will summarise the possible challenges and difficulties facing the implementation of this policy.

The ECE context in Hong Kong: Debates and dilemmas about free ECE Early childhood education (ECE) in Hong Kong is officially defined as ‘pre-primary education’, which refers to the three-year education provided by kindergartens. As a legacy of the former British colonial government, the provision of ECE services in Hong Kong has long been neglected and has never been ‘compulsory’ or ‘free’. Historically, the demands for ECE have been met totally by the private sector, and the kindergarten system in Hong Kong has been entirely private, publicly underfinanced and bureaucratically forgotten (Li et al., 2014). There are no public kindergartens; all the kindergartens are owned and run by charitable organisations, private enterprises or individuals (Li, Wong & Wang, 2008) and can be classified either as nonprofit-making kindergartens (NPMKs) or as private independent kindergartens (PIKs), depending on whether they are charitable organisations or private enterprises (Education Bureau, 2015). Thus, parents wishing their children to benefit from kindergarten education have had to pay tuition fees. NPMKs are subject to quality review1 by the Education Bureau (EDB), have their fees capped and are required to be non-­ profitmaking. By comparison, PIKs receive no public funding and thus can make a profit (Education Commission, 2000; Rao & Li, 2009). PIKs have autonomy in financial matters and curriculum development. In particular, they have the autonomy to set their tuition fees and are not subject to the same quality review requirements as NPMKs. According

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to the School Education Statistics (Education Bureau, 2015), there were 978 kindergartens in Hong Kong in 2015, of which 797 (81%) were NPMKs, and 181 (19%) were PIKs. Historically, the level of public funding of kindergarten education has been so low that the sector was once depicted as the ‘Cinderella’ of the education system, ill-treated and neglected by the government (Rao & Li, 2009). The insufficient attention and public resources have resulted in widely disparate quality of ECE provision in Hong Kong over the years.

The Debate over THE Pre-primary Education Voucher Scheme To alleviate the financial burden on parents, in 2007 the Hong Kong educational authorities launched the Pre-primary Education Voucher Scheme (PEVS). Currently, the government gives parents an annual voucher of HK$33,190(£ 3290), HK$43,150 (£ 4278) and HK$53,100 (£ 5263) per kindergartner for half-day, whole-day and long whole-day classes. Parents could use the voucher to send their children to their preferred kindergarten. But, only NPMKs are eligible to join this PEVS system with eligibility based on the following five criteria: 1) after deduction of government subsidy, the tuition fee per annum must not exceed HK$ 9,960 (£ 987) and HK$ 25,890 (£ 2567) for half-day and whole-day/long whole-day classes; 2) kindergartens must undergo quality reviews – both self-evaluations and external reviews – conducted by the EDB; 3) operational and financial transparency must be maintained; 4) teachers serving in the kindergartens must possess at least a Certificate in Early Childhood Education; and 5) kindergartens must offer a local curriculum which is in line with the Guide to the Pre-primary Curriculum (GPC) issued by the Curriculum Development Council (2006). In the 2013/2014 school year, for instance, the PEVS-eligible NPMKs were entitled to receive a voucher of

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HK$16,800 per student per annum as a full or partial subsidy for the tuition fee. If needed, parents could also apply for meanstested financial assistance to cover the postsubsidy part of the tuition fee and miscellaneous expenses. PIKs were encouraged to transform into NPMKs (charitable) to join the PEVS system; if not, they could continue to operate as private independent kindergartens. As of 2011, about 80% of all the kindergartens in Hong Kong had joined the PEVS scheme (as a NPMK) and about 85% of kindergarten-aged children had benefited from it. While enhancing the requirements for quality, transparency and accountability, the PEVS still allowed kindergartens the autonomy to develop their own curriculum and implement their own monitoring system, thus retaining the uniqueness of each kindergarten and safeguarding the diversity of ECE provision and thus also parental choice (Li & Fong, 2014). The PEVS criteria have made these eligible kindergartens more credible and attractive to parents. The PEVS enabled kindergartens to access more resources for the professional development of their teachers, and to continually improve their services (Li & Fong, 2014). In a study which surveyed 380 kindergarten principals and teachers in Hong Kong, we found that the PEVS could promote the accessibility, affordability and accountability of kindergarten education (Li, Wong & Wang, 2010). However, the PEVS has been criticised for not making ECE completely free to young children from low-income families. Despite greatly relieving the fees pressure on many parents (Li & Fong, 2014), some low-income families still had to pay extra school fees that could not be covered by the voucher, leading to the initiation of a campaign by political organisations advocating that all children, regardless of socio-economic backgrounds, receive quality ECE. One result of the campaign was a motion submitted to the Legislative Council (2011) urging the government to provide ‘15-year free education’.

In response, for the 2014/15 school year the government sought to further relieve the financial burden on needy families by revising the ceiling value of the PEVS voucher and increasing it to HK$20,010. However, the increased ceiling of the PEVS is bound to affect families differently due to the income gap and the different priority needs between the two groups of family. For example, in a study of the impact of vouchers (Li et al., 2010), we found that the richer parents tended to spend the savings from the voucher scheme on interest classes and other educational purposes for their children, whereas the lower-income parents would rather use the savings for family expenses instead of education.

The Debate over Free Kindergarten Education Recently, many professional and political organisations in Hong Kong have formed an advocacy group called the Alliance on the Fight for 15-Year Free Education whose key focus is to campaign for free kindergarten education (Li & Fong, 2014). The Alliance has used media-friendly language and images to appeal to the emotions and to build audience receptivity to the concept of ‘15-year free education’ with a political rally held to sell its movement to the public (Li et  al., 2014). The message of the campaign was that the free kindergarten policy could solve all the development problems faced by kindergartens, enhance teachers’ remuneration and establish a professional training system that would raise the overall quality of ECE in Hong Kong. In this way, the Alliance succeeded in convincing the public to believe that the policy is not just a ‘sound bite’, but the panacea for all the problems in the ECE sector in Hong Kong. However, empirical articles published in a special issue of International Journal of Chinese Education (Li et al., 2014) have collectively shown that

Free ECE in a completely privatised market

the problems they listed in the appeal for free education, could not be resolved simply by providing ‘15-year free education’. The real landscape of our kindergarten education is considerably more complex than is commonly portrayed. The public debate focused on two sets of questions: (1) what is the real meaning of ‘free education’? Does it mean everything should be free and free to every child? (2) How can free education be offered in a completely privatised market? Should the government pay the rent and teacher salaries for the school owners? If yes, should the government pocket all the profit? If yes, why don’t we transform private kindergartens into public ones? Responding to the public debate, Li, Wang and Fong (2014) argued that a credible and contextualised solution will not be achieved unless all these questions are appropriately addressed. As a way to open up these questions to analytic study, Lau, Li and Leung (2014) investigated the case of free ECE in Macau, while Cai and Hai (2014) and Li and Wang (2014) explored the same phenomenon via cases in Mainland China. Collectively, they found that the ‘15-year free education’ policy was neither ‘all fees free’ nor ‘all kids free’. Instead, in Mainland China, only public kindergartens delivered free education and to a limited number of young children; and most of the kindergartens were privately run, with very high tuition fees in the context of the local standard of living. In Macau, the most popular EC services were private kindergartens, which did not join the free education system and charged very high tuition fees (Lau et al., 2014). Macau parents were found to prefer expensive private kindergartens to the free public ones, due to perceived quality concerns in the public ones. In other words, Macau parents equated private kindergartens with quality, whereas the totally free public kindergartens were associated with ‘poor’ quality. Li and Wang’s (2014) analysis of the affordability, accessibility, accountability and sustainability (3A1S) of the 15-year free education policies in four counties of

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Mainland China further found that the ‘free’ education policies could only make ECE affordable to a limited extent; other problems of accessibility, accountability and sustainability were primarily unaddressed by the policy. Further, they found that the policies were unlikely to be sustainable as the public funding relied entirely on the local coal economy and fiscal investment at the county level. Collectively, the studies also found that government strategies differed in how public and private kindergartens were funded in Mainland China and Macau. In both areas, there was greater government commitment to financing public kindergartens, which – by comparison with private kindergartens – were limited in number and quality. Private kindergartens were either ineligible for government funding or only partially subsidised by the governments. The authors concluded that this public–private divide in education policy risks perpetuating educational inequalities in these Chinese societies and highlights the need for caution when considering the implementation of free ECE in Hong Kong (Li et al., 2014). In Hong Kong, the absence of public kindergartens to deliver free ECE means that any government subsidies could only be offered to support children’s attendance in private kindergartens. However, doing so would lead to a host of dilemmas related to how ECE services in Hong Kong function. These dilemmas are further analysed in the following section.

Dilemmas in delivering free ECE to all Although the idea of free early childhood education to all seems, on the face of it, a desirable public good, in the context of Hong Kong there are many practical and very critical dilemmas that would need to be resolved first. Four key ones relate to: (1) whether ECE should be free to all young children; (2) whether and how the government should sponsor the rent for kindergartens; (3) how to

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establish a workable place allocation system to achieve educational equality; and (4) how to avoid the two trade-offs that might be caused by the so-called ‘free for all’ policy. Perhaps the foremost critical dilemma is whether kindergarten education in Hong Kong should be completely free for all young children. As all the kindergartens are privately owned and many of them are profit-making, providing full-scale government subsidy would create a technical as well as a political problem. In particular, subsidising the profitmaking kindergartens with public money is not regarded as legitimate or appropriate in a free-market economy such as Hong Kong. Moreover, it is widely believed that taxpayers should not pay for the early education of children whose families can afford the cost of high-quality private programmes, because those affluent families are more than capable to pay for their children’s ECE. And since not all parents are in urgent need of free ECE for their child, it will be an unnecessary use of public money to provide it. Last but not least, early childhood education is not part of the compulsory education sector; it is perceived as a joint responsibility that should be shared by parents, government and society. The second dilemma is whether and how the government might be able to subsidise the rent for every kindergarten. This might be the most difficult problem and the crucial obstacle in delivering free ECE. In Hong Kong, about 22% of the non-profitmaking kindergartens are renting private premises, and about 30% of these are now receiving a full rental refund from the government. The rental costs vary considerably according to the size, location and quality of the rented property, ranging from HK$1–3 million per year. To deliver a thoroughly free ECE, the government would have to promise a full rental refund to all kindergartens. In this scenario, a likely outcome is that a landlord would raise the rent of a kindergarten in order to gain a higher government refund. If, in order to prevent such rent hikes, the government were to set up a rent control

system through mechanisms such as a ceiling level for the rental refund, the ceiling level might not cover the ‘real’ rental expenses and, accordingly, the kindergarten education could not be totally free to young children. Is it possible to set up a rent control system to prevent the free ECE rent subsidy from ‘serving the landlords’ by giving an excuse for a rent hike? In our view such a policy would require the removal of the two cornerstones of the Hong Kong economy – free market capitalism and neoliberalism. Given that even in ‘socialist’ Mainland China, the government could not stop rent hikes and did not set up any rent control systems, the chances of this happening are extremely low, if not impossible. In addition, some kindergartens actually own their buildings and do not need this kind of governmental support (Li, 2012). Therefore, having the government pay rent for all the kindergartens would directly benefit private preschool owners and would be a financial ‘gift’ to property developers and private property owners. Viewed from this perspective, such a policy would be neither justified nor feasible. The third critical challenge is how to establish a workable kindergarten place allocation system to achieve educational equality. If the free ECE policy were in place, there would likely be an inflation of housing prices in affluent areas with elite kindergartens, as parents would attempt to move to these areas to access the best possible preschools (Li & Fong, 2014). Accordingly, the technical problem emerges: how to allocate the kindergarten places in the most sought-after areas. Random assignment of young children among the kindergartens all over the city is not a solution, as it is not feasible to expect children to travel between districts for preschool (Li, 2012). Moreover, geographical proximity is presumably one feature of the ‘accessibility’ and thus the only fair solution would be for young children to be enrolled in a kindergarten in their neighbourhood and on the basis of their interest in attending a free ECE service. Once rents rise for kindergartens in sought-after areas,

Free ECE in a completely privatised market

the government would have to increase its funding support to cover the increased cost. But this would have the effect of benefitting property developers and landowners who are not the intended beneficiaries of the free ECE policy. At the same time, kindergartens in poor areas would be likely to not get enough enrolments, with the eventual result that the gaps between good and bad kindergartens, as well as between the rich and the poor, would continue to grow. A likely outcome would be the ‘Matthew effect’: rich kindergartens become richer, while poor kindergartens become poorer. The last dilemma is how to avoid the two trade-offs that might be caused by the socalled ‘free for all’ policy. The first trade-off is between affordability and accountability: if the government promised to provide full subsidy to solve the affordability problem, it would encounter the accountability problem. Put another way: without accountability measures for public monies in place, it would be possible for privately owned kindergartens to simply accept the government subsidy without delivering good provision, and the government could do nothing by way of redress (Li & Fong, 2014), making the policy unworkable. This is because when kindergartens are privately owned, the government has no right to close them down. The second trade-off would be between affordability and quality. Providing direct and full subsidy would reduce the competition among kindergartens, which is a key incentive of school improvement and quality assurance. As all the kindergartens would receive sufficient financial resources for operation without needing to remain ‘competitive’, it is likely that some would no longer strive for improvement. Accordingly, there might be decreased competition over student enrolment (Li & Fong, 2014). In this way, the government would be unable to keep schools accountable for the service they provide; and, eventually, the quality of ECE might be compromised. Nonetheless, this does not mean that the four dilemmas are not resolvable. In the next

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section, we will use the 3A2S framework to analyse the free ECE policy and to find a way out of these dilemmas.

Analysis of the Free ECE policy using the 3A2S framework In this section we turn to an analysis of the free ECE policy announced on 13 January 2016. As we noted earlier, this policy resulted from the report by the Committee on Free Kindergarten Education submitted to the EDB in May 2015. Our analysis uses the 3A2S framework (Li et  al., 2014; Li, Park & Chen, 2016) based on the principles of: accessibility, affordability, accountability, sustainability and social justice. Within this framework, accessibility means that every young child can easily attend a nearby kindergarten. Affordability means that every family can easily afford the fees of the chosen kindergarten, and that some fee exemptions are offered to needy families. Accountability means that every kindergarten should be accountable to the government for improving education quality. Sustainability means that the policy should be financially sustainable and continuously affordable to the government; and social justice means that all young children should have equal access to, and fair treatment within, ECE without any discrimination against their gender, race, religion, age, belief, disability, geographical location, social class or socioeconomic circumstances. In our view, a good free ECE policy should maintain the best balance among all the five principles of the 3A2S framework.

The Scope of Free Kindergarten Education The policy suggests that the government subsidy will cover half-day (HD) service as

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the basic provision for all Hong Kong children aged 3 to 6 years. Additional resource support will be provided for kindergartens offering whole-day and long whole-day services. And only those NPMKs that offer a local curriculum consistent with governmental guidelines and with a proven track record of providing quality education are eligible to join this free kindergarten education system. This is in line with the existing criteria for the PEVS-eligible kindergartens. The current government subsidy funds ECE at a level which enables kindergartens to provide quality education. The basic provision will cover tuition fees related to the expenses directly attributable to students’ learning and school operation. Other charges, such as expenses arising from rentals exceeding government subsidies and abovestandard services, will be borne by parents. Low-income families may apply for financial assistance. These provisions indicate that the new ‘free kindergarten education’ policy is neither ‘all fees free’ nor ‘all kids free’. Clearly, whole-day and long-day kindergartens and even the half-day kindergartens with rentals exceeding government subsidies will have to charge extra fees to cover their expenses. Accordingly, the parents of children enrolled in these programmes will have to share the school expenses that exceed government subsidies. This aspect of the policy has prompted Hong Kong parents, educators and politicians to criticise the proposal as offering a ‘fake version’ of free kindergarten education. But the government insists that this is the best solution possible at this time.

Funding Mechanisms of Free Kindergarten Education A number of funding mechanisms to achieve a free kindergarten education have been hotly debated. For example, there have been strong calls for the Government to fully subsidise kindergartens by adopting the

aided school subvention mode that has been used by public primary and secondary schools in Hong Kong. Others have suggested that the Direct Subsidy Scheme (DSS) mode, whereby funding is given to kindergartens primarily on a per student basis, might be considered. Given the diverse range of views, the Committee examined the main features of the four existing subvention modes, and analysed their pros and cons as well as their applicability to the kindergarten sector (Committee on Free Kindergarten Education, 2015).

Pre-primary Education Voucher Scheme (PEVS) First, the current PEVS has proven to be effective in promoting both market responsiveness and the quality of ECE in Hong Kong (Li et al., 2010). A change to the existing PEVS to incorporate more subsidy and choices was thus suggested as an improved option. But some kindergarten operators were concerned that directly subsidising parents would not address kindergarten-specific needs that might arise in their services. Specifically, the PEVS voucher was designed to subsidise the half-day kindergarten programmes, and this meant that it did not suit parents whose children attended whole-day or long whole-day kindergartens, resulting in inadequate levels of subsidies to those kindergartens that offered whole-day or long whole-day services. Moreover, since the value of the voucher was consistently the same for all eligible programmes, it was said to have failed to support kindergarten programmes of different operation modes and led to ‘unhealthy’ competition in the ECE market. This led the Alliance to argue that market forces alone would not be sufficient to boost education quality. While not borne out by evidence (Li et  al., 2010) this argument managed to win the popular vote in the media, and, despite arguments to the contrary, the Hong Kong government bowed to political pressure and abandoned the PEVS system from 2017–2018.

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Aided School Subvention Mode The Committee also considered the aided school subvention mode, in which the aided schools are financed by government. If this mode were used, the educational authorities would have to establish a series of rules to regulate kindergarten processes to ensure the cost-effectiveness of public funding. For example, teacher salary scales, promotion and dismissal of staff, number of children enrolled, class size and so on, would all need to be regulated by the government. As a free market economy, ECE in Hong Kong has been responsive to changing needs for kindergartens; all the kindergartens are privately owned by individuals, and NGO kindergartens are not eligible to be closed by the government under the current system. However, with a centralised and transparent place allocation system, this overall operating flexibility of the ECE sector in coping with fluctuations in the student population would be bound to be reduced. The stringent control measures and centralised kindergarten system in the aided school funding mode would moreover make the kindergartens less flexible in providing half-day and whole-day programmes to cater to parents’ needs, and these features might result in redundant teachers and the dismantling of classes when the student population drops. Therefore, this funding mode is also regarded as neither practicable nor feasible under the current commercial premises of kindergarten operation.

The Direct Subsidy Scheme (DSS) The Direct Subsidy scheme (DSS) was also considered by the Committee. In this scenario, kindergartens would be funded primarily on the basis of numbers of children enrolled and the ‘average unit expense of aided places’, in other words, the average unit cost of an aided kindergarten place. In particular, DSS preschools would be allowed to charge tuition fees on top of government subsidies which account for the provision of additional facilities and alternative education services to

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enhance the quality of ECE. Therefore, the DSS could promote diversity in the preschool curriculum, staffing and entrance requirement and other policies. However, the purpose of free kindergarten education would naturally be hindered, as the market competition among kindergartens would force them to provide more services and facilities, which would eventually transform into extra tuition fees. In addition, the DSS approach is not applicable to all kindergartens in Hong Kong, as it does not take into account rental issues. But some elements of the DSS mode could be adopted, such as using the unit cost approach to provide different unit costs based on the preschool’s operating history.

Lump Sum Grant (LSG) Last, the Lump Sum Grant (LSG) was also considered. This approach would involve governmental funding being provided in a lump sum to the agencies of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), which possess the flexibility in deploying their LSG. The staff emolument portion of the grant would be determined by the average salaries of the respective ranks of the staff. Obviously, the amount of LSG might not be sufficient to cover kindergartens’ staffing expenses and, as a result, kindergartens might be reluctant to recruit experienced teachers (with higher salaries), which would negatively influence the quality of ECE. Therefore, additional funding should also be granted to support kindergartens which offer ECE services that cater to children with special needs, and a mechanism should be developed to adjust the unit cost and school-specific grant accordingly on an annual basis. Otherwise, kindergartens will also have to charge extra fees to balance their budget.

The Proposed Solution As noted earlier, the government has decided to implement a free quality kindergarten education policy from the 2017/2018 school

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year. It will provide eligible local NPMKs with a basic subsidy for a three-year quality half-day service for all Hong Kong young children. The government subsidy will cover expenses directly contributing to the quality of teaching and learning, namely: (1) expenses related to staffing and operations; and (2) rent-related expenses. First, a competitive remuneration will be applied to kindergarten teachers in order to promote teacher professional development and retain talents. The policy also proposes a new salary scale for both teaching positions and core office staff positions (janitor, clerk etc.) (see Table 7.1) and incorporates multiple indicators to evaluate staff remuneration such as teaching experience and performance, professional qualification, additional job duties, etc. Moreover, the subsidy will be calculated based on the new teacher:pupil ratio of 1:11. All the eligible kindergartens will be required to establish a transparent mechanism with clear stipulations for determining staff salaries. Second, the current operating items accepted for fee revision purposes will remain accepted for kindergarten subsidy under the new funding arrangement (see Table 7.2). However, the eligibility of these items will be reviewed and examined Table 7.1  Proposal for new kindergarten teacher salary Position

Teaching staff

Rank

Class teacher Senior teacher Vice principal (large scale KG) Principal II Principal I Supporting staff Clerk Janitor Cook

Proposed salary range (2014 price level) (in Hong Kong Dollars) $18,000–$32,000 $24,000–$38,000 $30,000–$42,000 $34,000–$47,000; $40,000–$53,000 $10,000–$18,000 $10,000–$13,000 $12,000–$14,000

Source: Committee on Free Kindergarten Education (2015) Note: For very small-scale kindergartens, the rank of principal will be comparable to vice principal.

regularly. For example, the cost of staff training and school development will be included and other expenses might be considered according to kindergartens’ past expenditure patterns. In addition, rental subsidy will be provided for eligible kindergartens as recurrent funding on a per kindergarten basis to alleviate its financial burden. In order to guard against using public funds to subsidise over-provision of kindergarten places, the amount of rental subsidy for a kindergarten is to become contingent upon its fill-up rate. There will be a ceiling on the amount of subsidy to be provided for each eligible kindergarten to ensure proper use of public funds, which will be set with reference to the rentals of comparable kindergartens operating in premises situated in public housing estates. This will enable better budgetary control for the government. But those kindergartens receiving rental subsidy less than their actual rental payment will be allowed to charge a fee to be approved by the EDB to cover the difference. Eligible whole-day and long whole-day kindergartens will receive increased subsidy progressively. Through the implementation of the new policy it is estimated that about 70% to 80% of the places in half-day kindergartens will

Table 7.2 Current operating items accepted for fee revision purposes Category

Items

Teaching and learning

Teaching aids, learning activities Teachers’ stationery, paper and other consumables Student handbooks, profiles, certificates, identity cards Water and electricity charges, telecommunications, cleaning fees Postage charges, publications, transportation fees Insurance premium Audit fees, school administration service charges, etc. Furniture and equipment First aid and fire safety equipment

School operation

Supporting facilities

Source: Committee on Free Kindergarten Education (2015)

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become free of charge, with government spending on kindergarten education estimated to rise by 70%, taking expenditure from the current HK$4.1 billion to HK$7 billion for 2017/2018. The voucher for the year 2015/2016 is about HK$22,510 per child per year. This covers full tuition fees for about 17% of 144,700 children enrolled in 760 local NPMKs. The free kindergarten policy suggests that the 760 kindergartens will receive an annual subsidy equivalent to about HK$32,000 per child attending for half-day sessions, HK$41,600 per child for whole-day sessions and HK$51,200 per child for long whole-day sessions. It is expected that this will cover full tuition fees for up to 80% of half-day session children.

Further Analysis of Free ECE Policy With the help of the 3A2S framework, it is possible to further our analysis of these policies in Hong Kong and their impacts on the development of ECE. First, the privatised and market-led kindergarten education has achieved the balance between demand and supply. From the perspective of the 3A2S framework, this means that all children who want it can have access to affordable kindergarten education. The flexibility and diversity, meanwhile, have not been compromised; instead, parents have more affordable choices for their children. Second, the government has established a unique voucher system to finance and subsidise kindergarten education. Considering this aspect of the policy from the point of view of accessibility and affordability, it is clear that it holds the promise that almost all children can receive affordable or partially free kindergarten education with additional assistance from the KCFRS (Student Finance Office of the Working Family and Student Financial Assistance Agency, 2015) continuing to be available to parents if the fee subsidy from the PEVS is inadequate to cover the full actual tuition fees charged

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by the kindergarten. In other words, parents from low-income families could apply for additional assistance if they cannot afford the extra tuition fees for their children. In this way, their young children can really have free kindergarten education. Third, the government has also promoted accountability of the kindergarten education sector by establishing quality assurance mechanisms and measures. Since the introduction of the Quality Assurance Framework (QAF) in 2007, all PEVS kindergartens have been required to conduct continuous school self-evalutation (SSE) and to undergo quality review (QR) by the EDB annually (Education Bureau, 2016). Both school reports and quality review reports are released on the EDB websites to the public. The quality of teachers, curricula and programmes will gradually be noticeably promoted. This QAF policy will be followed to help improve the accountability of the new free kindergarten education system. Fourth, the Committee on Free Kindergarten Education has proposed a comprehensive solution for free kindergarten education, which has achieved a balance between affordability and sustainability. Last but not the least, the government has launched many measures to cater for children’s diverse needs without discrimination – including that no child would be deprived of free quality kindergarten education because of tuition fees, family background, nationality or any other factors, and early childhood inclusive education is also in place. Accordingly, social justice has been upheld in all ECE policy developments. In light of our analysis, we tend to support the Committee’s claim that this ‘free’ ECE policy is ‘practical and practicable’, as it can help achieve an equilibrium among the affordability, accessibility, accountability, sustainability and social justice of ECE. In our view, the policy is a fair one. In particular, we note some of the principles of the 3A2S framework as stated as the foundation for the development of the policy whose aim is described as: ‘To

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provide for a sustainable policy that respects the uniqueness of KG education in Hong Kong as well as the diverse needs of children, and to provide for equitable access to quality holistic KG education that promotes lifelong development of a person’ (Committee on Free Kindergarten Education, 2015, p. 23, emphasis added). This is a welcome indication that the educational authorities have accepted that accessibility, affordability, accountability, sustainability and social justice should be the criteria of policy development and evaluation. Now that this final proposal has gone through public consultation and has been announced by the chief executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), it will be important that the implementation of the policy and its effectiveness are systematically monitored.

Possible challenges for the implementation of THE FREE ECE Policy The Hong Kong government has decided to implement the free kindergarten education policy from the 2017/2018 school year. As analysed in the previous section, this controversial policy is expected to confront challenges during the course of implementation, especially in the very initial stages. One of the key challenges is likely to be that the increased budget will have to go through political scrutiny by the Legislation Council (LegCo), a process that is often confrontational and difficult. Although this new initiative could benefit most of the parents who are part of the voting population, the legislative members will not easily give it a green light. This is because the Government’s investment in kindergarten education will substantially increase from HK$3.3 billion (2015/2016) to about HK$6.7 billion in the 2017/2018 school year. And LegCo will naturally ask for accountability for this dramatic budget increase.

A second challenge is that the kindergarten operators and owners are likely to protest against this policy as the new salary scale proposed by the government will constitute a big increase to teachers’ salaries and consequently put financial pressure on those kindergartens with high rent and small enrolments. In addition, the recommended teacher:pupil ratio has been dramatically increased to 1:11; this means that kindergartens will have to employ more teachers and accordingly, increase their human resources bill. Of additional concern is that the total number of young children eligible for 2017/2018 kindergarten enrolment will be half of that of 2015/16, reflecting a dramatic drop in the birth rate in 2013/2014, when the number of newborns to mainlanders without residency in Hong Kong ‘declined to zero’. This means that some, if not many, kindergartens will have difficulties keeping up their enrolment and will eventually have to close. This will definitely trigger another political upheaval, and it is highly possible that LegCo will place the responsibility for the consequences on educational authorities. However, given that this is a totally privatised market, the government will claim that it is not responsible for any business failure. But LegCo (and others) will argue that the government created the conditions for a free market and, by introducing regulations and the new operating system, it interferes in that free market and hence impacts on the ability of different operators to survive or thrive. Third, it is proposed that the rental subsidy will be calculated based on that of NPMKs located in the public estates. But this is the lowest level of rentals, as the public estates are owned and run by the government which has been able to maintain rents at a stable level. Many kindergartens are renting space in commercial buildings and, as their rents go up, they have to charge extra fees to cover the rental expenditure. Consequently, although they would be joining the so-called ‘free kindergarten education’ system, these kindergartens will not be able to provide free education to the parents.

Free ECE in a completely privatised market

Fourth, although the government has decided to provide an additional subsidy for those eligible whole-day and long whole-day kindergartens, with the additional subsidy for each whole-day place set at 30% of the halfday unit subsidy, and that for each long wholeday place at 60% of the half-day unit subsidy, parents are unlikely to be satisfied. They will ask for totally and really ‘free’ kindergarten education for their children enrolled in those whole-day and long whole-day programmes. On the other side, the parents of children enrolled in half-day programmes will also challenge this ‘unfair’ policy, as their subsidy will be less than those of whole-day and long whole-day programmes. Last but not least, in the long term, the government will have to focus its attention and efforts on improving kindergarten premises and facilities, and exploring feasible measures to provide inexpensive and even free premises for kindergartens. Clearly, the ideal would be for government to provide free and suitable premises for all the kindergartens as this would truly be free quality kindergarten education. However, given that in Hong Kong land is in extremely short supply, and given the financial ramifications of free ECE, this campaign is likely to be a long-drawnout one, which really needs more creative ideas and innovative solutions.

Conclusion In summary, it would appear that in a totally privatised ECE market the HKSAR government appears to be doing its best to find ways to achieve its target of delivering free kindergarten education to all the families in the society. Although facing significant challenges and difficulties in policy implementation, the HKSAR government has achieved a policy which is marked by a practical balance among the principles of affordability, accessibility, accountability, sustainability and social justice of ECE (Li et  al., 2014). We argue that this

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3A2S framework should be the criteria of ECE policy development and evaluation. Moreover, as the first workable policy in Chinese societies, the implementation and future development of this brand new three-year free kindergarten education policy deserves further study and ongoing evaluation.

Note  1  The review is based on the Quality Assurance Framework (QAF) discussed later in the chapter.

References Cai, Y. Q., & Hai, Y. (2014). Free early childhood education in rural China: A case study of Ningshan. International Journal of Chinese Education, 3(2), 191–204. Committee on Free Kindergarten Education. (2015). Children First Right Start for All: Report of the Committee on Free Kindergarten Education. Hong Kong: Government Printer. Retrieved on 11 May 2016, from http://www.edb.gov.hk/attachment/en/edusystem/preprimary-kindergarten/kg-report/ Free-kg-report-201505-Eng.pdf Curriculum Development Council. (2006). Guide to the Pre-primary Curriculum. Hong Kong: Government Printer. Retrieved on 11 May 2016, from http://www.edb.gov.hk/en/ edusystem/primarysecondary/primary/index. html Education Bureau. (2015). Overview of kindergarten education in Hong Kong. Retrieved on 10 May 2016, from http://www.edb.gov. hk/en/edu-system/preprimary-kindergarten/ overview/index.html Education Bureau. (2016). Quality Assurance Mechanism. Retrieved on 10 May 2016, from http://www.edb.gov.hk/en/edu-system/ preprimary-­kindergarten/quality-assuranceframework Education Commission. (2000). Learning for life, learning through life: Reform proposals for the education system in Hong Kong. Hong Kong: Government Printer. Retrieved on 11 May 2016, from http://www.e-c.edu. hk/eng/reform/rf1.html

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Lau, M. M. Y. L., Li, H., & Leung, S. O. (2014). A multiple case study on the perceived impacts of the 15-year free education policy in Macau. International Journal of Chinese Education, 3(2), 223–249. Legislative Council. (February 16, 2011). Motion on ‘striving for 15-year free education’ moved by Hon CHEUNG Man-kwong. Retrieved 18 October 2013, from http:// www.legco.gov.hk/yr10-11/english/legco_ rpt/legco_motion02171-e.pdf Li, H. (2012). Free early childhood education. OMEP-HK Newsletter, 12(2), 13–18. Li, H., & Fong, R. W. (2014). Implementing 15-year free education in Hong Kong: Dilemmas and practical solutions. Hong Kong Teachers’ Centre Journal, 13, 1–14. Li, H., & Wang, D. (2014). Understanding the 15-Year free education policies in China: An online study of four cases. International Journal of Chinese Education, 3(2), 250–267. Li, H., Park, E. H., & Chen, J. (Eds.). (2016). Early childhood education policies in Asia Pacific: Advances in theory and practice. Singapore: Springer. Li, H., Wang, D., & Fong, R. W. (2014). Editor’s Note – Sound bites won’t work: Case studies of 15-year free education in Greater China.

International Journal of Chinese Education, 3(2), 161–170. Li, H., Wong, J. M. S., & Wang, X. C. (2008). Early childhood education voucher in Hong Kong: Perspectives from online communities. International Journal of Early Childhood, 40(2), 49–63. Li, H., Wong, J. M. S., & Wang, X. C. (2010). Affordability, accessibility, and accountability: Perceived impacts of the pre-primary education vouchers in Hong Kong. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 25(1), 125–138. Rao, N., & Li, H. (2009). Quality matters: Early childhood education policy in Hong Kong. Early Child Development and Care, 179(3), 233–245. School Education Statistics Section of EDB. (2015). Student Enrolment Statistics, 2014/15 (Kindergarten, Primary and Secondary Levels). Hong Kong: Government Printer. Retrieved on 10 May 2016, from http://www.edb.gov. hk/attachment/en/about-edb/publicationsstat/figures/Enrol_2014.pdf Student Finance Office of the Working Family and Student Financial Assistance Agency. (2015). Kindergarten and Child Care Centre Fee Remission Scheme (KCFRS). Hong Kong: Government Printer. Retrieved on 11 May 2016, from http://www.wfsfaa.gov.hk/sfo/en/ preprimary/kcfr/overview.htm

8 US Early Childhood Policy: Towards a More Coherent Early Childhood Policy in the US Jacqueline Jones

Early childhood policy in the US has emerged in large part as a response to shifting societal attitudes about where young children under the age of 5 years should be cared for – and by whom, the government’s response to the education of children living in poor families, and increasing parental need for a safe, nurturing, and affordable place to care for their children while they are at work. This chapter begins with a broad discussion of these changing attitudes and outlines the research base for some of the most significant federal and state early childhood intervention programs. The following sections outline the major federal, state, and city early childhood programs that have emerged over time in the context of the decentralized US education system. As policy and programs have developed, two challenges are highlighted: fragmentation of the system into multiple funding streams within and across the different levels of government and wide

variations in teacher qualification requirements. The last section, ‘Moving Towards Greater Coherence’, suggests actions that can support development of a more coherent, effective, and integrated US early childhood policy moving forward. In the US, several terms are used to describe programs that are intended to support the safety, well-being, learning, and development of young children from birth to age 8 years. For example, childcare often refers to programs that focus on providing a safe environment for young children while their parents are at work. However, the term ‘early learning’ has been used to emphasize that the program is designed to produce strong cognitive, social, and emotional outcomes for children. For the purposes of this discussion, the term ‘early childhood’ will be used to describe the range of programs that are referred to as childcare, daycare, early learning, and early learning and development.

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Shifting Policies In the beginning of the twentieth century, the goal of US early childhood policy was to keep young children at home and cared for by their mothers. Through legislation, such as the 1935 Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) act, funding was provided to allow poor, widowed, and unmarried women to remain in the home and raise their children. The underlying assumption was that it was in the child’s best interest to be cared for at home by their mother (Blank and Blum, 1997; Stevens, 2015). However, by 1938, almost 250,000 families were receiving ADC, and by 1956 the number had risen to almost 600,000 families. By 1965, 4.3 million people were receiving support from the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, which was an expansion of the ADC program to include two-parent families in which the father was unemployed (Tanner and DeHaven, 2010). These increases in the number of people receiving public assistance resulted in changes in public attitude and public policy toward the poor. Stevens (2015) reports that, ‘By 1995, 10 percent of all American mothers – including 7 percent of white mothers, 20 percent of Hispanic mothers, and 25 percent of African American mothers – were on AFDC’ (p. 20). Also contributing to concern about the rising numbers of citizens who were receiving public assistance was the great migration of over 4 million African Americans from the south to the north, midwest, and west between 1940 and 1970 (Colburn and Adler, 2001; Lemann, 1991; Wilkerson, 2010). Seeking jobs and escape from racial oppression, African Americans arrived in urban areas, as the need for unskilled labor began to decrease, and there were fewer work opportunities in cities (Blank and Blum, 1997). The early childhood policy agenda that provided direct payments to support women in poverty and widowed women so that they could remain at home and care for their children was challenged by the public’s

decreasing tolerance for cash payments to parents and greater focus on sending parents to work. Addressing these concerns, in 1996 President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act, which is commonly known as ‘Welfare to Work’. This law permitted federal welfare funds to be provided to each state in the form of a lump-sum block grant, known as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), and it placed significant restrictions on benefits (Office of Child Care, 2016). As poor parents were being encouraged to go to work, an additional societal and attitudinal change contributed to the increased need for early childhood programs outside the home. During World War II, women began to enter the paid workforce in large numbers, and they needed care for their children while they were working (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2009). This trend continued into the twenty-first century. Ruhm (2011) reported that, ‘Sixty percent of mothers with children under the age of six worked in 2008 compared with 33 percent in 1975’ (p. 38). However, keeping children safe was not going to be sufficient. A body of research was emerging that strongly suggested that these programs should also take on the responsibility of preparing children, especially poor children, for school success.

The Research Basis for the Programs for Children in Poverty There was also growing concern in the US that poor children and children of color were at a higher risk for difficulties in school and in life than their wealthier, white peers. In his 1964 State of the Union Address, President Lyndon Johnson placed a national focus on eliminating poverty in the US by launching a ‘war on poverty’. During the 1960s and 1970s, two carefully designed and wellimplemented early childhood interventions

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demonstrated the potential for long-term positive impacts for poor and minority children and shaped the policy discussion around these intervention programs for years to come.

Perry Preschool Program From 1962 through 1967 the HighScope Perry Preschool study provided high-quality preschool education to 3- and 4-year-old African American children who were living in poverty and assessed to be at high risk of school failure. Lead by David Weikart of the HighScope Educational Research Foundation and staff in the Ypsilanti, Michigan school district, the program was designed to help poor children avoid school failure and related social problems. Of the sample of 123 children, 58 were assigned to a treatment group that attended a preschool program, and the 65 children in the control group attended no preschool program. Randomly assigning participants into the control and treatment groups allowed the researchers to conclude that differences between the two groups were a result of participation in the preschool program. Data were collected annually on both groups from ages 3 through 11 and again at ages 14, 15, 19, 27, and 40. Overall, the study found that adults at age 40 who participated in the Perry Preschool program had higher earnings, were more likely to hold a job, had committed fewer crimes, and were more likely to have graduated from high school than adults who did not have a high-quality preschool experience (Heckman et al., 2010; Schweinhart, et al., 2005). It should be noted that the program was implemented by teachers who had earned bachelor’s degrees and teaching certification in education. In addition, the teachers in the Perry Preschool study were certified to teach in elementary, early childhood, and special education (Barnett, 2004).

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The Abecedarian Project The second study known as the Carolina Abecedarian Project provided children from infancy through age 5 with a full-time, highquality educational intervention in a childcare setting. The participants consisted of a sample of children born between 1972 and 1977 whose families were living in poverty. The children were randomly assigned, as infants, to either the early educational intervention group or to the control group. Each child had an individualized program of educational ‘games’ that were incorporated into the day. These activities focused on social, emotional, and cognitive areas of development, with an emphasis on language. Researchers monitored children’s progress with follow-up studies conducted at ages 12, 15, 21, 30, and 35. Positive impacts included higher reading and math scores, higher rates of college enrollment, and later childbearing compared to the control group (Campbell and Ramey, 2010; Campbell et  al., 2008; Shaw, 2016). Some teachers in the Abecedarian Project held master’s and bachelor’s degrees; others had demonstrated skills and competencies as teachers of young children in lieu of formal qualifications (Barnett, 2004). As these two landmark studies reported their immediate findings and the results of their longterm follow-up studies, the data provided fuel for ongoing advocacy in the US supporting the importance of high-quality programs. As early childhood advocacy groups sought funds to increase access to programs operated outside of the home, they used the results of the Perry Preschool program and the Abecedarian Project to describe the potential long-term benefits of early childhood programs and to argue for increased federal, state, and local funding. These two studies remain the standard by which the effectiveness of early childhood programs is judged. However, many of the intervention programs that followed differed from these landmark studies and did not require the

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teacher qualifications and competencies that were part of the design of the Perry Preschool and Abecedarian projects.

Legacy of the Early Programs Over time a significant body of evidence was established to suggest that children living in poor and low-income families were more likely to be at risk for difficulties in school than those whose families have greater access to financial resources. Analysis of data from the 2010–11 Kindergarten Class of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (Mulligan, Hastedt, and McCarroll, 2012), a sample of over 18,000 children entering kindergarten, revealed that scores on reading and math assessments were lowest for first-time kindergartners in households with incomes below the federal poverty level and highest for those in households with incomes at or above 200 percent of the federal poverty level.1 In the areas of reading and math, scores increased with parental education level. This study aligns with other long-standing data that reveal a connection between low levels of achievement and poverty (Duncan and Murane, 2011; Hart and Risley, 1995; Kirsch and Braun, 2016). Additional studies built upon the Perry Preschool and Abecedarian data to demonstrate the positive impacts of high-quality early childhood programs (Weiland and Yoshikawa, 2013; Yoshikawa, Weiland et al., 2013). For children whose families were living in poverty, early childhood programs served as both places where they could be cared for while their parents were working and as important interventions that could buffer them against the harmful consequences of poverty and prepare them to be successful in school and in life. However, over time, as the cost of early childhood programs increased, policy included a focus on programs that might benefit children across economic levels, including families who were not technically poor, but were increasingly unable to afford the cost of care for their children outside of the

home. The movement for universal preschool is an example (Friedman-Krauss, Barnett, & Nores, 2016). Early childhood advocates argued that all children, particularly 4-yearolds, regardless of the family’s economic circumstance, should have access to free high-quality early childhood programs that could prepare them for success in school and in life.

Developing Early Childhood Programs A series of programs were developed in the US in response to concerns regarding the educational achievement of children in poor families and the childcare needs of working mothers. This section focuses on four of the most significant federal programs designed to support young children and their families and outlines a sample of state and city initiatives. However, two major challenges have resulted from the development of early childhood policy at the federal, state and city levels: a fragmented early childhood system that is funded through a variety of programs, and an early childhood workforce that has wide variations in teacher competencies. At the federal level, programs intended to support young children and their families are funded through multiple programs that are operated across several different government agencies. The result is variability in program goals, the age group served, and teacher qualification requirements. This fragmented system has implications for state- and locallyfunded programs, as will be described later in a vignette. The second challenge is a direct result of a lack of consistency in teacher qualifications across the federal, state, and local programs. The early childhood workforce is uneven in competence and has not received the compensation and support necessary to build and maintain a highly skilled workforce of early childhood professionals, such as teachers, administrators, coaches, and

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master teachers (Whitebook, Phillips, and Howes, 2014). It is important to note that the US operates a decentralized education system in which most of the authority for education resides at the local level. The local communities operate schools, implement and enforce state laws and policies, develop and implement their own educational policies, hire and supervise professional teaching staffs, and raise money to pay for schools (US Department of Education, 2008). States have direct oversight of most aspects of education at all levels. The states set educational standards and often function in a similar manner as ministries of education in countries with centralized systems. Education is typically the most expensive item in the state budget. The states’ responsibilities include funding public education and licensing schools, higher education institutions, teachers, and any persons working in regulated professions. However, the US federal government has limited direct authority over education. The Education Department serves as the federal government’s lead education agency, and some responsibilities include administering federal programs that are legislated and funded by Congress; exercising leadership to promote educational policies; enforcing federal civil rights laws related to education; and providing information and statistics about education at the national and international levels. It is outside of the authority of the federal government to institute national standards, a national curriculum, or a national test (US Education Department, 2008). Moreover, the overall federal contribution to the country’s kindergarten through grade 12 (K-12) education system, in which children are typically enrolled from age 5 through age 17, amounts to less than 10 percent of the total K-12 budget. Nonetheless, the US federal government has played a significant role in funding and setting regulatory criteria for a number of the major US early childhood programs intended to support children under 5 years of age. Federal early childhood programs

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are operated primarily across the Education Department and the Department of Health and Human Services. Within and across these agencies, the programs vary in goals, eligibility requirements, and the age range of children served.

Federal Programs The major federal programs discussed in this chapter are Head Start and Early Head Start, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), and the Child Care Development Block Grant (CCDBG) (Figure 8.1). A comprehensive overview of the various funding streams shows the many sources from which early childhood education and care programs have been funded.

Head Start and Early Head Start In 1965, as part of President Johnson’s war on poverty, the US federal government instituted the Head Start program. Also known as Project Head Start, the initiative was designed to provide comprehensive health, nutrition, education, and parent involvement services to low-income children and their families. Originally conceived as a summer program to prepare children for kindergarten, it soon became clear that a 6-week intervention program could not make up for the impact of years of poverty in the first few years of life. Many Head Start programs began to operate for the entire length of the school year. Administered by the US Department of Health and Human Services, federal funds flow directly from the federal government to public or private communitybased organizations. In 1994 the Early Head Start program was created to serve infants and toddlers from birth to age 3 (Lombardi and Bogle, 2004).

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Head Start/ Early Head Start

Private providers

State-funded programs

Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)

Child Care Development Block Grant (CCDBG)

Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)

Figure 8.1 Early childhood funding streams

Head Start is perhaps the most studied of the federal early childhood programs with periodic congressional questions as to its effectiveness. In 2010, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released the results of a large-scale study of the impact of Head Start programs across the country (US Department of Health and Human Services, 2010). The results were mixed, and HHS imposed stronger accountability regulations on early childhood programs that were funded with Head Start dollars. However, in a study of the long-term impact of a mature local program, the Tulsa, Oklahoma, Community Action Project (CAP) Head Start program, provided evidence of Head Start’s positive impacts through middle school, primarily through 8th grade (approximately age 13 years). Children who had attended the CAP Head Start program and were enrolled in the Tulsa Public Schools (TPS) in kindergarten were compared to children who had also attended TPS kindergarten but had not attended the CAP Head Start or the TPS pre-K program as 4-year-olds. The researchers concluded that attendance in the Tulsa CAP Head Start program produced significant positive effects on achievement test scores in mathematics and on both grade retention and chronic absenteeism for middle-school students overall. In addition, positive effects were reported for girls on grade

retention and chronic absenteeism (Phillips, Gormley, and Anderson, 2016).

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) Enacted in 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), is administered by the US Education Department and serves as another remnant of the war on poverty. Through Title 1 of ESEA, flexible funding is provided to high-poverty school districts and schools. These funds may be used for staff salaries, teacher professional development, program materials, extendedtime programs and other strategies that have the potential to raise student achievement. In the US, school districts generally provide free public elementary education for children age 5 years and above. Although they are not required to do so, school districts may use ESEA funds to support programs for children under 5 years of age (US Department of Education, 2012).

Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) Enacted in 1975, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is a US

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federal law that regulates how states and public agencies provide early intervention, special education, and other relevant services to children with disabilities. Administered by the US Department of Education, Part B of IDEA covers assistance for the education of all children with disabilities aged 3 to 21 years. Part C of the law covers infants and toddlers with disabilities, including children from birth to age 2. This law was intended to ensure that children with disabilities receive a free and appropriate public education, the same as their typically developing peers.

Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) Created in 1990, this funding was designed to provide states with the opportunity to increase the availability, affordability, and quality of early childhood services. Under specific regulations, Native American tribes may also access these funds. The program was designed to help low-income working parents gain access to these services, which would otherwise be unaffordable to them. Under this legislation, funds go directly to states as formula block grants to be used to provide low-income working families with subsidies, typically in the form of vouchers that may be used to pay for programs that are selected by the family. Administered by the US Department of Health and Human Services, CCDBG is the primary source of federal funding that is dedicated solely to providing early childhood subsidies to lowincome working and welfare families for children from birth to age 13. The 2014 Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) Act reauthorization was intended to continue to support working parents and to also raise the level of program quality.

Other Federal Programs During the administration of President Barack Obama (2009–2017) early childhood

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education took a prominent role in federal policy and spending. Significant efforts were made to increase access to early childhood education programs, enhance the quality of early experiences for young children, and promote stronger coordination across programs and across federal agencies. In an attempt to stimulate the economy that had been battered by the economic downturn of 2008, President Obama signed the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) in 2009 that provided $100 ­billion to early childhood initiatives (Dichter, 2016). Competitive grant programs such as the Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC) helped support stronger and more coordinated state early childhood systems. States applying for this competitive grant program were asked to review the full range of early childhood funding across their state and work towards better coordination of that funding and a higher level of program quality (Federal Register, August 26, 2011). Also at the federal level, the US Secretaries of Education and Health and Human Services authorized the creation of an Interagency Policy Board (IPB) to develop policy recommendations and improve the coordination and quality of early childhood programs across the two departments. Members of the IPB included the heads of the major federal agencies that implement the programs described in this chapter: Head Start and Early Head Start, Elementary and Secondary Education Act, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and Child Care Development Block Grant (Dichter, 2016).

State-Funded Early Childhood Programs Beyond the various streams of funding provided by the federal government, increasing numbers of states have begun to use their own resources to support early childhood programs, with the primary focus on

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preschool programs for 4-year-olds. The Pew Charitable Trust, an independent non-profit, non-governmental organization, made a 10-year commitment, from 2001 through 2010, to promote a national early childhood campaign. Known as Pre-K Now, the initiative was intended to increase public awareness about the importance of high-quality early childhood programs for 4-year-olds and to build a strong research base through Pew’s support of the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) at Rutgers University (Pew Center on the States, 2011). The 2001–2002 school year marked the beginning of NIEER’s annual state-by-state report of data on the progress of state-funded preschool programs. In the State Preschool Yearbook each state was ranked along a set of 10 quality indicators (Table  8.1) (Barnett et al., 2016, p. 10). For the 2014–2015 school year the State Preschool Yearbook reported that there appeared to be increases in state funding for preschool programs after the great recession that began in 2008 and an overall increase in enrollment and in the number of states that met the Yearbook’s 10 benchmarks for minimum quality standards. Although NIEER reported that per child spending also increased in 2014–2015, the picture was mixed for individual states. The Yearbook authors cautioned: not all states moved forward. Some even moved backwards, including two of the nation’s most

populous states, Texas and Florida. For the nation as a whole, this means that access to a high-quality preschool program remained highly unequal, and this situation is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future unless many more states follow the leaders. (Barnett et al., 2016, p. 5)

However, considerable work remains to be done at the state level. As of 2015, eight states (Idaho, Indiana, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming) were not offering preschool programs, and only 29 percent of 4-year-olds and approximately 5 percent of 3-year-olds were enrolled in state-funded preschool programs in 2014–2015 (Barnett et al., 2016).

City-Funded Early Childhood Programs In addition to federal- and state-funded early childhood programs, a number of US cities, such as San Antonio, Texas; Boston, Massachusetts; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and New York City, have invested in preschool initiatives.

Boston, Massachusetts With a focus on a research-based curriculum, well-prepared teachers, and ongoing coaching for teachers, the Boston Public School’s (BPS) preschool program has received national attention for achieving significant

Table 8.1 National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) 10 Quality Standards 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Comprehensive early learning standards Lead teachers with a BA degree Teachers with specialized training in pre-school Assistant teacher degree holding a Child Development Associate certification (CDA) or equivalent Teacher in-service: at least 15 hours/year of professional learning Maximum class size of 20 or lower Staff–child ratio of 1:10 or better Screening/referral: vision, hearing, health; and at least one support service Meals served to children: at least one meal per day Monitoring of programs: at least one site visit every five years

Source: Barnett et al., 2016, p. 10

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learning outcomes. A study conducted by researchers from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, assessed learning outcomes in a racially, economically, and linguistically diverse group of just over 2,000 preschool children who were enrolled during the 2008–2009 academic year. The program was reported to have made moderate to large impacts on children’s language, literacy, numeracy and mathematics skills, and small impacts on children’s executive functioning (e.g. the ability to plan, organize, and perform tasks) and a measure of emotion recognition (e.g. the ability to identify others’ emotions) (Weiland and Yoshikawa, 2013). Weiland and Yoshikawa (2013, p. 2116) noted that a key ingredient in Boston’s program is the quality of the educators:

full-day, high-quality preschool. In the twoyear timeframe across the 2014–15 and 2015–16 school years, enrollment in full-day pre-K in New York increased from 19,287 to 68,647 4-year-olds. City officials reported that enrollment was high across every community, with the highest participation among low-income families (Office of the Mayor of the City of New York, 2014). Although these various funding streams have provided support for millions of young children and their families, they have also resulted in conflicting multiple regulatory systems, separate technical assistance systems, disconnected research agendas, overlapping segmentation of the populations to be served, and wide variability in state certifications (Figure 8.2).

All BPS prekindergarten teachers are subject to the same educational requirements and pay scale as K-12 teachers. All prekindergarten teachers must have at least a BA and must obtain a master’s degree within 5 years. Placing the Boston Public school’s teacher requirements within the national context, in 2010, 27 of 40 states required a BA for teachers in state-funded prekindergarten programs.

Vignette: Some Challenges to Working Within Multiple Funding Streams Over time, states and cities have funded a variety of services that fall under the umbrella term of preschool. However, unless state and local education budgets were supplemented with additional resources, few states and cities could fully fund high-quality programs

New York City Pre-K for All is New York City’s initiative to provide every 4-year-old with access to free,

PreK-3rd Early Elementary Preschool Infants & Toddlers Birth

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Figure 8.2  Birth through 8 continuum

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in which early childhood teachers are well prepared, and appropriately compensated. In many cases, in order to meet the cost of highquality programs for young children and their families, state- and locally-supported programs have operated by combining federal, state, and local funds. The complexity of this task is demonstrated in the example that follows. In 1998, the New Jersey Supreme Court mandated full-day preschool programs for all 3- and 4-year-old children in 31 of the poorest school districts in the State, known as Abbott Districts at the time of the court order. Under the court’s rulings and the regulations of the New Jersey Department of Education (NJDOE), all 3- and 4-yearold children, in each of the Abbott Districts, were entitled to attend a high-quality preschool program (MacInnes, 2009). In order to accommodate all the children in the 31 districts, New Jersey’s program implemented a mixed delivery system that used funding, personnel, and space, from the school districts, private providers, and Head Start programs in addition to state funds. Yet, the piecemeal system of federal funding outlined above had a direct impact on the ability of many community-based programs to collaborate with the school district and state. As a hypothetical example, assume that the Yellow Bird Center, located in one of the Abbott school districts, has been awarded a Head Start grant from the federal government. However, to improve the quality of their program and increase the skills, competencies and compensation of their teachers, the center directors would like to contract with the local school district to become part of the state-funded preschool initiative. They must sign a contract with the school district and agree to implement a set of program quality standards that have been outlined by the NJDOE. The advantage for the Yellow Bird Center is the possibility of receiving thousands of additional dollars per child, support for their teachers to earn the

required bachelor’s degrees and state certification, and salary parity with the public school teachers in the district’s K-12 system. However, the Yellow Bird Center would also continue to be required to adhere to the regulations of its grant with the federal Office of Head Start. The challenge for the Yellow Bird Center is that the Office of Head Start and the NJDOE operate under different program standards for teacher qualifications, teacher/child ratio, and criteria regarding physical space, etc: • Head Start required that half the teachers must hold a bachelor’s degree by 2013, while the NJDOE required that all lead teachers hold a bachelor’s and P-3 certification in order to receive comparable pay with public school teachers. • Head Start required a maximum of 20 children in a class; NJ required a maximum of 15 children. • The evaluation and auditing systems implemented by the Office of Head Start and NJDOE differed in a manner that could result in the Yellow Bird Center passing one audit and not the other. In essence, in order to raise the quality of its programs and enhance the skills of its teachers, the Yellow Bird Center would be responsible for two sets of program criteria.

In addition, the NJDOE’s funds covered a six-hour day, but funding for the two hours before and after the program was the domain of a different state agency. The center would need to negotiate separately with New Jersey’s Department of Human Services, which administered funds from the state’s portion of the federally-funded Child Care Development Block Grant (CCDBG) for funds to support the additional four hours that would be critical for working parents. There was also the risk that some of the teachers in the Yellow Bird Center who did not have the bachelor’s degree and certification would not be willing or able to return to school and earn these required ­qualifications – even if state funds were covering the costs. This could result in some teachers in the same center receiving pay comparable to their public school peers, while other teachers, with

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no four-year college degree but with similar or more experience, receive significantly lower compensation. The potential morale issues needed to be considered. With both the federal Office of Head Start and the NJDOE encouraging Head Start programs to collaborate with their local school districts to provide high-quality services to children most in need, the conflicting regulations presented a significant challenge. What appeared to be an extraordinary opportunity for the Yellow Bird Center, eventually resulted in a difficult decision.

The Early Childhood Workforce The competence of early childhood teachers and administrators remains a consistently important factor in the quality and effectiveness of interventions for young children (Bueno, Darling-Hammond, & Gonzales, 2010). Yet the patchwork of early childhood programs, each with their own changing set of teacher qualifications, has resulted in significant variations in teacher preparation and competencies. In the US, there are two widely recognized national early childhood certifications: the Child Development Associate (CDA) Credential and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) certification recognize novice and expert teaching, respectively. The CDA is an entry-level early childhood credential. Issued by the Council for Professional Recognition, individuals may earn a CDA credential to work with young children in center-based preschool, home-based family childcare, center-based infant/toddler, and home visitor settings. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards issues a nationally recognized certification for accomplished teaching in 25 areas, including early childhood. Although these certifications are widely accepted, the US has no ‘nationally agreed upon’ set of competencies that define a continuum of early childhood professional roles

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and the competencies required for each of those roles.

Teacher Qualification Requirements and Federal Programs Each of the federally funded programs discussed earlier in this chapter has their own set of teacher qualifications that may be changed with each reauthorization of the legislation.

Head Start teacher qualifications There have been continued efforts to enhance the quality of Head Start programs, and increase positive outcomes for children. One such attempt was made when the US Department of Health and Human Services raised the qualifications for the early childhood professionals working in Head Start programs. The Improving Head Start for School Readiness Act of 2007 contained several provisions intended to strengthen the program’s quality. These included aligning Head Start school readiness goals with state early learning standards and requiring higher qualifications for the Head Start teachers and teaching assistants. As of September 30, 2013, 50 percent of Head Start teachers were required to have a bachelor/advanced degree in early childhood education; or a bachelor/ advanced degree and coursework equivalent to a major in a related field, and preschool teaching experience. In addition, 50 percent of Head Start teaching assistants were required to have a Child Development Associate (CDA) credential or be enrolled in a program leading to an associate (a 2-year college program) degree or bachelor’s degree; or be enrolled in a CDA program to be completed within two years. Early Head Start teachers, who work with infants and toddlers, needed to have a CDA credential and be trained (or have completed equivalent coursework) in early childhood development

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(US Department of Health and Human Services, 2008).

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) When this act was reauthorized in December 2015 and renamed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), a great deal of authority for teacher quality and accountability was returned to the states. The law requires that teachers need to meet the licensing requirements of the state in which they are employed.

Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA) The 2015 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act also amended the teacher requirements under the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA), and the authority for setting criteria for teacher certification, licensing, and evaluation was returned to the states. However, the amendments require that a person employed as a special education teacher in elementary school, middle school, or secondary school must: 1) have obtained full certification as a special education teacher (including certification obtained through alternative routes to certification), or passed the state special education teacher licensing examination and hold a license to teach in the state as a special education teacher; 2) not have had special education certification or licensure requirements waived on an emergency, temporary, or provisional basis; and 3) hold at least a bachelor’s degree.

Child Care Development Block Grant (CCDBG) The Child Care Development Block Grant (CCDBG) Act of 2014 set clear limits on the role of the federal government in setting teacher qualifications. Referring to the US Secretary of Health and Human Services, the law stated that, ‘The Secretary shall not require credential acquisition, but the State may require a credential for providers. Sec.

658E(2)(G)’. Although the CCDBG Act of 2014 did not set specific educational or certification qualifications for childcare providers, it did outline some requirements for states. For example, states were required to set annual training requirements and provide professional development activities that would reflect the most current research and best practices in child development. In addition, participants could be encouraged to enroll in post-secondary education programs. Given the ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity of young children in the US, states were expected to make efforts to prepare childcare staff to work with a variety of age groups, English learners, and children with disabilities (Matthews et al., 2015).

Teacher qualification requirements within state programs Each state has designed a set of teacher qualifications that outline the requirements that teachers must meet if they are to be licensed to work in that state. Of the 57 statefunded pre-K initiatives, 33 states require the lead teacher to have a bachelor’s degree, and 47 require specialized training in preschool education. For example, Arizona requires 12 credit hours in early childhood education or the CDA certification, Colorado requires the CDA, and Delaware, Ohio, and the state of Washington require a two-year college degree (Barnett et al., 2016). Achieving some consensus regarding early childhood teacher qualifications, competencies, and compensation could provide an opportunity for greater coordination and improved program quality across all funding sources.

Towards Greater Coherence As US policymakers have worked to address the needs of young children and their families, a variety of federal, state, and local programs have been developed in the absence

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of a consistent set of program goals, a clear definition for program quality, and unified requirements for teacher qualifications across a continuum of professional roles. As early childhood programs emerged, so have some unintended consequences that have a potential negative impact on program implementation and on the quality of the early childhood workforce. While additional funding is certainly needed to increase the numbers of children and families who receive highquality services, additional funding alone will not bring coherence to US policies and programs for young children. This work could benefit from what Dr Martin Luther King called, in a 1967 speech, a ‘radical revolution of values’ in which people take priority over things. US policy has a chance to bring about a better alignment of programs and stronger positive impacts for children and families if policy could be guided by a new federal, state, and city commitment that focuses more on the children and families for whom the programs were designed than on the administrative structures and regulations that currently exist. Such a commitment to children and families should implement three approaches: (1) realign the early childhood funding streams with an emphasis on enhancing access to high-quality programs; (2) professionalize the workforce so that early childhood professionals are prepared, supported, and compensated in a manner that will allow them to provide services to young children that are of the highest quality; and (3) develop a more comprehensive early childhood policy that acknowledges the role of poverty in young children’s growth and development and integrates early childhood programs with paid parental leave and financial incentives for families with children.

Realign the Early Childhood Funding Streams Regardless of the goodwill of the leadership at the local, state or federal levels, the US

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early childhood system remains in need of greater coordination across the federal funding streams and stronger alignment across federal, state, and local levels of government, such as Head Start and state-funded programs. Overall, early childhood programs continue to vary greatly in program standards and components, and the qualifications, competencies, and compensation for early childhood professionals. Head Start, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Individuals with Disabilities Act, and the Child Care Development Block Grant should, at the very least, operate within a common definition of program quality, have explicit, realistic, and aligned goals for young children, and require a common set of teacher qualifications. Serious consideration should be given to placing early childhood programs within a single government agency that is dedicated to the coordination of early childhood programs and services, and the implementation of a seamless continuum of services for children and families. Since these programs currently have insufficient funding to deliver high-quality programs to all the young children and families who are in need, such an effort should not be used as an attempt to decrease spending for early childhood programs. Rather, strong and informed leadership will be needed to make real change that will use this alignment effort as an opportunity to put people first and enhance the quality and accessibility of services.

Professionalize the Early Childhood Workforce During the administration of President Barack Obama, public policy moved towards a greater focus on improving program quality by taking a closer look at early childhood professionals. In 2016 the federal departments of Education and Health and Human Services issued a joint paper, High-Quality Early Learning Settings Depend on a

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High-Quality Workforce: Low Compensation Undermines Quality, which highlighted the disparities in compensation between early childhood professionals and their public school peers and made the argument for parity of compensation (US Department of Health and Human Resources and US Department of Education, 2016). In another effort to better understand the needs of the early childhood professionals, the two federal agencies joined a group of philanthropic organizations to fund a National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine study of the early childhood workforce (Institute of Medicine, 2015). An interdisciplinary committee of experts was asked to re-envision the early childhood workforce, by using the current science of child development as the basis for proposing a comprehensive set of teacher competencies. The committee made recommendations for the knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary for caregivers and practitioners in five areas: core knowledge, practices to help children learn, working with diverse populations of children, developing and using partnerships, and continuously improving the quality of practice. In arguing for the importance of a well-prepared, wellcompensated, and well-supported workforce, the committee cautioned that young children face negative consequences when professionals do not have the necessary knowledge, skills, and supports to be successful: ‘Adults who are under-informed, underprepared, or subject to chronic stress themselves may contribute to children’s experience of adversity and stress and undermine their development and learning’ (Institute of Medicine, 2015). As an outgrowth of the National Academies report, several early childhood professional organizations began efforts to develop a nationally agreed upon set of competencies for early childhood professionals that can be accepted by the states (Goffin, 2013; NAEYC, 2016). This work could have significant potential to begin to professionalize the field of early childhood, raise program quality, decrease the variability in program quality, and ultimately

produce stronger outcomes for young children. The report of the National Academy of Sciences, along with efforts by early childhood professional organizations to define the continuum of early childhood professional roles and adopt a nationally agreed upon set of competencies, position the US to begin serious efforts towards a true professionalization of the early childhood workforce and towards building a competent, supported, well-compensated cadre of teachers.

Conceptualize a More Comprehensive Early Childhood Policy Although the early childhood programs discussed above often serve the same populations of children and families, they exist relatively independently of each other and are not strongly connected to other strategies that can support young children and their families, such as parental leave policies and financial benefits to those with children (Waldfogel, 2006). While significant efforts have been made to develop and implement programs that support the well-being of poor and low-income families, poverty still exists in the US. According to the National Center for Children in Poverty (Jiang, Ekono, & Skinner, 2016), in 2014 nearly one-half of the young children in the US who were under 6 years of age lived in families considered to be low income or below. Of the 23 million under-6-year-olds, 47 percent (10.9 million) live in low-income families. Of these children, 24 percent (5.5 million) live in poor families. Given the high percentage of children living in poverty in the twenty-first century, strategies have been used to provide support directly to families. For example, the Earned Income Tax Credit provides a tax credit to poor and low-income working families with children. Although this tax credit is helpful to low-income families, it is of little benefit to families who do not have sufficient income

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to be eligible to pay taxes in order to receive the tax credit. Those with higher incomes receive a higher credit (Blank and Blum, 1997; Lamy, 2013; Waldfogel, 2006). In addition, a report from Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child, From Best Practices to Breakthrough Impacts: A Science-Based Approach to Building a More Promising Future for Young Children and Families, argues for increased intervention at the sources of significant stress for young children and their families. The authors assert that, The greatest impacts on the largest number of people would thus be achieved by successfully targeted efforts, at a community or societal level, that focus on mitigating the effects of poverty, violence, discrimination, and other threats to wellbeing. On an individual basis (which is how most early childhood programs are organized), greater impacts are more likely when services build on existing resources and strengths, address identified needs, promote warm and responsive caregiving, and strengthen the ability of parents and other caregivers to scaffold the development of young children’s adaptive capabilities. (Center on the Developing Child, 2016, p. 22)

As the US develops public policies that can provide cash benefits to those with children, it is essential to consider the needs of families living in poverty and the strategies that can provide meaningful support to families with children. Additional efforts such as preparing parents for jobs that actually exist and pay a living wage, debt reduction, and assisting families to enhance their financial literacy skills may have greater impact when they are coordinated with high-quality early childhood programs and paid parental leave policies. At the beginning of a child’s life, many families need support to be able to bond with their infants and establish the strong and secure relationships that are essential for healthy development (Shonkoff and Phillips, 2000). While many developed countries offer a variety of forms of paid parental or family leave, the US has no such national policy. In general, the US differs from other developed

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countries in providing fewer supports in the length of leave, replacement of wages, and funding from sources other than individual employers (Waldfogel, 2006). However, the need for some type of family leave was acknowledged in 1993 when President Bill Clinton signed the Family and Medical Leave Act (Federal Register, 2015). This legislation required employers with more than 50 employees to provide unpaid leave for serious health conditions, to care for a sick family member, or to care for a newborn or adopted child. With some restrictions, the legislation provided 12 weeks of job-protected, but unpaid, parental leave. Paid family leave took on particular importance with the 2015 report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics which indicated that, in households that were maintained by the mother and in which marital status was reported as widowed, divorced, separated, or married but living apart from their spouse, 70.8 percent of the mothers were employed (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2016). Although no national policy of paid parental leave exists, states and cities across the US have begun to address this issue on their own. For example, in 2016 Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York signed the Paid Leave Law, which adopted a 12-week paid family leave policy for New York employees (Lewis and Zolla, 2016). Also in 2016, San Francisco, California became the first city in the US to approve six weeks of fully-paid leave for new parents who have given birth to or adopted a child (Fuller, 2016).

Conclusion US early childhood policy has responded to shifts in societal attitudes that have moved from supporting poor mothers so that they could care for their children at home, to the implementation of a variety of early childhood programs that are operated outside of the home, and to increased discussion of paid

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family leave so that working parents from all economic levels can remain at home with their young children. Overall, a more comprehensive and effective US early childhood policy would employ strategies to leverage parental leave, cash benefits, and early childhood programs in a more integrated manner in order to provide a seamless set of services to children and families. For poor and lowincome families, these policies must be implemented in the context of lifting families out of poverty and enabling them to enter the workforce and earn wages sufficient to enjoy a basic quality of life.

Note  1  There are clear definitions for poverty and lowincome status. The 2016 federal poverty guidelines for the states are derived from the Census Bureau’s most current official poverty thresholds. An individual with an annual income of $11,880 or less, a family of two with an annual income of $16,020 or less or a family of four with an income of $24,300 or less fit within the classification of poor. The classification of low income is defined as 200% of the poverty guidelines (Federal Register, 2016).

References Barnett, W. S. (2004). Better Teachers, Better Preschools: Student Achievement Linked to Teacher Qualifications. New Brunswick, NJ: National Institute for Early Education Research. Barnett, W. S., Friedman-Krauss, A. H., Gomez, R. E., Horowitz, M., Weisenfeld, G. G., Brown, K. C., & Squires, J. H. (2016). The State of Preschool 2015: State Preschool Yearbook. New Brunswick, NJ: National Institute for Early Education Research. Blank, S. W. & Blum, B. B. (1997). A brief history of work expectations for welfare mothers. The Future of Children, 7(1), 28–38. Bueno, M., Darling-Hammond, L., & Gonzales, D. (2010). A Matter of Degrees: Preparing Teachers for the Pre-K Classroom. Washington, DC: The Pew Center on the States.

Bureau of Labor Statistics (April 22, 2016) Employment Characteristics of Families – 2015. www.bls.gov/cps. Retrieved from https://data.bls.gov/search/query/results?cx= 013738036195919377644%3A6ih0hfrgl50 &q=Employment+Characteristics+of+Famil ies+-+2015 Campbell, F. A., & Ramey, C. T. (2010). The Abecedarian Project. In A. J. Reynolds, A. Rolnick, M. M. Englund & J. Temple (Eds.). Cost effective programs in children’s first decade: A human capital integration (pp. 76–95). New York: Cambridge University Press. Campbell, F. A., Wasik, B. H., Pungello, E. P., Burchinal, M. R., Kainz, K., Barbarin, O., Sparling, J. J., & Ramey, C. T. (2008). Young Adult Outcomes from the Abecedarian and CARE Early Childhood Educational Interventions. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 23, 452–466. Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University (2016). From Best Practices to Breakthrough Impacts: A Science-Based Approach to Building a More Promising Future for Young Children and Families. Retrieved from http://www.developingchild. harvard.edu Colburn, D. R. and Adler, J. S. (Eds.) (2001). African-American Mayors: Race, Politics, and the American City. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Dichter, H. (Ed.) (2016). Rising to the Challenge: Building Effective Systems for Young Children and Families, A BUILD E-Book. Duncan, G. & Murane, R. (2011). Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances. New York: The Russell Sage Foundation. Federal Register. (Monday, January 25, 2016). Annual Update of the HHS Poverty Guidelines. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. 81(15): 4036. Federal Register. (Wednesday, February 25, 2015). Final rule. Definition of Spouse Under the Family and Medical Leave. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. 80(37): 9989 10001. Federal Register. (Friday, August 26, 2011). Applications for New Awards; Race to the Top – Early Learning Challenge. 76(166): 53564–53594.

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Friedman-Krauss, A., Barnett, W. S., & Nores, M. (2016). How Much Can High-Quality Universal Pre-K Reduce Achievement Gaps? Washington, DC: Center for American Progress. Fuller, T. (April 5, 2016). San Francisco approves paid parental leave. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes. com/2016/04/06/us/san-francisco-approvesfully-paid-paternal-leave.html?_r=0 Goffin, S. G. (2013). Early Childhood Education for a New Era: Leading for Our Profession. New York: Teachers College Press Hart, B., & Risley, T. R. (1995). Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experiences of Young American Children. Baltimore, MD, Brookes Publishing. Heckman, J., Moon, S., Pinto, R., Savelyev, P., & Yavitz, A. (2010). The rate of return to the HighScope Perry Preschool Program. Journal of Public Economics, 94(1–2), 114–128. Institute of Medicine (IOM) and National. Research Council (NRC). (2015). Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth through age 8: A Unifying Foundation. Washington, DC: The National A ­ cademies Press. Jiang, Y., Ekono, M., & Skinner, C. (2016). Basic Facts about Low-Income Children: Children under 6 Years, 2014. New York: National Center for Children in Poverty. Kirsch, I. & Braun, H. (Eds.) (2016). The Dynamics of Opportunity in America: Evidence and Perspectives. New York: Springer International Publishing. Lamy, C. E. (2013). American Children in Chronic Poverty: Complex Risks, Benefit-Cost Analyses, and Utangling the Knot. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Lemann, N. (1991). The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How it Changed America. New York: Vintage Books. Lewis, L. & Zolla, N. (2016). New York State Passes 12-Week Paid Family Leave Law. Labor & Employment Law Blog New York Employment Legislation, Paid Sick Leave. Retrieved October 13, 2016 from http://www.laboremploymentlawblog.com/2016/04/articles/newyork-employment-legislation/new-yorkstate-passes-12-week-paid-family-leave-law/ Lombardi, J. & Bogle, M. M. (Eds.) (2004). Beacon of Hope: The Promise of Early Head Start for America’s Youngest Children. Washington, DC: ZERO TO THREE.

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MacInnes, G. (2009). In Plain Sight: Simple, Difficult Lessons from New Jersey’s Expensive Effort to Close the Achievement Gap. New York: The Century Foundation Press. Matthews, H., Schulman, K., Vogtman, J., Johnson-Staub, C., & Blank, H. (2015). Implementing the Child Care and Development Block Grant reauthorization: A guide for States. Washington, DC: Center for Law and Social Policy. Mulligan, G.M., Hastedt, S., & McCarroll, J.C. (2012). First-Time Kindergartners in 2010-11: First Findings From the Kindergarten Rounds of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010–11 (ECLS-K:2011). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics, US Department of Education. National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). (May 25, 2016). NAEYC Announces a New National Collaboration to Set Professional Guidelines for All Early Childhood Educators. Washington, DC: NAEYC. Retrieved from http://www. naeyc.org/NAEYC-Announces-New-NationalCollaboration Office of Child Care, US Department of Health and Human Services. (2016). Fiscal Year 2016: Federal Child Care and Related Appropriations. http://www2.ed.gov/about/inits/ ed/earylearning/­partnerships.html. Office of the Mayor of the City of New York. (2014). Ready to Launch: New York City’s Implementation Plan for Free, High-Quality, Full-Day Universal Pre-Kindergarten, New York. Pew Center on the States. (2011). Transforming Public Education: Pathway to a Pre-K-12 Future. Washington, DC: The Pew Center on the States. Phillips, D., Gormley, W., & Anderson, S. (2016). The effects of Tulsa’s CAP Head Start Program on middle-school academic outcomes and progress. Developmental Psychology, 52(8), 1247–1261. Ruhm, C. J. (2011). Policies to assist parents with young children. The Future of Children, 21(2), 37–68. Schweinhart, L. J., Montie, J., Xiang, Z., Barnett, W.  S., Belfield, C. R., & Nores, M. (2005). Lifetime effects: The High/Scope Perry Preschool study through age 40. Ypsilanti, MI: HighScope Educational Research Foundation.

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Shaw, D. (2016). The Promise of the Premise: The First 50 Years of the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina. Shonkoff, J. P. and Phillips, D. A. (Eds.) (2000). From neurons to neighborhoods; the science of early childhood development. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. Stevens, K. B. (2015). Renewing Childhood’s Promise: The History and Future of Federal Early Care and Education Policy. Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. Tanner, M. & DeHaven, T. (September 1, 2010) TANF and Federal Welfare. Downsizing Government. Washington, DC: Cato Institute. US Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2009). Women in the Labor Force: A Databook. US Bureau of Labor Statistics. US Department of Education. (2008) US Network for Education Information, Organization of Organization of US Education: The Federal Role. Retrieved from https://www2. ed.gov/about/offices/list/ous/international/ usnei/us/edlite-org-us.html US Department of Education. (2012). Serving Preschool Children Through Title I Part A of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, as Amended Non-regulatory Guidance. US Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families. (2008). Statutory Degree and Credentialing Requirements for Head Start Teaching Staff. Washington, DC.

US Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families. (2010). Head Start Impact Study: Final Report. Washington, DC. US Department of Health and Human Services and US Department of Education. (2016). High-Quality Early Learning Settings Depend on a High-Quality Workforce Low Compensation Undermines Quality. Washington, DC. Waldfogel, J. (2006). Early Childhood Policy: A Comparative Perspective. In K. McCartney and D. Phillips (eds) Blackwell Handbook of Child Development (pp. 576–594). DOI: 10.1002/9780470757703 Weiland, C. & Yoshikawa, H. (2013). Impacts of a prekindergarten program on children’s mathematics, language, literacy, executive function, and emotional skills. Child Development, 84(6), 2112–2130. Whitebook, M., Phillips, D., & Howes, C. (2014). Worthy Work, STILL Unlivable Wages: The Early Childhood Workforce 25 Years after the National Child Care Staffing Study. University of California, Berkeley: Center for the Study of Child Care Employment. Wilkerson, I. (2010). The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York, Random House. Yoshikawa, H., Weiland, C., Brookes-Gunn, J., Burchinal, M. R., Espinosa, L. M., Gormley, W. T., Ludwig, J., Magnuson, K. A., Phillips, D., & Zaslow, M. J. (2013). Investing in Our Future: The Evidence Base on Preschool Education. Washington, DC: Society for Research in Child Development.

9 Documenting Early Childhood Policy in Aotearoa New Zealand: Political and Personal Stories Helen May

Introducing the story In 1985, an extraordinary event was held in the Legislative Chamber of Parliament in Wellington. This was the Minister of Education’s Early Childhood Forum. The event was hosted by a Labour government, elected in 1984, that promised to redress the inequity of early childhood policy, blueprinted in the 1940s to favour part-day kindergartens (for 3- to 4-year-olds with teachers) and soon accommodated playcentres (for 2- to 5-year-olds run by parents). At the same time, emerging services, such as childcare and ng¯a K¯ohanga Reo, the M¯aori immersion language early childhood centres (both inclusive of infants and with large numbers of unqualified adults), were mainly excluded from government funding streams and located outside of the education sector. The presence of the prime minister, David Lange, and the minister of education, Russell Marshall, mingling with invited leaders in early childhood, including younger

advocates, was a heady mix. I was one of the latter, and presented an address – ‘Myths, realities and dreams of early childhood ­services’ – brashly claiming that ‘early childhood policy has been bound up in a sexist, cultural and class bias and has never matched the reality and need of the lives of all women’ (May Cook, 1985a, p. 4). Collectively the delegates wanted to re-draw the landscape and this government was prepared to take the risk. Before the Forum some delegates gathered at the Victoria University Crèche, of which I had been the co-ordinator. The occasion was the launch of Mind That Child: Childcare as a Social and Political Issue in New Zealand (May Cook, 1985b). This began my quest to document our early childhood policy story. I was 8 months pregnant with my third child, who later as a 6-monthold featured in an iconic photo, pushed on a swing at Lintott’s Daycare Centre by David Lange, then the New Zealand prime minister. That a prime minister was making such a visit was indicative of the changes ahead.

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The photo became the cover image of my book Politics in the Playground (May, 2001, 2009). Writing became a kind of political activism often undertaken when the forging of new policy stalled. This was not a solo venture. Our story has been variously documented by childhood advocates, including Anne Meade, Clare Wells, Linda Mitchell and Carmen Dalli whose writings are showcased as section headings in this chapter. Each of us, in different settings, and with others not cited, have sometimes challenged successive governments in print and press, but also worked with government and sometimes within government, to craft and implement new policy blueprints for early childhood. This chapter charts the Aotearoa New Zealand early childhood policy story from the 1980s until current times framed around representative writings of the ‘storytellers’. The story told is illustrative too of the ‘pen’ as a political tool in charting the policy landscape, but the ‘pen’ was never separate from engagement in the politics itself. During recent years the political mood has changed to one of caution and cut backs, so different from 30 years ago where this story begins, with its brief era of risk and optimism. The chapter concludes with an overview of some facts of current times. A larger lens could be applied to this story of political advocacy, mainly by women, intent on re-drawing the landscape of early childhood policy and provision from its earlier postwar blueprint. There are parallels to these endeavours in other countries. What is possibly unique about the New Zealand story is the tenacity and collegiality of the women involved and their political presence across changing work sites and endeavours over three to four decades. Through the network of strong personal relationships and alliances in a small country, it has been possible at times to shift the policy paradigm. But it has never been neat or complete, and with each setback, if nothing else, the ‘pens’ have documented the story outlined in this chapter. In various ways too, the authors have initiated new research,

proposed new directions, sometimes gained concessions or small gains, and/or they have joined the campaign and led the protest.

‘Women and young children gain a foot in the door’ (Meade, 1990) Researcher Anne Meade was the organiser of the 1985 Forum. It followed in the wake of the report Childcare Services, Impact and Opportunities (Department of Education, 1985) that positioned childcare as an issue for families, proposing that financial responsibility should be shared with the state and that all early childhood services be located in the Department of Education, thus replacing the previous divided approach to early childhood policy. This shift in attitude was the result of a decade of lobbying (Meade, 1990) and endorsed by the Forum. David Lange addressed the Forum, acknowledging that ‘It has taken far too long for early childhood care and education to begin to be taken seriously’. Delegates were told ‘to come up with strategies to make improvements in the area’ (Lange, 1985). The mood of delegates was that the strategies existed and the delay was government tardiness. Rosslyn Noonan (1985) paid homage to: all the wonderful cheeky, impudent and, above all, disagreeable women in the early childhood sector, particularly those who, over the last twenty years, have brought us to the position where a political party elected as Government has, as a major policy priority, a commitment to the development of early childhood care and education.

New Zealand’s foremost researcher of the time, Geraldine McDonald (1985) told politicians that the Forum was actually about ‘cake! … about wanting a share of the cake, needing a larger cake, but actually getting crumbs and leftovers’. Five years on, Meade wrote a summation of the rocky process that led to ‘women and young

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children gain[ing] a foot in the door’, and after some fierce politics, a more equitable share of a ‘larger cake’. Meade was the architect of a new policy blueprint during her appointment to the prime minister’s office, entitled Education to be More (ECCE Working Group, 1988). Also known as The Meade Report, the policy blueprint remains a significant philosophical statement on the benefits of early childhood for children, their families, their communities and society (Moss & Pence, 1994). Myths that had constrained early childhood policy development were buried. The report acknowledged the holistic nature of early childhood care and education. Essential elements of the model comprised features addressing the interests of children, the interests of women as caregivers and workers, and the interests of cultural survival (ECCE Working Group, 1988, p. 6). The authors argued that a substantive injection of funding was needed to ensure affordability, access and quality. Prime Minister Lange announced that the government was likely to adopt the principles of Education to be More, but it was unlikely to come up with the funding, central to all the early childhood demands. There was opposition (Meade, 1990, pp. 106–7): The interests of capital and male power-holders joined together and came to the fore. The Business Round Table and other key proponents of the New Right economic discourse were spelling out the political advantages of the Government decreasing its expenditure. … The funding proposal became a focus of the struggles between David Lange and the ‘wets’ arguing for benefits for small children, and the ‘dry’ supporters of [the Minister of Finance] Roger Douglas. What occurred in 1988/89 was that a temporary wedge was driven through the hegemonic barriers constructed by the male power-holders and the so-called captains of industry.

The government report Before Five (1988) retained the substantive recommendations of Education to be More and Lange’s introduction indicated that he had ignored the Treasury view: Research shows that resources put into early childhood care and education have proven results. Not

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only do they enhance the individual child’s learning, the advantages gained create success in adult life. Improvements in the sector are an investment for the future. Our children are our future. They need a good start in life. I believe Before Five will help give them that. (Lange, 1988, p. iii)

Divisions within the government ruptured with the resignation of the prime minister in 1989. Early childhood issues were just one site of a struggle, still reverberating in social policy. I wrote that: Although the struggle was one of economic philosophy, to women activists in the early childhood movement it had all the appearance of the patriarchy in a newly purchased cloak. Over the past twenty years successive governments had used many arguments to justify their unwillingness to increase early childhood funding. We had heard and fought against all of them. (May, 1992, pp. 85–86)

A coalition of organisations led by the Combined Early Childhood Union of Aotearoa (CECUA) – formed through the amalgamation of the Kindergarten Teachers Association and the Early Childhood Workers Union in 1990 – mounted a Campaign for Quality Early Childhood Education. Both unions brought to CECUA a history of strident advocacy to the campaign. Forty-two petitions were tabled in parliament during 1989. There were rallies and intense lobbying inside parliament coordinated by the parliamentary women’s caucus because women’s votes were at stake. The compromise was a five-year staged funding package. Kindergartens would not benefit until year four, but other services would get a substantive funding boost, particularly for under-2-year-olds. At the Fifth Early Childhood Convention in 1991 CECUA organiser, Clare Wells addressed delegates on ‘The Impact of Change: Against the Odds’ (Wells, 1991) in reference to the political obstacles purposefully blocking the path of early childhood advocates in previous years. Wells outlined the role that Treasury had played in its briefings to government, particularly during its 1987–1990 term, ‘raising questions about the

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amount of government involvement and the need for regulation … Many of Treasury’s arguments – against the Odds – did not win favour at the end of the day, much to their chagrin’ (Wells, 1991, p. 118). Wells cited some ‘Against the Odds’ gains, for example: • For kindergartens there were few immediate gains in the Before Five policies, nevertheless, Wells reminded the audience that ‘Nothing fell into the “lap” of the kindergarten services – it was hard fought for and hard won Against the Odds’ (Wells, 1991, p. 119). She was referring to kindergarten teachers coming under the benefits of the State Sector Act in 1987, covering all employees of the state, which previously did not include kindergarten teachers because they were employed by community organisations, even though the government directly paid their salaries. • Childcare workers had ‘Against the Odds’ formed the Early Childhood Workers Union and in 1984 negotiated their first collective agreement that had required legal challenges for the right to negotiate during a wage and price freeze, and parliamentary changes to the regulations. The later formation of CECUA strategically cemented a unified early childhood sector, despite the different industrial contexts of staff in childcare and kindergarten settings. • The shift of childcare services into the Department of Education in 1986 was ‘Against the Odds’, including Before Five’s integrated administrative and funding framework. • From 1988, three-year integrated teacher education qualifications, giving parity with primary teacher training, were underway. This was ‘Against the Odds’.

Collectively these changes made ‘New Zealand’s integrated early childhood policy … the focus of much envy and admiration’, claimed Anne Smith in 1994: When I go overseas childcare is considered totally different from preschool education. We’d thought that through. We were small enough and people who shared a vision for the future had enough contact with people in power to do something about it. (Interview with author)

Victory was short-lived. The 1990s were spent holding onto the gains of Before Five.

The ‘door’ was in danger of shutting before women and children had got through.

‘Is Cinderella back among the cinders?’ (Dalli, 1994) Carmen Dalli likened the years of the Labour Government to the fairy story of ‘Cinderella meeting the fairy godmother’ and the Before Five policies equivalent to the euphoria when ‘Cinderella goes to the ball’. But then ‘the clock strikes midnight’ (Dalli, 1994, pp. 224–225). In 1990 Labour lost the election and the new National Government began to review the Before Five policies. The turnaround reflected the different political priorities between Labour and National. The Before Five policies arose from equity concerns for women and children and a belief that state intervention was necessary. The policy slipped onto the agenda amidst a mood of deregulation, devolvement and individualism infiltrating policy decisions before the change of government (Meade, 1990). Government officials and politicians, who had resisted the thrust of Before Five, began to actively undermine and remould it. Within weeks there were changes lessening the quality requirements of Before Five which, for example, had defined minimum regulatory standards alongside new quality standards for child:staff ratios. Within months the government had halted further implementation of the funding stages, and announced reviews concerning the recently promulgated early childhood regulations, funding and qualifications. Dalli wrote, ‘The sector had hoped for a respite from submission writing and for some time to consolidate the recent gains … this was not to be’ (Dalli, 1994, p. 226). The ‘pens’ too were busy documenting the turnaround in the fortunes of early childhood (May, 1992; Meade, 1991; Meade & Dalli, 1992; Wells, 1991). The review process was orchestrated under the cloak of Budget Round secrecy by a Change Team

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advising the prime minister and exploring scenarios for the targeting of social services (Report of the Change Team, 1991). Meade addressed a worried early childhood audience: What seems to be happening in 1991 is a re-run of the same ideological battle, with early childhood education again the meat in the sandwich. Early childhood education was, and is again, an arena where ideological conflict is being worked out. (Meade, 1991, p. 55)

The radical potential of early childhood services, in the view of the dominant powerbrokers, needed to be restrained. In 1991, a new Employment Contracts Act caused many childcare workers to fall out of union coverage, losing the benefits of the recent funding gains (Wells, 1991). The new Act did not require employers to bargain in good faith and promoted individual rather than collective contracts, an attractive option for the burgeoning private-for-profit childcare sector. The 1991 ‘Mother of all Budgets’ is remembered for its spending cuts on social services, although weaker than the original Change Team proposal. Early childhood universal funding was retained but there were cuts to regulatory requirements on the proportion of qualified staff, staffing ratios and the mechanisms of accountability around the use of government monies originally intended to improve quality. Centres with children under the age of 2 took a funding cut amounting to 11% of the total early childhood funding – the highest level of cuts to any education or social service (May, 1992). Kindergartens were dealt a different blow by being bulk funded (like other services) rather than receiving payments from government linked to the actual cost of salaries. It was argued that this would force the previously free kindergartens to charge fees and lower staffing costs. Treasury still held that the substantive issues had not been grappled with. Cabinet agreed to further ‘examine the overall strategic framework for Government investment in early childhood education and care, and the

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appropriate share of the costs that should be met by the State and the individual’ (Smith & Shipley, 1991, p. 1). In 1993 the government embarked on another series of reviews labelled by the Opposition as the ‘Hidden Agenda’. The early childhood review covered all aspects of the Before Five policies, with targeted funding again to the fore. Dalli (1994, p. 246) wrote: If nothing else, it will serve to clarify the government’s real position on the role it perceives for itself in the provision of early childhood education and the value it places on it. … If Cinderella is back among the cinders, is she destined to remain there or will the prince come along to rescue her after all?

Labour’s ‘prince’ took longer to arrive, but National’s ‘ugly sister’ backed away from earlier agendas. The funding review did not surface until 1995, by which time the government was persuaded towards the idea of targeting quality. ‘Quality funding’ provided a higher tier to the grant linked to staff qualifications. A working group chaired by Anne Meade developed an agreed formula (Quality Funding Working Group, 1995). This signalled the possibility of a more consultative partnership with government, as had been the case in the 1980s, and established principles linking qualifications, funding and quality. The policy caused an upswing and demand for qualified staff. In a mid-decade review Linda Mitchell, then working for the early childhood union, CECUA, summed up the ‘crossroads’ reached after a tumultuous five years and noted that unresolved industrial issues and qualifications benchmarks were stalling progress (Mitchell, 1995). Her concern was that current policy lacked the cohesion set out in the earlier Before Five policies. Nevertheless, and again ‘Against the Odds’, it was amidst these years that the Early Childhood Curriculum Project developed the bicultural curriculum document Te Wh¯ariki (Ministry of Education, 1996). This was at the behest of a National government intent on curriculum reform and more government

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control across the education sector. The development and wide acceptance of Te Wh¯ariki was a story of cautious and strategic collaboration between a National government and the sector (Carr & May, 1993; May & Carr, 2016). There was both accommodation and resistance to government agendas. Citing Te Wh¯ariki, Tina Bruce urged British colleagues, dealing with New Right agendas, to clarify for the politicians, ‘what we want for our children in early childhood. This has been done in New Zealand … the radicals have been allowed to speak’ (Bruce, 1996, p. 11). Sandy Farquhar (2010, p. 150) later wrote: As a first curriculum for early childhood education in Aotearoa, and indeed one of the first internationally, it is remarkable that in an era of rightwing conservatism, the document was able to capture the spirits of feminism, M¯aori sovereignty, children’s rights and educational theories – at the same time as traversing the path to acceptance.

The consequences of Te Wh¯ariki were to shape future policy concerning the early childhood profession. In an address ‘Before Five – 5 years on’, Meade expressed concern at the government’s undermining of the regulatory qualification. Te Wh¯ariki became a lever (Meade, 1994, p. 7): A hodge-podge of courses does not equate to a qualification. I have fears for what it might mean for children’s education. Will such staff be able to plan, implement and evaluate their centre’s curriculum based on Te Wh¯ariki?

While the ‘pen’ and the talk were at odds with the policy of the 1990s, the advocacy of both was effective in sowing the political seeds for the next decade, linking effective curriculum implementation with a 100% teacher qualified sector.

‘Future Directions … for the 21st century’ (Wells, 1999) In 1994 CECUA merged with the New Zealand Educational Institute – Te Rui Roa

(NZEI-TRR) in a united union with primary teachers. Amidst the fragmentation of early childhood policy and the consequent disarray, officials within NZEI–TRR resolved to take a proactive stance towards shaping policy directions. In 1995, Linda Mitchell and Clare Wells initiated the Future Directions Early Childhood Education Project, including all community early childhood groups. Not joining was the Early Childhood Council, mainly representing private childcare owners, who were supportive of government directions to reduce costs and regulations. Geraldine McDonald chaired the process. She wrote, ‘In the last seven years early childhood education has had its fair share of change … A feature of early childhood policy development has been the carrying out of ‘‘top down’’ reviews’ (Early Childhood Education Project, 1996, p. 1). The exercise modelled community consultation. The Future Directions report (1966) delivered recommendations towards realising universal funding for early childhood services equitable with schools; a partnership in policy development between government, providers, parents and practitioners; and a strategic plan for the early childhood sector. The organisations embarked on a media campaign to bring attention to the ‘directions’ suggested. It was again election year. Opposition parties incorporated the goals of Future Directions in their policies. In 1997, a series of petitions arrived at parliament recommending the adoption of the report. Wells noted that Future Directions was kept ‘in front of politicians and officials for nearly two years’. There were no more secret reviews by government. With the sector having been ‘effectively locked out of policy development process between 1990 and 1995’ (Wells, 1999, p. 56), there were indications of some political resolve to address issues relating to funding and qualifications that had confounded the implementation of earlier policies. For example, so-called ‘quality funding’ was introduced in 1996 linked to the number of qualifed staff employed by education and care centres.

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For kindergarten teachers the emerging spirit of collaboration was sorely tested. Under parliamentary ‘urgency’ procedures, the government introduced a Bill to remove kindergarten teachers from the State Sector Act. Cabinet papers noted: The Bill is likely to be contentious. Both NZEI and the kindergarten associations are likely to oppose the Bill through the parliamentary process. This is also likely to coincide with a public campaign accompanied by community action. Kindergarten closures are likely. (Cabinet Committee, 16 April 1997)

Mitchell described this as a ‘shocking, unjustified, undemocratic act’ (NZ Education Review, 7 May 1997). Kindergarten organisations saw the removal as putting further pressure on their bulk funding grant from government and undermining conditions they had worked hard for. Jenny Shipley, the Minister of State Services, summed up the government’s position: Kindergarten teachers and, in particular the NZEI, have been able to use their industrial muscle. The time has come for that to stop … This is an avenue to secure extra funding for wage increases that is not available to other early childhood providers. The government is not prepared to allow this inequity to continue in the forthcoming contract negotiations. (Shipley, Hansard, 29 April 1997)

Throughout the remaining government term kindergarten teachers campaigned against their expulsion. In 1999, a Labour government came to power. The prime minister, Helen Clark, promised that the government would not be ‘downgrading kindergarten’: I have been a great supporter of the kindergarten movement. Partly because it is the main choice of parents for early childhood education … you know at the kindergarten your children will be taught by a fully educated and trained teacher and you know that you will always be getting a very good standard of education. Long may that be the case. (Evening Post, 4 April 2000)

The new government immediately announced that kindergartens would be returned to the State Sector Act; began work on the

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development of an early childhood strategic plan; and undertook to work towards implementing a unified teaching pay scale including early childhood teachers. The ‘prince’ had not forsaken ‘Cinderella’ after all and there was another opportunity to rearrange the landscape and realise longheld aspirations. Long-time activists too were back in the fold.

‘Towards citizenry rights in early childhood’ (May, 2004) The story of the 2000s concerns the roll-out of the Labour Government’s strategic plan for the sector, Pathways to the Future: Ng¯a Huarahi Arataki 2002–2012 (Ministry of Education, 2002). Clare Wells was appointed an adviser to the minister of education, Trevor Mallard, and Anne Meade was appointed the co-ordinator of the strategic plan process, in which both Linda Mitchell and I participated. Mitchell applauded the ‘currents of change’ underway (Mitchell, 2002), calling for ‘a new debate about childhood’, in which ‘early childhood institutions [are] conceptualised as community institutions playing an important role in fostering a democratic society’ (Mitchell, 2002, p. 1). Mitchell was joined by others to argue that early childhood policy be framed around children’s rights (Dalli & Te One, 2003; Mitchell, 2002). Local issues and advocacy, combined with global interest in the economics of early childhood education, provided the necessary mix to get the plan onto the political stage. There was advocacy for a ‘new agenda for children’ (Child Poverty Action Group, 2001) with reference to the right of all children to benefit from the country’s resources. The government’s policy Agenda for Children (Ministry of Social Development, 2002) included the reconsideration of early childhood policy, already underway. In 2000, the government set up an equity working party to raise early

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childhood participation in groups that were under-represented. Subsequently an equity subsidy was paid to community-based providers to recognise costs associated with low socio-economic communities, children with special needs and non-English speaking backgrounds and rural isolation (Ministry of Education, 2005). The Strategic Plan Working Group placed a new demand on the political agenda, ‘for whanau and families to have a universal entitlement to a reasonable amount of free, high quality ECE’ (Strategic Plan Working Group, 2001, p. 5). The minister’s reaction was that this was ‘blue skies thinking’ and he urged a more ‘fiscally responsible’ document (May, 2009). Unlike school-aged children, who had long had ‘a right as a citizen, to a free education’ (Fraser, 1939, p. 2), children under the age of 5 years had no such entitlement (May, 2004). Pathways to the Future made a commitment to quality participation in ECEC for all children. This would require new funding and regulatory systems to support diverse services to achieve quality early childhood education, including a teacher-led early childhood profession. This bold move was supported by evidence that the presence of qualified teachers has long-term positive outcomes for children (Wylie & Thompson, 2003), and in the context of New Zealand, was deemed necessary for realising the aspiration, within Te Wh¯ariki’ for all children ‘to grow up as competent and confident learners and communicators, healthy in mind, body, and spirit, secure in their sense of belonging and in the knowledge that they make a valued contribution to the world’ (Ministry of Education, 1996, p. 9). The strategic plan introduced a schedule for all staff in teacher-led centres to be qualified teachers or be completing qualifications by 2012. A new funding stream differentiated between teacher-led and parent-led services, linked to the actual costs of employing qualified teachers (Ministry of Education, 2005). As centres phased in the requirements for

registered teachers, the funding increased. Pathways to the Future was silent on the issues of ‘free early childhood education’ and ‘enitlement’. A taskforce began developing a new funding formula and, in a re-run of earlier years, government officials proposed targeted funding models linked to affordability for parents. Linda Mitchell played a backroom role at the behest of the minister of education, who was wary of his officials’ advice and its potential to shift a universal funding model towards a targeted one. Her ‘presence and pen played an important part in keeping the free early childhood policy on the agenda’ (May, 2009, p. 296). Mitchell (2007, p. 187) reported: In a courageous political decision, Trevor Mallard, the Minister of Education, rejected this [targetted] proposal. He asked officials to go back to develop and cost alternative options for providing totally free early childhood education by the year 2012.

After much in-fighting, the 2004 Budget promised the introduction of 20 hours a week of free early childhood education for 3- to 4-year-old children in all teacher-led community-based centres. The announcement was welcomed with surprise, although it was less than the earlier ‘demands’ for a ‘child’s right to a free education’ and indeed the minister’s earlier instructions to officials. The policy was later extended to include all early childhood services, including the private childcare sector and parent-led services, after dismay from parents who saw their children missing out. In 2007, a midway point in the implementation of the strategic plan, the Ministry of Education hosted a symposium, Travelling the Pathways to the Future: Ng¯a Huarahi Arataki (Ministry of Education, 2007). There was a ‘celebration’ of the positive effects the strategic plan had had on the sector. However, delegates noted that there was much to ‘evaluate’, particularly in relation to a widening divide between teacher-led and parent-led services and difficulties meeting the requirements for qualified teachers. The scope of

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NZ’s policy directions had international attention. Attending from the UK, Peter Moss described NZ as ‘leading the wave’ of early childhood innovation; having ‘confronted the wicked issues’ with the development of an integrated approach to funding, regulation, curriculum and qualifications (Moss, 2007, p. 33). Moss’s outsider view was that: Perhaps the most radical change of all, New Zealand has an integrative concept that encompasses all services – ‘early childhood education’, a broad and holistic concept that covers children, families and communities, a concept of ‘education-in-its-broadest-sense’ in which learning and care really are inseparable and connected to many other purposes besides. New Zealand has, in short, understood the need to rethink as well as restructure early childhood education and care. (Moss, 2008, pp. 7–8)

In 2008 an election was looming. Political commentator Colin James provided an insider perspective on government policy in an ‘obituary’ to ‘Labour’s Legacy’: When it comes time to memorialise Labour’s fifth spell in office, it may be remembered most lastingly for early childhood education. … Making early childhood systematic … takes us into a deep zone of policy debate: on citizens’ access to and participation in our economy and society. That debate is no longer just about the absence of legal or administrative impediments. It is about what constitutes genuine capacity to participate. … So early childhood education is investing in infrastructure, just like building roads. It is arguably Labour’s most important initiative, its biggest idea. (Otago Daily Times, 19 February 2008)

‘From a child rights to an interventionist approach’ (Mitchell, 2015) The election of a National government in November 2008 caused a shift in early childhood policy directions with a ‘new narrative’ and a determination to curtail the building of ‘big picture’ infrastructure (May, 2014). Within weeks of being elected, the Strategic

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Plan was removed from the Ministry of Education website, and the word ‘free’ was removed from the ‘20 hours [free] policy’. Mitchell (2015, p. 294) concluded that ‘free education as an entitlement for children was not to be a policy priority and signalled a philosophical shift away from state responsibility for ECE’. An economic recession justified funding retrenchment, and research, training and professional development programmes were culled. The 2010 Budget announced that Labour’s 100% teacher qualification target would be cut. Subsidies would only cover up to 80% of qualified staff. Instead there would be initiatives to improve early childhood participation in ‘high need’ locations with mainly indigenous M¯aori or Pasifika children. The cutbacks around the infrastructure of quality were called ‘a brutal blow’ (Te Tari Puna Ora o Aotearoa – NZCA, Press statement: 20 May 2010). The New Zealand Herald (24 May 2010) ‘Editorial: Preschool Budget cuts right move’ was in support of government: Plainly National does not regard specialist teaching of pre-school children to be quite as important as Labour did. It is probably right. … Did childcare centres ever need to be fully staffed by trained teachers? Or is this a classic case of ‘qualification inflation’. … The Government is right to direct more of its early education support to areas where children are missing out. … Contentious the decision may be but it seems educationally harmless, socially equitable and financially necessary.

The issue remains ‘contentious’, reflecting political divides over universal funding of quality early childhood education for all children versus targeting funding towards those children deemed to pose risks. The targeted focus was reflected in the government’s welfare policies, and the Green Paper on Vulnerable Children (Ministry of Social Development, 2011) that viewed children in terms of their vulnerabilities and deficits. Minister of Education Anne Tolley (Press statement, 4 April 2011) justified the government’s position:

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Taxpayer investment in early childhood services has trebled over the last five years. … Despite this growth in funding, too many children that the evidence tells us would benefit most from ECE are still missing out. They are at a disadvantage before they even start school. The economic reality is that money will be tight for the foreseeable future, so more than ever we must invest in the areas that will make the biggest difference to children and their families.

New Zealand has a high rate of early childhood participation, but lower levels of participation associated with ethnicity and income. In 2015, participation before starting school at age 5 was 96.4%; M¯aori participation was 94.3% and Pasifika, 91.8% (Education Counts, 2015). From 2010, various ECE participation programmes targeted localities where children were starting school without early childhood participation. This has been successful. In 2008, the participation statistics were 93.4% in total, 89.6% for M a¯ ori and 85% for Pasifika (Education Counts, 2009). Mitchell has undertaken the evaluation of these programmes for the Ministry of Education (Mitchell, MeagherLundberg, Davison, Kara & Kalavite, 2015). She has also been a stern critic of the shift from policies once inching towards citizenry rights for all children to targeted intervention strategies (Mitchell, 2015). A backdrop to these concerns was the establishment of an ECE Taskforce in 2010. The terms of reference phraseology included ‘effectiveness and efficiency of the Government’s current early childhood expenditure’, ‘the value gained from the different types of investment’ and determining ‘cost effective and evidence-based ways to support children’s learning in early childhood’ (ECE Taskforce, 2011, p. 13). The report reiterated the strong case for investment in high-quality early childhood services, especially for children from low-income families (p. 22), but broadly urged a ‘stepping up’ by the sector including parents (ECE Taskforce, 2011, pp. 14–15) to take more responsibility with less reliance on the state.

The Taskforce was asked to propose a new funding model ‘without increasing current government expenditure’ (ECE Taskforce, 2011, p. 176). The recommendations were controversial, again proposing a shift from universal funding mechanisms towards targeting socalled ‘priority children’. Taskforce member Anne Smith released a minority report (Smith, 2011) opposing such principles, including the focus on economic development as opposed to child wellbeing or the rights of children. Linda Mitchell (2015, pp. 299–300) summed up the contrasting policy paradigms: New Zealand’s policy regimes under the last 15 years have highlighted different policy agendas reflective of differing views of the role of the state: a supportive state (Labour-led government) which works in collaboration with early childhood communities and a minimal state (National-led government) where onus is placed on early childhood communities to ‘step up’ to their responsibilities. … Children are treated as dependents within their families and the government intervenes when it regards families as unable to provide. By contrast, under the supportive state approach, children, family and teacher participants in ECEC [early childhood education and care] are empowered and supported to participate and contribute to the ECEC service. This offers a view of participants as agents with their own funds of knowledge and cultural capital making a worthwhile contribution. … Yet neither approach is ‘pure’. Neither the Labour-led nor the National-led governments have made ECEC an entitlement for children – a next step in making ECEC a child’s right.

This long-held vision is still on the table.

The aftermath of interventionism An Agenda for Amazing Children (ECE Taskforce, 2011) reflected the new narrative of government policy. There were some opportunities to address concerns. By mid2012, two expert advisory groups had convened and reported to the minister with advice on implementing the Taskforce recommendations regarding improving the

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quality of ECE sector-wide, and improving the quality of ECE services for children under 2 years (ECE Sector Advisory Group, 2012). Both groups highlighted the costs of quality, and urged improved regulations for staffing ratios and group sizes for under-2year-olds, and more professional development. The minister of education promised a response possibly contingent on the third ECE advisory group, convened in mid-2012, tasked with designing a new funding model. By mid-2016 no proposals had been made public and no action taken on the advisory groups’ recommendations. The ECE Taskforce also considered whether to review Te Wh¯ariki, and in new political times, ‘against the odds’, it survived. The Taskforce consensus was that the framework was robust, but recommended a review of its implementation. The language of Te Wh¯ariki was, however, at odds with the tenor of the policy narrative. Joce Nuttall (2013, p. 2) reported: Despite support for the centrality of Te Wh¯ariki, [the Taskforce] report is silent about the issue of children’s universal human rights, including their rights to an optimal education. The language of rights is sidelined by the language of vulnerabulity and risk … The language of Te Wh¯ariki is not one of risk, vulnerability and competition. It speaks, instead of opportunity, respect and relationships.

Concerns about implementation were shared by the Education Review Office (ERO). Data from a snapshot evaluation (ERO, 2013) found that while 90% of centres were engaging with Te Wh¯ariki, there was variation in understanding by staff. After the 2014 election and the return of the National government, the minister of education established an advisory group for strengthening the implementation of Te Wh¯ariki. The terms of reference were clear – that rewriting Te Wh¯ariki’ was ‘out of scope’ (Ministry of Education, 2014, p. 1). The focus was to advance the aspirations of Te Wh¯ariki in different times and for a new generation of children and their families. The advisory group (Ministry of Education, 2015), chaired

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by Joce Nuttall, addressed the infrastructure of quality, particularly relating to the profession and made recommendation around resources, research and professional development – areas that in earlier times had been culled. There were recommendations around transition that, for the first time, proposed the upward move of Te Wh¯ariki into the early years of school. There was radical potential here. By mid-2016 there had been no cohesive forward action across the respective advisory groups’ recommendations, excepting piecemeal nods to no-cost items. The only significant gains in the sector have been the ECE participation programmes. While successful, their policy context is narrow and linked to wider agendas about welfare, economic risk and vulnerable children. Mitchell’s call for early childhood policy to be shaped by a ‘new debate about childhood’ (Mitchell, 2007) has not been possible. Nevertheless, the aspirations remain with political ‘pens’ still shaping much of the discourse for which New Zealand is known. Andrew Gibbons and Sandy Farquhar challenge policy actors to engage in ‘responsive and reciprocal dialogue’: Serious debate and inclusive and participatory policy development are essential to early childhood. … The purpose of such debate is to develop policy that remains open, … that recognizes differences and tensions as the very elements that have enabled a productive early childhood community that has been of such interest around the world. (Gibbons & Farquhar, 2014, p. 8)

Conclusion Some government statistics usefully summarise some shifts in the early childhood landscape of New Zealand in current times. • A shift from fragmented qualification regulations towards 100% qualified teacher staffing in teacher-led services. Currently all qualifications are at degree level. Despite the halting of the

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100% qualified policy, many services have determined to retain this level. Overall, in 2014, 74.6% of staff working in early childhood had a teaching qualification, a rise from 38% in 2004, and 96% of services were attracting the 80% qualified teacher funding band subsidy, a rise from 84% in 2011 (Education Counts, 2015). The statistics reveal that the levels of qualified teachers in the sector continued to rise. Kindergarten teachers gained and have retained pay parity with other education sectors. Some teachers working in education and care services inched towards pay parity with kindergarten teachers, but employment practices have stalled earlier progress for pay parity across the education sector. • Early childhood providers remain independent of government with a mix of community and private ownership. There has been a shift in the landscape of providers. Government funding subsidies encouraged a rise in private ownership of early childhood education and care services from 41% in 1992 to 65% in 2013 (Mitchell, 2015). Despite some efforts by Labour to privilege community services, all funding policy streams are available to both community and private owners. • There has been a shift in service type, reflecting parental preference, market availability and new funding drivers. Education and care centres, offering full-day coverage and often including infants and toddlers attract 63% of enrolments, rising 52% between 2004 and 2014. Conversely, kindergartens, playcentres and Kohanga ¯ Reo have seen a gradual drop in enrolments (Education Counts, 2015). • Enrolment rates have been rising across all ages since the 1990s but with changes in the proportion of children enrolled at different ages. Between 2004 and 2014 there was an enrolment growth of 3.9% points for under-1-year-olds, 9% points for 1-year-olds and 10.2% points for 2-year-olds. Overall, 96.4% of 4-years-olds are enrolled; 94% of 3-year-olds, 62% of 2-year-olds, 42% of 1-year-olds and 16% of under-1-year-olds (Education Counts, 2015).

Government presents these figures to herald the success of its early childhood policy despite retrenchment. Internationally, the statistics are indicative of a good policy mix. The political ‘pens’ cited in this article,

however, are still keen to engage in deeper debates about participation, quality, rights and qualifications, and yearn too for more consensus across the political spectrum, which over the past 30 years has been a roller coaster ride of curtailment and gain.

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ECE Taskforce (2011) An agenda for amazing children. Wellington: NZ Government. Education Counts (2009) Annual ECE census summary report 2008. Wellington: Ministry of Education. Retrieved from: https://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/statistics/early-childhood-education/annual-ece-summary-reports Education Counts (2015) Annual ECE census summary report 2015. Wellington: Ministry of Education. Retrieved from: https://www.­ ­ educationcounts.govt.nz/statistics/early-childhood-education/annual-ece-summary-reports Education Review Office (2013) Working with Te Wh¯ariki. Wellington. Farquhar, Sandy (2010) Ricoeur, identity and early childhood. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Fraser, Peter (Rt. Hon.) (1939) Appendices to the Journal of the House of Representatives. Wellington: Government Printer. Gibbons, Andrew and Farquhar, Sandy (2014) ‘Mapping policies and pathways in early childhood education: A note from Aotearoa New Zealand’. NZ Research in Early Childhood Education Journal, 17: 1–10. Lange, David (1985) ‘Speech notes’, in Proceedings of Minister of Education’s Early Childhood Care and Education Forum, Wellington. Lange, David (1988) Before five: Early childhood care and education in New Zealand. Wellington: Government Printer. May Cook, Helen (1985a) ‘Myths, realities and dreams of the early childhood services’, in Proceedings of Minister of Education’s Early Childhood Care and Education Forum, Wellington. May Cook, Helen (1985b) Mind that child: Childcare as a social and political issue in New Zealand. Wellington: Blackberry Press. May, Helen (1992) ‘After Before Five: The politics of early childhood education in the nineties’, NZ Women’s Studies Journal, 8(2): 83–100. May, Helen (2001 & 2009) Politics in the playground: The world of early childhood in New Zealand. Wellington: NZCER Press. May, Helen (2004) ‘Towards citizenry rights in early childhood’, Delta, 56(1): 75–91. May, Helen (2014) ‘New Zealand case study: A narrative of shifting policy directions for early childhood education and care’, in L. F. Gambaro, K. Stewart and J. Waldfogel (eds.), An

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Equal Start? Providing quality early childhood education and care for disadvantaged children. London: Policy Press. pp. 147–170. May, Helen and Carr, Margaret (2016) ‘Te Wh¯ariki: A uniquely woven curriculum shaping policy, pedagogy and practice in Aotearoa New Zealand’, in T. David, K. Gooch and S. Powell (eds.), Handbook of philosophies and theories of early childhood education and care. London: Routledge. pp. 316–326. McDonald, Geraldine (1985) ‘Summing up’, in Proceedings of Minister of Education’s Early Childhood Care and Education Forum, Wellington. Meade, Anne (1990) ‘Women and young children gain a foot in the door’, NZ Women’s Studies Journal, 6(1/2): 96–111. Meade, Anne (1991) ‘Boffins in early childhood services’, in L. Foote, M. Gold and A. B. Smith (eds.), Fifth Early Childhood Convention papers. Dunedin. pp. 55–67. Meade, Anne (August 1994) ‘Before Five – 5 years on’, keynote address presented to the NZ Association for Research in Education special seminar, University of Auckland. Meade, Anne and Dalli, Carmen (1992) ‘Review of the early childhood sector’, in I. Livingstone (ed.), New Zealand Annual Review of Education 1991:1. Wellington: Faculty of Education, Victoria University of Wellington. pp. 113–132. Ministry of Education (1996) Te Wh¯ariki: He Wh¯ariki Matauranga mo nga Mokopuna o Aotearoa. Early childhood curriculum. Wellington: Learning Media. Ministry of Education (2002) Pathways to the Future: Ng¯a Huarahi Arataki 2002–2012. Wellington: Learning Media. Ministry of Education (2005) Early childhood education funding handbook. Wellington: Ministry of Education. Ministry of Education (2007) Travelling pathways to the future. Ng¯a huarahi arataki. Early childhood education symposium proceedings, 2–3 May, Wellington. Ministry of Education (2014) Terms of Reference – Advisory Group on Early Learning. Retrieved from http://www.education.govt. nz/assets/Documents/EarlyChildhood/News/ TORAdvisoryGroupOnEarlyLearning.pdf Ministry of Education (2015) Report of the Advisory Group of Early Learning. Wellington: NZ Government.

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Ministry of Social Development (2002) New Zealand’s Agenda for Children. Wellington: Ministry for Social Development. Ministry of Social Development (2011) Green Paper on vulnerable children: Every child thrives, belongs, achieves. Wellington: NZ Government. Mitchell, Linda (1995) ‘Crossroads – Early childhood education in the mid-1990s’, in I. Livingston (ed.), New Zealand Annual Review of Education 1995:5. Wellington: Faculty of Education, Victoria University of Wellington. pp. 75–92. Mitchell, Linda (2002) ‘Currents of change: Early childhood education in 2001’, in I. Livingston (ed.), New Zealand Annual Review of Education 2001:11. Wellington: School of Education, Victoria University of Wellington. pp. 123–143. Mitchell, Linda (2007) ‘A new debate about children and childhood: Can it make a difference to early childhood pedagogy and policy?’ unpublished PhD thesis, Victoria University of Wellington. Mitchell, Linda (2015) ‘Shifting directions in ECEC policy in New Zealand: From a child rights to an interventionist approach’, International Journal of Early Years Education, 23(3): 288–302. Mitchell, Linda, Meagher-Lundberg, Patricia, Davison, Claire, Kara, Helena, & Kalavite, Telesia (2015) ECE Participation Programme Evaluation. Stage 3. Retrieved from https://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/publications/ECE/ ece-participation-programme-evaluation-delivery-of-ece-participation-initiatives-stage-3 Moss, Peter (2007) ‘Leading the wave: New Zealand in an international context’, Travelling pathways to the future: Ng¯a huarahi arataki. Early childhood education symposium proceedings, 2–3 May. Wellington: Ministry of Education. pp. 27–36. Moss, Peter (2008) ‘Beyond childcare, markets and technical practice: Re-politicising early childhood’, Proceedings of Early Childhood Care and Education Seminar Series 2. Dublin: Centre for Social and Educational Research. pp. 5–14. Moss, Peter and Pence, Alan (eds.) (1994) Valuing quality in early childhood services. London: Paul & Chapman Publishing.

Noonan, Rosslyn (1985) ‘Panel presentation’, in Proceedings of Minister of Education’s Early Childhood Care and Education Forum, Wellington. Nuttall, Joce (2013) Weaving Te Whariki: ¯ Aotearoa New Zealand’s Early Childhood curriculum document in theory and practice. Wellington: NZCER Press. Quality Funding Working Group (1995) Criteria for Eligibility for Quality Funding: Report to the Associate Minister of Education. Wellington: Ministry of Education. Report of the Change Team on Targeted Social Assistance (1991) Wellington: Prime Minister’s Office. Shipley, Jenny (Rt. Hon.) (29 April 1997) Hansard: NZ Parliamentary Debates. Wellington: NZ Parliament. Smith, Anne (2011) ‘Position Paper on Essay 3: Reforming funding mechanisms’, Dunedin. Smith, Lockwood (Rt. Hon.) and Shipley, Jenny (Rt. Hon.) (9 October 1991) Targeted assistance to low income users of early childhood services, Cab (91) M 28/18 ref., paper to Prime Ministerial Committee on Reform of Social Assistance. Wellington: NZ Parliament. Social Advisory Council. (1985) Childcare Services: Impact and Opportunities. Wellington: Government Printer. Strategic Plan Working Group (2001) Consultation document for the development of the Strategic Plan for Early Childhood Education. Wellington: Ministry of Education. Wells, Clare (1991) ‘The impact of change: Against the odds’, in L. Foote, M. Gold and A. B. Smith (eds.), Fifth Early Childhood Convention papers. Dunedin. pp. 115–127. Wells, Clare (1999) ‘Future Directions: Shaping early childhood policy for the 21st century – A personal perspective’, in I. Livingstone (ed.), New Zealand Annual Review of Education 1988:8. Wellington: School of Education, Victoria University of Wellington. pp. 45–60. Wylie, Cathy, & Thompson, John (2003) ‘The long-term contribution of early childhood education to children’s performance – evidence from New Zealand’, International Journal of Early Years Education, 11(1): 69–78.

10 Early Childhood Policy in China Jennifer J. Chen

Introduction Officially known as the People’s Republic of China, mainland China is located in East Asia. It is the most populous country in the world – in 2015, there were more than 1.37 billion inhabitants in China, with approximately 56% of them residing in urban areas, and 44% in rural areas (China Statistical Yearbook, 2016). According to the data from the 2010 Population Census, China comprised 22 provinces, five autonomous regions, and four municipalities; its diverse population was represented by 56 distinct ethnic groups – with the majority (approximately 92%) of Chinese being of the Han ethnicity (National Bureau of Statistics, 2011; Population Reference Bureau, 2011). Although many dialects are spoken in China, its official language is Mandarin. With such a large, diverse populace, China is faced with vast challenges as well as opportunities in advancing itself further in all sectors (i.e. economic, educational, social, cultural).

China has, especially over the past three to four decades, emerged vigorously as one of the world’s economic powerhouses. Since the initiation of the policy of ‘reform and opening up’ (otherwise known as the ‘open-door’ policy) by Chinese communist leader Deng Xiaoping in 1978, the country has witnessed rapid and tremendous economic development as well as facilitated an unprecedented process of modernization and exposure to the global world. Most notably, the country’s economic system was transformed from a centrally-planned economy to a marketdriven one. In a planned economy, the central government is the one that makes economic decisions, whereas in a market economy, individuals and private businesses are the ones who do so according to supply and demand in the free market. Intricately influenced by the country’s political and economic reform and progress, the landscape of its early childhood education (ECE) sector has also been shaped by a series of drastic transformations. One such transformation involves ECE

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providers: the provision of ECE begins to shift from a system that relies solely on the government to one that draws on non-governmental or individual-based entities, resulting in a larger number of private versus public kindergartens (Hong & Chen, 2016). This phenomenon essentially reflects the country’s market-driven economy, which has provided an impetus and space for the flourishing of private provision of ECE. Unfortunately, as private kindergartens are not monitored by a quality assurance system in the way public kindergartens are, the majority of them are of poor quality. Worst, many children from disadvantaged backgrounds, especially those from impoverished, rural areas, are unable to access and afford a kindergarten education. All of these factors have exacerbated issues of educational equity and quality throughout the country. In this chapter, I begin by contextualizing the evolution of some major ECE reforms in China over the past three to four decades within the historical landscape of the changing economic, political, and socio-cultural climate. I then provide a critical analysis of some major ECE reforms, especially with respect to their impetuses, implementation, and outcomes in addressing issues of educational equity and quality, all of which are prevalent levers for policy change. Not intended to be an exhaustive review of all ECE policies in China, this analysis instead focuses only on some key ones with the goal of contributing to a better understanding of the formulation, evolution, and implementation of these policies, especially those occurring during 1978–2015 and within the context of the ‘one-child’ rule. Furthermore, in analyzing the challenges and opportunities concerning ECE provision against the backdrop of the ‘two-child’ policy that superseded the one-child legislation in January 2016, I conclude the chapter by speculating on the implications of this newly implemented family planning law for recalibrating ECE provision in meeting the dynamic needs of the potentially soaring child population.

Early Childhood Education in China The Chinese government offers children nine years of compulsory education from Grades 1 to 9. Children start first grade typically at age 6 years. Before then, ECE is an option for children from birth to age 6 years. ECE institutions in China consist mainly of three types: (1) nurseries for children from birth to 3 years; (2) kindergartens (also known as ‘preschools’) which are usually full-day, one-to-three-year programmes for children aged 3 to 6 years; and (3) the so-called ‘preschool classes’, normally a one-year educational programme offered in rural areas for children aged 5 to 6 years; some preschool classes are organized within primary schools, while some others are operated as separate units. While many children in urban areas have access to a three-year ECE, those in rural areas may have access to only a one-year ECE. Although preschool education is currently neither compulsory, universal, nor free, China did set an ambitious goal of universalizing ECE by 2020, a policy which I discuss later in this chapter. Considering that kindergartens are the major institution of ECE services in China, this chapter is chiefly devoted to analyzing policies pertinent to the kindergarten sector. Given that the two terms, ‘preschool’ and ‘kindergarten’, are synonymous in the context of ECE in China, they are used interchangeably throughout this chapter. Accordingly, hereinafter, ECE refers solely to preschool/kindergarten education (public and private).

A Historical PORTRAIT OF ECE DEVELOPMENT IN CHINA (1903–2016) Political changes affect all aspects of society and the ECE sector in China is no exception. In this section, I analyze the developmental transformations in ECE provision in China as shaped by the country’s political changes. In China, ECE has had more than a centurylong history.

Early Childhood Policy in China

The Earliest Period (1903–1948) The earliest development of the ECE system in China may be traced back to the establishment of its first kindergarten in 1903 in Wuhan (the capital of Hubei Province) during the period of the Qing dynasty, also called the Manchu dynasty (spanning from 1644 to 1912), which was the last imperial dynasty of China (Zhu & Wang, 2005; Zhu & Zhang, 2008). However, the ECE curriculum and pedagogy employed at the time were modelled after its neighbouring Japan, and even the kindergarten principal and teachers were Japanese because Japan was considered a successful example of westernization and civilization for China (Li & Chen, 2017, in press).

The First ‘Golden Era’ (1949–1957) In the 1900s, China underwent significant political turmoil. Specifically, in 1912, the first Chinese Revolution overthrew the Qing dynasty, resulting in the founding of the Republic of China (ROC, the Chinese nationalist regime). This regime was subsequently overthrown by another Chinese Revolution in 1949, which led to the establishment of what is now known as the People’s Republic of China (PRC, the Chinese socialist regime). Following the founding of PRC in 1949 and up to 1957, ECE in China experienced a rapid expansion of public kindergartens and nurseries in both urban and rural areas to accommodate the childcare needs of working parents, especially since the new socialist government encouraged women to participate in the workforce (Li, Yang, & Chen, 2016). The booming of the ECE sector during this period ushered China into what was dubbed the first ‘Golden Era’ of ECE development (H. Li et al., 2016).

The First ‘Dark Age’ (1966–1976) During the decade from 1966 to 1976, communist leader Mao Zedong led the ‘Cultural Revolution’, a political upheaval that resulted

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in the closing down of educational institutions including kindergartens. As a result, children received no education, and qualified teachers were dispatched to the countryside for ‘re-education’ through labouring (Li & Wang, 2008; H. Li et  al., 2016). This challenging period was considered the first Dark Age of ECE development.

The Second ‘Golden Era’ (1978–1993) The very first Dark Age of ECE development in China finally saw light during a period of what could be called the second ‘Golden Era’ of ECE development (1978–1993) when in 1978, led by communist leader Deng Xiaoping, the central government launched its ‘opendoor’ policy. The open-door policy meant that China was ready to ‘open’ itself up to the outside world, especially by welcoming investments and trade from foreign businesses (Li & Chen, 2017, in press). The process resulted in a transformation of the country’s economy from one that was primarily self-sufficient to one that thrived on the world market (Huan, 1986). Furthermore, China’s gigantic economic leap from a centrally-planned to a marketdriven economy was a ‘bold experiment’ in national development characterized by substantial policy changes (Tsang, 2000). In a planned economy, all economic decisions are based on a plan formulated by a central authority, whereas, in a market economy, such decisions rely chiefly on market forces to determine supply and demand as well as the price of services and goods. The launching of the open-door policy and the market economy reform in 1978 has affected the development of ECE in significant ways. Most notably, in the 1990s, the market economy led to the privatization of kindergartens and a reduction in involvement by the central government (Hong & Chen, 2016). Specifically, facing limited investments in ECE by local governments, the majority of public kindergartens ended up being privatized.

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To better regulate the quality of ECE and provide a strong foundation for the continued development of ECE, in 1989, the State Education Commission (now known as the Ministry of Education (MoE)) issued two important documents. The first one was called Regulations on Kindergarten Work [trial version] (revised in 1996 and again in 2016) and aimed at promoting high quality in ECE, including elements of structural quality (e.g. the physical premises of ECE services, teacher– child ratio, teacher qualifications) and elements of process quality (e.g. curriculum enactment, teacher–child interaction) (MoE, 2016). The second one was entitled Regulations on the Management of Kindergartens, designed to enhance the sound management of all kinds of kindergartens (MoE, 1989). The aforementioned two regulatory policies served as essential guidelines for local governments to follow (MoE, 1989, 2016). That is, in compliance with these regulations and guidelines, each province was expected to be individually responsible for formulating its own measures for systematically implementing different requirements for different local regions, and different types of kindergartens in each locality. Accordingly, each province was responsible for developing and implementing a set of quality assurance standards to guide, regulate, govern, and manage various components of kindergarten work, such as teacher qualifications, learning environment, and curriculum. These standards were designed to specify: (1) dimensions of quality measures and associated performance indicators; (2) the weighting of each dimension in the rating scale; (3) programme quality as indicated by level and/or category; and (4) criteria for determining each level or category of programme quality (Hu & Li, 2012).

The Second ‘Dark Age’ (1994–2009) Unfortunately, the second Golden Era of ECE development in China was short-lived as, in 1994, the ECE sector entered what was considered the second Dark Age of ECE

development that lasted until 2009. During this period, the central government implemented the alleged ‘government retreats but private sector advances’ policy that encouraged privatization and marketization (H. Li et  al., 2016). Under this policy, the central government withdrew its role and shifted its responsibility of funding, providing, and monitoring ECE services to the private sector or non-governmental organizations (NGOs). This political move further led to the implementation of the ‘walking with two legs’ policy that encouraged collaboration between the government and NGOs as well as the private sector; that is, ‘the government organizations (“one leg”) and the NGOs and private sector (“the other leg”) work (“walk”) together’ to effectively strengthen ECE throughout the country (H. Li et al., 2016, p. 4). These policies have subsequently provided an impetus for social organizations, such as NGOs and individuals, to establish and run kindergartens (Pan & Liu, 2008). Faced with the reality of a lack of infrastructure and financial resources to provide ECE services, the central government had no choice but to accept privatization as a pragmatic solution (Li & Wang, 2008). Furthermore, in the late 1990s, due to a tax reform that restricted general local funding, some local governments ended up restructuring and marketizing public kindergartens by shutting them down, suspending them from operating, merging and transforming them, or selling them (Hong & Chen, 2016). Accordingly, China has since witnessed a considerable upsurge in the number of private kindergartens operated by non-governmental organizations or individuals.

Foreign Influences on Early Childhood Curriculum and Practices (1990s to present) Over the course of a century, Chinese early childhood curriculum (ECC) has been influenced by an integrated thread of ideologies

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and pedagogical practices from various countries and cultures. For instance, as discussed earlier, the earliest development of ECC in China was influenced by models from its neighbouring Japan. China’s ECE reform was also guided by what was hailed as its socialist partner and role model – the Soviet Union (Li & Chen, 2017, in press). Furthermore, the ‘open-door’ concept in 1979 welcomed the introduction of western philosophical and educational ideologies (especially those of Dewey, Piaget, and Vygotsky) into the Chinese education system, leading its ECC to become more diverse (Zhu, 2015). Accordingly, western ideologies were integrated into the first national curriculum guidelines in 1989 (Hu & Szente, 2009). Reinforcing the importance of ECE and child development, these curriculum guidelines reflected developmentally appropriate practices advocated in the United States (Bredekamp, 1987). Western curriculum approaches and models, such as the Project Approach, Reggio Emilia, and Montessori, were also incorporated into both public and private kindergartens (Zhu & Zhang, 2008). Furthermore, in 1989, the National Education Commission issued the document, Regulations on Kindergarten Education Practice (trial version), advocating for the adoption of theories, curriculum models, and pedagogical practices from western cultures, notably the United States (which was considered a leading country from which to learn) (Li & Chen, 2017, in press). Initiated through a top-down reform approach, these imported practices seemed easy for reformers to advocate; however, they were challenging for teachers to enact. A major hurdle facing teachers was the fact that they were neither trained nor ready to make the transition from their deeply rooted Chinese traditional pedagogical practices, resulting in a gap between ‘policy/ theory and practice’ (Li, Rao, & Tse, 2012). Accordingly, this cross-cultural transplantation of pedagogical practices has led to tremendous practical challenges among practitioners. Notably, traditional cultural values, that have

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long characterized teaching and learning in ECE classrooms in a predominantly collectivist-oriented Chinese society, inevitably clash with individualist-oriented western cultural values and theories about child development and their corresponding child-centred pedagogical practices. For instance, the traditional cultural values in Chinese society of obeying authorities and developing proper behaviour do not align with western practices of independence and individuality (Zhu, 2015). Pedagogically, Chinese parents and teachers tend to emphasize drilling, memorizing, and disciplining rather than individually-driven and creativity-related activities highly valued in the western context (Li et al., 2012). Faced with little guidance, many Chinese teachers ended up not being able to successfully enact the imported practices advocated enthusiastically by reformers (Li, Rao, & Tse, 2011). Recognizing the inherent pedagogical challenges incurred by incompatibilities between western progressive educational ideologies and realistic local conditions within which Chinese ECE services operated, in 2001 the Ministry of Education released the Supplementary Guidelines for Kindergarten Education (trial version) to provide guidance to practitioners on how to implement these imported practices (e.g. child-centred, play-based). In acknowledging socio-cultural realities, the Guidelines document sought a compromise by ascribing specific and clear requirements and content in different curriculum domains (Zhu & Zhang, 2008). They also encouraged change in the curriculum by developing a more progressive yet contextually appropriate pedagogy that sensitively responds to both local realities and global demands (Li et al., 2012).

Current Development in ECE Policies (post-2010) Recognizing ECE as foundational to basic education, since 2010, the central government has played an increasingly active role

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in promoting ECE development across the country. For instance, in recent years, the central government’s total financial investment in ECE was the largest of all levels of education, from 13.3 billion Chinese yuan in 2008 to 74.4 billion yuan in 2012, representing more than a fivefold increase (MoE, 2014). Furthermore, the central government’s commitment to strengthening the education sector subsequently led to its release of two ambitious policy reforms in 2010: The Outline of National Plan for Medium-and Long-Term Education Reform and Development (2010– 2020) (hereinafter referred to as the National Plan) that specified its education reform and development that decade (State Council, 2010a); and Views Concerning the Guidance on Early Childhood Education Reform and Development (hereinafter referred to as Views on ECE Reform and Development) (State Council, 2010b). The promulgation of these two policy reforms acted to amplify the central government’s support for the development of ECE, particularly in promoting both equity and quality in education for young children throughout the country. Both sets of legislations also advocated for the development of a quality rating system that could effectively evaluate the quality of kindergartens at the provincial level (Hu & Li, 2012). Specifically, the National Plan identified four strategic goals for ECE development in China during the decade from 2010 to 2020: (1) increasing attendance rates of preschool education; (2) universalizing preschool education by 2020; (3) clarifying the government’s responsibilities in ECE provision; and

(4) improving ECE in rural and impoverished areas (State Council, 2010a). For instance, the National Plan stipulated the gross attendance rate to increase from the year 2009 to the year 2020 (State Council, 2010a) (see Table 10.1). As Table 10.1 shows, by 2020 the central government aims to have 95% of children accessing one year of preschool education, 80% of children two years of preschool education, and 70% of children three years of preschool education. With more than 42 million children attending kindergartens and a gross attendance rate for three years of kindergarten education reaching 75% in 2015 (see Table 10.2), these figures actually exceeded the target ones set for that year by the National Plan (see Table 10.1). With continual financial investments by all governmental levels to support ECE development throughout the country, especially in impoverished, remote rural areas, China may indeed reach its target goal for basic universality of preschool education by 2020. Prior to 2010, the central government primarily attended to ECE development in urban areas, while neglecting that in rural areas (Hu & Roberts, 2013). Since 2010, the central government has become more involved in supporting ECE provision in rural areas, as demonstrated by the goals set by the National Plan. To accomplish these goals, pilot projects of ECE reform, such as the ‘Pilot Project of Central and Western Rural ECE Advancement Programme’ and the ‘NationalLevel Training Program for Kindergarten Teachers’, have been successively launched across many parts of the country with central

Table 10.1  Major goals for basic universality of preschool education from 2009 to 2020 Preschool education

2009

2015

Number of children attending kindergarten Gross attendance rate for those attending kindergarten one year before starting formal schooling Gross attendance rate for those attending kindergarten two years before starting formal schooling Gross attendance rate for those attending kindergarten three years before starting formal schooling

26.58 million 74%

34 million 40 million 85% 95%

65%

70%

80%

50.9%

60%

70%

Source: State Council (2010a, p. 11)

2020

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government funds providing the bulk of the financial support for developmental work at the provincial level (Hong & Chen, 2016). For instance, in Shaanxi (one of the ten pilot provinces), the National Development and Reform Commission provided a total financial investment of 51.3 million yuan, of which 45 million yuan came from the central budget and a matching fund of 6.3 million yuan from the local government of Shaanxi Province (Shaanxi Provincial Development and Reform Commission, 2010). The Views on ECE Reform and Development further clarified that a major goal was to make ECE more accessible to young children, thereby alleviating the ‘difficulty in admission to kindergarten’ issue in China (State Council, 2010b). That is, the difficulty arises because the supply of kindergartens does not meet the demand for them, resulting in many young children lacking access to a kindergarten education. The Views on ECE Reform and Development’s major proposal was to require local governments to formulate and implement a Three-Year Action Plan for improving ECE provision. Each province was granted the autonomy to develop its own Three-Year Action Plan into two phases (Phase-I, 2011–2013 and Phase-II, 2014–2016). Correspondingly, local governments implemented the first phase of their plan to address the accessibility problem for young children by boosting the supply of kindergartens (Hong & Chen, 2016). At the same time, following the guidelines of the Views on ECE Reform and Development, both the central and local governments sought to increase their fiscal investments in ECE development, resulting in greater accessibility to ECE for young children throughout the country. To build on and extend the efforts and momentum of Phase-I, Phase-II of the Three-Year Action Plan focused particularly on kindergarten development in both urban and rural areas, especially in expanding ECE resources and increasing the accessibility of ECE for children from disadvantaged backgrounds (Hong & Chen, 2016).

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Lingering Issues and Promising Opportunities for ECE Development Equity in ECE Provision: Improving but Still Not Yet a Reality Educational equity refers to the provision of equal access to quality education for all citizens of a society, according to the two principles of fairness and inclusion (OECD, 2008). Since 2000, the Chinese government has been promoting a fair education and gender equity in access to education for young children (Assessment Report Drafting Group of NCEDR, n.d.). For instance, gender difference in preschool education was reduced to 1.41% in 2005 among first-year students entering primary school (Assessment Report Drafting Group of NCEDR, n.d.). As discussed earlier, the central government has mobilized efforts at all levels to improve ECE services in poverty-stricken, rural areas. Yet, educational equity in ECE provision in China is still not a reality; rather it persists as a severe social issue that requires a remedy. In China, equity of access to high-quality and affordable kindergartens – that meet the basic standard of quality and charge affordable fees – has not been realized for the country’s most vulnerable children, including children from impoverished families, orphans, children in remote, rural areas and children with disabilities (Hong & Chen, 2016). This educational inequity at the preschool level is attributable to two critical factors: (1) a severe shortage of supply of kindergartens to meet the demand – an issue of quantity; and (2) disparities in the quality of kindergartens between private and public providers, and between urban and rural areas – an issue of quality.

ECE Provision: High Demand but Low Supply In China, the demand for ECE is exceedingly high, influenced by three main factors: (1)

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traditional Confucian ideology about the importance of education and academic success; (2) examination-oriented education system; and (3) the ‘one-child’ policy. First, Chinese culture has long been influenced by Confucianism; one of its widespread beliefs is that education is key to developing virtues in oneself (Chen, 2007). It is, thus, not surprising to find that parents in China typically emphasize educational success for their children. Accordingly, Chinese parents invest heavily in their children’s education and hold high expectations for their academic success, beginning in the early years. For instance, in a study of preschools in Xi’an (a large city and the capital of Shaanxi Province located in central China), Vaughan (1993) found that Chinese parents often desired their children to begin academic work early, believing that it would give them a head start for educational success. Second, in the context of the academic-oriented education system in China, competition for entry into fiercely selective ‘key’ and best schools further fuels Chinese parents to provide their children with an early start in education (Vaughan, 1993). Furthermore, many Chinese parents subscribe to the widespread mentality of ‘winning at the starting line’, implying that if the child is started off with a successful early education, he or she will have a competitive edge in excelling academically in the future. Thus, Chinese parents seize the early years as a critical time and ECE as a critical vehicle for their child to get a head start. Third, as a measure to control population growth, China officially implemented the one-child policy from 1980 to 2015. This political context provides yet another impetus for Chinese parents to enrol their only child in the ECE system and invest in his or her education early on. Having only one child means that families can concentrate whatever financial, educational, and emotional resources they can afford on just this one child to ensure that he or she is better positioned for academic success (Vaughan, 1993). All of the aforementioned factors jointly create high demands for ECE services. Unfortunately, the supply of

kindergartens is scarce, resulting in a large gap in ECE provision between demand and supply. This phenomenon has continued to plague the ECE sector in China due to what is dubbed the ‘3A’ problems: (1) accessibility (low supply of kindergartens resulting in the problem of ‘admission difficulty’); (2) affordability (some kindergartens, especially private ones, set high tuition fees, resulting in the problem of ‘expensive kindergartens’); and (3) accountability (inadequate accountability and quality assurance mechanisms, resulting in most kindergartens being of ‘low quality’) (H. Li et al., 2016). Consequently, the 3A problems collectively exacerbate the educational inequity for some of the nation’s most vulnerable children, especially those from destitute, rural areas.

ECE Disparity between Public and Private Kindergartens In China, there are two types of kindergarten providers: public and private. Public kindergartens are operated and funded by various government bodies, such as the central government and state-owned enterprises, whereas private ones are run by private entities, such as non-governmental sectors or individuals. As discussed earlier, a number of factors (i.e. China’s market-driven economy, limited involvement of the central government, and insufficient financial investments in ECE by local governments) have led to the privatization of kindergartens. Table 10.2 shows an increase in the provision of kindergartens (both public and private) to serve a large number of kindergarteners since 2009. In 2015, China had 223,683 kindergartens, of which the majority (65%) were operated privately. In fact, as shown in Table 10.2, the number of private kindergartens was nearly double that of public kindergartens.1 As the majority of kindergartens in urban areas are federally funded and publicly operated by government-affiliated agencies, ­ they are subject to accountability and quality measures. In fact, the MoE monitors the

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Table 10.2 Number of kindergartens (public and private), number of kindergarteners (public and private) and gross enrolment rate in three-year ECE, 2009–2015 Year

Total number of kindergartens

Public

Private

Total number of kindergarteners

Public

Private

Gross enrolment rate in three-year ECE (%)

2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015

138,209 150,420 166,750 181,251 198,553 209,881 223,683

48,905 48,131 51,346 56,613 65,102 70,575 77,283

 89,304 102,289 115,404 124,638 133,451 139,306 146,400

26,578,141 29,766,695 34,244,456 36,857,624 38,946,903 40,507,145 42,648,284

15,236,447 15,772,001 17,302,366 18,330,180 19,044,367 19,253,364 19,623,855

11,341,694 13,994,694 16,942,090 18,527,444 19,902,536 21,253,781 23,024,429

50.90 56.60 62.30 64.50 67.50 70.50 75.00

Note: Data compiled from the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China (en.moe.gov.cn/Resources/Statistics/)

quality of all types of public kindergartens in China through a periodic mandatory assessment process in such a way that all kindergartens seeking a licence must first meet all national legal requirements (Hu & Li, 2012). These qualified kindergartens can then be rated for a level and category of quality according to standards set by their local government. As mentioned earlier, each local government is responsible for formulating its own quality rating system that aligns with national regulations, such as ascribing a list of performance indicators for each level and category of quality, spanning both the structural and process elements of quality (Hu & Szente, 2009). The quality level and category of each kindergarten is determined on the basis of the total scores assigned by raters. For instance, there are three possible levels of quality, from highest (level one) to lowest (level three). In Beijing, a kindergarten which was rated as demonstrating the highest quality is called the ‘city’s model kindergarten’ (Hu & Szente, 2009, p. 248). Kindergartens with higher quality ratings can benefit from (a) being rewarded with financial support from the central and local governments; (b) enrolling children from more politically powerful and socioeconomically affluent families; and (c) recruiting and retaining highly qualified teachers (Hu & Li, 2012). In contrast to public kindergartens, privately operated kindergartens do not receive government funding and thus are not subject to quality ratings. Furthermore, while

local educational authorities have the power to register, inspect, and approve private kindergartens, they are not in a position to stop them from operating or to fund them (Hong & Chen, 2016). This means that the structural and process elements of quality among private kindergarten providers are unregulated and can vary widely (Hu, Zhou, Li, & Roberts, 2014). Similarly, tuition fees too are variable and are determined by market forces (Liu & Pan, 2013). Thus, since there is a high demand for the limited supply of kindergarten places, and since there are no monitoring mechanisms in place, private kindergartens may charge a range of high tuition fees from several hundred to several thousand Chinese yuan per month. It is well known in China that some high-quality private kindergartens may even charge tuition fees that are higher than those for some universities. In the context of short supply of high-­ quality kindergarten places, parents who desire a ‘best’ start for their children, would vie for the limited number of spots in highquality public kindergartens, even to the extent of resorting to illegal measures, notably the influence of power, ‘guanxi’ (personal connections) or a ‘back door’ method, and bribes to gain entry (Hong & Chen, 2016). For other families, there are four other options: (1) lowquality, affordable public kindergartens; (2) low-quality, expensive private kindergartens; (3) high-quality, expensive private kindergartens; and (4) low-quality, affordable private kindergartens. While children from affluent

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households can afford high-quality, expensive private kindergartens, this arrangement is not an option for children from socio-­ economically low or impoverished backgrounds (Song, 2016). Furthermore, children of migrant workers without ‘hukou’ (city residence permits) are known to experience even greater difficulty than their resident counterparts in gaining access to high-quality and affordable urban public kindergartens. The differences between private and public kindergartens further compound the urban– rural disparity in ECE provision across China. For instance, in 2010, more than half (55%) of kindergartens in rural areas were privately operated (MoE, 2010). This phenomenon suggests that in the face of inaccessibility to highquality, affordable public kindergartens, rural children may end up being only able to access low-quality, privately operated kindergartens. Unfortunately, the scarcity of high-quality, affordable public kindergartens coupled with high-quality but expensive private ones has collectively exacerbated the issue of affordability of ECE, especially for children from impoverished families (Hong & Chen, 2016).

ECE Disparity between Urban and Rural Areas While China as a whole is prospering economically, its unbalanced socioeconomic development in eastern and western regions and between urban and rural areas has yielded ‘social consequences’ (Law & Pan, 2009). One of these social consequences is educational inequity in terms of rural children’s inability to access high-quality kindergarten education relative to their urban peers (Hu & Li, 2012). When a kindergarten education is accessible to rural children, this is likely of low quality, limited in its resources, and staffed by unqualified adults with no formal ECE training (Hu & Szente, 2009; Hu et al., 2014). Research shows that this educational inequity applies also to children from vulnerable backgrounds, especially those living in

destitute, remote rural areas (Hu & Li, 2012; Hu & Roberts, 2013; Hu & Szente, 2009). Evidence of systemic low quality in rural kindergartens was also reported by K. Li et al. (2016) in their study of the quality of ECE programmes in Zhejiang Province using the Chinese Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale; they further found that there was lower quality in private versus public programmes, and in programmes serving children of parents with lower levels of education. Additionally, Liu (2011) reported that the proportion of teachers with a teaching qualification certificate was significantly higher in urban (82.5%) than in rural (61.5%) areas. Furthermore, the salary for rural ECE teachers was described by Zhao and Hu (2008) as ‘unreasonably low’ (p. 201). Two further studies reported that low salaries are a major reason why qualified teachers are not willing to teach in kindergartens in rural regions (Guo, 2003; Xu, 2001). Thus, children in rural areas end up not being well served by existing ECE services, and accessibility and affordability of high-quality ECE remain significant challenges for these children. This issue also makes the accessibility and affordability of a kindergarten education a national social crisis that exacerbates the existing inequities of educational opportunities for children from various socio-­economic backgrounds and between children in rural and urban areas. To address the issue of educational equity, the central government has – since the release of the National Plan in 2010 – spearheaded efforts to improve the accessibility and affordability of ECE provision by augmenting funding support. For instance, during the first phase of the Three-Year Action Plan (2011–13), an increased amount of funding was invested in ECE development, particularly in rural areas. Specifically, the central government invested 50 billion yuan and mobilized local governments to invest more than 1,600 billion yuan to rapidly develop ECE provision (MoE, 2014). As a result of the Three-Year Action Plan, private, profitmaking kindergartens – by improving their

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quality and lowering tuition fees to match as closely as possible those of public kindergartens – have gradually improved in quality and affordability (Hong & Chen, 2016). Consequently, the urban–rural disparity in accessibility and affordability of ECE has begun to narrow. To equalize ECE opportunities, it is critical that the central and local governments continue to invest in high levels of funding and resources to promote quality ECE services for children in poverty-stricken regions, particularly central and western China (Hong, Luo, & Cui, 2013).

Strengthening the Monitoring and Quality Assessment System While the central government has been responsible for setting the overall policy direction for ECE, since 2010, it has been the local, provincial governments that have borne the responsibility of executing the policies by implementing their own individual mechanisms for reforming the development of ECE. To facilitate and support the developmental work in ECE by local governments, the central government issued the Interim Measures of Early Childhood Education Monitoring and Evaluation in 2012, aimed at providing guidance on necessary monitoring, assessment, and annual inspection systems in various provinces to achieve the principles of development, incentive, objectivity, and effectiveness (MoE, 2012). The Interim Measures established an index system to assess the developmental ECE work achieved by local governments in six areas: (1) responsibilities of local governments in formulating and implementing a Three-Year Action Plan; (2) local investment of funds and implementation of various financial support policies; (3) expansion and development of kindergartens; (4) training of kindergarten teachers; (5) systems for managing standards; and (6) development of standards, especially for alleviating the difficulties faced by many

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families in gaining admission to kindergarten for their children. The allocation of financial support from the central government to local governments was determined by how well the local governments performed on these six dimensions (MoE, 2012). These are promising monitoring and supervisory mechanisms; however, given that the monitoring supervisory authority is itself part of the educational administrative department, rather than an independent third party, concerns have been raised about its objectivity (Office of National Education Inspectorate, 2012). Since 2010, four other important financial initiatives have been initiated by the central government to promote social equity in ECE for children in central and western rural areas and for those facing disadvantaged circumstances in urban areas (MoE, 2014). First, the central government invested 38.2 billion yuan to support central and western rural regions in building more than 4,500 new kindergartens and providing about 80,000 additional kindergartens by renovating vacant, rural school buildings into kindergartens and adding kindergartens to existing primary schools (MoE, 2014). Second, the central government invested 9.1 billion yuan to support urban enterprises and institutions so that they could help provide ECE services to the children of migrant workers (MoE, 2014). Over a three-year period, the central government’s financial support has benefited more than 10 million children, of whom 3 million were children of migrant workers. Third, the central government provided 1.62 billion yuan to encourage ECE provision for about 3 million children from disadvantaged backgrounds (i.e. children from impoverished families, orphans, children with disabilities) (MoE, 2014). Fourth, the central government intensified efforts to advance teacher competence including investing 1.1 billion yuan to train 296,000 teachers working in rural kindergartens (MoE, 2014). All of these areas of financial support have subsequently provided educational opportunities for many more children plagued by disadvantaged circumstances.

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Implications of the ‘TwoChild’ Policy for Future ECE Development In October 2015, China announced through its state-run news agency the supplanting of its existing one-child policy with a two-child policy, a law that would allow Chinese married couples to have a maximum two children. This new policy was proposed as a pragmatic solution to the crisis of an ageing population and, relatedly, the dwindling labour force as well as issues of gender imbalance. In December of the same year, the new ‘one couple, two children’ policy was passed into law by the National People’s Congress Standing Committee, the country’s law governing entity. Effective from 1 January 2016, the new family planning rule, embraced by many Chinese families, ushered in an era of a more expansive child population for China. January 2017 marked exactly a year-long implementation of the universal two-child policy. While no scholarly literature or direct data is yet available on the population growth of newborns under the two-child policy, media reports are beginning to discuss this phenomenon. For instance, according to China Daily (2016), citing statistical information from China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission, by the end of June 2016, there was a total of 8.31 million newborns; of which 44.7% were second-child newborns, representing an increase of about 6.9% as compared to the proportion of all second-child newborns in 2015. In the context of the two-child policy, how expansive the birth population becomes in China in the future remains to be seen. Currently, at least two types of ramifications related to having two children are certain: (1) economic; and (2) educational. It is an economic issue because birthing, raising, and educating an additional child require financial resources. In China, while the two-child policy was welcomed by many Chinese families, many other Chinese families, especially those in conurbations, felt that they were not in the

position, financially, to have more than one child. For instance, according to a survey conducted in 2011 collaboratively by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Institute of Youth and the City Women’s Federation Department of Children and Family (Shanghai, 2011) on 2,000 families in Shanghai (the country’s largest city and an international financial hub), 35% of Shanghai parents indicated that raising a child had placed a heavy financial burden on them and 45.3% of the parents expressed that they would not have a second child, even if allowed by policy. In addition to being an economic issue, the two-child policy is an educational issue because all stakeholders will need to ensure equity and quality in educational provision for the anticipated soaring numbers of children born across all regions in China. As the aforementioned lingering issues demonstrate, China’s ECE services still have a long way to go to achieve its goals of educational equity and quality for all of its young children. One can only imagine that if unresolved, these issues will compound. Clearly, augmenting financial investments in ECE development by both the central and local governments continues to be vital not only in increasing the number of kindergartens but also in offering more, high-quality kindergartens throughout the country to meet the enrolment needs of a potentially growing child population. The two-child policy presents a unique set of challenges as well as opportunities for all stakeholders (e.g. early childhood educators, policymakers, parents) concerning how to address the educational demands of the additional wave of young children entering kindergarten in the imminent future.

Conclusion The architecture of a society is built on many interrelated, supporting structures. Its health and prosperity depend on the citizens who design and operate it. As the early years are foundational to a country’s long-term welfare

Early Childhood Policy in China

in human capacity, accelerated progress in ECE is critical for societal achievement in all areas, be it economic, educational, or sociocultural. Over the last three to four decades, China has made great strides in implementing a series of political changes that propelled the country rapidly into becoming an economic powerhouse in the world. Particularly, the political and economic reform of the opendoor policy initiated in 1978 was a powerful driving force. China’s prosperous economic development has subsequently led to a series of ECE reforms, resulting in various advances and policy interventions. Yet, the development of ECE has not been without practical challenges. It continues to wrestle with various issues including accessibility, affordability, and accountability associated with ECE provision, and disparity in the quantity and quality of kindergarten provision between urban and rural areas and between private and public providers, all of which have the potential to erode rather than facilitate the development of human potential in young children. Without adequate structures in place, the architecture of ECE will not stand strong and its policy targets are arduous, if not impossible, to realize. My analysis of the major policies concerning ECE development in China suggests that the areas within which the country most needs continuous strengthening include funding, programme quality assurance, and educational equity by achieving high levels of accessibility, affordability, and accountability of ECE provision. Failure to do so is likely to undermine economic prosperity and societal welfare, and worse still, reinforce social inequity in educational opportunities in the long run. In China, as children from disadvantaged backgrounds (e.g. children in destitute, rural areas, children with special needs, children of migrant workers, orphans) continue to strive for accessibility and affordability of high-quality ECE services, the issue of social equity merits top priority. Accordingly, designing effective, strategic plans and ensuring adequately stocked resources from both the central and local governments are not

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only necessary but also critical. It is also imperative that accountability in government funding in ECE is monitored. This imperative includes the need for both the central and local governments to develop and implement sound mechanisms for not only increasing the quantity of kindergartens, but also assessing the quality of both public and private kindergartens in urban and rural areas so that financial resources are distributed and monitored effectively and accordingly to enhance educational opportunities and experience for all young children throughout the country.

Note  1  The number of children attending private and public kindergarteners does not show the same ratio as that for the number of premises, i.e. the number of children in private kindergartens did not double those in public ones (see Table 10.2). This is because overall there were more public kindergarten classrooms than private kindergarten classrooms. For instance, in 2010, there were approximately 825,000 public kindergarten classrooms versus roughly 696,000 private kindergarten classrooms, a difference of about 129,000 classrooms (MoE, 2010).

References Assessment Report Drafting Group of National Center for Education Development Research (NCEDR) of China. (n.d.). Chapter VII: Gender equality. Retrieved from http://www.unescobkk.org/fileadmin/user_upload/efa/EFA_ M D A / N a t i o n a l _ E FA _ M D A _ R e p o r t s / China_EFA_MDA_VII_Annex.pdf Bredekamp, S. (Ed.). (1987). Developmentally appropriate practice in early childhood programs serving children from birth through age 8. Washington, DC: NAEYC. Chen, J. J.-L. (2007). How the academic support of parents, teachers, and peers contributes to a student’s achievement: The case of Hong Kong. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. China Daily. (2016). Two-child policy working, birthrate figures show. Retrieved from http:// usa.chinadaily.com.cn/epaper/2016-10/31/ content_27226748.htm

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China Statistical Yearbook. (2016). Age composition and dependency ratio of population. Retrieved from http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjsj/ ndsj/2016/indexeh.htm Guo, Y. Y. (2003). Reflection on the development of early childhood education in western rural areas (in Chinese). Journal of Teaching and Management, 15, 5–6. Hong, X., & Chen, J. (2016). A critical analysis of the changing landscape of early childhood education in mainland China: History, policies, progress, and future development. In H. Li, E. Park, & J. Chen (Eds.), Early childhood education policies in Asia Pacific: Advances in theory and practice (pp. 31–50). Singapore: Springer. Hong, X., Luo, L., & Cui, F. (2013). Investigating regional disparities of preschool education development with cluster analysis in mainland China. International Journal of Child Care and Education Policy, 7(1), 67–80. Hu, B. Y., & Li, K. (2012). The quality rating system of Chinese preschool education: Prospects and challenges. Childhood Education, 88(1), 14–22. Hu, B. Y., & Roberts, S. K. (2013). A qualitative study of the current transformation to rural village early childhood in China: Retrospect and prospect. International Journal of Educational Development, 33(4), 316–324. Hu, B. Y., & Szente, J. (2009). Exploring the quality of early childhood education in China: Implications for early childhood teacher education. Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education, 30(3), 247–262. Hu, B. Y., Zhou, Y., Li, K., & Roberts, S. K. (2014). Examining program quality disparities between urban and rural kindergartens in China: Evidence from Zhejiang. Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 28(4), 461–483. Huan, G. (1986). China’s open door policy, 1978–1984. Journal of International Affairs, 39(2), 1–18. Law, W.-W., & Pan, S.-Y. (2009). Legislation and equity in basic education for all in China. Interchange, 40(4), 337–372. Li, H., & Chen, J. J. (2017, in press). Evolution of the early childhood curriculum in China: The impact of social and cultural factors on revolution and innovation. Early Child Development and Care, published OnlineFirst on August 17, 2016 as doi: 10.1080/03004430. 2016.1220373

Li, H., & Wang, X. C. (2008). Transformation of public kindergartens in Shenzhen: Internet study of public views. Chinese Education & Society, 41(2), 41–70. Li, H., Rao, N., & Tse, S. K. (2011). Bridging the gap: A longitudinal study of the relationship between pedagogical continuity and early Chinese literacy acquisition. Early Years: An International Journal of Research and Development, 31(1), 57–70. Li, H., Rao, N., & Tse, S. K. (2012). Adapting Western pedagogies into teaching Chinese literacy: Case studies of Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Singapore preschool classrooms. Early Education and Development, 23(4), 1–19. Li, H., Yang, W., & Chen, J. J. (2016). From ‘Cinderella’ to ‘beloved princess’: The evolution of early childhood education policy in China. International Journal of Child Care and Education Policy, 10(2), 1–17. Li, K., Pan, Y., Hu, B., Burchinal, M., De Marco, A., Fan, X., & Qin, J. (2016). Early childhood education quality and child outcomes in China: Evidence from Zhejiang Province. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 36, 427–438. Liu, Y., & Pan, Y.-J. (2013). A review and analysis of the current policy on early childhood education in mainland China. International Journal of Early Years Education, 21(2–3), 141–151. Liu, Z. L. (2011). Evaluation of kindergarten education quality in mainland China: Investigation in eleven cities. Beijing: Educational Science Publishing House. Ministry of Education (MoE) of the People’s Republic of China. (1989). Regulations on the management of kindergartens (in Chinese). Retrieved from http://www.moe.edu. cn/publicfiles/business/htmlfiles/moe/ moe_620/200409/3132.html Ministry of Education (MoE) of the People’s Republic of China. (2010). Number of kindergartens and kindergarten classrooms (in Chinese). Retrieved from http://www.moe. edu.cn/s78/A03/moe_560/s4628/ s4632/201010/t20101021_110050.html Ministry of Education (MoE) of the People’s Republic of China. (2012). The announcement issued by the Ministry of Education about the interim measures for early childhood education supervision and evaluation (in Chinese). Retrieved from http://www. moe.edu.cn/publicfiles/business/htmlfiles/ moe/s6500/201205/xxgk_136728.html

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Ministry of Education (MoE) of the People’s Republic of China. (2014). Financial investment in early childhood education has increased by five times in five years – Ministry of Education spokesperson’s responses to questions asked by reporters concerning financial investment in early childhood education (in Chinese). Retrieved from http://www. moe.gov.cn/publicfiles/business/htmlfiles/ moe/s271/201406/169763.html Ministry of Education (MoE) of the People’s Republic of China. (2016). Regulations on kindergarten work (in Chinese). Retrieved from http://www.moe.edu.cn/srcsite/A02/s5911/ moe_621/201602/t20160229_231184.html National Bureau of Statistics of China. (2011). Communiqué of the National Bureau of Statistics of People’s Republic of China on Major Figures of the 2010 Population Census [1] (No. 1). Retrieved from: http://www.stats.gov.cn/English/ NewsEvents/201104/t20110428_26449.html OECD. (2008). Policy brief: Ten steps to equity in education. Paris: OECD. Retrieved from h t t p : / / w w w. o e c d . o r g / e d u c a t i o n / school/39989494.pdf Office of National Education Inspectorate. (2012). Office of Ministry of Education spokesperson’s responses to questions asked by reporters concerning strengthening the supervision system of accountability so that citizens would be satisfied with education (in Chinese). Retrieved from http://www.moe.gov.cn/publicfiles/business/htmlfiles/moe/s271/201407/171720.html Pan, Y., & Liu, Y. (2008). A comparison of curricular practices in Chinese kindergartens: The influence of curriculum reform. International Journal of Early Childhood, 40(2), 33–48. Population Reference Bureau. (2011). Population of provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions, 2010 census of China, and change in the percent distribution by area, 2000–2010. Retrieved from http://www.prb.org/pdf11/ china-2010-census-results-table.pdf Shaanxi Provincial Development and Reform Commission. (2010). The State determines the province [Shaanxi Province] as one of the central and western rural preschool education pilot projects and issued an investment of 45 million yuan (in Chinese). Retrieved from http://www.sndrc.gov.cn/newstyle/pub_ newsshow.asp?id=1005209&chid=100074 Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Institute of Youth and the City Women’s Federation

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Department of Children and Family. (2011). Family child care costs an average of 3 million, nearly half of families in Shanghai gave up having a second child (in Chinese). Retrieved from http://finance.people.com.cn/money/ GB/15315314.html Song, Y. (2016). Chinese research perspectives on education. In D. Yang (Ed.), Trends in preschool education: Public finance investment, development trends, and challenges to its equality (Vol. 3, pp. 77–110). Leiden: Brill. State Council (2010a). Outline of China’s national plan for medium and long-term education reform and development (2010–2020). Retrieved from https://internationaleducation.gov.au/News/newsarchive/2010/Documents/China_Education_Reform_pdf.pdf State Council. (2010b). The State Council’s Several Opinions on the Current Development of Early Childhood Education. Retrieved from http://www.gov.cn/zwgk/2010-11/24/ content_1752377.htm Tsang, M. C. (2000). Education and national development in China since 1949: Oscillating policies and enduring dilemmas. China Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Greater China 10, 579–618. Vaughan, J. (1993). Early childhood education in china. Childhood Education, 69(4), 196–200. Xu, Z. Y. (2001). The factors influencing the development of early childhood education in rural areas (in Chinese). Studies in Preschool Education, 1, 34–35. Zhao, L., & Hu, X. (2008). The development of early childhood education in rural areas in China. Early Years: An International Journal of Research and Development, 28(2), 197–209. Zhu, J. (2015). Early childhood education and relative policies in China. International Journal of Child Care and Education Policy, 3(1), 51–60. Zhu, J., & Wang, X. C. (2005). Contemporary early childhood education and research in China. In B. Spodek & O. N. Saracho (Eds.), International perspectives on research in early childhood education (pp. 55–77). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Zhu, J. X., & Zhang, J. (2008). Contemporary trends and developments in early childhood education in China. Early Years: An International Research Journal, 28(2), 173–182.

11 Highlights and Shadows in ECEC Policy in Latin America and the Caribbean1 Cynthia Adlerstein and Marcela Pardo

Introduction There is extensive evidence that Latin America and the Caribbean (hereafter, LAC) exhibit one of the highest levels of income inequality in the world and, by international standards, middling levels of educational inequality. Commenting on both inequalities, Cox (2010, p. 1) noted that their historic roots ‘are deep and the contemporary economic, social and political institutions and forces that sustain them are durable and powerful’. It is a heterogeneous region, where diverse indigenous cultures and the Spanish cultural heritage co-exist, and several languages are spoken (Stavenhagen, 2004). According to UNESCO (2014), the LAC region is composed of 41 countries,2 which the IMF (2016) classifies as both low and middle income. In terms of social justice, the income inequality is extensive throughout the region (Fraser & Honneth, 2006). For example, in 2014 the population of Chile, the country with the largest gross domestic product (GDP) in the region, had a per capita income 3.4 times higher than the per

capita income in Nicaragua. Also, citizens of countries located on the southern end of the region, like Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, have higher average incomes (nearly double) than inhabitants of other countries of the region (BID, 2016b). Comparing worldwide, LAC is the world’s second most unequal region with an estimation of 52.9. According to 2014 data cited by Caetano & De Armas (2014), this figure stands slightly below Sub-Saharan Africa (56.5), while it is followed at a distance by Asia (44.7), Eastern Europe and Central Asia (34.7). This inequality is even more acute when referring to children. The total population of the LAC region is 625 million (Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe, 2016), where approximately 64.5 million are children under 6 years old (UNESCOWCECCE, 2010). As a distinctive feature of the region, though the young population increased 2.5 times between 1950 and 2005 and is expected to decline by around 17% between 2005 and 2050 (Saad, 2009), about 20% of under 18-year-olds lived in poverty

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in 2010 (CEPAL-UNICEF, 2013). This early childhood population is the poorest in the region and despite the increase in scientific evidence of the importance of this age group and political efforts to improve the conditions in which they live, young children still bear the greatest burden of poverty, disease, violence, and other risk factors closely associated with low levels of academic achievements and overall well-being (Britto et  al., 2013a; UNICEF, 2012). Studies have concluded that levels of cognitive development and language are higher in children from wealthier households, and underline that disparities deepen as children grow, at least until entry into the school system (BID, 2016b). In general, in the region there are important differences among children from different socioeconomic strata in cognitive development and language, and to a lesser degree in levels of social-emotional development and behavioural problems (Berlinski & Schady, 2015). As a region LAC has quite a long history of provision of education and care services for young children, dating back to the nineteenth century (although some can be traced back to the colonial period). Consisting of diverse initiatives in the areas of child protection, health, and education, these initiatives focused mainly on the poorest children under the care of the State. The initiatives were consistent with a welfare approach to children’s services, which predominated until the ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in the 1990s – as we discuss later in the chapter. Though the first educational centres for young children were heavily based on pedagogical approaches imported from Europe and primarily inspired by the work of Froebel, Montessori, and Dewey’s New School, the early childhood population in the LAC region had to wait more than a century for their country to define education as a political priority (Diker, 2010). Indeed, in the late nineteenth century, the Latin American education system historically focused its efforts on the universalization of elementary education, leaving the initial level

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without political, institutional or educational definition well into the second half of the twentieth century. Due to the absence of state policies to promote the expansion and operational infrastructure of kindergartens, as well as the lack of monitoring mechanisms and state control, the history of the early childhood education sector shows a characteristically slow development and a very diverse structure of provision (Harf et al., 1996). Coverage of ECEC started to increase steadily around the 1970s. At the time, the term ECEC mainly referred to formal programmes annexed to schools or kindergartens attended by 4- and 5-year-olds. In the meanwhile, programmes serving younger children were termed as ‘child care’ and were not conceived as educational. The emphasis of such services was on welfare aspects of childcare, and health and nutrition activities with minimal educational components (UNESCO-WCECCE, 2010). About that time, new models of both curriculum development and management began to develop. The most important example of this development during the 1970s and 1980s is the case of non-formal programmes (also known as non-centre-based educational services, and community-based or unconventional early childhood education); considered a particularly Latin American and Caribbean contribution to the patrimony of world education (Young & Fujimoto-Gómez, 2004). This local model of provision emphasized the socially effective ways in which civil society could participate in early childhood development, transcending the pedagogical sphere, and engaging in social justice and community development of its own assets and empowerment3 (Kirpal, 2000). Though the LAC region continues to lag behind more developed countries in socioeconomic and early childhood education and care (ECEC) indicators, it fares much better, on average, than other poor regions in the world (Vegas & Santibañez, 2010). So, based on the ample evidence of the many benefits of ECEC for early childhood and socio-­ economic development (Carneiro & Heckman, 2003; Heckman, 2011), ECEC

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policies should be a national priority and a particularly important tool for reducing socio-cultural and educational gaps (BID, 2016b; Vargas-Barón, 2015). Unfortunately, research leading to evidence-based policies on ECEC has been slow to develop in the region and attracts lower public investment compared to other educational levels and disciplines (e.g. health) associated with early childhood development. At the same time, the results and impact of already implemented public policies in the region have been minimally monitored. Hence, available knowledge on this issue is quite limited, allowing only partial descriptions of this phenomenon. Today, in LAC countries, one of the greatest challenges is to ensure knowledge production that directs investment towards programmes that have a measurable impact on early childhood and social development (Berlinski & Schady, 2015; Pardo & Adlerstein, 2016). The period between 1990 and 2015 has seen the greatest policy activity in ECEC in the history of the region. Main trends show that countries have increased their expenditure in the sector; governments have carried forward institutional and curricular reforms and have developed programmes which make disadvantaged groups a priority, with quality and equity as driving criteria. ‘The policies impact not only coverage, which was the main focus of state actions in education throughout the twentieth century, but also institutional and curricular arrangements’ (Cox, 2010, p. 33). This idea has had its own expression in ECEC, which has become visible in policies and discourses regarding the promotion of equity and social justice. Metaphors such as ‘levelling the field’, ‘social justice from the cradle’, ‘windows of opportunities’ and ‘lifelong learning’ have been repeatedly used in politics, press and academia, highlighting the huge opportunities and potential that ECEC is perceived to have for making a difference to children’s chances of a better life. In the last two decades, ECEC has acquired increased political priority in the region, as a crystallization of the wide agreement on the relevance of nurture from the first years of

life, as well as the recognition of education as a right of all children. Thus, plenty of policy initiatives have emerged in every country, each enthusiastically pursuing the individual and social benefits of ECEC, as described in the scientific literature (Britto et al., 2013b) and yielding ECEC policies and programmes that vary in scale, type of services and institutional architecture (Vegas & Santibañez, 2010). This chapter provides a critical analysis of the current situation of public policies for ECEC in the LAC region. By identifying the rising relevance of ECEC and the expansion of its coverage as its most remarkable highlights, and sustained problems of quality and equity as its most concerning shadows, we propose that if LAC countries are to successfully emerge from these shadows, they will need to develop and strengthen their national policies. The arguments are organized into four sections. First, we address the LAC context in which a new political agenda for ECEC is possible. There we discuss how LAC countries, since the 1990s, have been influenced mainly by the UNCRC and by the international banks and agencies that have pushed ECEC policies along specific pathways. Second, the chapter highlights the main trends in ECEC policy development, distinguishing between achievements and dilemmas that countries have faced along the way. Third, shadows are identified and discussed, with particular attention to structural elements of policies that are hindering the achievement of the objectives proposed for ECEC. Finally, we analyse the challenges ahead for ECEC policies.

The Latin American context since the 1990s and the emergence of a new political agenda for ECEC Since the beginning of the 1990s a new agenda for ECEC has unfolded in the LAC region. In this section we review how the political and

Highlights and shadows in ECEC policy in Latin America and the Caribbean

socio-cultural moment of transition towards democracy and peace restitution in the continent provided the impulse for this development.

Political Agreements and the UNCRC Increasingly, LAC countries have chosen to invest in child development and early childhood education, focusing early efforts on the population with lowest household income, as a strategy to improve school outcomes and trajectories during adulthood (Engle & Black, 2007; Engle et al., 2011). Since the 1990s this slow but consistent trend in public policy has been based, first of all, on the recognition that children have a legal identity and a set of interests that are separate from their parents’ and worth protecting (Berlinski & Schady, 2015). Thus, countries of the region show – as a major accomplishment – a greater visibility of early childhood on public policy agendas and an increasing recognition of children as subjects with rights (UNESCO-WCECCE, 2010). Though the notion of children’s rights is relatively new, it has been widely accepted in LAC, influencing the notions of early childhood education as a right, and of children as rights holders. Since the 1990s the UNCRC has been the most widely ratified human rights treaty in the continent, signed by all nations. In Chile, for instance, the agreement took just nine minutes in the Congress to be approved. In fact, according to UNICEF (2004) in no other region of the world was there such an intense social mobilization around the UNCRC as in the case of Latin America. The new winds of change were aroused first by the withdrawal of military dictatorships (Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Bolivia, among others). Later, the end of armed conflicts (in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua) presented the new governments of democratic transition with the possibility of a friendly and apparently politically innocuous gesture that endowed them with legitimacy after years of deep disagreements with civil

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society (Berlinski & Schady, 2015). This new political agenda set in place a new legal and cultural landscape for children, changing relations with institutions and with adults. UNICEF (2004) identifies two stages in the implementation of the UNCRC within the continent. A first moment of transition to the new model occurred between 1989 and 1991, when the LAC governments were driven by a ratification movement and the Convention’s approval was massively adopted by the governments. However, these countries kept the old legislations intact, maintaining policies designed for the control and protection of the abandoned delinquent minor during the first decades of the twentieth century. The second stage, from 1992 on, was a moment of legal and cultural expansion of autonomy for children and intermittent implementation of the articles of the UNCRC. It was in this period that governments in LAC started reforming and adapting their laws, institutions, and power relations concerning childhood, in alignment with the UNCRC. These new legal instruments were expressed in long-term policy commitments and were aimed at groups who have faced discrimination and a lack of political, economic and social recognition. Within the ECEC field, the adoption of the child rights approach has acquired relevance in contesting ECEC policies developed from a children’s needs perspective, with the understanding of children as beneficiaries of policies, and governments acting out of patronage and charity. Instead, the drive to establish a rightsbased approach has recognized children as individuals with legal rights to learning, playing, and accessing educational programmes and institutions. Particular expressions of this social force within ECEC are, for example, the UNCRC constituting a major principle within the national curricula of every country in the region, the questioning of ECEC policies with primarily childcare intentions, and the idea of ‘education from birth’ as a constitutional right of every citizen. In addition, the UNCRC approach has introduced a new agenda, stating quality and public education from birth as a

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main right of every child, mobilizing not only new legislations, but also real new social projects (UNICEF, 2004). Children, within ECEC, are not simply the property of their parents, caregivers or the state, but citizens, rights holders, and social agents with the right to participate in the shaping of their own development, learning, and destiny, according to their age and maturity (Lee, Krappmann & Akosua Aidoo, 2015). Despite the UNCRC having widely permeated the ECEC framework in LAC, its translation into concrete measures has been much less extensive. For example, the right to education from birth has been upheld in the official curricula of every country of the region; however, it has been mostly promoted through the expansion of coverage, with scarce attention paid to equity or quality issues. According to Francisca Morales (2016), a former UNICEF consultant, this gap partly stems from the lack of institutional mechanisms for the implementation of measures to embed the rights approach in ECEC services.4 This vision is consistent with the interpretation of Rosa Blanco,5 (2016) current Director of OEI (Organização dos Estados Ibero-americanos/Organization of IberoAmerican States), who, while identifying the importance of the UNCRC in putting ECEC on the educational and social agenda, strongly criticized the lack of public policy investment in quality and the pertinacity of some curricula in appearing unaware of children’s right to play, their right to joy and to learning for citizenship.

International Organizations as a Main Source of ECEC Policies It is interesting to observe that despite exhibiting quite different socio-cultural backgrounds, income levels, and ECEC institutional structures, LAC countries have tended to build similar ECEC policy objectives and strategies. Most countries have prioritized the expansion of children’s enrolment in centre-based programmes and the establishment of national curricula as the main elements of ECEC policies (Pardo & Adlerstein, 2016).

This trend has been associated with the influential role that several inter-­governmental organizations have played in the region as advocates or supporters of public investment in ECEC as a promoter of individual and social benefits. Certainly, the entire field of education in the region has been strongly influenced by international organizations, such as the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and UNESCO, prompting an isomorphic effect across educational systems (Cox, 2010); the ECEC field has not been an exception. In fact, several LAC countries – among them, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico – have funded ECEC policy initiatives through loans from the World Bank and/or the InterAmerican Development Bank, in accordance with their respective orientations (BID, 2016b; World Bank, 2017). Likewise, UNESCO has provided LAC countries – and other regions, as well – with diagnoses and advice on ECEC policy. For example, this organization has issued two reports for LAC focused on the first goal of Education for All (which aims at expanding and improving ECEC), identifying challenges to achieve it, and offering concrete suggestions towards this objec­tive (UNESCO, 2007; UNESCO-WCECCE, 2010). Thus, several authors have posited the idea that these international organizations have contributed to the construction of an international homogeneous discourse aimed at public investment in certain types of ECEC (Mahon, 2011; Penn, 2002). From this more critical perspective the isomorphic development of ECEC in LAC strongly contrasts with the diversity of socio-cultural, economic, and institutional contexts that can be observed in the region. Along with several reconceptualist researchers and social and pedagogical movements in the region (Todos Pela Educação in Brazil; SNTE in Mexico; Colegio de Educadoras de Párvulos de Chile), we argue that although these policies claim to have children’s interests at heart, and identify early childhood as a fruitful site for interventions, they draw on traditional AngloAmerican notions of family, community, and

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childhood (Penn, 2002). The case has also been made that the isomorphic development of ECEC policies pursues neoliberal economic policies that in many cases intensify the gap between rich and poor (Cox, 2010).

Main trends in policy development of ECEC: Accomplishments and auspicious paths Poverty and inequality in the region begin at birth and are becoming exceedingly difficult to bridge. As different studies have shown (Britto et al., 2013b; Marope & Kaga, 2015; Vegas & Santibañez, 2010), policies for quality ECEC are a main tool in overcoming these social gaps and issues. This section will reflect on the main achievements of the region in recognizing ECEC as a social issue of main relevance to the sustainable development of economies and societies. We argue that the development of strong institutions, the expansion of coverage and enrolment, together with the construction of national curricular frameworks, have been main accomplishments in LAC countries, but not free from political tensions and dilemmas.

Institutional Architecture6: Towards Comprehensive Models of Governance Though the origin of ECEC in the region dates to the late eighteenth century (UNESCOWCECCE, 2010), the establishment of institutional architectures in LAC is a more recent process that has developed during the second half of the twentieth century. As we have mentioned, the first reason for this development was the growing consensus that early childhood services are a human right. The second driver of institutional systems and architectures for ECE in the region has been the need to strengthen human development and solve social gaps. These criteria have deeply influenced the institutional

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arrangements countries have put in place to implement public policy. They have seen in the institutionalization of early childhood services a powerful tool to address their social inequalities, leading to consistently stronger and wider state action to put in place systems that would guarantee ECEC as a right and a public priority. Across the political spectrum, political parties have recognized early childhood development and learning as a complex and multidimensional phenomenon and governments in the region have progressively identified themselves as the main guarantors of all children’s right to quality education. This has resulted in national laws, administrative structures, and programmes that guarantee education and care, and a targeting of the population living in exclusion and poverty. Likewise, all national agendas, education laws, and regulatory instruments have recognized ECEC as the initial level of the educational system, with a special focus on comprehensive approaches to early childhood development and well-being from birth to 6 years of age (Pardo & Adlerstein, 2016). Yet, despite the increased commitments in the governance of public ECEC in LAC, the search for comprehensive approaches, political coherence, and administrative efficiency of an ECEC system is still a challenge. The quest has generated several institutionalization models. Drawing on a comparative study of 16 countries within the region (Pardo & Adlerstein, 2016) we identify two types of institutional infrastructures (OECD, 2001): the divided or split model, and the unified or integrated model. The divided model remains the most common among LAC countries. In this model, education and early childhood care is divided into different administrative agencies (not always governmental, sometimes including private institutions), such as ministries of social services, health or education and nonprofit foundations. The divided administrative responsibility for ECEC policy is based primarily on an age criterion, where the agencies assume and distribute responsibilities per cycles of child development and education.

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Preschool, pre-primary or transition levels (concerning education of children 4 to 6 years of age) are usually linked to ministries of education. Meanwhile the ministries of ‘Social Welfare’, ‘Family’, ‘Health’ or ‘Youth and Children’ tend to take responsibility for care services and protection of children below that age (from birth). Guatemala, for example, divides responsibility for ECEC provision between the Ministry of Social Welfare (0 to 4 years) and the Ministry of Education (preprimary, 4, 5 and 6 years old). In Honduras, the Education Office of the Secretary of State is responsible for the education of children aged 4 and 5 years, while the Ministry of Social Development Sector in the Ministry of Health has responsibility for early childhood services for children aged from 0 to 5 years (likewise: Argentina, Colombia and Peru, among others). The divided institutional infrastructure may also be organized according to federal, provincial, and local levels of government, or it might be separated into public and private not-for-profit providers. Bureaucratic silos and service duplication are frequent in these institutional infrastructures, because services are built around the agencies that provide them (Berlinski & Schady, 2015), instead of a comprehensive system to attend to children’s needs. Policies for the coordination across levels and among departments is the major challenge of a divided infrastructure. A few countries are currently attempting to move towards having a unified model with a centralized governance in a state agency. Within this infrastructure, both the policies and the provision of early childhood education are concentrated and coordinated from a unique governing organ or ministry. These new state agencies, also called boundary spanning entities, are institutions with an explicit mandate to coordinate efforts among myriad relevant institutions linked to ECE. The main advantages of this model are that both horizontal coordination (among sectors such as social protection, health, and education) and vertical coordination (across national, federal, and local levels of

government) are solved in a unified administrative entity (Berlinski & Schady, 2015), usually involving the creation of a new institution or state agency (within or outside the existing ministries) and the challenge of realigning deeply rooted practices and ideas in line ministries. This recent push for a unified model has been strongest in Colombia and Chile. For example, Colombia founded an Intersectional Commission of Early Childhood inside the presidency in 2011, while Chile created a new Undersecretary of Early Childhood Education inside the Ministry of Education, in 2015.

Provision Models and Expansion of Enrolment The way in which each country has managed to answer its obligation towards its early childhood population is embedded in its socio-cultural history, which defines not only what services should be delivered, but also how and to whom they are delivered (Berlinski & Schady, 2015). In LAC countries, the transition to democratic regimes during the 1990s led to an explicit political emphasis on education as a mechanism for producing equality of opportunity. Thus, policies adopted in a growing number of countries, like Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela, show a trend towards emphasizing early childhood education for disadvantaged groups, and children from low-income households as part of human capital development and healthy economies (Blanco Guijarro, 2012; UNESCO-WCECCE, 2010). This has established the idea that state action is compensatory, and passive towards more advantaged groups. Considering this criterion, governments have made progress in service expansion either by growing coverage for determined age groups (mainly pre-primary, 4- to 6-year-olds, implemented as compulsory levels) or by diversifying the kinds of services delivered. Between 2002 and 2014, the largest increases in enrolment in ECEC were observed in Argentina (from 21% to 66%) and Chile

Highlights and shadows in ECEC policy in Latin America and the Caribbean

(46% of 80%). However, enrolment is still less than 50% in Costa Rica, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic. Though the efforts of expanding enrolment in LAC countries have been internationally recognized, the region still confronts important barriers to accomplish equity and social justice through its ECEC coverage. Comparative research shows that there is more universal coverage of services at pre-primary education level (4- to 6-year-olds) than in those services oriented to children under 3 years of age, and these shortages can be more critical for children living in rural areas, or from a lowincome family, or belonging to an indigenous group, or having special needs or disabilities (Bertram & Pascal, 2016; Pardo & Adlerstein, 2016; UNESCO-WCECCE, 2010). With the intention of contesting socio-­ cultural barriers, LAC countries have rolled out a great variety of provision models that can be subdivided into two key types of services: formal and non-conventional.7 Usually, there is no single institutional model for provision in each country, but rather a variety of options aimed at satisfying different types of demand. Formal provision refers to traditional service models that function with a centre-based structure, either in independent establishments (kindergartens or childcare centres) or within primary schools (generally known as preschool or transitional levels). These services provide ECEC through professional teachers and other qualified staff, and provide learning experiences that are managed according to nationally established frameworks, regulations, and curriculum. The type of service provided generally has a clear educational/pedagogical content and integrates areas related to basic needs such as nutrition, health, and physical care. Some LAC countries, namely Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and Peru, have developed formal services as the mainstream channel of provision delivery. On the other hand, non-conventional provision and programmes take place in ­community-based settings and show a higher level of flexibility and variability in their

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organization and functioning. This provision also tends to be less pedagogically structured and is not necessarily based on general curriculum guidelines, often managed by promoters or volunteers, community agents, mothers, and grandparents whose level of education might only be up to primary or secondary level. These educators share the local culture, values, and customs of the region where the programme is conducted, and can therefore provide children with culturally relevant care and education. These non-formal modalities are especially directed towards disadvantaged groups, those in rural or remote areas, or those belonging to indigenous populations. Examples of these are ‘Cuna Más’ (formerly termed Wawa Wasi) from Peru and ‘Educa a tu Hijo’ from Cuba.

In Pursuit of ECEC Quality for Every Child Quality in ECEC is an issue of concern for LAC countries, especially in terms of the quality provided to children from low-income households. The review of educational systems for early childhood in the region shows that several measures have been carried out, including legislation to regulate structural factors of provision and the renewal of curricula. The latter has been a fundamental device to lift quality for all children accessing the system and to eliminate the idea of ECEC as a basic care service or home substitute (Blanco, 2012). To this end, many countries in the LAC region have constructed national curricular frameworks that establish learning principles, pedagogical purposes and relevant outcomes that children should develop during their passage through ECEC institutions. In this section we analyse two main issues of quality: the development of national curricula and the professional development of early childhood teachers. Although the foci and configurations of national curricula in LAC countries is rather diverse, depending mainly on the ages of children and institutional architectures, the main trend has been towards the implementation of

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national frameworks based on specific reforms with a new pedagogical paradigm of ECEC that contests the ‘psychologized’ or child developmentalist perspective. Generally, the mainstream political decisions have organized these curricula into two learning cycles: an early stage from 0 to 3 and a second, and more school-oriented stage, focused on the learning of children from 4 to 6 years of age (usually a compulsory educational level). The main achievement related to these frameworks is the importance given to children’s learning experiences (as a right and as a core value of ECEC) and to flexibility, understood as a possibility of local contextualization of a broad curricular prescription (Blanco, 2012). Likewise, the new curricular frameworks have understood ECEC content as complementary to parental engagement and community socialization, rather than as a replacement of it (Palmer, 2015; Peralta, 2010). According to Peralta (2010) building relevant curriculum models in the LAC region has been a historically difficult process, because of the social and cultural complexity of Latin America and because of the different political and educational emphasis of governments. However, gradually, countries have been moving from excessively technocratic and theoretically naive positions, to the construction of more critical and situated frameworks that unfold power relations and promote social transformation which, from a social justice perspective, curricula are recognized to do. By these means, LAC countries have aligned with the ILO guidelines (2014, p. 8), suggesting that ‘curricula and learning methods should be periodically reviewed and updated’. However, the main dilemma they have confronted during the process has been the unattended demand for participation of stakeholders, professionals and social organizations of the field. The ILO has suggested that curricular reforms should ‘take place in consultation with organizations of ECE employers and personnel, and other ECE stakeholders’ (ILO, 2014, p. 8) – an issue that remains a struggle for governments and public policy designers.

However, the implementation and assessment of these national frameworks is often unmonitored and thus their impact on the lived curriculum in ECEC settings is unknown and – some suspect – may be negligible (Abuchaim, 2015; Brailovsky, 2015; Pardo & Adlerstein, 2015). Countries like Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, whether because they have built rather broad and non-prescriptive curricular frameworks, or because they have divided institutional architectures to manage the curricula, often face complaints from ECEC teachers about the lack of guidance within these frameworks and the limited opportunities they have had to participate in the curriculum construction process (Blanco Guijarro, 2012). There is wide consensus in LAC countries that the role of ECEC teachers8 is critical to the provision of quality ECEC. Thus, both preservice and in-service preparation of teachers has been enthusiastically promoted with the support of legislation and diverse policy measures, and most countries have institutions for the pre-service preparation of ECEC teachers. In our study of the state of early childhood teacher education and professional development in 16 LAC countries (Pardo & Adlerstein, 2016), we found that among the ten countries for which data were available, over 75% of early childhood teachers held a professional degree, with Cuba and Trinidad and Tobago standing out at 100% and Chile at 99%. Nevertheless, it is noticeable that in the rest of the LAC countries the percentage of early childhood teachers having this level of academic credential is noticeably lower compared to the credentials of elementary school teachers. Moreover, the wide-ranging qualification requirements for ECEC work within the region suggest divergent visions of the profile that these educators should meet. Specifically, there is a remarkable variety of alternatives for pre-service preparation both within and between countries with options including courses in normal secondary schools, tertiary non-university institutions, and universities. For instance, in Costa Rica the required qualification is exclusively a university degree; in

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Argentina, El Salvador, and Peru the required qualification is a professional degree, either from a non-university tertiary institution or a university; in Brazil, Cuba, and Honduras the requirement is for a degree conferred either by a normal secondary school or a university. Interestingly, the large variety of alternatives of pre-service preparation for ECEC teachers is not exclusive to the LAC region, but is also present in other countries, such as the United States of America and some European countries, suggesting that a variety of qualifications is not unusual in this field (Eurydice, 2015; Hyson, Horm & Winton, 2013). However, considering that research evidence suggests that the best benefits from early childhood education are correlated with ECEC teachers holding a higher education degree (Fukkink & Lont, 2007; Hyson et  al., 2013), there is increasing agreement within the region about the necessity to move forward to that academic qualification. Thus, Chile established the university degree as the exclusive requirement for the professional practice in ECEC just in 2014; similarly, Brazil and Cuba are currently adopting measures with the same objective (Pardo & Adlerstein, 2016). Unfortunately, available research suggests that the initial preparation of ECEC teachers may be under-developed in several LAC countries. For example, national reports for Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia – where data on this issue were available – pointed out that courses tended to use inadequate methods for student assessment (Brailovsky, 2015); plans of study tended to fragment knowledge into disciplinary areas (Abuchaim, 2015) or to ignore the features of the early childhood education system (Buitrago Rodriguez, 2015). Moreover, data for Guatemala indicate that a fundamental problem of pre-service preparation of ECEC teachers is that there is a shortage of adequately qualified faculty (Pardo & Adlerstein, 2016). With regards to in-service professional development opportunities for ECEC teachers, all LAC countries have implemented several programmes. While these programmes have not yet been systematically researched and appraised in terms of quality or impact

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(Pardo & Adlerstein, 2016), anecdotally it is understood that a common denominator of these programmes is that they are almost infinitely variegated – both within and between countries – differing in terms of content, duration, method, and degree conferred.

Shadows over optimistic roads Despite the remarkable policy priority that ECEC policies have gained in the whole of the LAC region during the last two decades, significant challenges cast dark shadows over the optimistic objectives described in the previous section. In this section we discuss three main challenges that obscure ECEC policy development: multiple and divergent aims for ECEC; the fragmentation of efforts when building a comprehensive agenda for ECEC; and the insufficient levels of public investment in ECEC policies.

Multiple and Divergent Aims for ECEC Policy efforts put into the expansion of ECEC provision have concurrently pursued multiple aims in most countries of the region. One of these aims has been to promote the holistic development of young children, securing their subsequent success in school. Another has been to support less advantaged children to have a better start to their lives, compensating for social inequality. Yet another aim has been to allow mothers to access the labour market and to support gender equality more widely. These differing goals are evident not only from a country-comparative perspective, but also within LAC countries. This means that the same country may have policies for ECEC focused on achieving different outcomes for children (Britto et al., 2013a). The multiple aims behind ECEC policies have at times been problematic as, in practice, they compete for political priority bringing service coverage in tension with the quality of

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ECEC. As argued, from a child rights approach, young children’s learning and development need to be understood as a prime objective for ECEC, requiring that five key dimensions of quality are attended to: relevance of learning outcomes, cultural pertinence of pedagogical processes, equity, efficacy and efficiency (Pardo & Adlerstein, 2016). Those tensions can be clearly observed in the way that, in most of the LAC countries, the practice of ECEC is separated out into two subsystems: one for children aged 0 to 3 years and another for 4- and 5-year-olds. This separation can also be observed in other regions of the world, including developed countries (Bennett, Kaga & Moss, 2010). Interestingly, despite the differences between the two subsystems, none of them can be considered to be a model of quality ECEC, for each has its own shortcomings in terms of promoting children’s learning and development. ECEC programmes for younger children tend to follow the welfare tradition, mainly focusing on the provision of day care9 for young children, while their parents are at work. For instance, in Colombia, Nicaragua, and Peru the subsystem for 0- to 3-year-olds has usually relied on noncentre-based modalities which are staffed by non-professional educators (including personnel with elementary education as their highest educational attainment) (Buitrago Rodriguez, 2015; Nicaragua, 2015; Ochoa, 2015). This situation has been interpreted as the result of the lesser political priority and resources given to this subsystem, in comparison to services for 4- to 5-year-olds (Pardo & Adlerstein, 2016). Concerns about the effects of daycare services on children have been discussed at length in the literature. Described as those services that primarily provide children with supervision and feeding, while not emphasizing the support for their holistic learning and development (Bowman, Donovan & Burns, 2000), daycare services have been called into question as a deficient alternative for the education and care of young children that may have null or even negative impacts on their development (Barnett, 2011; Camilli et al., 2010; Melhuish

et al., 2014; Ruhm & Waldfogel, 2011). Within the LAC region, several specialists have urged that services within the sub-system for 0- to 3-year-olds be improved by aligning them with an educational approach (Abuchaim, 2015; Ochoa, 2015; Pardo & Adlerstein, 2015). In the meantime, the subsystem for 4- to 5-year-olds has tended towards schoolification, that is to say, the preparation of children for their entrance to elementary education by prematurely emphasizing the development of literacy and numeracy skills for young children (OECD, 2006; OMEP, 2011). Also termed as the ‘school readiness’ issue, it has gained prominence as concerns about academic achievement in elementary education have increased, and given place to an understanding of ECEC as a solution to that problem (Moss, 2013; Pianta, 2007). Several scholars and international organizations have contested the schoolification of ECEC, pointing to the pre-eminence it gives to teacher instruction and its detrimental effects on holistic and playful approaches to early childhood education (Meisels, 1998; OECD, 2006; OMEP, 2011). A few works have addressed the schoolification of ECEC in LAC. Among them, Pardo & Woodrow (2014) have discussed this issue for Chile, positing that it is the reason for an emerging tension between early childhood teachers and public policy discourses. They have argued that schoolification undermines the fundamentals of early childhood education by appraising the relevance of this educational level according to indicators of academic achievement in elementary education. These concerns have also been voiced by ECEC specialists in Chile who have pointed out the urgent need to address the problem of the schoolification of ECEC, particularly within the recent approval of compulsory education for 5-year-olds. Likewise, Buitrago Rodriguez (2015) and Ochoa (2015) have claimed that ECEC in Colombia and Peru, respectively, has been understood as preparation for school, emphasizing written language and mathematics while neglecting other areas of development and learning, such as arts and literature.

Highlights and shadows in ECEC policy in Latin America and the Caribbean

Fragmented Institutional Structures and Their Impact on Quality ECEC Though developed countries have proven the positive impact and cost-effective relevance of building comprehensive public policies in the region (Berlinski & Schady, 2015; Blanco, 2012; Marope & Kaga, 2015), an integrated coherent policy infrastructure for ECEC is still lacking in the LAC region, casting another shadow over the signs of progress discussed so far. The reality is that ECEC continues to develop through a collection of unconnected programmes that are set up to answer specific population needs on an ad hoc basis rather than in a planful fashion and with due attention to the policy challenges in providing quality services to young children. As a result of this lack of a systemic approach, the potential returns to public investment in early childhood are being compromised. As important as picking the right programmes is the development of an institutional infrastructure to support them (Berlinski & Schady, 2015). Another shadow that triggers great concern is the continued silo-ing of policy within different government agencies with relatively few strategies in place ‘to promote cross-cutting, intersectional actions permeated by a firm sense of the comprehensive nature of human development’ (SITEAL, 2009, p. 96). Some countries in the region are attempting to overcome this situation by testing different types of programmes and using intersectional and interinstitutional mechanisms that cross government sectors and incorporate not only national policy sectors but also families, communities, sub-national and municipal governments, and civil society actors to design comprehensive policies that recognize children’s needs and ensure respect for all their rights. This is the case with early childhood rights protection systems promoted under comprehensive laws that generally envision the participation of civil society in intersectional and interinstitutional planning mechanisms. Several countries in the region – like

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Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, and Paraguay, to name a few – have put together councils at the national, federal, sub-national, and local levels. The pioneer of these councils in Latin America was Brazil’s National Council on the Rights of Children and Adolescents (CONANDA), which is the entity responsible for upholding the country’s Statute of Childhood (ECA). Likewise, Guatemala deserves a mention for setting up Municipal Commissions on Children and Adolescents which bring together government representatives with civil society organizations as partners striving to achieve comprehensiveness in all measures adopted to uphold the human rights of young children (Guatemala, 2003; Pardo & Adlerstein, 2016). However, the greatest struggle in this task of integration and institutional coordination, has been the building of sustainable quality provision models for formal and nonconventional ECEC contexts. Investment in non-conventional models has been far more meagre than in the formal programmes, inevitably producing inequitable levels of quality in both provision and in educational outcomes (UNESCO, 2015). In fact, during the 1990s these non-conventional services were used to expand the enrolment of the poorest sectors of the population, at low cost and without major control over the quality of teaching and the application of simplistic pedagogical strategies (UNESCO-WCECCE, 2010). In many countries of the region, the non-conventional model of early childhood education detoured into what Hargreaves and Fullan (2012) termed a business capital approach. From this view, the purpose of education was no longer a community-based empowering pedagogy, but a rapid integration of children into a system of low-cost teaching. Given the importance of education at this level, most countries have developed a public policy that makes ECEC mandatory for at least the last year before primary education (5-yearolds). Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela increased this compulsory education to three years (Berlinski & Schady, 2015), even when families do not

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demand or request it. Likewise, LAC countries have constantly highlighted the absence of articulation between formal and non-formal programmes, as well as the non-existent support and information on the quality and efficiency of non-conventional education programmes (UNESCO-WCECCE, 2010). Research by UNESCO (UNESCO-UIS, 2011) indicates that if the LAC region is to advance the development of policies for ECEC, priority should be given to the development of holistic, integrated, and strategic early childhood systems. The lack of participation of civil society organizations in the design and implementation of ECEC policies is another weak element in the ECEC institutional architecture. Such participation should also include families in a cohesive manner (Marope & Kaga, 2015). Family intervention programmes, although primarily available in high-income countries, have been very effective in improving well-being in a service in a cost-effective manner (Wasik, 2012). In LAC countries, however, families have been considered either beneficiaries of policies or clients of ECEC services, rather than relevant educators and agents in building institutional architectures for ECEC (Blanco, 2012; Britto et al., 2013a). LAC countries likewise do not show a strong level of professional participation, or teacher impact, in policy design. Though teachers’ active involvement in an ongoing public dialogue can have an impact on policymaking, the available information from labour unions and professional organizations in LAC countries shows that existing trade unions are widely dispersed, have very different purposes one from another, and are organizationally complex. Countries such as Argentina, Brazil, and Peru show more professional influence on policy than other countries of the region (Pardo & Adlerstein, 2016). Placing teachers and teaching at the heart of policymaking means viewing early childhood teachers as key players in that effort. Only if teachers believe change is important and take responsibility for pursuing it, can the long-term implementation of their input into the policy process be envisaged.

Insufficient Public Investment in ECEC Policies Unfortunately, the optimistic policy discourse on ECEC in the LAC region has not been supported by all the necessary policy investment to fulfil the enormous expectations it has raised. Two major gaps related to this concern are the low level of public investment and the insufficient data on ECEC. Bearing in mind that the literature has acknowledged that ECEC programmes are beneficial for learning and development in the long term (i.e. Perry Preschool Program, Carolina Abecedarian Project), it should be remembered that these programmes are distinguished by high cost (Weikart, 2000). The ECEC programme investments in the LAC region are, by comparison, considerably lower. The limited data available on public expenditure on ECEC in the region show it to be significantly low, measuring approximately 0.2% of the gross domestic product (GDP) in those countries with data. Data from 2004 show that public expenditure on ECEC was very low, ranging from less than 1% to slightly over 12% of the total educational expenditures of each country. Likewise, the public expenditure on ECE of each country of the region – with the exception of Guyana, Mexico, and Barbados – was less than 0.5 percent of the GNP in the same year (Vegas & Santibañez, 2010). Economic research on ECEC in the region (Behrman & Urzúa, 2013) confirms that the aforementioned level of investment is quite concerning, as it is associated with poor structural conditions in the region, such as minimally qualified educators10 and large numbers of children per adult in the classroom. This low-cost ECEC expansion is certainly risky, for it may not only yield lower rates of return for society than expected, but also, and more alarmingly, produce a negative impact on the development of children (Barnett & Nores, 2015). Lack of public investment in ECEC infrastructure goes hand in hand with limited data on ECEC in the region. A recent analysis of policies related to early childhood teachers, in

Highlights and shadows in ECEC policy in Latin America and the Caribbean

which 16 LAC countries participated (Pardo & Adlerstein, 2016), revealed that despite important differences among the participating countries, little systematic knowledge was available on the issue. This problem stems from two causes. The first is that research on ECEC is still emerging in the entire region and, within it, there is little attention given to the profession. Although all LAC countries stress the need for studies, monitoring systems, evaluation, and official lists of services and programmes, there are few experienced personnel who could set up and manage such a database and limited accumulated knowledge among them. As has been widely recognized by the developed countries and international organizations (OECD, 2014; UNESCO, 2015), informed policy and decision-making that would strengthen evidence-based policy is largely dependent on the existence of systems that allow the production of reliable and continuous data. The second reason is the scattered nature of existing data in the region, which makes its dissemination difficult not only between different countries but also within each country. The insufficiency of data on ECEC represents a major limitation, for it hinders the development of evidence-based ECEC policies in LAC countries, while favouring the use of foreign evidence coming mainly from developed countries, which is not always relevant to the local cultural, institutional or fiscal conditions.

Challenges and new developments in ECEC policies for LAC From the above analysis, it is clear that ECEC in LAC is characterized by several highlights, as well as a number of challenges. It is interesting to observe that some of those features are quite distinctive to LAC, while some others are shared with other regions, including the United States of America (Kagan & Kauerz, 2012) and some developed countries of Europe (Eurydice, 2015), suggesting that

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these issues are endemic in the field. In this final section of the chapter, we discuss the main challenges to ECEC provisions in the LAC region. We argue that these challenges need priority attention to achieve the social expectations and c­ontributions attributed to early childhood education.

A Systemic and Comprehensive Approach to ECEC Policy Development LAC countries have developed a collection of programmes to make ECEC available for all children. A focus on programmes is necessary, but not enough. The region requires a systemic orientation that values both programmes and the institutional architecture with policies that support those programmes and services. As the literature has shown (Berlinski & Schady, 2015; Blanco, 2012; Kagan & Kauerz, 2012; SITEAL, 2009; Vegas & Santibañez, 2010) high-quality, equitably distributed, and sustainable services cannot be achieved merely through ad hoc programmatic interventions. A comprehensive system of policies that moves towards an integrated institutional infrastructure requires extensive development time and effort. These efforts must include not only the coordination of governmental agencies, but also the regulation and participation of non-governmental actors and external stakeholders to promote and support policies for young children, and work to create consensus regarding other aspects of the policy process in areas such as the accountability, monitoring, and evaluation of standards. There is no recipe or one model for success. A comprehensive institutional architecture to sustain the implementation of public policy in ECEC is a critical search that the public sector of each country in the region needs to undertake. The quest for this new institutional architecture should consider that services be delivered in a synergistic manner over a relatively short period of the life cycle (Berlinski & Schady, 2015). It should also

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contemplate the relationship between ECEC and elementary education, and the articulation of quality centre-based and community-based programmes, as a feasible way to promote early development and learning, in accordance with the rights perspective and within the specific possibilities of the LAC region.

Cultural Change: Asserting ECEC as Education Enhancing ECEC policies in the LAC region in the terms discussed in this chapter is a very challenging endeavour. In our vision, the enhancement of ECEC policies in LAC implies – perhaps above all – a cultural change in the objectives of these services and in the way they go about achieving them. It entails asserting ECEC as education – not as care only – since this is the only way to fully satisfy young children’s right to learning and development from birth. Since no formulas are available to produce that change, a national debate, involving all key actors from the ECEC field, would be a fruitful way to promote it. Two actors are particularly critical of the enhancement of ECEC policies. First, policymakers need to deeply understand the relevance of quality in ECEC and the diverse structural and process factors associated with it, as the foundation of sound ECEC policies. That is, it is necessary that policymakers and managers engage with evidence about the complexity of quality ECEC, and that their work is informed by rigorous, sustained, and transparent information. Therefore, the challenge for timely information is huge (BID, 2016b). Second, ECEC teachers need to build and communicate a thorough professional voice regarding their own perspectives on ECEC policy issues since, historically, they have been marginal actors in the development of policies for the field. This problem stems in part from the low professional recognition they have in society, including from policymakers. For example, in Chile, when the

presidential commission for the design of early childhood policies was summoned in 2006, among all the distinguished members of the expert commission, no one was appointed to represent ECEC teachers (Chile: Consejo Asesor Presidencial para la Reforma de las Políticas de Infancia, 2006). But the problem also stems from the weakness of ECEC teachers’ professional organizations themselves which have exerted minimal influence on the design and implementation of policies for the field. The exceptions to this rule have been the teacher unions in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Peru, that have exerted significant influence on the development of policies (Abuchaim, 2015; Brailovsky, 2015; Ochoa, 2015; Quintanilla, 2015). ECEC teachers’ perspectives are important to uphold the pedagogical component of ECEC services and to emphasize that ECEC, whatever delivery model is chosen, is always the first experience of the formal educational process. ECEC teachers must also uphold their responsibility to ensure children have access to learning and can exercise their right to education, play, and joy from birth.

Increased State Commitment for Sustainable and Evidence-Based ECEC Policies To overcome the challenges facing the ECEC sector, stronger state action is needed. As a first step this entails securing a bigger share of each country’s fiscal resources, prioritizing this agenda over other urgent needs of the public sector. Second, it also entails building the knowledge foundations for ECEC policy development, by promoting both more research and systematic data gathering and management about ECEC services. Research has demonstrated that a great variety of ECEC programmes and provision models can be used, and a wide range of educational settings and pathways are possible to establish a high-quality ECEC system.

Highlights and shadows in ECEC policy in Latin America and the Caribbean

However, the development of articulated ECEC policies requires careful thought about the conditions needed and evidence-based decisions. As shown throughout the chapter, there is limited systematic data available on ECEC in the LAC region. This shortage is problematic for the development of policies in the region, as these have needed to rely on evidence produced in very different contexts, coming from developed and largely Anglophone countries whose socio-cultural as well as economic contexts are not comparable to those in LAC countries (Britto et al., 2013b; Pardo & Adlerstein, 2016). This situation strongly suggests the need to promote more research on ECEC in the region, as a critical element for the design of pertinent policies for each country. In the same manner, it suggests the need to gather and centralize the available data that are scattered within countries and, therefore, not available for analysis. Complementarily, it suggests the need to optimize the use of existing data, by promoting its analysis and dissemination throughout the field.

Conclusion In this chapter, we have provided a critical analysis of the current situation of public policies for ECEC in Latin America and the Caribbean, arguing that there are both highlights and shadows. In general, LAC public policy has been strongly shaped by the influence of intergovernmental organizations (Mahon, 2011; Penn, 2002; Vegas & Santibañez, 2010), yielding isomorphic ECEC policies and programmes that vary in scale, type of services, and institutional architectures. As the most relevant highlights, we have identified that LAC countries have taken several steps forward in prioritizing ECEC public policy development. This reveals the growing consensus about the relevance of nurture from the first years of life, as well as the recognition of education as a right of all children.

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As the most concerning shadows, we have contended that in the LAC region, there remain significant problems of quality and equity in ECEC provision. We have argued that the divergent purposes for ECEC are associated with fragmented institutional architectures and comparatively meagre investments which have their most eloquent expression in the low qualification level of the workforce. As challenges to be addressed in order for the region to achieve ECEC as a means for social justice, we have proposed that new policy developments are needed in the LAC region. Specifically, LAC countries need to adopt a systemic and comprehensive approach to ECEC policy, one that promotes a cultural change to assert ECEC as an educational right, and increasing state commitment to sustainable and evidence-based policies. From our perspective, the possibility of consolidating highlights and overcoming shadows in ECEC policies in the LAC region requires the reaffirmation of ECEC as a right of children and a means for social justice. Aligning LAC countries with this affirmation means the development of ECEC policies which put children at the centre of all d­ imensions of sustainable development (Chan, 2013).

Notes 1  This work draws heavily upon a recent state-ofthe-art analysis of policies for early childhood teachers’ preparation and professional development in LAC (see Pardo & Adlerstein, 2016), under the entrustment of OREALC/UNESCO. Both authors are grateful to the Regional Strategy on Teachers in Latin America and the Caribbean that coordinated this work. 2  According to UNESCO, LAC countries are as follows: (i) as part of Latin America: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Dominican Republic, Uruguay and Venezuela; (ii) as part of the Caribbean: Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Netherlands Antilles, Aruba, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Dominica, Granada, Guyana, Haiti, Cayman Islands, Turks and Caicos

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Islands, British Virgin Islands, Jamaica, Montserrat, Saint. Kitts & and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint. Vincent and the Grenadines, Saint Lucia, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago, Turks and Caicos Islands, and the British Virgin Islands (UNESCO, 2014).   3  In 1968, CARITAS (a Catholic welfare agency) began one of the first non-formal early childhood education projects of Latin America, in Peru. Designed to serve peasant families in Puno, the first children’s homes, Wawa Wasi or Wawa Utas, in the Quechua and Aymara communities were intended to cover the multiple needs of rural mothers and their young children. With this purpose the Ministry of Education allocated educators and community volunteers to provide recreation and food supply to children aged 3 to 6 years. This effort was so successful that Peru decided to expand the programme to young children who were outside the school system (Young & Fujimoto-Gómez, 2004).  4  Francisca Morales is former UNICEF consultant in charge of the area of Early Childhood Development from 2003 to 2013, as well as a former member of the National Council for Childhood. She was interviewed as an expert on policies and rights of early childhood. Interviewed by M. Pardo, 20 August 2016.  5  Rosa Blanco is a former OREALC/UNESCO consultant on early childhood inclusion and public policy. At the time of the interview she had been acting as the OEI Director in Chile, since the year 2012. She was interviewed as an expert on policies and rights of early childhood. Interviewed by C. Adlerstein, 14 August 2016.  6  In this chapter, we use the concept of institutional architectures (Berlinski & Schady, 2015; Kagan & Kauerz, 2012) referring to the institutional arrangements that pursue governance and finance of ECEC in each country, and that affect the implementation of public policy in early childhood. This concept is rather new, but it has been gaining visibility and legitimacy in international reports and policy-making documents related to the development early childhood systems.    7  In LAC countries formal education is understood as programmes intended to provide learning services. Within formal education, conventional and non-conventional programmes are available. As we describe, the first type of programme mostly occurs in centre-based education, and the second in community and alternative learning spaces.   8  The analysis of this chapter is focused on early childhood teachers holding a professional degree either from higher education or normal secondary schools. The reason for this decision is that the available data on non-professional ECEC workers – who make up the largest part of the workforce in LAC – is dramatically lacking, suggesting the prior

need to gather and analyse available data, and to carry out further research.   9  In this chapter, we understand day care as services that provide basic supervision for children while their parents work, with little emphasis on fostering early learning and development (Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000).  10  Educator is a concept that has an ambivalent use in Latin American Spanish. In some countries such as Chile and Paraguay it may be used to refer to professional practitioners and ECEC teachers. In other countries such as Argentina, Honduras, and El Salvador, it acknowledges a less trained workforce, usually community agents and secondarylevel technicians.

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Pianta, R. (2007). Early education in transition. In R. Pianta, M. Cox & K. Snow, School readiness and the transition to kindergarten in the era of accountability (pp. 3–10). Baltimore, MD: Brookes Publishing. Quintanilla, G. (2015). Informe Nacional sobre Docentes para la Educación de la Primera Infancia: México. Documento de Trabajo preparado para el Proyecto Estratégico Regional sobre Docentes para América Latina y el Caribe de OREALC/UNESCO. Retrieved August 26, 2015 from http://www.politicasdocentesalc.com/images/stories/­Biblioteca/ Informe%20Primera%20Infancia%20 M%C3%89XICO%20WEB.pdf Ruhm, C., & Waldfogel, J. (2011). Long-term effects of early childhood care and education. IZA DP No. 6149. Retrieved from: http://ftp.iza.org/dp6149.pdf Saad, P. (2009). Demographic trends in Latin America and the Caribbean. Washington, DC: World Bank. Shonkoff, J., & Phillips, D. (Eds.). (2000). From neurons to neighborhood: The science of early childhood development. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. SITEAL. (2009). Primera Infancia: La situación actual y las respuestas desde el Estado. Informe sobre tendencias sociales y Educativas en América Latina. OEI-UNESCO-IIPE. Retrieved August 25, 2015 from http:// www.siteal.iipeoei.org/informetendencias/ informetendencias2009.asp Stavenhagen, R. (2004). La diversidad cultural en el desarrollo de las Américas. Los pueblos indígenas y los estados nacionales en Hispanoamérica. Organización de Estados Americanos. Serie de Estudios Culturales Nº 9. Retrieved from http://portal.oas.org/ Portal/Topic/SEDI/Educaci%C3%B3ny Cultura/Cultura/Recursos/EstudiosyPublicaciones/tabid/324/Default.aspx UNESCO. (2007). Regional overview: Latin America and the Caribbean. Santiago, Chile: UNESCO. UNESCO. (2014). América Latina y el Caribe. Revisión Regional de la Educación para Todos al 2015. Santiago, Chile: OREALC/UNESCO. Retrieved from http://unesdoc.unesco.org/ images/0023/002327/232701s.pdf UNESCO. (2015). A review of the literature: Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE)

personnel in low- and middle-income countries. Paris: UNESCO. Retrieved from http:// en.unesco.org/gem-report/sites/gem-report/ files/191433e.pdf UNESCO-UIS. (2011). Global initiative on outof-school children. Paris: UNESCO. UNESCO-WCECCE. (2010). Early childhood care and education regional report: Latin America and the Caribbean. Report prepared for the World Conference on Early Childhood Care and Education. Moscow: UNESCO-World Conference on Early Childhood Care and Education. Retrieved from http://unesdoc.unesco. org/images/0018/001892/189212e.pdf UNICEF. (2004). Estado mundial de la infancia 2005. La infancia amenazada. New York: UNICEF. UNICEF. (2012). Inequalities in early childhood development: What the data say. New York: UNICEF. Vargas-Barón, E. (2015). Institutional frameworks and governance for early childhood systems: Multisectoral coordination and integration. In Investing against evidence: The global state of early childhood care and education (pp. 269– 290). Paris: UNESCO Publishing. Vegas, E., & Santibañez, L. (2010). The promise of early childhood development in Latin America and the Caribbean. Washington, DC: The World Bank. Retrieved from http:// siteresources.worldbank.org/EDUCATION/ Resources/278200-1099079877269/5476641099079922573/ECD_LAC.pdf Wasik, B. (2012). Handbook of family literacy. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Weikart, D. (2000). Early childhood education: Need and opportunity. Paris: UNESCO- Fundamentals of Educational Planning. Retrieved from http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/ 0012/001223/122380E.pdf World Bank, The. (2017). Early Childhood Education Projects. Retrieved April 20, 2017 from http://www.worldbank.org/en/ region/lac/projects/all?sector_exact=Early+ Childhood+Education&qterm=&lang_ exact=English Young, M. E., & Fujimoto-Gómez, G. (2004). Desarrollo infantil temprano: Lecciones de los programas no formales. Acción Pedagógica, 13(2): 186–201. Retrieved April 4, 2010 from http://www.oas.org/udse/readytolearn/documentos/3.doc

Part II

Equitable Early Childhood Services: Intervention to Improve Children’s Life Chances

12 Equitable Early Childhood Services: Intervention to Improve Children’s Life Chances in South Africa Te r e s a T. H a r r i s a n d N k i d i C . P h a t u d i

Introduction Issues of equity are a timeless universal challenge to be faced by all people and all governments. South Africa is a country with a legacy of inequity that elevated an entire race over other indigenous and immigrant groups. The system of apartheid government created divisions that have had a lasting impact on ‘the haves’ and ‘the have nots’. In the 22 years of democratic government in South Africa, changes in policies and practices have been essential to ensuring equal rights to all as guaranteed by the national Constitution. Although progress to address the disparities of the apartheid era has been steady, multiple barriers remain to be addressed across the multiple sectors of education, social services, and economic development. At the same time, national policies must be implemented within localities. Some communities have mobilized local resources in advance of a slower-moving national agenda. For many communities, however, the

lack of material and financial resources have hindered policy and programme advances. Early Childhood Development in South Africa refers to a comprehensive approach to policies and programmes for children from birth to 9 years of age, with the active participation of their parents and caregivers. Its purpose is to protect the child’s rights to develop his or her full cognitive, emotional, social, and physical potential. In this chapter, we discuss those policies that directly impact ECD provisioning prior to formal school entry for children from birth to 6 years of age. We recognize that there are additional policies that specifically address issues of health, human services, and social justice that have come from other sectors. Many of the ECD policies directly affect the formal sector where the funds are allocated to Departments of Education, Social Development, and Health. Our focus for this chapter is on the implications of policies for the informal sector where most children receive services. We review the history of ECD policies in South Africa. Next, we present five

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early childhood programmes that began prior to the democratic era and continue today. Finally, we examine interventions that have been implemented and evaluated in light of the ‘essential package’ (Ilifa Labantwane, 2013) of services that have been identified through research and policy as effective in supporting the healthy growth and development of South Africa’s youngest citizens.

The South African Context Located at the southern tip of the African continent, South Africa is comprised of nine

provinces (Figure 12.1). Both Pretoria, the political capital of the country, and Johannesburg, the economic capital of the country, are located in Gauteng Province. Other major cities include Cape Town, the legislative capital, in the Western Cape and Durban in KwaZulu-Natal on the Indian Ocean. About 65% of the country’s population lives in urban areas (Geohive, 2015). In terms of land area, over 80% of the country is considered rural and home to over 70% of the country’s poorest people (Kepe, 2016). In 2015 there were 8,207,723 children from birth to 6 years of age (5,936,350 children

Figure 12.1  Map of South Africa Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_South_Africa_with_English_labels.svg

Equitable early childhood services: South Africa

birth to 4 years; 1,144,897 5-year-olds) living in South Africa (RSA, 2015). Twentythree percent of children under age 7 lived in KwaZulu-Natal and 20% lived in Gauteng. Only 2% of children in this age group lived in the Northern Cape and 5% lived in the Free State. Although child poverty rates have decreased by as much as 15 percentage points since 2004, most children in South Africa continue to live in poverty. Using income level to determine eligibility for the Child Support Grant (about R3000/month/singleparent household in 2011), more than 65% of children live in poverty and require additional income support. Poverty is unequally distributed across provinces, geography, and population groups. Most poor young children are African (65.5%) and live in the predominantly rural provinces of Limpopo (76%), the Eastern Cape (75%), and KwaZululNatal (67%). Almost 80% of children living in rural tribal areas live in poor households, compared to 57% in urban informal and rural formal areas and 38% in urban formal areas (RSA, 2015, p. 35). Early childhood development services are provided through three national government levels: the Department of Basic Education, the Department of Social Development, and the Department of Health. The Department of Basic Education serves children from birth to age 9 years through curriculum development and implementation, early stimulation, teacher training, and learning and teaching resources. The Department of Social Development serves children from birth to age 5 years through social grants, subsidies, and site (childcare centre) registration. The Department of Health serves children from the prenatal period to age 9 years through the Integrated Management of Childhood Diseases, Primary Health Care, and HIV and AIDS interventions. Historically, each department worked individually to provide services. This approach contributed to significant gaps that exacerbated challenges of access faced by families living in poverty.

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South African Policies in the New Democracy Although a government’s desired outcomes for its children influence the policy landscape, diverse political agendas drive actual approaches to serving children (Georgeson & Payler, 2013). This can be seen in the contrast between early childhood policies of South Africa’s past apartheid era and the current democratic era. Prior to 1994, the ECD landscape reflected the national policy of racial segregation that favored the white race in terms of provisioning and the importance it was accorded by the former government. ECD in the black sector of the population was in the hands of non-profit organizations (NPOs) and other concerned stakeholders. Lack of national funding and commitment from the government to provide a system of early childhood programmes and services, particularly for the majority population, left the early childhood phase in disarray with uncoordinated services, inadequately trained teachers, under-resourced settings, and unfocused policies to provide direction for action. In the transition period heralding the new democratic era, a flurry of activities on the political front reflected a new vision for South Africa’s youngest citizens. As early as the 1970s, the preschool movement for the black sector was led primarily by non-profit and philanthropic organizations and community movements that felt the need to bridge the gap between home and school for the child. The De Lange Commission of the 1980s was instrumental in highlighting the importance of preschool education for disadvantaged communities to improve performance in formal schooling. Progressive movements within the country had concluded that the government should introduce a Reception year class to promote school-readiness and cut the costs of early childhood sector funding (NEPI, 1992). In 1992, the National Education Policy Investigation (NEPI, 1992), an advisory education body for progressive

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movements, investigated the ECD provision in the country. Its recommendation to implement Grade R was declined by the apartheid government under the pretext of high costs. This recommendation influenced later developments in the early childhood education sector (Phatudi, 2007). Children’s rights across the races were brought centre stage in South African politics for the first time in 1994 (Phatudi, 2007). Enshrined in Section 29 (a) of the Constitution’s Bill of Rights (RSA, 1996), the right to basic education opened doors for all young children to actively participate in the educational provisions offered by the country. White Paper No. 1 on Education and Training of 1995 recognized the importance of child well-being and the need for adequate nutrition, good health, early childhood stimulation, and a safe environment (RSA, 2015).

Early Childhood Policies With the stage set to address inequities in the system of public education, policymakers turned their attention to the early years that preceded formal schooling (Table 12.1). As early as 1996, the government recognized that early childhood development was a multifaceted concept. The Interim Policy of Early Childhood Development laid the foundation to pilot a universal reception year. In the same year, the National Programme of Action for Children in South Africa focused on child health, early childhood education, and social welfare development. By 1997 The White Paper on Social Welfare and the White Paper for the Transformation of the Health System in South Africa issued calls for more inclusive services within their respective departments and through greater inter-sectoral collaboration. To more clearly understand the fragmented system of service provision, the National Department of Education conducted an audit of Early Childhood Development programmes

and services to provide accurate information on the nature and extent of ECD provisioning, services, and resources (Williams & Samuels, 2001). ECD sites were identified and information was obtained on the sites, learners, educators, and programmes. The audit revealed ongoing inequities within the ECD sector that reflected the legacy of apartheid. Differences in access to resources were associated with race and economic status. Language practices marginalized the home languages of learners. Lack of adequately qualified and remunerated educators was widespread. Issues noted for further investigation included the need for more extensive evaluation of ECD programme quality and impact, and the extent to which the needs of children with disabilities were being addressed to promote optimal development. Armed with the results of the national audit, Grade R classes were expanded and institutionalized as a school-readiness strategy through White Paper 5, 2001 (Department of Education, 2001). The policy focused on 5-year-old children and at-risk 4-year-olds who included poor children living in rural and urban families, HIV- and AIDs-infected children, and children with special needs. However, there was no systematic effort to meet the basic needs for safe water, basic sanitation, growth monitoring, immunization, nutrition, and shelter. Furthermore, the policy was inadequate in addressing the serious issues that separated departments in terms of their perceived roles and responsibilities and their philosophical orientations to service delivery (Ebrahim, 2010). To more efficiently and effectively serve South Africa’s children, the government put forward the National Integrated Plan (NIP) for Early Childhood Development in South Africa 2005–2010 to articulate an integrated system of service delivery for children from birth to 4 years of age (UNICEF, 2005). The Departments of Health, Social Development, and Education working with the presidency were charged with providing leadership for services. Through an annual cumulative

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Table 12.1  Policy documents associated with the Universal Right of Children to Early Childhood Development Year

Policy

Description

1995

White Paper No. 1 on Education and Training

1996

Constitution of the Republic of South Africa

1996

Interim Policy of Early Childhood Development

1996

National Programme of Action for Children in South Africa

1997

White Paper on Social Welfare

1997

White Paper for the Transformation of the Health System in South Africa White Paper 5 on Early Childhood Development

Recognizes the importance of child well-being in the early years and the need to provide adequate nutrition, health, early childhood stimulation, and safe environments. Guarantees the rights of all children under the age of 18 years (including young children) to equal enjoyment of the rights to life, dignity, access to information, citizenship, a name and nationality, a healthy environment, basic education, family and parental care, nutrition, shelter, basic health care and social services, language, and culture. Recognizes early childhood development as a multifaceted concept; provided for a national early childhood development pilot project for a universal reception year. Prioritizes nutrition, child health, water and sanitation, early childhood education and basic education, social welfare development, leisure and cultural activities, and child protection measures for all children. Goal: expansion of early childhood development activities, including low-cost family- and community-based interventions. Guides welfare and social development provisions in South Africa; called for a national early childhood development strategy and inter-sectoral programme in collaboration with other government departments, civil society, and the private sector; and for appropriate early childhood development services to young children under 5. Commits to the provision of nutritional support and maternal, child, and women’s health as essential elements of a transformed inclusive health system for all South Africans.

2001

2001

2005

2005

2012

2012

Links early childhood development services, child well-being, school achievement, and development domains; commits to addressing inequitable provisioning of early childhood development programmes and remediation of the fragmentary early childhood development legislative and policy framework. White Paper 6 on Inclusive Establishes procedures for early identification and interventions for children with Education disabilities as well as for addressing barriers to learning in the education system, including the foundation phase (Grades R to 3). National Integrated Plan The first national multi-sectoral plan of action for a comprehensive package of (NIP) for Early Childhood early childhood development services that include birth registration, child and Development in South maternal health, nutrition, immunization; referral services for health and social Africa 2005–2010 services, early learning programmes, and water and sanitation. Children’s Act No. 38 of 2005 Provides a comprehensive child protection framework that requires the development of a comprehensive national strategy aimed at securing a properly resourced, coordinated, and managed early childhood development system that specifically includes children with disabilities and chronic illnesses. National Plan of Action for Provides a holistic framework for the integration of all policies and plans Children (NPAC) in South developed by government departments and civil society to promote the wellAfrica 2012–2017 being of children. The Buffalo City Declaration The product of a national early childhood development conference that (March 2012) recognized early childhood development as a right and committed to scaling-up access and quality, especially for the most marginalized young children, and to the development of a holistic, coherent, and well-resourced national early childhood development system.

(Continued)

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Table 12.1  Policy documents associated with the Universal Right of Children to Early Childhood Development (Continued) Year

Policy

2013

South African Integrated Commits to the development of a national early childhood development policy Programme of Action that outlines a comprehensive early childhood development programme for Early Childhood and establishes the structures, procedures, and capacity-building initiatives Development-Moving necessary to support the implementation of the policy Ahead (2013/14–2016/17) National Integrated Early Outlines provision of comprehensive ECD services such as health care, nutrition, Childhood Development social protection, parenting support, and a host of learning opportunities as a Policy of the Republic of universal right of all children South Africa

2015

Description

Source: RSA National Integrated Early Childhood Development Policy (2015, pp. 26–28)

targeted expansion process, the government anticipated serving 5 million children by 2010 (UNICEF, 2005). Challenges remained in terms of fragmented, uncoordinated service delivery, inequitable provisioning, inadequate funding, and limited inter-sectoral/ inter-departmental collaboration. To address issues associated with the uncoordinated service delivery, the Children’s Act of 2005 synthesized a number of acts to create a comprehensive and coordinated intervention towards the development and protection of children in order to promote children’s rights and well-being. It served as a legal framework to guide anyone involved in the care, development, and protection of children and offered children the right to participate, to be heard, and to be respected. Rights of children with disabilities were also protected by the Act.

Recent Policies Ongoing efforts to ameliorate the history of service fragmentation, inadequate access to programmes and services, and severely limited financial and material resources were highlighted in recent parallel evaluation, the Diagnostic Review of Early Childhood Development (DR) and the National Integrated Plan (NIP) for ECD. These simultaneously occurring evaluations provided an ECD Sector Review (Richter, Biersteker, Burns, Desmond, Feza, Harrison, Martin,

Saloojee & Slemming, 2012). The NIP focused on institutional issues of accountability, decision-making, leadership, coordination, planning, and resource mobilization and allocation (Davids, Samuels, September, Moeng, Richter, Mabogoane, Goldman & Buthelezi, 2015, p. 2). The Diagnostic Review examined the current policy and programme environment and identified the challenges to the provision of ECD. The Diagnostic Review of Early Childhood Development (Richter et  al., 2012) highlighted the importance of interventions in the first 1000 days of a child’s life (0 to 2 years). The report acknowledged the repressive and discriminatory laws of the apartheid government and their damaging effects, especially on the black population of the country. The Diagnostic Review acknowledged gains made over the years, such as the improved enrolment of children in Grade R (73%), advances in the health area such as increased immunization rates (89%), and greater numbers of children receiving the Child Support Grant (73%) to fight the scourge of poverty. Key policy findings included the need for a broader definition of ECD programmes to incorporate more comprehensive services and supports. Two major gaps were noted. Gaps were found in support for parenting, prevention of stunting, and safe and affordable childcare for very young children and other families needing assistance. A second gap was in the planned rapid expansion of

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early childhood care and education with service provision to the families with greatest need and to families with children with disabilities (Richter et al., 2012). Issues of systemic collaboration for service provision and the need for adequate funding mechanisms were identified as critical to moving forward. The National Integrated Early Childhood Development (NIECD) Policy of the Republic of South Africa was approved in 2015. This policy outlined the provision of comprehensive ECD services such as health care, nutrition, social protection, parenting support, and multiple learning opportunities as a universal right of all children. ECD is therefore viewed as a collective of programmes across the government spectrum requiring a concerted effort to coordinate services to avoid duplication and non-delivery of essential services to realize the full benefit of interventions to disadvantaged children. The policy advocates for the holistic development of children through the committed effort demonstrated by stakeholders tasked with the responsibility of supporting children so that they will develop to their fullest capacity (Republic of South Africa, 2015).

ECD in Local Communities National policies have focused on greater collaboration among agencies to provide services to children and families through multi-sectoral arrangements that address the needs of the whole child. However, at the local level, the daily concerns of providing care and education with available resources has been a priority. Historically, privileged children have been served through a threeyear pre-primary education programme, but there was no such programme available for the majority population. Non-profit and philanthropic organizations took on the responsibility for drawing attention to the needs of local communities. They looked for innovative ways to provide staff training, support, and advice to communities. They explored

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parental involvement in center-based and home-based care (Ebrahim, 2010). Areas of concern for the NPOs included the quality of teacher training, curriculum approaches, and for-profit centres focused on financial gain over children’s development. With the advent of a democratic government that established education as a right for all children, NPOs continued to serve local communities through service provisioning, staff training, parental involvement and education, and advocacy. Although policies have become increasingly inclusive and collaborative, the issues associated with meeting the needs of children and families remained significant in marginalized communities. Among the challenges that ECD providers continue to face is the historical inequity in education. In identifying a workforce to provide early care and education intervention services, NPOs and governmental agencies find that people entering the field to work with young children have limited educational experiences themselves. Even among those people who have completed secondary schooling, basic conceptual understanding of literacy and numeracy is often limited. Organizations that provide training for practitioners to work with families and children have found that workshops and training sessions alone are inadequate to meet the need for a highly-trained ECD workforce. A number of the ECD programmes in operation today began by serving local populations within specific geographical locations. Over time, these programmes expanded in terms of their reach within the community and their approaches to build networks to meet the diverse needs of young children and their families. Five such NPOs have a long-standing history of service: Centre for Early Childhood Development (CECD) and Early Learning Resource Unit (ELRU) in the Western Cape; the Khululeka Community Education Development Centre (KCED) in the Eastern Cape; Ntataise in the Free State; and Training Resources for Early Education (TREE) in KwaZulu-Natal (Table 12.2).

Source: Authored by Teresa Harris (chapter author)

KwaZulu-Natal

Training and Resources in Early Education (TREE) 1984

Free State; Limpopo; 1980 Mpumalanga; Gauteng

1989

Khululeka Community Eastern Cape Education Development Centre (KCED)

Ntataise

1978

Early Learning Resource Western Cape; Unit (ELRU) North West Province

Infrastructure upgrades Equipment provision Skills enrichment Family outreach work Parent education workshops Governing body training Organizational support Family and Community Motivators Programme Hlumisa’s Playgroup Programme Whole Centre Development Programme Training for principals and practitioners Open Source Portal to resources ECD Orientation Workshop Programme Further Education and Training Certificate in ECD (Level 4) National Diploma in Early Childhood Development (Level 5) HighScope Training of Trainers Programme Literacy/Numeracy Parent Workshop Programme 3H Infant and Toddler Parent Support Programme Family Home Visiting Programme Community Development Practitioner [skills] Training Homestead Gardening Programme HIV/AIDS Awareness Programme Community Organizational and Management Skills Training Accredited Level 4 training Enrichment programmes Toy library Mobile playgroup units Network programme serving 18 member organizations Accredited ECD qualification at NQF Level 4, short courses, and skills training programmes Parenting programme Networking and advocacy Home-based care Structured play groups Toy libraries Community development

Activities

Provide training, resources, individual •• support, and organizational capacity •• •• •• •• •• •• Provide access to quality early •• childhood development for every •• child within a community •• •• •• Increase access to relevant, appropriate •• programmes that support and •• respond to community needs •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• Empower women through training and •• development to provide and sustain •• quality ECD programmes •• •• •• Provide integrated, coordinated, •• comprehensive programming for families and vulnerable children in •• early childhood •• •• •• •• ••

Years of Purpose operation 1994

Location

Centre for Early Cape Town Childhood Development (CECD)

Centre

Table 12.2 Examples of current early childhood programmes in South Africa

Equitable early childhood services: South Africa

Centre for Early Childhood Development (CECD) In operation for 20 years, Cape Town’s CECD provides training, resources, and support to enhance individual and organizational capacity, develops and disseminates resources, and conducts research related to the African context in all nine provinces. ECD programmes and services include infrastructure upgrades, equipment provision and training, skills enrichment workshops, family outreach work, parent education workshops, governing body training, and organizational support. They also offer research, advocacy and lobbying, staff development and training, strategic planning, evaluation, conferences, and campaigns (Centre for Early Childhood Development, 2013). Their impact through programming is widespread thanks to multiple international and national funders. For example, in 2014/15, outreach services such as a home-visiting programme for families whose children do not attend an ECD centre was provided to 92 families and 146 children. With funding from two Netherlands partners, CECD provided participating ECD community centres with educational equipment, skills training for teachers, and on-site mentoring support for registering with appropriate departments to access the ECD subsidy. Funding through the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust and the National Department of Social Development enabled CECD to provide a national ECD leadership programme to build the capacity and effectiveness of non-profit leaders and organizations. Fifty-two ECD directors and programme managers have participated in the 8-module programme that ran over two years (CECD, 2015).

Early Learning Resource Unit (ELRU) In 1978 ELRU began to respond to the void in ECD in the Western Cape by building a base of training, support, research, and publications. By the mid-1980s the organization had

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moved towards policy development and dialogue promotion through its research, conferences, and dissemination of articles and papers. Over time, ELRU consolidated its practices through greater engagement and collaboration with government to reach more children with high quality programmes. Today ELRU works to provide an integrated array of services and programmes (Early Learning Resource Unit, 2014). The ELRU home-based Family and Community Motivators (FCM) programme focuses on providing community workers to enter households and support families during the child’s first 1000 days. One of the first non-centre-based ECD initiatives in the North West Province, this programme provides support to vulnerable families of young children from 0 to 6 years of age and to pregnant women (Ilifa Labantwana, 2016). In 2014, the programme served 1583 households and 2751 children. Hlumisa’s Playgroup programme empowers caregivers and communities to extend quality ECD programming to vulnerable children who lack access to formal centrebased programmes. Focusing on children in the 2 to 5 years age group, the aim of this programme is to provide structured and quality play-based stimulation programmes to the 7 out of 10 children from poor and vulnerable communities whose parents may not be able to afford to send them to a formal ECD programme. This programme also empowers unemployed caregivers and mothers from the local communities to become the ‘Hlumisa’ of her block, street or neighbourhood. The Hlumisa is trained in delivery of a basic ECD programme to stimulate six children for a period of three hours, twice per week. The activities of the programme are aligned with the South African National Curriculum Framework (NCF) 0–4 years, and follows a typical playgroup structure aligned to the HighScope approach. The Whole Centre Development pro g­ramme assists ECD practitioners in creating optimal environments, developing quality

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programming in clean, safe, well-provisioned centres. In the centre-based ECD programme, ELRU staff work with stakeholders at a community and ECD centre level by undertaking projects that result in increased health care systems, stimulating educational activities, pre-Grade R support and Grade R readiness, quality management structures, and appropriate social, psychological and physical development of young children. Their Open Source Portal makes high quality resources available to caregivers, communities, and ECD practitioners at no cost.

Khululeka Community Education Development Centre (KCED) KCED in the Eastern Cape was established in 1989 to increase access to ECD programmes in response to the expressed needs of the communities they serve. Their non-centre based target population is vulnerable families, ­caregivers and parents. Vulnerable young children (e.g. children at risk, orphaned, infected with/affected by HIV/AIDS, living in childheaded households, with disabilities) are a secondary focus. Using an integrated approach to ECD, KCED educates practitioners, upgrades programme standards and practices, facilitates active learning environments, provides resources, and establishes partnerships among practitioners, parents, and management committees (Khululeka, 2014). Working in rural areas with high levels of poverty and unemployment and inadequate access to resources, basic services, and quality ECD programmes, KCECD works with practitioners who, themselves, possess very little formal training. The only HighScope teacher education centre in southern Africa, KECD has enhanced teacher quality through their accredited Further Education & Training in ECD (Level 4) and National Diploma in ECD (Level 5). The community development practitioners are trained to conduct home visits to build family capacity to address issues associated with

vulnerability, and also to provide their infants and toddlers with opportunities for active learning. The 3H infant & toddler parent support programme enhances child development and parenting skills through structured workshops to increase levels of parental involvement and participation in their children’s education. Community-based programmes offered through KECD include the Homestead gardening programme to enhance nutritional and health status of families and vulnerable infants, toddlers and young children; the community development practitioner training to build competency to deliver family home visits, infant and toddler parent support workshops, and the household gardening programmes; the HIV/AIDS awareness programme to develop community capacity to make informed choices and protect themselves against HIV/AIDS and care for those who are HIV positive or have AIDS; and the community organizational and management skills training to develop leadership skills to develop the structures and systems to ensure the effective and efficient delivery of ECD services.

Ntataise Ntataise, ‘to take a child by the hand’, began in 1980 to help women in disadvantaged rural communities gain the knowledge and skills needed to establish and sustain effective ECD programmes for children in their care. In its early days Ntataise worked exclusively on farms. Today Ntataise’s work is divided between its training and development programme in the Free State and its national network capacity-building and support programmes in seven provinces (Ntataise, 2016). Ntataise has a long history of developing training programmes that lead to certificates and the Level 4 diploma. Trainers offer workshops and training sessions using active learning principles of modeling, role playing, and discussion in combination with ongoing

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coaching through site-based visits to observe, model, and reflect with teachers. Given the resource limitations within the Ntataise service catchment, this NPO provides training in using local resources as well as providing a toy library and making available toys and education materials to centres within their network. Ntataise’s founder, Jane Evans, reported that staff support is the most influential factor. Training sessions are only the beginning step. Practitioners need on-site and ongoing support because they need to develop conceptual understandings of what it means to work with young children and their families. As a result of their intensive model of demonstrations and support, 50% of their practitioners earned the Level 4 qualification. In 2014 the Ntataise Further Education and Training (FET) Program ECD: Level 4 included the ongoing training of 101 ECD practitioners working in pre-schools. A hallmark of their training approach, this vocational training programme provides in-service training with short periods of intensive workshops interspersed with on-site, hands-on support, mentoring, and assessment. Ntataise’s work in the Free State and North West Province focuses on providing training and support to ensure good quality ECD programming for children that will equip them for formal schooling. These programmes include an accredited training programme for pre-school practitioners; a support programme for pre-schools, practitioners and supervisors to maintain standards and improve the quality of learning in the playroom; and an outreach programme to increase access to quality ECD programmes for children not enrolled in a pre-school. This outreach programme includes playgroups on farms surrounding Viljoenskroon, playgroups in the Rammulotsi township and at a day clinic, as well as a toy library based at the Ntataise training centre in Rammulotsi. The Ntataise enrichment programme continues to be an essential programme in improving the learning environment for children in the playroom. Thirty-two ECD

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practitioners from pre-schools from communities in the Free State participated in the Ntataise enrichment programme in 2014. This project transformed 32 pre-school playrooms from stark and colorless to bright, vibrant and exciting learning environments for children. Facilitators reported a significant improvement in the layout of the preschool environment, both in the playroom and in the outside playground. Special activities such as symbol boards, wall calendars, morning news and attendance boards adorned the walls of playrooms and were common in all centres. As part of the programme, Ntataise provided each playroom with a set of specifically selected toys, books, and educational equipment. The workshops and support programme, together with the provision of toys and equipment, has significantly improved the learning opportunities for children in these pre-schools.

Training Resources for Early Education (TREE) Founded in 1984, TREE is an accredited ECD resource and training organization offering ECD qualifications at the NQF levels 1 and 4 in KwaZulu-Natal. They also offer skills training programmes at a foundation level and as enrichment programmes, providing support, monitoring, and assessment visits to practitioners in their ECD sites. In addition, they assist in building resource and institutional capacity through the production of educational and culturally appropriate toys, equipment, and print resource materials; provision of skills training to produce educational equipment from locally available and reusable/recyclable materials; and through skills training for governing body members, supervisors, parents, caregivers, and practitioners. TREE’s work extends to networking and advocacy on all issues facing young children in South Africa. In response to government policy to provide universal ECD services by 2017 (National

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Planning Commission, 2015), TREE is committed to providing ‘integrated, coordinated and comprehensive processes targeting families and vulnerable children in early childhood (ages 0–4) with particular focus on monitoring, evaluation and project impact as well as quality assurance across all interventions’ (TREE, 2015, p. 8). Using an integrated model that focuses on the child’s holistic development, TREE has worked to coordinate efforts among practitioner training, parental education and involvement, and community engagement to give children a sound foundation for healthy development. Intervention focusing on the practitioners has been in providing training. The aim of TREE’s training programme is to improve practitioner development and capacity through the accredited ECD qualification at the NQF Level 4 and through skills training programmes at the foundational level and as enrichment programmes. However, TREE recognized that although their training was of high quality, their practitioners needed support after the training relationship ended. To that end, they developed a mentorship programme to continue for one year as a support phase to provide time for practitioners to continue developing new skills and confidence. They also recognized that in offering the essential package of services, there was a gap in service at the conception to birth phase, leading them to develop a more robust intervention with parents and to improve their measurement of the interventions to demonstrate the importance and efficacy of their approach. In 2014, TREE trained 1268 practitioners/ facilitators and supported sites and practitioners that reached 42,102 children through sites and household visits. As a result, practitioners and community facilitators have benefitted from the child-centred approaches, case management practices, training tools, and referral linkages developed during the 2014–15 period (TREE, 2015). To build resource and institutional capacity, TREE offers ECD site support and development through its ECD Enabling

Environment (EEE) programme which consists of the home visiting programme, the structured playgroups programme, and the community toy library programme. These programmes have also built parenting capacity to address the educational, health, and social needs of the child and family, facilitating healthy and supportive environments for child rearing and improving access to resources and services to improve the quality of daily living. In 2014–15 TREE reached a total of 759 primary caregivers caring for approximately 1293 children through their home visiting and structured playgroup programmes. Of these children, 861 had their official birth registration documents; 799 had access to essential services; 920 had Road to Health cards, the record of immunizations and growth rate given to mothers when the child is born; and 1094 received nutrition based on their developmental needs. In addition, 759 primary caregivers received training to provide a quality ECD experience that can be transferred to other parents and caregivers who have not participated in these programmes (TREE, 2015). Within the communities, TREE has implemented an inter-sectorial approach to support the advancement of the comprehensive rights of young children. By establishing partnerships with traditional leadership groups and departments of social development, education, agriculture, social security, and communitybased organizations, local communities can reduce fragmentation and pool resources. Through regularly scheduled meetings, local leadership teams collaborate to address the various issues affecting families and share information to ensure that individual departments can provide needed interventions that are particular to families’ needs.

Impact of Local Interventions Each of these programmes is highly valued within its local and regional service area.

Equitable early childhood services: South Africa

However, taking these programmes to scale to serve a national ECD population is a major challenge. National policies that recognize the need for an integrated approach to service provisioning are currently in place. Questions about the interventions that will be most effective to improve quality in teacher training and ECD programmes remain to be answered. Ilifa Labantwana is a multi-donor partnership supporting early childhood development in South Africa. This organization works to ‘increase access and improve the quality of ECD services and support SA policy implementation’ (Dawes, Biersteker, & Hendricks, 2012, p. 7). Ilifa Labantwana recognized the efficacy of interventions based on meta-analyses, systematic review of randomized controlled trials, and longitudinal studies. They also reviewed studies supporting the higher rate of return on investment in ECD over investments made later in the lives of children (Heckman, 2000, 2007, 2008). Ilifa Labantwana designed a study to evaluate different models of social sector ECD service delivery to establish which are most effective and can most easily be taken to scale on a regional or national level within the South African context (Dawes, Biersteker & Hendricks, 2012, p. 7). The Sobambisana Initiative created a local evidence base for interventions to improve ECD and evaluate the impact of interventions on children at Grade R entry. Sobambisana examined select interventions from CECD, ELRU, Khululeka, Ntataise, and TREE. Having been well-established within their regions, these programmes agreed to test specific interventions. The interventions themselves were evidence-based and included the training of centre-based ECD practitioners, the advocacy of improved public services to children, home-based ECD programmes, community playgroups, and parenting education. The interventions were designed with community participants to meet their unique needs. The evaluation process itself monitored and evaluated partner implementation, evaluating the

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outcomes of the interventions and the impact of the interventions on the children when they reached Grade R (Dawes et al., 2012). Training ECD practitioners at ECD sites and schools was difficult for the three accredited Level 4 training programmes and reached only 38 practitioners. Shorter workshops reached 138 practitioners. Longer programmes tended to experience high levels of dropping out due to a variety of issues associated with poverty such as illness, leaving or losing jobs, or transferring to programmes offering stipends. However, almost all the training interventions improved classroom practice in the community preschools. Grade R learners who attended preschools staffed by trained teachers achieved higher cognition, language, numeracy, and readiness to learn scores than those children who had not been exposed to preschool programming. Advocacy for integrated service delivery was tested out by four of the five participating organizations. Results for efforts were mixed but the evaluation showed that advocacy is most successful when it is sustained and has a clear goal and strategy. Regular reports back to the community and meetings that brought the community together to discuss issues built interest and demand for services to children and improved the responsiveness of service providers. Home visit interventions included shared parent/caregiver education about health, hygiene, nutrition and stimulation, care­ giver support, and linking households with services. The home visiting programmes reached significant numbers of caregivers and children, providing support to the caregivers and access to services for the children to stimulate their development. In the period 2009–2011 the home visiting programmes reached 794 caregivers and 1513 children. All the interventions improved access to services in areas where baseline access was limited and there were improvements in caregiver coping. At Grade R, there was no difference in cognition, language, numeracy, and emotional maturity between children who

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received the interventions and those who did not. Given the educational attainment levels of the home visitors and the particular training they received to deliver the home visiting services, this is not surprising. These findings suggest that if home visiting is to successfully impact school readiness, home visitors need additional training that addresses early education in the areas of cognitive development and intellectual stimulation, numeracy, literacy, and socio-emotional maturity. Community playgroups used structured curricula and were delivered weekly. Ntataise’s curriculum focused on school-readiness activities offered by a formally trained ECD facilitator. TREE provided a broader developmental programme facilitated by a trained playgroup facilitator once a week with volunteer caregivers providing services on other days. Findings were mixed. The Ntataise programme had promising child outcomes, but its high costs per child suggest that taking the programme to scale might be difficult. The group experiences for the children did appear to demonstrate that even when parents did not attend the playgroups, children’s cognitive performance did improve. Parent education programmes were offered by two participants. It appears that for this intervention to be successful, it needs to be viewed as practical to parents, particularly when these parents are often burdened by poverty and the everyday tasks they have to manage, in addition to travelling to venues that are far from their homes. A major challenge to these programmes was regular attendance by parents, particularly when these families are not receiving other forms of social support. Implementers must also have adequate time in their own caseloads to offer regular support to parents and target families who might benefit from their services.

Conclusion As is evident in this review, creating an integrated, coordinated system of Early Childhood

Care and Education that is responsive to the holistic development of young children is a work in progress at both the national and local levels. Currently, there are a number of programmes underway across the country that are attempting to address ongoing issues of poverty mitigation, health and nutrition, parenting education, inclusivity, and professionalism. Many of these programmes have been at work in their communities for decades. However, measuring their impact beyond anecdotal reports from stakeholders and the annual reports of NPOs has been difficult. With new efforts on the part of government to build a national evaluation system, there is the opportunity to bring stakeholders together around data that can be used for decision-making and programme improvement (Davids et  al., 2015). Efforts to contextualize international measures for data collection, as evidenced in the Sobambisana Report (Dawes et al., 2012), are also promising. However, outcomes associated with significant gains in economic development that reflect returns on investment in the early childhood sector may take generations to realize in any significant way. With measures that are currently available and studies currently underway, limited progress has been documented. Factors of duration and frequency of interventions, quality of interventions relative to target populations, and fidelity of monitoring and evaluation practices carried out by stakeholders are areas of concern and ongoing study. Nores and Barnett (2010) noted in their study of interventions in 23 countries that effects were smaller in less economically developed countries. They hypothesized that a threshold must be crossed to improve the measured outcomes and that such a threshold may be more difficult when the economic level is low. They also conjectured that intervention effects might depend on the availability of other environmental supports that may not be present in less developed economies. Nores and Barnett go on to note that the duration of interventions, while positively affecting health outcomes, had negative effects on

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schooling. They suggest this might occur because longer interventions studied for effects on schooling were systematically less intensive or offered lower quality education because of a cost trade-off between intensity and duration. Ongoing work to integrate service provisioning, so that children and their families can access the comprehensive services needed, particularly by those who live in poverty, remains. The Diagnostic Report of 2012 references the successes of Grade R, but speaks to the gaps in services related to nutritional support for women and children, support for parenting and families, and childcare support for very young children and children with special needs. To achieve the integrated service delivery needed to support ECD, the report calls for effective inter-sectoral collaboration that includes a common ECD agenda and goals mainstreamed into sectoral policies, programmes, and budgets and an integrated monitoring and evaluation process. The latest report on the status of early childhood, The South African Early Childhood Review (Hall, Sambu, Berry, Giese, Almeleh & Rosa, 2016), speaks to the need for continued government support to offer a comprehensive package of services in the long run and immediately offer a package of essential components of ECD services to all children. With nearly two-thirds of children under 6 living in the poorest 40% of households with high unemployment rates and poor living conditions, the response cannot remain at the local level. South Africa certainly has a long way to go to address the deep-seated poverty that resulted from its legacy of apartheid. But this country is making progress, at both the local and the national level, to improve the life chances of its youngest citizens.

References Centre for Early Childhood Development. (2013). Programmes. Retrieved from http://

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www.cecd.org.za/index.php/programmes -mainmenu-64 Centre for Early Childhood Development (CECD). (2015). 2015 Annual Report of Centre for Early Childhood Development. Retrieved from http://www.cecd.org.za/images/Annual%20 Report%202014%202015.pdf Davids, M., Samuels, M.-L., September, R., Moeng, T. L., Richter, L., Mabogoane, T. W., Goldman, I., & Buthelezi, T. (2015). The pilot evaluation for the National Evaluation System in South Africa – A diagnostic review of early childhood development. African Evaluation Journal 3(1). Retrieved from www.aejonline. org/index.php/aej/article/download/141/169 Dawes, A., Biersteker, L., & Hendricks, L. (2012). Towards integrated early childhood development: An evaluation of the Sobambisana Initiative. Cape Town, South Africa: Ilifa Labantwana. Department of Education. (2001). White Paper 5 on Early Childhood Education. Retrieved from http://www.education.gov.za/LinkClick. aspx?fileticket=4dPdpYszrVQ%3D& Early Learning Resource Unit. (2014). ELRU’s approach. Retrieved from http://www.elru. co.za/pages/about Ebrahim, H. (2010). Tracing historical shifts in early care and education in South Africa. Journal of Education, 48, 119–136. Geohive. (2015). Urban/rural division of countries for the years 2015 and 2025. Retrieved from http://www.geohive.com/earth/pop_ urban.aspx Georgeson, J., & Payler, J. (2013). The importance of international perspectives. In J. Georgeson & J. Payler (Eds.). International perspectives on early childhood education and care (pp. 3–8). New York: Open University Press. Hall, K., Sambu, W., Berry, L., Giese, S., Almeleh, C., & Rosa, S. (2016). South African early childhood review 2016. Cape Town: Children’s Institute, University of Cape Town and Ilifa Labantwana. Heckman, J. J. (2000). Policies to foster human capital. Research in Economics, 54(1), 3–56. Heckman, J. J. (2007). The economics, technology, and neuroscience of human capability formation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States

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of America, 104(33), 13250–13255. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/ stable/25436470 Heckman, J. J. (2008). The case for investing in disadvantaged young children. Retrieved from http://heckmanequation.org/content/ resource/case-investing-disadvantaged -young-children Ilifa Labantwana. (2013). The essential package: Early childhood services and support to vulnerable children in South Africa. Cape Town, South Africa: Ilifa Labantwana. Ilifa Labantwana. (2016). Ilifa Labantwana Annual Report: 1 July 2014-30 June 2015. Retrieved from http://ilifalabantwana.co.za/ wp-content/uploads/2016/03/ilifa-annualreport-FINAL-for-web.pdf Kepe, T. (2016). Rural geography research in post-apartheid South Africa: Patterns and opportunities. South African Geographical Journal, 98(3), 495–504. Retrieved from http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.108 0/03736245.2016.1212731?scroll=top&nee dAccess=true Khululeka Community Education Development Centre. (2014). Working together for children. Retrieved from http://www.khululeka. org.za/ National Education Policy Investigation (NEPI). (1992). Early Childhood Educare: A work of the NECC Early Childhood Research Group. Cape Town: Oxford University Press. National Planning Commission. (2015). Our future – Make it work: National Development Plan 2030. Retrieved from http://www. brandsouthafrica.com/images/NDP/00-overview/02_NDP_in_full.pdf Nores, M., & Barnett, W. S. (2010). Benefits of early childhood interventions across the world: (Under)investing in the very young.

Economics of Education Review, 29(2), 271–282. Ntataise. (2016). Ntataise Annual Report 2015. Viljoenskroon, South Africa: Ntataise. Phatudi, N. C. (2007). A study of transition from preschool and home contexts to grade 1 in a developing country (Unpublished doctoral thesis). University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa. Republic of South Africa (RSA). (1996). Constitution of the Republic of South Africa. Retrieved from http://www.gov.za/documents/constitution-republic-south-africa -1996 Republic of South Africa (RSA). (2015). National Integrated Early Childhood Development Policy. Pretoria: Government Printers. Richter, L., Biersteker, L., Burns, J., Desmond, C., Feza, N., Harrison, D., Martin, P., Saloojee, H., & Slemming, W. (2012). Diagnostic review of early childhood development. Retrieved from http://www.gov.za/sites/ www.gov.za/files/ECD%20Diagnostic%20 Report.pdf Training Resources for Early Education (TREE). (2015). 2015 Annual Report of TREE. Retrieved from http://www.tree-ecd.co.za/ wp-content/uploads/2015/08/AnnualReport2015.pdf UNICEF. (2005). National integrated plan for early childhood development in South Africa 2005–2010. Retrieved from www.unicef. org/southafrica/SAF_resource_nip.pdf Williams, R., & Samuels, N. K. (2001). The nationwide audit of ECD provisioning in South Africa. Retrieved from https://www. researchgate.net/profile/Kopano_Ratele/publication/228799598_The_nationwide_audit_ of_ECD_provisioning_in_South_Africa/ links/02bfe510a410e085ef000000.pdf

13 Scaling-up Early Learning as a Sustainable Development Priority: A Case Study of Ethiopia1 M a r t i n W o o d h e a d , J a c k R o s s i t e r, Andrew Dawes and Alula Pankhurst

Introduction The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Target 4.2 identifies ‘pre-­ primary education’ as a strategy to strengthen school readiness and contribute to the quality and outcomes of education, which is supported by the powerful evidence from evaluation research. This chapter explores the opportunities and challenges of delivering quality early learning for all, through a case study of Ethiopia’s plans to scale-up Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE). Ethiopia is one of four countries within Young Lives longitudinal research and policy engagement into the impacts of growing up in poverty on outcomes for children (www. younglives.org.uk). The government of Ethiopia’s ambitious targets for early learning have been set out in the fifth Education Sector Development Programme (ESDP V, 2015), with O-Classes within primary schools being seen as the most rapid route to scale-up. This chapter reports a recent Young

Lives engagement with the Ministry of Education and other partners to support scale-up. The progress and the challenges have been highlighted through exploratory fieldwork on two key themes, namely the response of Regional Education Bureaus in planning, financing, management and ensuring human capacity for scale-up; and the potential of Ethiopia’s Colleges of Teacher Education to supply sufficient trained teachers to work with young children, especially in the rapidly expanding O-Classes.

Delivering quality early learning for all The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have established early childhood as a global priority (Young Lives, 2016). Strengthening this period of life is key to achieving at least seven of the SDGs, on poverty, hunger, health (including child mortality), education,

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gender, water and sanitation, and inequality. Specifically, one of the education targets states that by 2030 countries should: ‘ensure that all girls and boys have access to quality early childhood development, care and preprimary education so that they are ready for primary education’ (SDG Target 4.2). In the words of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon: early childhood development can help drive the transformation we hope to achieve over the next 15 years. This is a pivotal time. … Too many countries have yet to make early childhood development a priority. We need to invest more, not just in education, but in health and protection. We need to target our investments and interventions to reach children at greatest risk of being left behind. The Sustainable Development Goals recognize that early childhood development can help drive the transformation we hope to achieve over the next 15 years. (UN Secretary-General, 2015)

Taken in their entirety, the implication of the SDG goals for early childhood policy development are very ambitious – requiring multi-sectoral (and well integrated) initiatives supporting households, parents and children from around the infant’s conception, through pregnancy and the earliest stages of life and right through to the first grades of school (Woodhead, Bolton, Featherstone & Robertson, 2014). Positioning early childhood at the heart of global development reflects the convergence of persuasive lines of policy analysis and research evidence that ‘investing in ECD (Early Childhood Development) leads to gender equality and empowerment, better health and education outcomes, improved skills, abilities and productivity, narrows the income, ethnic, and geographic inequality gaps, provides timely intervention for persons with disabilities, and is a cost effective strategy for eliminating disadvantage’ (Consultative Group, 2012, p. 19). Policies and strategies to scaleup early learning via pre-primary programmes are the key component of ECD and the main focus of this chapter. While ‘pre-primary’ programmes are our specific focus, early learning programmes are frequently referred to

generically as ECCE (Early Childhood Care and Education), or included within the more holistic concept of ECD. SDG Target 4.2 identifies ‘pre-primary education’ as a strategy to strengthen school readiness and contribute to the quality and outcomes of education. Including pre-primary amongst SDG targets also builds logically on progress towards the MDG goal of universal primary education, with the primary school net enrolment ratio improved from 84% in 1999 to 93% in 2015. Improvements were especially strong in sub-Saharan Africa, with 11 countries rising at least 20 percentage points from 1999 to 2012 (UNESCO, 2015). Unfortunately, headline indicators on primary school enrolment often disguise poor attendance rates, children over-age for grade, with overcrowded classrooms, high drop-out rates, and low achievement levels on core skills, especially amongst the most disadvantaged children who are most often attending the poorest quality schools. The quality crisis in primary education is widely recognized, with UNESCO estimating that approximately 250 million children are attending school but not learning the basics (UNESCO, 2014). In this context, policymakers are increasingly looking towards ECCE programmes as one of the strategies that can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of primary schools – by improving ‘school readiness’. By 2014, even before the SDGs were agreed, 29 of the 49 sub-Saharan countries had adopted ECCE policy instruments while 9 were in development (Vargas-Barón, 2015). By 2014, 40 countries across the world had taken ECCE policy a stage further, introducing pre-primary as a compulsory stage of education although Ghana is the only country in sub-Saharan Africa to have taken that step and ‘progress in access has been uneven, with considerable difference between urban and rural areas, rich and poor families and communities, and thriving and deprived regions’ (UNESCO, 2015, p. 59). In support of scale-up of pre-primary education, Crouch and Merseth identify a close statistical link between low levels of

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pre-primary participation, inefficiencies in the early primary grades and poor performance on cognitive skills. Specifically, they argue that in the absence of pre-primary, large numbers of under-age children are being enrolled in Grade 1 where they ‘churn’ for several years without learning much before moving on to Grade 2, where they ‘churn’ again in smaller but still significant numbers. From this perspective, enrolling children in pre-primary classes would increase their readiness to learn in school, take the pressure off teachers in the early grades and improve children’s chances of making progress through the school curriculum (Crouch & Merseth, in press). It is important to note alternative perspectives on policy priorities for ‘school readiness’. The flip side of improving ‘children’s readiness for school’ is about ensuring ‘schools’ readiness for children’. Or as Kagan puts it, readiness is ‘the match between the child and the institutions that serve the child’ (in Woodhead & Moss, 2007, p. 22). The risk to children if governments push ahead to implement early learning programmes in low-resource contexts is that millions may be enrolled in low quality pre-primary and then progress to low quality primary classrooms, and despite considerable investment, the long-term policy objective of improved human capital development is not realized. These risks are greatest during a transitional period when education quality systems are being consolidated, teacher training for pre-primary and primary classes is being strengthened and effective governance and monitoring systems introduced.

Young Lives studies on early childhood This chapter explores these issues through a case study of Ethiopia, one of the four countries that has been studied as part of Young Lives longitudinal research and policy ­engagement.2 Young Lives research in Ethiopia has been tracking 3,000 children

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growing up in 20 diverse sites across five regions in Ethiopia’s Federal government structure. The household circumstances, development and education of a younger cohort of 2,000 of these children has been recorded since they were babies in 2000/1, along with a smaller older cohort of 1000 children born in 1994/5. With five rounds of data collected by the end of 2016, Young Lives has comprehensive information on these children’s lives and development, including their access to early education and progress through school, which is set in a comparative context with parallel research being carried out by Young Lives teams in India, Peru and Viet Nam. Young Lives began a specific strand of research into early childhood policies and services in 2007, with parallel studies around access, equity and quality in Ethiopia (Orkin, Yadete & Woodhead, 2012) as well as in India and Peru (Woodhead, Ames, Vennam, Abebe & Streuli, 2009). Young Lives research has also tracked the long-term outcomes linked to participation in ECCE (Woldehanna & Gebremedhin, 2012). Since 2015, we have been working closely with government, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and other agencies and stakeholders to inform the operationalization and scale-up of early education policies set out in the fifth Education Sector Development Programme (ESDP V, 2015), which is the specific focus of this chapter. Besides providing a case study into the scaleup of early learning, the chapter highlights an approach to research-policy engagement built on close dialogue between government priorities and research insights embedded in a specific country context.

Ethiopia’s education revolution since 1990 We begin by outlining the rapid growth in Ethiopia’s primary school system in recent decades, which is the context for the

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Ethiopian government’s current ambitious plan for expanding early education. Ethiopia is the second-most populous country in subSaharan Africa, with a population of 99 million (World Bank data, 2015), as well as being one of the world’s poorest. The Ethiopian government has been demonstrably committed to addressing poverty and reducing inequalities – with an impressive record of pro-poor and pro-education spending. Over the past decade, the share of education budget in the total government budget has remained steady at 20 per cent (Khan, Faguet, Gaukler & Mekasha, 2014). Government reform programmes and donor support have encouraged rapid economic growth and improvements in infrastructure and services. Child mortality has fallen, access to healthcare has improved and expansion of education has been rapid from a very low base. Following a regime change in the early 1990s, education was placed at the centre of Ethiopia’s development policy, with a constitution that affords the right to equal access for every citizen. The major vehicle of policy development has been via successive national Education Sector Development Programmes (ESDPs) which set out goals and plans for progressive implementation of a comprehensive education system. Ethiopia was identified in 2007 as one of the countries making most rapid progress towards achieving universal enrolment and gender parity at the primary level (UNESCO, 2007). Total enrolment in primary grades more than doubled from 7.4 million in 2000/07 to 18.7 m ­ illion in 2014/15. Even so, the United Nations Human Development Index for 2015 still ranked Ethiopia 174 out of 188 countries (UNDP, 2015). Rapid construction of an education system from such a low starting point has not been achieved without compromises in the quality of learning, at least in the short term. Children from families with no prior experience of school entered classrooms that were often overcrowded and under resourced, and taught by teachers with only basic training,

and in some cases relatively low competency levels in the skills they are expected to teach. A donor-supported General Education Quality Improvement Program (GEQIP) has supported quality improvements in general education since 2009. Young Lives longitudinal design makes it possible to monitor the way opportunities, challenges and outcomes have changed for our two cohorts. For example, when they were 7-years-old in 2002, only 28% of the older cohort enrolled in school; in contrast, in 2009, 50% of the (by then) seven-yearolds in the younger cohort enrolled. But enrolment was powerfully associated with poverty: 32% of younger cohort children in the poorest versus 75% in the least poor quintile were enrolled in 2009. Tracking these younger cohort children shows that many were enrolled much later than 7 years old, such that 90% of 12-year-olds were in school in 2013, but 52% were ‘over age’ for their grade. This was due to a combination of factors: late entry, poor attendance and frequent grade repetition because of slow progress (Young Lives, 2014). The consequences for low school achievement are also clear in Young Lives data on cognitive and psychosocial measures, as well as numeracy and literacy tests. Comparisons between cohorts at 12 years old suggest a surprising trend, with no clear evidence of educational improvement; and a decline in standards for some indicators. For example in 2013, only 71% of 12-year-olds in the younger cohort were able to answer a basic maths question (‘2 × 4 = ?’) compared with 83% of an equivalent group of older cohort 12-year-olds in 2006. For literacy, the evidence points towards weak progress through schooling, with 39% unable to read a full sentence in their mother tongue by the age of 12 in 2006, improving slightly to 35% in 2013. Even so, 10% of the older cohort 12-year-olds were unable to read even single words in their mother tongue in 2006, which increased to 14% for the younger cohort at the same age in 2013 (Young Lives, 2014).

Scaling-up early learning: a case study of Ethiopia

Extending Ethiopia’s education system into the early years The Government of Ethiopia first designated a pre-primary stage in the Education and Training Policy of 1994. The second Education Sector Development Programme (ESDP II, 2002) also acknowledged the importance of a pre-primary stage and the government’s ‘crucial role in policy development and standard setting’, but proposed that ‘the private sector, NGOs and the community are encouraged to invest in the development of pre-school programs and facilities’ (Ministry of Education, 2002). Consequently, pre-school services only increased by 2% between 1999 and 2006 (UNESCO, 2009). Young Lives household survey data for 2006 provide a snapshot of access to services amongst our 2000 younger cohort children a decade ago. At that time nearly 58% of the Young Lives sample in urban communities had attended pre-school at some point since the age of 3. But only 5% of all children went to a government-run programme. In contrast,

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less than 4% of rural children had attended pre-school of any kind (Orkin et  al., 2012; Woodhead et al., 2009). This trend was confirmed by Ministry of Education statistics for 2007–08 which indicate a reported national gross enrolment ratio of 3.9%, with 74.9% in Addis Ababa (Ministry of Education, 2009). Figure 13.1 draws attention to the equity challenges in a largely unregulated, demand-led pre-school system, at that time. Dominated by private fee-paying kindergartens, access to pre-school strongly favoured the better off households among the Young Lives urban sample. The early childhood landscape in Ethiopia has changed dramatically since Young Lives children were eligible for pre-primary education. The first policy boost came in 2010 when a National Policy Framework for ECCE was launched (Ministry of Education, 2010). Enrolment levels across all forms of pre-school rose from just over 340,000 in the 2009/10 academic year, to over 3,000,000 in 2014/15 (Rossiter, 2016). Especially significant were the rapidly increasing numbers of

Figure 13.1 Early childhood services: attendance by poverty quintiles (Young Lives urban sample, 2006)

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children attending primary school in the year before Grade 1 (which in Ethiopia is known as the ‘O-Class’ year). Figure 13.2 highlights the fact that O-Classes attached to primary schools have emerged as the most widely available and highest priority for government, mostly due to the relatively low cost of provision within an established school site and the ease with which pre-school classes attached to primary schools can be managed within existing Federal and regional government structures. In the first academic year following the launch of the National Policy Framework for ECCE (i.e. 2011/12), O-Classes enrolled almost three times as many children as had access to ECCE through kindergarten centres the year before. The growth in O-Class has also shifted access in ways that strengthen equity, given the rural location of the majority of O-Classes. Enrolment continued to grow through 2014/15 with O-Class serving 1.9 million young children – two in every three that attend the preprimary stage, according to official statistics. The successes since 2010 – at least in terms of enrolment figures – have encouraged greater ambition for early education in Ethiopia. In 2015, the Ministry of Education embarked on its fifth Education Sector Development Programme (ESDP V). The boldest target relates to ECCE access, with

a proposed enrolment increase from 35% of 4- to 6-year-olds in 2015 to 80% by 2020, which, it is estimated, will require the training and recruitment of 100,000 teachers to work in the new O-Classes. This ambitious vision for ECCE in Ethiopia combines with a much more proactive role for government than previously. Figure 13.3 represents the scale of these ambitious targets. The details of how they will be delivered was not elaborated in ESDP V, other than the statement that a mix of modalities will be used and that ‘in the first years of ESDP V different approaches will be piloted and lessons learned will be used to inform expansion choices’ (ESDP V, Ministry of Education, 2015). As an example of this piloting in action, in 2015/16 the government of Ethiopia and UNICEF trialled two 8-week (150-hour) Accelerated School Readiness (ASR) packages for 6- or 7-year-old children: a July/ August programme during the annual school break and a September/October programme as a replacement for the first two months of Grade 1. Bridging programmes of this type are a response to the perceived high infrastructure and management costs of O-Class or kindergarten, which can slow down ECCE expansion in the poorest areas. The ASR programme is designed to support children’s cognitive, motor, social and emotional

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development, through story-telling, play and conversation. Preliminary findings from a 162-school pilot study in BenishangulGumuz regional state were mixed (American Institutes for Research, 2016). A formal evaluation of ASR impacts is now underway, comprising a 120-school randomized control trial to test the effects of each of the accelerated school-readiness interventions on children’s academic and non-academic learning, attendance and continued enrollment in school.

Supporting scale-up plans for Early Education in Ethiopia Young Lives longstanding presence and credibility within Ethiopia has created rare opportunities to inform policy and service development, including in early childhood. In early 2015, Young Lives launched a new study specifically on early learning in Ethiopia, with support from the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF). The timing of this new study coincided with the Ministry of Education’s drafting of ESDP V. Our overall goal has been to provide data and analysis on the operationalization of O-Class policies.

Work began just as ESDP V was being finalized early in 2015, and Young Lives was able to offer input from international experience to the details of the ESDP V plan for ECCE. Strong links were established with the ESDP V drafting team and other Ministry of Education officials, as well as major ECD/ ECCE-focused donors and NGOs based in Addis Ababa (including the World Bank, UNICEF, and Save the Children). The study has also been guided by an ECCE Taskforce – an inter-ministerial and donor group linked to the Ministries of Education, Health, Women and Children’s Affairs in Ethiopia and convened at the federal level. A workshop presentation subsequently developed into a policy paper to link Ethiopia’s ambitious ECCE plans with international guidance, Scaling Up Access to Quality Early Education in Ethiopia: Guidance from International Experience (Rossiter, 2016). Through this policy paper, six features of effective ECCE systems were identified: (i) equitable and inclusive access; (ii) curriculum, teaching and learning materials; (iii) teachers and school leaders; (iv) parental and community support and engagement; (v) standards, monitoring and learning; and (vi) systems, financing, management and leadership.

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To date (2016), two of these priorities (ii and vi) have translated into exploratory studies. Both studies have been based around fieldwork visits, semi-structured interviews and consultations with key stakeholders. They have also been informed by the analysis of national Education Management Information System (EMIS) data, for example to visualize regional variation in the reach of O-Class supply, the rate of change in O-Class enrolment and the patterns of enrolment by gender, location and age.

Young Lives Consultations with Regional Education Bureaus Ethiopia has a federal system of government, with the delivery of central government policies decentralized to the regions. It is regional education bureaus (REBs) within each state that carry the major responsibility for operationalizing the policy targets in ESDP V. Decentralized governance is one of the reasons why ESDP V does not specify in any detail how policies for early education are to be operationalized, but it is respected as the guide for what is to be achieved in the plan period. Consultation visits were arranged for seven regions of Ethiopia. They revealed the

challenges of delivering ambitious national policies when there is a shortage of specialist ECCE administrators and little orientation or training has been provided regarding national plans for ECCE expansion. REBs had, however, set enrolment goals for ECCE and use population data to estimate demand for services. Some REBs have targeted rollout for pastoral communities, girls and language minorities and all REBs used similar approaches to mobilize demand, with forums during ‘Education Week’ and village-level mobilization programmes a common core. Delivery constraints were also clear. None of the seven regions had a budget allocated for ECCE services. Each recognized the shortage of qualified personnel but had received little guidance on ECCE implementation standards, monitoring and supervision approaches.

Regional Variations in Scale-up of Early Education Despite sharing similar constraints, REBs varied in their response to policies on ECCE expansion. As illustrated in Figure 13.4, some have made substantial enrolment progress from a low base, while others are only just emerging as ECCE providers.

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Three regional groupings can be identified:

O-Class in 2015. With a gender parity index of 0.95 across pre-primary, the opportunities to improve gender equality in the sector may be being missed. Second, the initial policy vision for O-Class has been as a single year for 6-yearolds before entering grade one, at age 7. At the moment, however, O-Class is accommodating students as young as 3 years old and as a result, only 42% of students enrolled in O-Class are 6 years old (see Figure 13.5). The remaining 58% of O-Class attendees are two or more years away from school entry age, with expectations to stay for multiple years at that level, before entering Grade 1. The trend varies between regions. In Somali and Addis Ababa, for example, fewer than one-quarter of enrolees were 6 years old. In contrast, Tigray has 91% of enrolees at 6 years old. This pattern of O-Classes attracting much younger children can be interpreted as a positive reflection on families’ appetite for early learning opportunities and, incidentally, very similar trends created challenges for policymakers in England when British primary education was being consolidated in the late nineteenth century (see Woodhead, 1989). Also, any tendency for children to

(a) Addis Ababa: The economic and political capital of the country is a special case. The reason for low enrolment rates in O-Class in Figure 13.5 is because of an established infrastructure of mainly private fee-charging kindergarten programmes and some church-linked pre-schools (Orkin et al., 2012). (b) Oromiya, Amhara, SNNP and Tigray: In these larger and more established regions ECCE services have until recently been very sparse. The O-Class initiative has found fertile ground, as a logical extension of now well-established primary school systems. (c) Afar and Benishangul-Gumuz are relatively underresourced and started their educational development from a much lower base than the larger and more established regions. Benishangul-Gumuz targets ECCE services, notably to increase access for indigenous groups and for girls. It has chosen to deploy experts from REB level to support districts in implementing ECCE plans. In contrast, Afar faces difficulties in gathering local political support for ECCE.

Age and Gender Differences in O-Class Enrolment The impressive growth in O-Class enrolment masks other trends, related to gender and age. First, more boys than girls were attending

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stay in O-Class for multiple years before progressing to Grade 1 is worryingly reminiscent of the early grade inefficiencies identified in emergent primary education systems (labelled ‘churn’ by Crouch and Merseth (in press); see above).

Young Lives Study of O-Class Teacher Supply A second exploratory study addressed questions of human capacity: how are regions servicing such a rapid increase in enrolment in O-Class with trained teachers? And what plans are being constructed to achieve the projected requirement for 100,000 additional teachers? During early 2016, Young Lives carried out a focused study in Amhara region. Amhara is one of the three largest and most populous regions, and has seen the largest absolute O-Class enrolment increase in recent years (50% average annual growth rate of enrolment for three years). Amhara has the highest number of colleges of teacher education (CTEs). There are 36 CTEs in Ethiopia, although at the time of this research, only 17 offered training for ECCE. Ten of these 36 CTEs are in Amhara so the scale of human capacity requirements – and potential to deliver – are equally large. Amhara has also stated that its ambition is to provide 100% trained staff for ECCE during the ESDP V period. Semi-structured interviews were carried out in six Woreda education offices (WEOs) and four of the ten CTEs in the region, with senior administrators, trainers and trainee teachers.

Top-down Planning and Weak Communication ECCE training programmes were typically organized towards either a ‘diploma’ or a ‘certificate’. They differed in duration

(3 years and 1 year, respectively) but app­ eared similar in terms of content, entrance and graduation requirements. Each programme prepared for ‘universal ECCE’ without targeting for any particular type of service delivery, age group, or later placement. Instructors reported that programme modules were relevant to ECCE teaching but concerns were expressed that content was too theoretical, and with too much overlap with primary-level training programmes. The importance of specialist modules for ECCE training was recognized. Neither the instructors nor the administrative staff responsible for ECCE training programmes expressed a clear understanding of what was expected of them by federal or regional government, including: which training approaches might be appropriate; which curricula were to be used for trainees or would be applied in O-classes or kindergarten centres; and how ECCE-trained teachers would fit within salary scales and career progression opportunities. As one CTE instructor put it, the expansion of ECCE was launched as a ‘kind of campaign where both resources and teachers are not ready’. This uncertainty is made worse by the apparent weaknesses in communication to CTEs, with core policy documents scarce and many CTE instructors expressing limited understanding of the regional or national expectations of the ECCE programme and curricula. In terms of formal governance, the REB in Amhara carries responsibility for planning, but there appeared to be limited engagement either with the Woreda Education Offices (WEOs) responsible for delivering ECCE via O-Classes, or with the CTEs responsible for teacher supply. The senior management of CTEs saw themselves as passive implementers who train teachers as advised by the REB. One CTE department head who had read the core national policies for ECCE in ESDP V commented that: The REB doesn’t seem to encourage CTEs with a sense of ownership … we are not part of the planning, often we get advised by the REB on the

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number of trainees we have to accept. I know ESDP V personally. As a CTE, we never participated in the process, and we were not introduced to the new policies after they were approved.

The Capacity of the CTEs to Support O-Class Teacher Training Even though current planning approaches, support and guidance from federal and regional government have been weak, instructors showed initiative in strengthening ECCE capacity with limited resources. Ideas included arranging ad hoc events to share information on ECCE; gathering experience by visiting local ECCE facilities: ‘for instance I visited a community school personally to understand what the environment and the ECCE provision look like. This is just my initiative’; and using internet resources to learn from other national ECCE systems and to obtain teaching materials. CTEs had established a variety of networks/links with schools, NGOs or universities. CTEs were also aware of shortcomings and called for a technical link to federal and regional ECCE planners for training/awareness purposes – to improve understanding of programme objectives/constraints on all sides.

Models of Pre-service Training and In-service Support Even if the planning and coordination processes can be improved, it is unlikely that traditional, and relatively expensive, preservice training approaches are going to be sufficient to service demand for capable teachers. Two major challenges need to be overcome. First, O-Class is seen as an ECCE approach with promise to reach most children in Ethiopia, according to central government officials and policymakers. Amongst CTEs interviewed, however, there was scepticism about the feasibility of scale-up, combined with a belief that designating primary

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classrooms (and often primary teachers) for an O-Class would be a temporary fix. In support of this view, community mobilization efforts have resulted in rapid infrastructure expansion for O-Class. Quick wins have been achieved by adapting primary-school classrooms and using local resources to furnish and supply ECCE-specific facilities. Moving towards fully-resourced ECCE environments will be slow, however. Many classrooms remain sparse or ill-adapted to ECCE, with inadequate nearby sanitation and water services and often lacking sufficient designated outdoor space and resources for play (Teferra & Hagos, 2016). Second, clarity will be needed from federal and regional governments about the continuation of ‘certificate’ training programmes as a one-year (‘fast-track’) route to ECCE teacher status. Certificate training is generally considered by CTEs as inferior to the three-year diploma course. Yet questions surround the feasibility of delivering this extended route on the scale required to meet the shortfall in pre-primary teachers, and the capacity development needs of the thousands of temporary and often locally contracted individuals that are working in classrooms. Short-term training options – such as summer ‘rainy season’ courses during typically quiet periods for CTEs – for these individuals could help to rapidly capacitate a system that is trying to respond to ambitious demands. Work has begun to develop a professional development course for these individuals which may include complementary approaches via radio or ‘teacher packages’ of training for basic skills, as well as use of increasingly accessible new technologies.

Six Challenges in scaling-up global ECCE Previous sections have explored the way Ethiopia has been responding to the global policy challenge crystallized in SDG Target

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4.2 to ‘ensure that all girls and boys have access to quality early childhood development, care and pre-primary education so that they are ready for primary education’. In this final section we reflect on six of the key challenges for global ECCE: scale-up; equity; ageappropriateness; cross-sectoral coordination; capacity-building; and research and evidence. Other key challenges go beyond the scope of this chapter, notably the models for governance and financing that can deliver quality ECCE for all. 1 Scale-up: A first challenge is around how ambitious goals for scale-up of ECCE will be operationalized. The goal for Ethiopia is to move from around 25% enrolment in 2013 to 80% by 2020. Lessons from scale-up by other countries in the region are useful. Some years ago, South Africa prioritized establishing Grade R (equivalent of O-Class) in its primary school system. Between 2001 and 2012 Grade R enrolment increased by 11% per year. Achieving this goal required providing 1000 new classrooms each year (in order to accommodate 45,000 extra children each year). In 2011/12, annual provision per child was calculated as R3,112 (US$243). Despite this investment, it took until 2012 to expand provi-

sion to the point that 94% of Grade 1 learners had attended Grade R (Department of Basic Education, 2014). Ethiopia is aspiring to achieve 80% in half that time, from a lower starting point, with far smaller budgets and with wider ambitions for ECCE than O-Class (see Figure 13.6).   Referring to South Africa’s capacity for implementation as Grade R was scaled-up, Biersteker (2010, p. 37) notes: ‘Significant investments were required for learner support material, teacher training, increased education department staff at national and provincial levels, and physical infrastructure’. 2 Equity: A second challenge is around how to ensure equity in scale-up of services, prioritizing the most disadvantaged groups, which requires a proactive targeting of resources and capacity. The global evidence on equity of access to quality services is not encouraging for any region of the world, despite the strong evidence and rhetoric around early intervention being a ‘powerful equaliser’ (Figure 13.7).   The risk is that better quality and more accessible ECCE services are available in urban and better-off communities, which merely serves to amplify the initial advantages of more privileged children and widens the gap on entry to school. Within Ethiopia, as we have seen, providing equitable access and especially reaching remote

Figure 13.6 Grade R uptake in South Africa over 10 years Source: Hoadley (2013)

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Figure 13.7  Inequalities in access to ECCE across 20 countries Source: Unicef data as cited in Young Lives, 2016, Figure 3

regions is a strong policy priority. Governance and ­resourcing issues are critical, to ensure propoor delivery of services.   Again, South Africa’s experience of introducing Grade R is relevant. An impact evaluation commissioned by the Department of Performance, Monitoring and Evaluation (DPME) and the Department of Basic Education (DBE) found that, on average, children who attended Grade R had better mathematics and home language scores in subsequent primary school years than those who had not. However, there was no effect for children from poor backgrounds (the vast majority) who also attended schools of low quality. The authors conclude that: ‘provision of Grade R to all will improve results in the wealthiest quintile by about half a year’s learning, with almost no benefits for lower quintiles’ (DPME & DBE, 2014, p. 7). South Africa’s m ­ assive roll-out has in fact

widened the gap between rich and poor children. The research indicates that without significant attention paid to the quality of the teaching and learning environment, the promise of a Grade O or R year will not be realized. 3 Age-appropriateness: A third challenge is about avoiding ‘early learning’ being treated as an instrumental ‘means to an end’ of improving children’s readiness for grade teaching and the efficiency of primary school systems in delivering strong achievement outcomes. The risk is that ECCE is conceptualized (and delivered) very narrowly, as a downward extension of the primary cycle to ever younger children with little regard to the age-appropriateness of learning and teaching, or the synergies between health, well-being and learning. Locating early childhood programmes within school classrooms, with many teachers being redeployed from teaching

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older grades, without specific ECCE training and with few age-appropriate resources and insufficient guidance and support are all risks for many countries keen to scale-up ECCE. Within Ethiopia, the current Ministry of Education emphasis is on expanding O-Class, although the 2010 National Policy Framework identified four pillars spanning a much broader range of early childhood services, and including health sector initiatives, child-to-child etc. 4 Cross-sectoral coordination: Recognizing the importance of a broad concept of early childhood services, beyond pre-primary classes, bridges to a fourth challenge. ECD is about much more than ‘pre-school’ in terms of age range, sectoral responsibilities and entry points for delivering services (Woodhead et al., 2014). As the UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake and World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Dr Margaret Chan put it: to be most effective, interventions must be intersectoral, going beyond education to encompass health, nutrition, and protection. The healthy development of a child’s brain depends on multiple positive experiences. Nutrition feeds the brain; stimulation sparks the mind; love and protection buffer the negative impact of stress and adversity. And distinct interventions are mutually supportive, achieving the strongest results when delivered together. (Lake & Chan, 2014, p. 1)



For example, effective early learning programmes can begin in infancy and be closely tied to nutrition. A randomized controlled trial, begun in Jamaica in 1986/1987, has tracked the benefits of two years of psychosocial stimulation via home visiting combined with nutrition supplementation, with follow-up after 20 years showing higher scores on a range of cognitive and educational tests and psychosocial functioning, eventually translating into higher earnings by the experimental group compared with a control group (Gertler et al., 2014, p. 1001; Walker et al., 2006).   Current plans for ECD in Ethiopia are largely along sectoral and age-specific lines, notably, with little tie-in between the current Ministry of Education plans in ESDP V and the Ministry of Health’s equally ambitious large-scale Health Extension Workers (HEW) programme, launched in 2013, aiming to provide two health extension workers in each community and targeting f­amilies with much younger children (Workie and Ramana,

2013). Arguably, expecting more integrated policy and service delivery is unrealistic during the early stages of system development. Just as scale-up of ECCE sets challenges for the delivery of core early learning objectives, so the HEW programme already requires the implementation of 16 packages, and any goals related to infant learning and development would add to the pressures on para-professionals tasked with delivering the programme. 5 Human capacity: These inevitable constraints on scale-up of holistic, integrated early childhood policies links to a fifth challenge, which is about human capacity, about the availability of sufficient adequately trained and remunerated professionals, para-professionals and community workers to deliver on ambitious policy goals. The Ethiopian government’s scale-up plans in ESDP V anticipate an additional 120,000 teachers by 2020, trained in early learning and teaching. With only 17 CTEs able to train for ECCE, and very few faculty with specialist ECCE training, it is hard to imagine how this can be achieved without compromising on quality. Pushing ahead on enrolment targets will need to be matched by equally strong plans for curriculum and classroom quality, as well as teacher capacity, training and support. A short- medium- and long-term policy may be needed on each aspect of strengthening capacity, fully operationalized with effective finance, governance, leadership, monitoring and community engagement. 6 Research and evidence: There is currently an imbalance in research investment between the well-articulated fundamental science of ECD and more patchy, contextualized studies of service delivery. This also reflects in the global policy discourse, especially the compelling economic analyses reporting high returns on investment in early childhood which are largely based on a small number of US-based experimental designs (Heckman, 2008). It is encouraging that growing numbers of well-designed evaluations are being reported across diverse global locations (Engle et al., 2011; Nores & Barnett, 2010), although still under-represented in sub-Saharan Africa (but see Martinez, Naudeau & Pereira, 2012 for an example from Mozambique, and a South African evaluation by Dawes, Biersteker & Hendricks, 2012).

For Ethiopia, Young Lives is able to offer some encouraging data on the positive

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impacts of ECCE, at least for a relatively privileged urban sample for whom data is available: ‘children who had been to preschool had progressed further through primary school, by 0.218 of a grade on average, than those who had not’ (Woldehanna & Gebremedhin, 2012). Some studies have been conducted on Child-to-Child (Mundy et  al., 2014) and on the Accelerated School Readiness Programme (American Institutes for Research, 2016). To date, very little evidence is available about scale–up, quality and effectiveness of O-classes, that goes beyond the modest studies reported in this chapter. This appears to be changing, however, with evaluations of two of Ethiopia’s non-formal school-readiness programmes ongoing and commencement during 2017 of the World Bank’s Early Learning Partnership research in Ethiopia. The latter is set to return a ‘systems diagnostic’ for early learning in Ethiopia and will report on measures of child development and early learning environments in O-Class.

Conclusion This chapter has explored the role of ECD programmes in strengthening education systems towards sustainable futures through a case study of Ethiopia. Of course, achieving better outcomes for education is not the only justification for investing in early childhood. There are many less instrumental and much more fundamental arguments for early childhood programmes, about young children’s fundamental rights to a healthy environment, adequate nutrition, psychosocial support and early learning. Equally, we are cautious about building the case for ECCE around trying to resolve weaknesses in the next stage of the school system; again, children have a right to receive quality learning, and not just for reasons of education efficiency. While all the evidence points to the potential of investment in early childhood, when it

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comes to delivering on that potential, many of the same challenges will face early childhood services as face primary education: namely ensuring good governance; sufficient resources; well-trained and remunerated teachers; and quality, age-appropriate, childcentred curricula and pedagogy. At worst, mediocre ECD programmes will not compensate for mediocre school systems; and children (especially poor children) will be the losers, and the promise of investment in ECCE scale-up will not be realized. A South African education policy specialist reflected on that country’s experience with the conclusion that: ‘We shouldn’t put a bad [Reception Year] onto a primary school system facing many challenges simply because we have the money to roll it out’ (cited in Biersteker, 2010, p. 49).

Notes 1  An earlier version of this chapter appeared as Young Lives Working Paper No. 163, Scaling-up early learning in Ethiopia: Exploring the potential of O-Class, Oxford University, Department of International Development, 2017. 2  Young Lives is core-funded from 2001 to 2017 by UK aid from the Department for International Development (DFID, 2012). A sub-study on early childhood was funded by the Bernard van Leer Foundation (2007–12). This chapter has been prepared as part of a research and policy programme on early education in Ethiopia funded by the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (2015–18).

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Washington, DC: Wolfensohn Center for Development at Brookings Institution. http:// www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2010/ 04/child-development-south-africabiersteker Consultative Group on Early Childhood Care and Development (2012). Key to Equality: Early Childhood Development. Paper written for Task Team for the Post-2015 Development Agenda consultation on Addressing Inequalities. Crouch, L., & Merseth, K. A. (in press). Stumbling at the first step: Efficiency implications of poor performance in the foundational first five years. Prospects. Dawes, A., Biersteker, L., & Hendricks, L. (2012). Towards integrated Early Childhood Development. An evaluation of the Sobambisana Initiative. Cape Town: IlifaLabantwana. http://ilifalabantwana.co.za/ an-evaluation-of-the-sobambisana-initiative/ Department of Basic Education. (2014). 2014 Country Progress Report (Education for All). Pretoria: Department of Basic Education. Department of Performance, Monitoring and Evaluation, & Department of Basic Education. (2014). The impact of the introduction of Grade R on learning outcomes. Pretoria: Department of Performance, Monitoring and Evaluation & Department of Basic Education. DFID. (2012). Operational Plan for Ethiopia 2011–15. https://www.gov.uk/government/ uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/ file/67393/ethiopia-2011.pdf Engle, P., Fernald, L., Alderman, H., Behrman, J., O’Gara, C., Yousafzai, A., Cabral de Mello, M., Hidrobo, M., Ulkuer, N., Ertem, I., Iltus, S., & the Global Child Development Steering Group. (2011). Strategies for reducing inequalities and improving developmental outcomes for young children in low-income and middle-income countries, The Lancet, 378(9799), 1339–1353. Gertler, P., Heckman, J., Pinto, R., Zanolini, A., Vermeersch, C., Walker, S., & GranthamMcGregor, S. (2014). Labor market returns to an early childhood stimulation intervention in Jamaica, Science, 344(6187), 998–1001. Heckman, J. J. (2008). Schools, skills and synapses, Economic Inquiry, 46(3), 289–324.

Hoadley, U. (2013). Building strong foundations: Improving the quality of early education. In L. Berry, L. Biersteker, A. Dawes, L. Lake & C. Smith (Eds.). South African Child Gauge 2013 (pp. 72–77). Cape Town: Children’s Institute, University of Cape Town. Khan, Q., Faguet, J., Gaukler, C., & Mekasha, W. (2014). Decentralization’s effects on education, health and agriculture outcomes, and on distribution: Evidence from Ethiopia. Washington, DC: World Bank. Lake, A., & Chan, M. (2014). Putting science into practice for early child development, The Lancet, Comment, early online publication, 20 September. Martinez, S., Naudeau, S., & Pereira, V. (2012). The promise of preschool in Africa: a randomized impact evaluation of early childhood development in rural Mozambique. Washington, DC: World Bank (with Save the Children). Ministry of Education. (1994). Education and Training Policy. Addis Ababa: St. George Printing Press, Government of Ethiopia. Ministry of Education. (2002). Education Sector Development Programme II: 2002/3–2005/6 Programme Action Plan. Addis Ababa: Government of Ethiopia. Ministry of Education. (2009). Education Statistics 2000 E.C. (2007–08). Addis Ababa: Ministry of Education of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. Ministry of Education. (2010). National Policy Framework for Early Childhood Care and Education. Addis Ababa: Government of Ethiopia. Ministry of Education. (2015). Education Sector Development Programme V (ESDP V) 2015/16-2019/20. Addis Ababa: Government of Ethiopia. Mundy, K., Proulx, K., Janigan, K., Geva, E., Frase, C., & Asefa, E. (2014). An evaluation of the Child-to-Child School Readiness Programme in Ethiopia. Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Nores, M., & Barnett, W. (2010). Benefits of early childhood interventions across the world: (under) investing in the very young, Economics of Education Review, 29(2), 271–282. Orkin, K., Yadete, W., & Woodhead, M. (2012). Delivering quality early learning in low-resource

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settings: Progress and challenges in Ethiopia, Working Papers in Early Childhood Development 59. The Hague: Bernard van Leer Foundation. Rossiter, J. (2016). Scaling up access to quality early education in Ethiopia: Guidance from international experience, Policy Paper 8. Oxford: Young Lives. Teferra, T., & Hagos, B. (2016). Assessment of the status of O-Class in four regional states of Ethiopia. Addis Ababa: University Institute of Education, Health and Development and World Bank Ethiopia. UN Secretary-General. (2015). Remarks at event on Investing in Early Childhood Development as the Foundation for Sustainable Development, http://www.un.org/apps/news/infocus/ sgspeeches/print_full.asp?statID=2744 UNDP. (2015). Human Development Report 2015: Work for Human Development. Retrieved from http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/ 2015_human_development_report.pdf UNESCO. (2007). Strong Foundations: Early Childhood Care and Education. EFA Global Monitoring Report, Paris: UNESCO. UNESCO. (2009). Overcoming Inequality: Why Governance Matters. Education For All Global Monitoring Report 2009. Oxford: Oxford University Press. UNESCO. (2014). Teaching and Learning: Achieving Quality for All. 2013/14 EFA Global Monitoring Report. Paris: UNESCO. UNESCO. (2015). EFA Global Monitoring Report. Education for All 2000–2015: Achievements and Challenges. EFA Global Monitoring Report, Paris: UNESCO. Vargas-Barón, E. (2015). Policies on early childhood care and education: their evolution and some impacts. Background paper for EFA Global Monitoring Report 2015. Walker, S., Chang, S., Powell, C., Simonoff, E., & Grantham-McGregor, S. (2006). Effects of psychosocial stimulation and dietary

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supplementation in early childhood on psychosocial functioning in late adolescence: follow-up of randomised controlled trial, British Medical Journal, 333, 472–474. Woldehanna, T., & Gebremedhin, L. (2012). The effects of pre-school attendance on the cognitive development of urban children aged 5 and 8 years: Evidence from Ethiopia, Young Lives Working Paper 89, http://www.younglives.org.uk/sites/www.younglives.org.uk/files/ YL-WP89_Woldehanna-Gebremedhin.pdf Woodhead, M. (1989). School starts at five … or four years old? The rationale for changing admission policies in England and Wales, Journal of Education Policy, 4(1), 1–21. Woodhead, M., & Moss, P. (2007). Early Childhood and Primary Education, Early Childhood in Focus 2. Milton Keynes: The Open University. Woodhead, M., Ames, P., Vennam, U., Abebe, W., & Streuli, N. (2009). Equity and quality? Challenges for early childhood and primary education in Ethiopia, India and Peru, Working Papers in Early Child Development 55. The Hague: Bernard van Leer Foundation. Woodhead, M., Bolton, L., Featherstone, I., & ­Robertson, P. (2014). Early Childhood Development: Delivering inter-sectoral policies, programmes and services in low-resource settings, HEART Topic Guide. Brighton: Health and Education Advice Workie, N. W., & Ramana, G. N. V. (2013). The Health Extension Program in Ethiopia, UNICO Studies Series 10. Washington, DC: World Bank. Young Lives. (2014). http://www.younglives.org. uk/sites/www.younglives.org.uk/files/Ethiopia-­ Education-and-Learning-Factsheet.pdf Young Lives. (2016). http://www.younglives. org.uk/sites/www.younglives.org.uk/files/ YL-PB28_Early%20Childhood%20Development%20in%20the%20SDGs.pdf

14 Doing More with Less: Innovations in Early Childhood Development from Low-resource Contexts Michelle J. Neuman

Introduction: The early years and the global development agenda Nations around the world increasingly recognize the critical importance of the early years not only for promoting children’s survival, health, and nutrition, but also for strengthening their school readiness and education achievement (Naudeau, Kataoka, Valerio, Neuman, & Elder, 2010; Yoshikawa & Kabay, 2014). Almost all countries – rich and poor – have ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which protects the rights of the youngest children (United Nations, 2006; Woodhead, 2005). At least 68 countries have national early childhood policy instruments – policies, strategic plans, and laws – and another 23 countries have instruments under development (Vargas-Barón, 2015). The economic benefits of investing in early childhood development are also persuasive with strong evidence from several longitudinal studies from the US and similar findings emerging

from other parts of the world (Barnett & Nores, 2015; Heckman, 2008; Naudeau et al., 2010). For example, a 20-year follow-up study in Jamaica found that low-income, stunted children who participated in an intensive early intervention program in their homes earned 25 percent more as adults than those who did not take part (Gertler, Heckman, Pinto, Zanolini, Vermeersch, Walker, & Grantham-McGregor, 2014). In 2015, the inextricable connection between early childhood development and these important education, health, nutrition, and protection outcomes was affirmed in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to which 193 world leaders committed. For the first time, the early years feature prominently on the global development agenda, especially in Target 4.2: ‘by 2030 ensure that all girls and boys have access to quality early childhood development, care and pre-primary education so that they are ready for primary education’ (United Nations, 2015, p. 19).

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Reaching the new global goals will require overcoming the enormous challenges faced by children and families in developing countries (c.f., Engle, Rao, & Petrovic, 2013). Recent research estimates that 250 million children under age 5 – 43 percent – in low- and middle-income countries will not reach their full developmental potential due to poverty, undernutrition, and inadequate stimulation in the home (Black et al., 2016). Policymakers and program planners in many of these countries struggle with competing priorities, weak policies, scarce public funding and provision, and limited capacity to sustain quality early childhood programs at scale (Neuman & Devercelli, 2013; Putcha, Upadhyay, Neuman, Choi, & Lombardi, 2016). In this chapter, I focus on three pressing early childhood policy challenges in low- and middle-income countries1: 1 Reaching the most disadvantaged with quality services 2 Building bridges across sectors 3 Filling the financing gap

Although the emphasis in this chapter is on developing countries, where the majority of the world’s children live, these three challenges are remarkably similar to those affecting disadvantaged children and communities in other parts of the world (cf. Marope & Kaga, 2015; OECD, 2006; UNESCO, 2015). The main argument is that despite tremendous obstacles, policymakers, community leaders, business people, and families are finding innovative solutions to support early childhood development in low-resource contexts, and these experiences are relevant to, and insightful for, those working for young children and families around the world. In this chapter, I present these three policy challenges facing the early years, give examples of innovative responses from low- and middle-income countries, and discuss what may be learned from these experiences. The highlighted cases were selected because

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they: (a) focus on improving equity, a key principle of the Sustainable Development Goals; (b) provide creative, practical solutions to common challenges in low-resource contexts; and (c) have been in existence long enough to have demonstrated results and potential to scale. The cases are intentionally drawn from multiple countries and regions, representing a wide range of cultural understandings and policy approaches toward early childhood policy and provision. Some of the cases focus on government-led reforms, whereas non-state actors have initiated others, often through public–private partnerships. Although the innovations presented show promise for expanding to reach all eligible children, many are currently smaller scale programs. This geographical, cultural, and programmatic diversity enriches opportunities for learning, with the caveat that reforms inspired from experiences elsewhere need to be adapted to and shaped by local contexts and approaches. The concluding section identifies strategies to encourage innovation in early childhood in low- and middle-income countries, as well as, foster cross-national learning with other parts of the world.

Challenge 1: How to reach the most disadvantaged children with quality services? The Problem In developing countries, young children who would benefit most from quality early childhood development opportunities are the least likely to receive them (UNICEF, 2012; UNESCO, 2015). Inequalities in early childhood development start early – before most children begin formal schooling – and continue to grow over time. According to research in five Latin American countries, for example, large cognitive differences between children from the poorest and richest socio-economic backgrounds emerge by age 3 and often

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continue to worsen until age 6 (Schady et al., 2015). Evidence from Cambodia, Ethiopia, India, Madagascar, Mozambique, and Vietnam follows similar patterns (Engle, Fernald, Alderman, Behrman, O’Gara, & Cabral de Mello, 2011; Fernald. Kariger, Hidrobo, & Gertler, 2012; Naudeau, Martinez, Premand, & Filmer, 2011). It is both more difficult and more costly to address these gaps over time. While a supportive home environment can mediate disparities in child development outcomes, it is often more challenging for parents and other family members in low-income households to support their children’s early development and learning due to the stress of poverty and other obstacles, such as violence, illness, and food insecurity (Engle et al., 2013). In both poor and rich countries, regardless of parent education, occupation or class, children who grow up in households where books are available are more likely to receive more years of education. However, one multi-country study found that children in the richest families are more than twice as likely as children from the poorest families to have books in the home (see Figure 14.1). In most of these countries, parents and other caregivers from poorer households were less likely to be engaged with young children in other learning activities such as reading, telling stories, singing songs, taking children outside the home, playing, counting or drawing (UNICEF, 2012). The good news is that quality early childhood services can make a difference, especially for the most disadvantaged children. While early childhood development encompasses a range of services for young children across the education, health, nutrition, and child protection sectors, data are most widely available for pre-primary education. Global enrollments in pre-primary education have tripled over the past decade (UNESCO, 2015). Although 44 percent of children participate in pre-primary education globally, the gross enrollment ratio is only 17 percent in lowincome countries compared to 83 percent in high-income countries (see Figure 14.2; UNESCO, 2016). At the same time, there

are wide regional differences; for example, the pre-primary enrollment rate in the Latin America and Caribbean region is almost four times the rate in sub-Saharan Africa (73 percent vs. 21 percent) (UNESCO, 2016). Moreover, in most low- and middle-income nations, children from richer families are far more likely to attend early childhood provision than those from poorer families (see Figure 14.3), and there are large disparities in enrollment between urban and rural areas in most countries (Neuman & Hatipoglu, 2015; UNICEF, 2012). In contrast to the situation in most OECD countries, governments in lowand middle-income countries historically have played a more limited role in financing, regulating, and providing early childhood services, and private provision requiring household contributions is more prevalent (Putcha et al., 2016). Regardless of the mode of delivery, a ‘one size fits all’ approach does not reach the most marginalized groups who face numerous barriers to accessing quality, affordable services. There is a need for creative and alternative approaches that accommodate the diverse circumstances of children from poor and disadvantaged backgrounds without compromising quality standards.

Innovative Responses To address this problem, policymakers and program managers in low- and middleincome countries are experimenting with diverse strategies to reach the most marginalized children. There is a trend to integrate at least one year of preschool into the formal education system, and globally 40 countries have made preprimary education compulsory (UNESCO, 2015). Two other innovative responses to reach underserved populations, especially children in rural and remote areas, using flexible forms of provision have emerged in Kyrgyz Republic and Zanzibar. These alternative approaches currently operate on a relatively small scale, but have the potential to reach large numbers of eligible children.

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Percentage of children under age 5 with three or more children’s books, by wealth quintiles in selected countries and areas with available data Mali Dem. Rep. of the Congo Chad Central African Republic Togo Gambia Afghanistan Malawi Mozambique Sierra Leone Zimbabwe Cambodia Côte d'Ivoire Nepal Iraq Nigeria Ghana Bangladesh Algeria Bhutan Lao People's Dem. Rep. State of Palestine Yemen Tajikistan Honduras Jordan Tunisia Morocco Albania Syrian Arab Republic Kyrgyzstan Viet Nam Uzbekistan Panama Suriname Turkmenistan Georgia Costa Rica Thailand Bosnia and Herzegovina Jamaica Belize Kazakhstan The former Yugoslav Rep. of Macedonia Serbia Argentina Montenegro Republic of Moldova Barbados Ukraine Trinidad and Tobago Belarus

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Figure 14.1 Children in the richest households tend to have more books in the home than children in the poorest households Source: UNICEF global databases, 2016, based on Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS), Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and other nationally representative surveys, 2005–2014 Notes: For Argentina, the sample was national and urban (municipalities with a population of more than 5,000), since the country’s rural population is scattered and accounts for less than 10 per cent of the total. Data for Cambodia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Jordan and Togo refer to the youngest child in the household aged 36 to 59 months. Data for Georgia refer to children aged 3 to 5 years. Data for Morocco differ from the standard definition.

Kyrgyz Republic: Alternative Models Bring Early Learning Opportunities to Underserved Children in Remote Areas In the Kyrgyz Republic, a former Soviet republic in Central Asia, 85 percent of children have no regular access to preschool. The country went through a difficult period economically and socially after the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s (Shamatov, 2011).

Although many preschools closed during this period, the influence of the former Soviet preschool system has continued with full-day, public kindergartens to support working parents. This one-size-fits-all model has been criticized for its low coverage, the high cost for government and parents, and limited parental involvement, all of which have constrained the nation’s ability to serve all eligible children with quality early childhood services (Arnold, Aitikulova, & Mamadfozilov,

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Figure 14.2 Vast majority of children in low-income countries are not enrolled in preprimary education Source: 2014 data retrieved from UNESCO Institute of Statistics, 2017

2012). More than 50 percent of children aged 3 to 6 years in the richest quintile attend preschool compared to less than 10 percent of the poorest quintile (World Bank, 2013a). In particular, children from rural and remote areas have been excluded by the prevailing approach. In 2004, before the reforms

described below, 4 percent of children in rural areas were enrolled in kindergartens compared to 20 percent in urban areas (Bartlett, 2013). Despite these difficulties, the context in Kyrgyz Republic is ripe for experimentation. There is strong demand for kindergarten

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80 60 40 20 0 Central and eastern Europe and CIS

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Figure 14.3 Access to early childhood programs varies by family income Source: The Lancet, 378(9799), 1339–1353 (October 2011)

Middle East

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from parents who recognize its importance for promoting children’s development and learning and for supporting working families. In recent years, the Ministry of Education has been open to new approaches and has partnered with national early childhood experts, civil society, and international organizations to expand early childhood programs in rural and remote areas (World Bank, 2013a). The existence of empty or under-utilized facilities (including some schools) in many rural areas – in part as a result of lower birth rates – means that finding facilities to house new pilot kindergartens is not a major obstacle (Arnold et al., 2012). In 2005, a partnership among the Aga Khan Foundation, government authorities, and communities formed to develop alternative early childhood models that build on strengths of the former system and Kyrgyz culture. The reform was carried out in remote communities in two districts and included several components. First, a shift system was implemented so that children could attend kindergarten sessions either in the morning or the afternoon. This part-time provision helped double the spaces and the number of children served without reducing the curriculum covered. Second, halfday ‘satellite’ kindergartens were created in schools, homes, or community spaces to reach children who could not be accommodated in traditional kindergartens due to lack of space or distance. Each satellite is associated with a traditional kindergarten to reduce the isolation of the teachers and provide them with support. Teachers in both programs have the same training and qualifications. Third, a solution was found to serve children who spend four months of the year with their parents in the jailoo (high pastures) to graze their livestock. Situated in traditional yurts – nomadic tents – the teaching and learning materials are taken on horseback to these remote, mountainous areas in the form of mobile preschools. These ‘Jailoo kindergartens’ also focus on recognizing and

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preserving Kyrgyz cultural traditions and the environment. As part of the partnership, the government covers the operating costs and teacher salaries in the pilot kindergartens, the Aga Khan Foundation provides technical support and training, and local communities engage in farming and gardening activities to benefit the centers (Arnold et al., 2012). Together, these alternative early childhood models – the introduction of shift systems, satellite kindergartens, and Jailoo kindergartens – have increased access to ­ preschool in the two pilot districts of Osh and Naryn to 17 percent above the national average.2 Since 2005, more than 15,000 children aged 4 to 6 have been reached in 160 kindergartens; two-thirds of these children would not have access to any early childhood programs without the new models (Aga Khan Foundation, 2016). In addition to expanding coverage, teacher training has been strengthened to focus more on interactive childcentered approaches and mentoring. More learning materials are available in the kindergartens, and teachers are encouraged to use low-cost or no-cost local materials such as animal bones and felt (Arnold et al., 2012). The experiment with pilot kindergartens has also influenced national policy in Kyrgyz Republic. A recent preschool law officially recognizes these types of alternative models as equivalent to traditional kindergartens, which will address parents’ potential reluctance to send their children to them.3 This official recognition also provides an opportunity for government to scale the models beyond the pilot regions (Aga Khan Foundation, 2016; Arnold et  al., 2012). In recent years, the Ministry of Education has received grants from the Global Partnership for Education to expand community-based kindergartens and continue to cover salaries and operating costs, as well as introduce a school preparation program prior to school entry. The Jailoo mobile kindergartens have been replicated in three other districts, with support from a private Kyrgyz foundation,

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local governments, and communities themselves (Aga Khan Foundation, 2016). The results for children are also encouraging. An evaluation conducted by the Aga Khan Foundation found that Grade 1 students (age 7) who participated in early childhood development programs in Osh regions scored, on average, 13 percent higher on a standardized curriculum-based assessment of reading and writing than those who did not. Importantly, the evaluators found no statistical difference in learning achievement between those attending full-day kindergartens and satellite kindergartens (one of the alternative models), which suggests that quality can be achieved in both traditional and non-traditional settings (Arnold et  al., 2012; Bartlett, 2013). Although similar evaluations of the Jailoo kindergartens are not yet available, preliminary research suggests that when children who attend these mobile preschools begin primary school, they outperform their peers who did not participate in the program in both reading and math.4

Zanzibar: Technology Expands Access and Supports Early Childhood Practitioners in Rural Areas Early childhood practitioners in rural areas also need support and it is not always feasible for them to attend formal training programs. In Zanzibar – a semi-autonomous part of Tanzania composed of two islands in the Indian Ocean – almost all children are enrolled in primary education. However, one of the major problems facing the education system in Zanzibar is that children start school late. Students who start school late are more likely to drop out than those who begin on time (Sabates, Akyeampong, Westbrook, & Hunt, 2010). The situation is also challenging for teachers who face large class sizes of mixed-age students in the early grades, including many overage students, as well as limited books and other resources.

Some of the factors linked to late enrollment in Zanzibar, as in other developing countries, are parent views that their children are too small or not ready to start school and/or that the schools are too far for young children to reach them safely on their own (Sabates et al., 2010). In response to these issues, the government of Zanzibar created new policies to reduce the official school entry age to Standard 1 (equivalent to Grade 1) from 7 to 6 and to provide two years of compulsory, free preprimary education as part of the basic education cycle (Morris et al., 2009). At the time, there was limited access to preschool in rural and remote areas – gross enrollment was less than 15 percent – and a shortage of trained early childhood professionals (Morris, Philip, Othman, & Mitchell, 2009). To support the implementation of these reforms, the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training, the Education Development Center (an international non-profit organization), and local communities came together to create the Radio Instruction to Strengthen Education (RISE) project. The main mission of the RISE project, which ran from 2006– 2011, was to promote quality early learning in areas with shortages of qualified teachers, preschools, and learning materials using Interactive Radio Instruction (IRI) (EDC, 2015; Morris et al., 2009). As part of the RISE project, participating children attended non-formal, community-led preschool and Standard 1 learning centers known as TuTu (‘play and learn’) clubs. Often located in community spaces or thatched huts, these TuTu clubs are led by community volunteers known as ‘mentors’ (who received a stipend). The mentors completed an initial 3-day training, followed by two 2-day trainings, and ongoing supervision and support. Every year returning mentors received refresher trainings. Each morning session started with a 30-minute introduction and pre-radio activities. Guided by a locallyproduced radio program, mentors engaged children in 30-minute lessons focused on

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math, Kiswahili, English, and life skills. The mentors used low and no cost materials (e.g. shells or sea glass for counting, slates for drawing) to support children’s participation in the interactive activities. The session concluded with 60 minutes of post-radio activities to deepen learning. A group of children in Standard 1 and 2 also received radio lessons in formal government classrooms (Ahmed, 2010; Morris et al., 2009). RISE enabled more than 20,000 children in remote areas to gain access to early learning experiences at the preschool and primary levels. Many of these children would otherwise likely have waited until about age 9 to enter school. Access to early childhood development increased dramatically from about 14 percent in 2006 to 34 percent in 2010. More than 400 previously untrained local community members became mentors. (RISE also trained certified teachers in government primary schools, headteachers, school management committees, and Ministry of Education officials.) Another strength of the program was that it was community-owned and locally adapted. While co-managed by EDC, Ministry staff were seconded to the project to develop the content of the radio sessions and participate in the implementation and monitoring. The content intentionally complemented and was informed by the official Zanzibar curriculum to help children make a smooth transition to government schools (EDC, 2015; Morris et al., 2009). A quasi-experimental evaluation of Standard 1 students found that children who participated in the radio program, whether in nonformal or formal school settings, had greater overall learning gains than children in formal classrooms who did not participate.5 IRI participants in Standard 1 of primary school outperformed control students by 10 percent overall. Specifically, learning gains were 12 percent higher for those attending non-formal settings and 15 percent higher for the formal group relative to the control group who did not participate in the radio program.6 Preschool exposure was the most influential factor

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affecting learning gains in English, math, and Kiswahili in Standard 1. On average, students with preschool experience scored nearly 5.3 percent higher than their counterparts who did not attend preschool, regardless of what kind of program they attended (Morris et al., 2009). Children who participated in the RISE formal school program continued to perform better on standardized assessments than the other intervention and control groups six years later. However, learning levels were low across groups (EDC, 2015). Although the project formally ended in 2011, a new eLearning Division was created within the Ministry of Education to carry on many of the original RISE activities. The TuTu programs are still broadcast on the radio and mentors continue to facilitate sessions; however, the refresher training of mentors has not been sustained due to resource limitations. With support from the Global Partnership for Education, training of new mentors took place in 2014 and 120 new TuTu centers are planned to open in the coming years (EDC, 2015).

Lessons Learned There are several lessons to take away from these two diverse approaches to reach disadvantaged and underserved children in rural and remote areas. First, when introducing new and alternative forms of early childhood provision, it is important to build on the strengths and traditions of existing early learning programs to ensure that the model is relevant, supported by parents and local officials, and sustained longer-term. Both examples expanded and enhanced the national curriculum for early childhood programs using traditional stories, songs, and learning materials. As a model for serving mobile populations, the Jailoo kindergarten brings the services to the children, rather than making them come to the villages, so that it is easier for them to participate when they are in the mountains with their families.

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Second, lower-cost, non-formal approaches do not necessarily mean lower quality ones, but safeguards are needed to ensure that less advantaged children do not end up in second-tier programming. A major focus of both approaches was not only to improve access, but also to improve quality by providing early childhood practitioners with training and support. It is important to note that these alternative models now operate as part of the overall early childhood system, with government financing and monitoring. In Kyrgyz Republic, children attending community-based kindergartens performed as well as those attending traditional ones. Although Standard 1 children attending non-formal, community-based early childhood programs improved their short-term learning outcomes in Zanzibar, those in formal school settings did better, which suggests that as children get older it may be more important for them to shift to formal settings. Given the low levels of learning outcomes as children progress in the education system, both the intensity of the early interventions and the quality of primary education deserve attention. Third, both of these examples stress that it is important to work at multiple levels in partnership with government, communities, civil society organizations, and other sectors to build ownership and increase the likelihood of sustainability. Funding is an ongoing challenge and neither approach has been scaled up nationally. Despite budget constraints, however, both the Kyrgyz Republic and Zanzibar have found ways to continue elements of the pilot projects, using both government and donor resources. Finally, technology can support quality and access. In Zanzibar, the radio helped overcome the challenge of a lack of qualified early childhood practitioners by providing on-the-job training and guidance to mentors and teachers, and also ensured that children receive consistent, quality lessons in every session. The potential of radio, mobile phones, etc. to expand and improve

quality early childhood programs is relatively untapped in developing countries.

Challenge 2: How to build bridges across sectors? The Problem Young children’s development is integrated across different domains – cognitive, socioemotional, physical, language – and requires multiple interventions including pre-natal and post-natal care, immunizations, breastfeeding and nutrition support, childcare and preschool, parenting education, social protection schemes, and clean water and sanitation (Naudeau et  al., 2010; Neuman & Devercelli, 2013; Vargas-Barón, 2013). Yet, government ministries and services are typically organized by sector (e.g. education or health) or age group (e.g. infants and toddlers; preschoolers). In OECD countries, there are concerns that the ‘care’ and ‘education’ divide leads to fragmentation and discontinuity for young children and their families (OECD, 2001, 2006; Kaga, Bennett, & Moss, 2010). Typically, the Ministry of Health or Social Welfare is responsible for children under the age of 3, whereas the role of the Ministry of Education increases as children reach school age. The two systems often operate in isolation, with different funding, regulatory, and staffing policies, even though the needs of children transcend these institutional boundaries. In contrast, some countries, such as Norway, New Zealand, Sweden, and Slovenia, have integrated all early care and education services for children from birth through school age under the responsibility of the Ministry of Education to harmonize policies, including those related to staff training and curriculum, and to foster continuity for children as they transition from preschool to school (Kaga, Bennett, & Moss, 2010).

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In developing countries, where resources are more scarce, it is even more critical for the full range of actors and institutions to work together to address the whole child (Woodhead, 2014). For example, young children who are malnourished often suffer from poor physical growth and delayed cognitive development, which can lead to learning difficulties later in life (Naudeau et al., 2010). However, nutrition, health, and early learning interventions are rarely well coordinated. The existing approach leads to overlap and duplication, gaps and inefficiencies, with children falling through the cracks and their parents confused or underinformed about the resources and options available to them (Neuman & Devercelli, 2013; Woodhead, 2014). The challenge is how to build bridges across sectors to foster more coordination and coherence for children and families.

Innovative Responses Strategies to address the coordination challenge in the early years include establishing inter-sectoral coordinating mechanisms and consolidating responsibility for early childhood under one government entity (Kaga et al., 2010; Naudeau et al., 2010; Neuman & Devercelli, 2013). There is a trend in lowand middle-income countries to create national integrated early childhood development policies that cover a range of sectors and departments, including health, nutrition health, nutrition, social protection, agriculture, justice (Vargas-Barón, 2015; VargasBarón & Schipper, 2012). In order for these strategies to translate into better coordination of early childhood services, sufficient resources and attention must be accorded to implementation (Neuman & Devercelli, 2012). This section will highlight how Jamaica and Pakistan are building bridges across sectors at the policy and program level as well as some of the keys to successful coordination in the early years.

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Jamaica: Creating a National Intersectoral Coordination Mechanism to Reduce Fragmentation Jamaica is a middle-income country in the Caribbean with a broad set of programs for young children that require coordination across sectors. While the nation has achieved nearly universal preschool enrollment for 3- to 6-year-olds, only about 12 percent of children under 3 have access to center-based early learning opportunities (World Bank, 2013b). In the late 1990s, after conducting a situational analysis, key government agencies recognized the need for coordination across the age span of 0 to 6 years to benefit from synergies and complementarities between actors, reduce duplication, and minimize gaps in service delivery. The focus on inter-sectoral coordination was also informed by world-renowned studies (Gertler et  al., 2014) conducted in Jamaica on the benefits of integrating early stimulation and nutrition (World Bank, 2013b). With this background, the Early Childhood Commission (ECC)7 was formally established as an inter-sectoral coordination mechanism in 2003 and has achieved many accomplishments over more than a decade of its existence. According to its first chair, Dr Maureen Samms-Vaughan, ‘the cross-sectoral approach is about bringing everybody together and working towards one goal’ (Jamaica Information Service, 2010). By reaching across sectors and political parties, the ECC has helped foster a more holistic view of the early childhood field. It is an independent body that is tasked with advising the Ministry of Education on policy matters. The structure of the ECC is shown in Figure 14.4. The members of the commission – including representatives from education, health, local government and community development, labor, finance, protection, and planning – assist the planning and preparation of budget, strategy, and programs for young children and their families. The ECC is responsible for developing standards and licensing regulations for

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Honorable Minister of Education Chairman

Board of Commissioners Executive Director (only ex-officio member)

Opposition party

Ministry of Education, Youth, and Culture

Ministry of Local Government & Community Development

Ministry of Health

Ministry of Labour and Social Security

Ministry of Finance and Planning

Child Development Agency

Planning Institute of Jamaica

Public Education

Research & Data Management

Training & Development

7 qualified ECD practitioners

Subcommittees Audit

Finance

Human Resource

Legal and Regulatory Affairs

Parenting and Community Intervention

Operational Arm

Figure 14.4 Organizational structure of Jamaica’s Early Childhood Commission Source: World Bank (2013b)

early childhood services and can impose fines for non-compliance (Naudeau et  al., 2010; Samms-Vaughan, 2014; World Bank, 2013b). The ECC also monitors and reports on the implementation of Jamaica’s inter-agency, costed National Strategic Plan. A detailed monitoring and evaluation system not only tracks progress toward the plan but also creates incentives for coordination by linking the release of funding to the achievement of specific indicators or results (e.g. percentage of early childhood institutions meeting accreditation standards; number of vulnerable households screened to identify required early interventions for at-risk children) (Holland & Evans, 2010). There are several keys to Jamaica’s success. Cross-sectoral representation on the ECC governing board from all ministries and private actors relevant to children and families creates a forum to discuss challenges and plan collaboratively. The inclusion of the private sector is particularly important because it is the dominant provider of preschool in Jamaica. The ECC is bipartisan, and the inclusion of both political parties has strengthened support for the early childhood sector. For example, even though the government changed hands during preparation of

the National Strategic Plan, there were few disruptions to the process (Naudeau et  al., 2010). Given that the technical work of the ECC is well respected, the ECC’s leader can mobilize cooperation across sectors and politics. It has the legislative power to enforce quality standards, which strengthens its authority and encourages compliance. The results-based financing model provides incentives for the ECC to implement the National Strategic Plan (Holland & Evans, 2010; Naudeau et al., 2010).

Pakistan: Integrating Parenting Education in Existing Health Services to Maximize Child Development Moving from policy to practice, what are different models for integrating early childhood services for children? Sometimes services can be co-located in a ‘one stop shop’. The Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) in India is one of the oldest and largest examples. Anganwadis (‘courtyard shelters’) serve children under 6 with supplementary nutrition, immunization, health check-ups and

Innovations in EC development from Low-resource Contexts

referral services, and preschool education. While it is an important model of coordination to meet children’s needs, ICDS and similar programs have struggled to provide all intended services with equal attention and sufficient quality (Woodhead, 2014). Another approach is to integrate early stimulation and parenting support into existing health, nutrition, or social protection platforms (Black & Dewey, 2014; Woodhead, 2014). In Pakistan, a community health program that has existed for 30 years provides an entry point for enhancing child development. Currently, 100,000 trained female community health workers, known as Lady Health Workers, deliver basic health services door-to-door in hard-to-reach communities, including: immunizations, pre/post natal care, family planning, and nutrition services. Since 2013, Lady Health Workers have received six months of training and a government salary (Yousafzai, Rasheed, Rizvi, Armstrong, & Bhutta, 2014). A recent randomized control trial has looked at the effects of integrating responsive stimulation activities into these routine health services, both alone and with an enhanced nutrition intervention. Building on the existing model, early childhood development facilitators trained, mentored, and coached Lady Health Workers and also supported community sensitization activities. As part of the intervention, the Lady Health Workers held monthly home visits and parenting sessions with families with children under age 2. During these sessions, the Lady Health Workers coached parents and caregivers to carry out simple play and communication activities with their children (e.g. games like peek-a-boo). (The enhanced nutrition intervention included training on nutrition education messages, such as skills for feeding infants, and the provision of sprinkles.) An evaluation found that at age 24 months, children in the responsive stimulation group had higher developmental scores on cognitive, language, and motor domains than those who did not receive the intervention. Both the enhanced nutrition and the responsive

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stimulation activities significantly improved parenting skills, with larger effects in the stimulation group (Yousafzai et al., 2014). A follow-up study two years after the pilot ended, when the children were 4 years of age, found that children who had received the responsive stimulation intervention (with or without enhanced nutrition) had significantly higher cognition, language, and motor skills than children who did not. Their mothers also had significantly better responsive caregiving behaviors (e.g. telling stories, singing songs, playing with the child, taking the child out of the home). Children who received enhanced nutrition had significant improvements to motor development. An additive benefit was found for the combined group on children’s pro-social behavior compared with either responsive stimulation alone or enhanced nutrition alone. Although overall effect sizes were lower than at the short-term follow-up, it is encouraging that the benefits of building onto a community health program were sustained two years later (Yousafzai et al., 2016).

Lessons Learned Effective coordination of early childhood policy and programs is both a political and technical process, one which is challenging and takes time. Staff at all levels – national officials, regional and local officials, and direct providers – need to be encouraged and supported to build bridges and overcome potential ‘turf issues’. The Jamaica experience teaches us that it is important to seek high-level political endorsement to secure early childhood on the national agenda. An ‘institutional anchor’ – such as Jamaica’s Early Childhood Commission – can help facilitate coordination. However, this anchor needs clear leadership and a mandate, as well as adequate staffing and financial resources for it to be credible and effective. Involving stakeholders from a range of political parties and sectors, including those outside traditional child-focused agencies (e.g. justice,

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agriculture), and clearly delineating responsibilities are also critical. Beyond national inter-agency coordination, early childhood policy planners should seek strategic entry points for integrating early childhood interventions into existing services and platforms. The health system is a practical place to start in many countries because it reaches most families. The experiment in Pakistan shows that these integrated interventions are cost-effective and also have effects for children two years after the end of the intervention. However, workers need to be supported with training and mentoring without overloading them with responsibilities. More research is needed on strategies to best coordinate services, especially at scale (Black & Dewey, 2014). There is also a need to support information flowing horizontally across sectors and vertically – from the ground up – so that practical experience integrating early childhood services informs policy.

Challenge 3: How to fill the financing gap?

early childhood development. They spend on average less than 0.1 percent of gross national product (GNP) and less than 5 percent of their education budgets (see Figure 14.5). Existing funding falls short relative to both need and compared to investment in other education levels (Putcha et  al., 2016). Unlike many other areas of education and social policy, there is a greater mix of public and private spending and provision in the early years in low- and middle-income countries. As a result of limited government attention and funding, household contributions are significant and lead to inequities in the access to and quality of provision (UNESCO, 2015). In many countries, the public sector’s limited capacity creates difficulties to coordinate, regulate, distribute, spend, and monitor early childhood financing in a mixed-delivery system. In sum, there is a need for more public funding and to allocate existing resources more efficiently and effectively (Putcha et al., 2016).

Innovative Responses

The Problem The third challenge relates to financing. Lowand middle-income countries underinvest in

How do we solve the challenge of addressing inadequate early childhood investment in low-resource contexts? How do we allocate that funding equitably and efficiently?

Central and Eastern Europe

0.55

North America and Western Europe

0.44

Central Asia

0.27

Latin America and the Caribbean

0.22

East Asia

0.09

South and West Asia

0.02

Sub-Saharan Africa

0.01 0.0

0.1

0.2

0.3

0.4

% GNP

Figure 14.5 Public expenditure on pre-primary education by region Source: Putcha et al. (2016)

0.5

0.6

Innovations in EC development from Low-resource Contexts

Although regular government funding is essential for supporting an early childhood system (OECD 2001, 2006; Putcha et  al., 2016), several developing countries have explored innovative sources and mechanisms of finance to make the most of limited resources. For example, a national payroll tax in Colombia supports child health, childcare, preschool, and parenting services. In the Philippines, a tax on casinos and other gaming corporations funds the construction and operation of child development centers (Putcha et al., 2016). There is growing interest in funding preschool and home visiting programs with impact bonds where an investor provides upfront capital to a service provider. If the program is successful in achieving predetermined outcomes, the outcome payer – either the government or a donor – pays back the investor with interest.8 These ‘pay for success’ schemes in early childhood exist in the US and are under development in Cameroon, Kenya, and South Africa (Gustafsson-Wright & Gardiner, 2016). This section highlights two additional cutting-edge ideas: social franchising and cash transfers. Both examples are common in the health and social protection sectors, and more recently have been applied to the early childhood field.

Colombia: Social Franchising Brings Essential Health, Education, and Social Welfare Services to Low-income Populations at Scale In developing countries, there is a long history of social franchising in the child and maternal health field to replicate quality provision costeffectively at scale. Social franchises are a network of typically non-governmental providers that carry out a package of common activities and share monitoring and evaluation systems. Unlike commercial franchises, social franchises are designed to maximize social impact, not profit. For example, they focus on increasing the number of people served and

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the number of health providers employed (Norton, 2011). The goal is to reduce duplication or ‘re-inventing the wheel’, promote quality standards, and create economies of scale. Social franchises can also create employment for small business owners – often women – who have the incentive to join the network as franchisees in order to benefit from the support, training, and cost savings that they would not receive as independent providers (DG Murray Trust, 2014). Social enterprises – including franchises – are becoming popular in the early childhood space in low- and middle-income countries as a means of rapidly reaching large numbers of underserved families with quality services in a financially sustainable way.9 In Colombia, where 68 percent of households live in extreme poverty and 65 percent of children do not receive any early childhood development services, a social enterprise, aeioTU, works closely with the government and other partners to provide holistic early childhood services – education, nutrition, health, and family support – to low-income families. Inspired by the world-renowned municipal preschools in Reggio Emilia, Italy (another example of cross-national learning), aeioTU has adopted a curriculum and pedagogical approach that focuses on the child as the main actor in his or her learning. The program has also developed an online platform for monitoring the quality of services provided. An interim external evaluation found positive effects of the program on children’s language and motor development, as well as a narrowing of the gap in outcomes between children from high- and lowincome backgrounds. After participating in the program, parents are more playful, have a greater understanding of the importance of play and pedagogical materials, and are more likely to take part in community events (DG Murray Trust, 2014). aeioTU has developed a creative approach to sustainably financing its operations. While aeioTU currently receives government subsidies, donations, and private grants, it has

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developed a cross-subsidization model. The profits from centers serving children in higher-income areas help subsidize the expansion and operations of centers serving lower-income families. aeioTU has expanded from four centers in 2009 to 28 centers in 2014, reaching more than 13,000 children. aeioTU also runs a home visiting program in rural areas, provides technical assistance to more than 53,000 children attending 300 public ECD centers, and advocates for greater government and business investment in young children. Its business plan is that its high-quality model will attract entrepreneurs who are interested in operating their own franchises as part of the aeioTU network. These semi-independent operators will pay aeioTU a fee to receive technical support related to pedagogy, curriculum, and administration, and benefit from economies of scale in procurement, branding, and marketing. In turn, aeioTU will use this income to reduce its reliance on donations, sustain its overall operations, and subsidize its activities for lower-income families (Center for Education Innovations, 2016; DG Murray Trust, 2014).

Nicaragua, Uganda, and Niger: Cash Transfers Address the Intergenerational Transmission of Poverty Cash transfers aim to directly increase the income of poor or disadvantaged households as well as reduce the transmission of poverty from one generation to the next by improving children’s development and well-being.10 Conditional cash transfers (CCTs) can encourage parents to invest in their children by increasing financial resources in the household and requiring the recipient to engage in behaviors that support their children’s well-being, such as enrolling their children in school or bringing them to health check-ups. Unconditional cash transfers (UCTs)11 have ‘no strings attached’, however, information campaigns and other ‘soft

conditions’ may be part of the program to encourage behavior change (Fiszbein et  al., 2009; Naudeau et al., 2010). CCTs started in Mexico in 1997 with the Progresa program (later renamed Oportunidades) and have spread throughout Latin America and around the world (Fiszbein et  al., 2009).12 Although several studies of CCT programs have found that participating families are more likely to utilize health services, the impact on the health and nutritional status of these young children has been mixed. Similarly, while CCTs have led to greater school enrollments and attainment for participating children, these gains have not translated into better education outcomes (Naudeau et al., 2010). Until recently, there has been limited research on the impact of cash transfers conditioned on attendance at parenting programs or preschools on young children’s cognitive and socio-emotional outcomes (Putcha et al., 2016). Several cash transfer experiments are now focused more explicitly on improving young children’s development. In Nicaragua, for example, a rigorous randomized control trial found that households receiving cash transfers spent more on nutrient-rich foods, provided more early stimulation to their children, and made more use of preventative health care. These behaviors were associated with better socio-emotional and language development outcomes among children under age 7 in the treatment group; the positive effects lasted two years after the program ended. Although the health check-up condition was not enforced, parents were informed about the benefits of investing in early childhood development from ‘social marketing’ associated with the cash transfer program (Marcours, Schady, & Vakis, 2012). In Uganda, a pilot CCT program required participants to send their children to preschool. An impact evaluation found that the program led to greater preschool attendance and an improvement in cognitive development (e.g. visual reception skills, fine motor skills, and language skills) among 4- to 5-year-olds

Innovations in EC development from Low-resource Contexts

in the intervention group compared to a control group. In addition, the quality of the preschools in the pilot area improved, they operated more often, and children attended more frequently. Parents were also more likely to contribute more money to preschools. Teachers’ motivation in these preschools increased as well. (Gillian & Roy, 2016). In rural Niger, a child development module has been integrated into an existing social safety net (UCT program) for very poor women. Given that access to formal preschool is very limited in Niger, the pilot aims to strengthen parenting skills at home. Members of the target communities are invited to participate in monthly village assemblies focused on children’s health, nutrition, cognitive, and socio-emotional development. Parents receiving the UCT participate in small group sessions and receive home visits. An evaluation is underway to assess the impact and cost-effectiveness of adding this parenting intervention to the social safety net program.13

Lessons Learned These case studies focus on innovative financing mechanisms to complement and stimulate traditional approaches to public financing of early childhood services. Both examples have only recently been applied to early childhood development, so further experimentation in diverse contexts is needed to assess the potential benefits and limitations. Social franchises demonstrate the possible advantages of having state and non-state sectors working together to rapidly scale up early childhood services, an ongoing challenge in many low-resource contexts. However, even if innovations focus on engaging the private sector, such as social franchises and impact bonds, greater overall public investment is needed to strengthen the early childhood system, and the role of the government is critical in setting targets,

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regulating, monitoring, and assuring quality and equity goals are met. Another take-away for policymakers and program designers is to look for both supply- and demand-side solutions to filling the financing gap. To promote the well-being of children living in poverty, it is necessary to expand both the supply of quality direct services, such as early childhood centers and parenting programs, as well as cash transfers or fee subsidies for low-income parents which stimulate demand for these services. Cash transfers have the potential to increase household income and improve children’s development, but this safety net program alone cannot eliminate broad economic and social inequalities and should be considered as part of a broad package of policies and programs that support families. Further research is needed regarding how to effectively target households, the impact of conditionality, and the size of the transfer needed to improve child development outcomes (Naudeau et al., 2010; Putcha et al., 2016). Finally, to date, many innovative financing mechanisms have been developed by economists. Early childhood specialists can play an important role in ensuring that the interventions are well designed, the targets are reasonable, and the assessment tools to measure success are appropriate.

Conclusion In order to meet the ambitious Sustainable Development Goals and targets related to young children, nations will be searching for creative and effective policy approaches. This chapter has shed light on some of the innovative responses that are emerging in developing countries to address three of the most pressing policy challenges in the early childhood field. I suggest three strategies to encourage innovation in low- and middleincome countries as well as foster

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cross-national learning with other parts of the world: 1 Strengthen mechanisms to identify and share early childhood innovations: To foster innovation and learning across borders, there is a need for more South-South and North-South exchanges – such as online platforms, study tours, and joint learning activities – to allow innovators to connect with one another and discuss shared challenges. These efforts can build on existing platforms to document innovations and provide opportunities for innovators to connect and learn from one another (e.g. Center for Education Innovations, Grand Challenges Canada Saving Brains Program, the WISE ed.hub). 2 Evaluate impact and analyze key elements of success: Several of the early childhood initiatives presented in this chapter are small-scale or pilot programs. Rigorous process and summative evaluations can help program designers and funders unpack the underlying mechanisms in order to ensure that the quality and impact of these programs are not compromised as they expand. It is also important to identify the contextual characteristics that influence a program’s potential to be adapted and replicated. 3 Attract financing for both piloting and scaling effective ideas: Many of the innovative efforts to support early childhood development in low- and middle-income countries are externally funded by multi-lateral institutions like the World Bank, bilateral agencies, or private foundations. While this external financing is often critical for piloting and experimentation, to help make programs sustainable once the initial funding from donors disappears, it is important to work in partnership with the government and other in-country stakeholders on a longer-term financing strategy.

Notes 1  This chapter is based on a keynote address given at the annual conference of the European Early Childhood Education Research Association in Crete, Greece on 8 September, 2014. 2  http://www.akdn.org/project/providing-education-remote-regions-kyrgyzstan  3  The law also provides equal pay for kindergarten and primary teachers with the objective of boosting quality by encouraging qualified teachers to work with younger children.

  4  http://www.akdn.org/project/providing-­educationremote-regions-kyrgyzstan  5  The RISE project team and the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training in Zanzibar developed the pre- and post-tests to measure the mastery of major learning objectives in math, English, and Kiswahili (Morris et al., 2009).   6  Although the target age for Standard 1 in the RISE project was 6 to 8 years, due to over-age enrollment, the actual ages of students ranged from 4 to 13 (Morris et al., 2009).    7  http://ecc.gov.jm/   8  When the government is the outcome funder, impact bonds can help offset the risk of investing in early childhood services, because government only pays if the program is successful. When a non-governmental entity such as a private donor acts as an outcome funder, impact bonds can help programs demonstrate results and make a case for government investment (Putcha et al., 2016).   9  Other examples of social enterprises are Hippocampus in India, Kidogo in Kenya, and Smart Start in South Africa. For more information, see the Center for Education Innovations: http:// www.educationinnovations.org   10  Cash transfers programs have provoked both strong proponents and critics. These broader debates go beyond the scope of this chapter (see Fiszbein et al., 2009 for a review).  11  Unconditional cash transfers are similar to child allowances in OECD countries (OECD, 2006).  12  The first pilot of CCTs in a higher income setting was of Opportunity Family Rewards in New York City which provided cash allowances to households that met education, health, and work conditions. An evaluation found that the program reduced poverty, hunger, and some housingrelated hardships. Participants also were substantially more likely to graduate from high school (Riccio et al., 2013).   13  http://www.worldbank.org/en/programs/sieftrust-fund/brief/niger-safety-nets-project-impactevaluation

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Arnold, C., Aitikulova, B., & Mamadfozilov, Z. (2012). Ensuring quality early childhood education for all in resource poor settings. Presentation at Global Partnership for Education Improving the Quality of Early Childhood Education Services for All in the CEE CIS Region, 4–6 June 2012, Athens, Greece. Barnett, W. S., & Nores, M. (2015). Investment and productivity arguments for ECCE. In M. T. M. Marope & Y. Kaga (Eds.), Investing against evidence: The global state of early childhood care and education (pp. 72–88). Paris: UNESCO. Bartlett, S. (2013). Learning about learning: Reflections on studies from 10 countries. Geneva: Aga Khan Foundation. Black, M. M., & Dewey, K. G. (Eds.). (2014). Every child’s potential: Integrating nutrition and early childhood development interventions. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1308. Black, M. M., Walker, S. P., Fernald, L. C. H., Andersen, C. T., DiGirolamo, A. M., Lu, C., … Grantham-McGregor, S. (2016). Early childhood development coming of age: Science through the life course. The Lancet. Published online Oct 4. http://dx.doi. org/10.1016/ S0140-6736(16)31389-7 Center for Education Innovations. (2016). aeioTU program profile. Accessed October 1, 2016 at http://www.educationinnovations. org/program/aeiotu DG Murray Trust. (2014). Hands on experience learning. Special issue: scaling up early childhood development in South Africa. Cape Town: DG Murray Trust. Education Development Center (EDC). (2015). Radio Instruction to Strengthen Education (RISE) and Zanzibar Teacher Upgrading by Radio (ZTUR) Post-Project Evaluation in Zanzibar Final Report. Executive Summary. Washington, DC: EDC. Engle, P. L., Rao, N., & Petrovic, O. (2013). Situational analysis of young children in a changing world. In P. R. Britto, P. L. Engle, & C. M. Super (Eds.), Handbook of early childhood development research and its impact on global policy (pp. 35–64). New York: Oxford University Press. Engle, P. L., Fernald, L. C. H., Alderman, H., Behrman, J., O’Gara, C., Cabral de Mello, M., et  al. (2011). Strategies for reducing

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inequalities and improving developmental outcomes for young children in low-income and middle-income countries. The Lancet, 378(9799), 1339–1353. Fernald, L. C. H., Kariger, P., Hidrobo, M., & Gertler, P. (2012). Socioeconomic gradients in child development in very young children: Evidence from India, Indonesia, Peru, and Senegal. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; 109, 17273–17280. Fiszbein, A., Schady, N., Ferreira, F. H. G., Grosh, M., Keleher, N., Olinto, P., & Skoufias, E. (2009). Conditional cash transfers: Reducing present and future poverty. World Bank Policy Research Report. Washington, DC: World Bank. Gertler, P., Heckman, J., Pinto, R., Zanolini, A., Vermeersch, C., Walker, S., & GranthamMcGregor, S. (2014). Labor market returns to an early childhood stimulation intervention in Jamaica. Science, 344(6186), 998–1001. Gillian, D. O., & Roy, S. (2016). The effect of transfers and preschool on children’s cognitive development in Uganda. 3ie Impact Evaluation Report 32. New Delhi: International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie). Gustafsson-Wright, E., & Gardiner, S. (2016). Using impact bonds to achieve early childhood development outcomes in low- and middle-income countries. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution. Heckman, J. (2008). The case for investing in disadvantaged young children. In Big ideas for children: Investing in our nation’s future (pp. 49–58). Washington, DC: First Focus. Holland, P., & Evans, D. (2010). Early childhood development operations in LCR: Jamaica, Mexico, and Brazil in focus. En Breve Number 152. Washington, DC: World Bank. Jamaica Information Service. (2010). Jamaica’s early childhood strategic plan gaining global recognition. Retrieved October 2, 2016 from http://jis.gov.jm/jamaicas-early-childhoodstrategic-plan-gaining-global-recognition/ Kaga, Y., Bennett, J., & Moss, P. (2010). Caring and learning together: A cross-national study on the integration of early childhood care and education within education. Paris: UNESCO. Marcours, K., Schady, N., & Vakis, R. (2012). Cash transfers, behavioral changes, and the cognitive development of young children,

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international and domestic sources in lowand middle-income countries. Washington, DC: International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity. Riccio, J., Dechausay, N., Miller, C., Nuñez, S., Verma, N., & Yang, E. (2013). Conditional cash transfers in New York City: The continuing story of the opportunity NYC–family rewards demonstration. Executive Summary. New York: MDRC. Sabates, R., Akyeampong, K., Westbrook, J., & Hunt, F. (2010). School drop out: Patterns, causes, changes and policies. Background paper commissioned for the Education for All Global Monitoring Report 2011. Paris: UNESCO. Samms-Vaughan, M. (2014). Structuring early childhood programs in Jamaica. Presentation at the Scaling Program Investments for Young Children Globally: A Workshop on Evidence from LAC and Other Developing Regions, November 11, 2014, Sao Paolo, Brazil. Schady, N., Behrman, J., Araujo, M. C., Azuero, R., Bernal, R., Bravo, D., Lopez-Boo, F., Marcours, K., Marshall, D., Paxson, C., & Vakis, R. (2015). Wealth gradients in early childhood cognitive development in five Latin American countries. Journal of Human Resources, 50(2), 446–463. Shamatov, D. (2011). Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan: Early grade reading review. Almaty, Kazakhstan: United States Agency for International Development Mission in the Central Asian Republics. UNESCO. (2015). Education for All 2000– 2015: Achievements and challenges. Education for All Global Monitoring Report. Paris: UNESCO. UNESCO. (2016). Education for people and planet: Creating sustainable futures for all. Global Education Monitoring Report. Paris: UNESCO. UNICEF. (2012). Inequities in early childhood development: What the data say. Evidence from the Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys. New York: UNICEF. United Nations. (2006). UN Convention on the Rights of the Child – General Comment 7. Implementing child rights in early childhood. Geneva, Switzerland: United Nations. United Nations. (2015). Transforming our world: The 2030 agenda for sustainable development. New York: United Nations.

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Retrieved December 2, 2016 from https:// sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015/ transformingourworld Vargas-Barón, E. (2013). Building and strengthening national systems for early childhood development. In P. R. Britto, P. L. Engle, & C. M. Super (Eds.), Handbook of early childhood development research and its impact on global policy (pp. 443–466). New York: Oxford University Press. Vargas-Barón, E. (2015). Policies on early childhood care and education: Their evolution and some impacts. Paper commissioned for the EFA Global Monitoring Report 2015, Education for All 2000–2015: achievements and challenges. Paris: UNESCO. Vargas-Barón, E., & Schipper, J. (2012). Review of policy and planning indicators in early childhood (Commissioned by UNESCO within the framework of the Holistic Early Childhood Development Index). Paris: UNESCO. Woodhead, M. (2005). Early childhood development: A question of rights. International Journal of Early Childhood, 37(3), 79–98. Woodhead, M. (2014). Early childhood development: Delivering inter-sectoral policies, programmes, and services in low-resource settings. The Health, Education Advice Resource Team (HEART) Topic Guide. London: HEART, DFID. World Bank. (2013a). SABER early childhood development country report: Kyrgyz Republic.

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Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER) country report. Washington, DC: World Bank. World Bank. (2013b). SABER early childhood development country report: Jamaica. Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER) country report. Washington, DC: World Bank. Yoshikawa, H., & Kabay, S. B. (2014). The evidence base on early childhood care and education in global contexts. Paper commissioned for EFA Global Monitoring Report 2015, Education for All 2000-2015: achievements and challenges. Paris: UNESCO. Yousafzai, A. K., Rasheed, M. A., Rizvi, A., Armstrong, R., & Bhutta, Z. A. (2014). Effect of integrated responsive stimulation and nutrition interventions in the Lady Health Worker programme in Pakistan on child development, growth, and health outcomes: A cluster randomized factorial effectiveness trial. The Lancet, 384(9950), 1282–1293. Yousafzai, A. K., Obradović, J., Rasheed, M. A., Rizvi, A., Portilla, X. A., Tirado-Strayer, N., Siyal, S., & Memon, U. (2016). Effects of responsive stimulation and nutrition interventions on children’s development and growth at age 4 years in a disadvantaged population in Pakistan: A longitudinal follow-up of a cluster-randomised factorial effectiveness trial. The Lancet Global Health, 4(8), e548–e558.

15 What Place for ‘Care’ in Early Childhood Policy? Peter Moss

Introduction: Education and/or care? An English government website is headed ‘Find free early education and childcare’, before going on to state that ‘[a]ll 3 and 4-year-olds in England are entitled to 570 hours of free early education or childcare a year’ (https://www.gov.uk/find-free-earlyeducation) (emphasis added). This seems to beg a number of questions about early childhood services, suggesting as it does a degree of confusion about the relationship between ‘education’ and ‘care’. How are ‘education’ and ‘care’ understood and how are they assumed to relate to each other? Are they deemed to be quite distinct and alternative concepts (‘or’), or are they deemed in some way complementary (‘and’)? And is ‘care’ in early childhood services confined to the child – as the term ‘childcare’ implies – or does it have wider relevance and application?

In this chapter I plan to offer answers, albeit partial and provisional ones, to these questions. But first I want to consider how we got to the current state of confusion, marked by an uncertain and uneasy relationship between ‘education’ and ‘care’ in many countries, starting with a historical split within early childhood services, a split that has bequeathed a dysfunctional legacy to the present day. I will then discuss what it would mean to get completely beyond this split, to achieve a fully integrated early childhood service that gets beyond the education/care divide, illustrating a successful transition with the case of Sweden, and contrasting it with the case of England, where a movement towards integration stalled, leaving a fault line between care and education that has been only partially bridged. I will finish by offering, tentatively and as a basis for discussion, four policy points that address the question framing this chapter: What place for ‘care’ in early childhood policy?

What Place for ‘Care’ in Early Childhood Policy?

As the preceding comments imply, my focus is on one element of early childhood policy: formal services that provide (in the commonly used term) ‘early childhood education and care’ for children below compulsory school age. Within the Anglophone world, such services go by various names, including: childcare centres, long-day care centres, day nurseries, nursery schools and classes, playgroups, preschools, kindergartens, family daycare and so on. While I think my suggested answer to the question of the place for care in such services (and their non-English equivalents) will prove relevant and applicable to other services and fields of policy, I will confine my discussion to this particular area of policy and provision.

The education/care split – a dysfunctional legacy Early childhood education and care services (henceforth abbreviated to ‘early childhood services’) embody two different traditions and streams of development: care and education, both of which have their origins in the nineteenth century. The former services were often developed as a welfare measure for working-class children who needed care, especially while their parents were at work; the latter services as kindergarten or pre-primary educational provision preceding formal schooling. ‘Care’ thus has come to be associated with meeting the needs of working parents, ‘childcare for working parents’ being today a common expression, and with being provided for some children only, on the basis of parental need. ‘Education’, by contrast, has come to be seen as a universal entitlement (albeit often only for children from 3 years of age), focused more on the needs of children. Today, these different traditions and streams of development are expressed in most countries as ‘split systems’ of early childhood services. Typically, the two

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sectors – care and education – in these split systems are governed, in terms of policymaking and administration, by social welfare and education ministries respectively. They are also structured in very different ways with respect to types of provision, workforce, access, funding and regulation (including curriculum). In some countries (in particular the Anglophone), the care sector dominates, providing services across the whole preschool age range, while education services typically provide only one or two years of provision; elsewhere (for example in France or Italy), the education sector dominates, offering three years of provision, with the care sector ending its role when children go to nursery school at 3 years of age. Given their distinct historical roots and continuing distinct identities, ‘childcare’ and ‘early education’ services in split systems not only differ organisationally; they embody different understandings of children and workers, purpose and responsibility. Split systems have been the subject of critical discussion since the 1970s and analyses have identified several core problems. For example, they express and reinforce an idea that education can only begin when children are aged 3 or 4, with younger children defined as mainly needing minding or care while their parents work. Governments assume greater responsibility for education for children over 3 years, thus investing more public funding in early education than in care services for younger children. Differences between services in welfare and education in key areas such as access, regulation, funding and workforce lead to inequalities and lack of continuity for children, parents and workers (European Commission/EACEA/ Eurydice/Eurostat, 2014; Kaga, Bennett & Moss, 2010). To reduce the adverse effects of split systems, two main strategies have been employed: greater coordination and integration. The former involves creating inter-ministerial mechanisms to promote coordinated approaches to early childhood provision. One such

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mechanism is a coordination body, within or outside line ministries, consisting of representatives from relevant sectors. Evidence shows that such intersectoral coordination has generated some positive results, such as improved public awareness of early childhood services, and increased use of comprehensive services. Coordination mechanisms have been found to work well when they are established for a specific purpose or to focus on a target population; however, they have proved less successful in promoting a coherent overall policy and administrative framework across sectors. That leaves integration to create a fully unitary system. But what does that mean? In a cross-national study of integration (Kaga et  al., 2010), eight dimensions were identified: policymaking and administration; regulation; curriculum; access; workforce; type of provision; funding; and concept. The first seven of these dimensions are structural, to do with the organisation of services; while the eighth concerns the more nebulous, but nevertheless vital, issue of how services are thought of and talked about, of how people and society conceptualise them. To qualify as fully integrated, all eight of these dimensions need to have been worked on, producing a single, seamless early childhood system with no sign left of past fault lines between care and education. Of the five countries included in the study, all of which had started on the road to integration, only two (Slovenia and Sweden) had achieved full integration; the other three (Brazil, Jamaica, New Zealand) had only got part way. I shall illustrate full integration with the case of Sweden, and use the case of another country, England, as a contrast, involving as it does an example of partial and stalled integration.

The case of Sweden Sweden began, like all countries, with a split system of early childhood services, dating

back to the nineteenth century. Nurseries were opened for children of poor working mothers, the first in 1854 in Stockholm, run by charities and churches as philanthropic causes and available for up to 12 hours a day; there were Spartan interiors, large groups and staff were often untrained, but children were kept clean and well fed (Korpi, 2007). At the same time, kindergartens began to be opened, but these were very different, in purpose, organisation and users: The kindergartens were only open three to four hours a day and were run for purely pedagogical purposes, often by private persons. The fees were self-financing, and the children came from affluent, well-educated families. The kindergarten was intended to support upbringing at home … [and recognised] the importance of play in the child’s development … Those working in the kindergartens were liberal, radical women. They wanted to contribute to a better society by giving children a rich and stimulating childhood. (ibid., pp. 13–14)

From the late 1960s, and in a context of rapidly expanding public provision in response to the growing employment of women, integration of this split system began, until almost full integration had been achieved by the early 1990s. The culmination of the process was the transfer in 1996 of early childhood services from the social welfare to the education system, followed two years later by the publication of the first curriculum for the Förskola or ‘preschool’ (the term used for the age-integrated centres for children from 1 to 6 years that account for most early childhood services in Sweden), and then, in 2001–2, the extension to children with nonemployed parents of an entitlement to a preschool place from 12 months of age.1 Sweden today has a fully integrated early childhood system. What does that mean in practice? There is no sign left of the previous split between nurseries providing care and kindergartens providing education. Instead the great majority of children go to one type of provision, the preschool, which is staffed by graduate preschool teachers and qualified assistants (roughly 50/50), both specialising

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in work with the whole preschool age group. There is a common funding framework, with 525 hours per year of free attendance for 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds and fees for additional hours of attendance capped at a low rate;2 overall parental fees contribute to overall costs, but make up only a small part, the rest coming from tax-based public funding. Responsibility for the system rests nationally with the Education Ministry, which issues a national curriculum, and locally with municipal education departments, which manage most preschools. What about conceptual integration? Early childhood services, mostly open for up to 12 hours a day, are understood to play an important role in supporting employed parents, alongside the generous system of parental leave that enables parents to take a year or so away from work at 80 per cent of normal earnings; indeed, Sweden shows further evidence of an integrative approach to early childhood policy, in being one of the few countries where there is no gap between the end of well-paid leave and the start of an entitlement to good early childhood services (Moss, 2012). Yet the system is conceptualised in a wholly integrated way, centred on the child and on education, but education broadly conceived. Thus the curriculum states the task of the preschool in the following inclusive terms: The preschool should lay the foundations for lifelong learning. The preschool should be enjoyable, secure, and rich in learning for all children. The preschool should stimulate children’s development and learning and offer secure care. Activities should be based on a holistic view of the child and his or her needs and be designed so that care, socialisation and learning together form a coherent whole. (Skolverket, 2010, p. 4)

In Sweden, after decades of discussion and development, care has found its place as an integral part, but just one part, of an educational institution and a holistic approach to the child. Most Swedish parents go out to work, and their children need to be in a safe and secure setting while they do so. But that

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setting, the preschool, is first and foremost for children, all children irrespective of their parents’ employment status, and over time it has come to be accepted not only as predominantly educational, in a broad sense, but as part of what constitutes a good childhood. In the words of two Swedish researchers: What was once viewed as either a privilege of the wealthy for a few hours a day, or an institution for needy children and single mothers, has become, after 70 years of political vision and policy-making, an unquestionable right of children and families. Furthermore, parents now expect a holistic pedagogy that includes health care, nurturing and education for their pre-schoolers. (Lenz Taguchi & Munkammar, 2003, p. 27)

The case of England England, like Sweden, has a history of divided early childhood services, in a system split between ‘daycare’ (the term used legally and administratively until recently) and ‘education’, the former mainly provided by childminders and day nurseries, the latter by classes attached to primary schools; while a large group of mainly parent-run and parttime services, ‘playgroups’, were placed legislatively and administratively within ‘daycare’, though providing a service that was projected as mainly about socialisation and education. England, like Sweden, began its move towards greater integration of early childhood services as demand from employed parents began to increase rapidly, a process first visible at the end of the 1980s, and as national government, after many years of neglect, made early childhood services a policy priority. This shift in policy gained momentum with the election of a Labour government in 1997, which saw early childhood services as an important means for raising employment and reducing poverty – but also for tackling a range of other social problems through ‘early intervention’. The government’s high hopes are expressed in a 2002 Inter-departmental Childcare Review,

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specifying the many government objectives that ‘the availability of good quality, affordable childcare is key to achieving’: Childcare can improve educational outcomes for children. Childcare enables parents, particularly mothers, to go out to work, or increase their hours in work, thereby lifting their families out of poverty. It also plays a key role in extending choice for women by enhancing their ability to compete in the labour market on more equal terms, helping them to overcome the glass ceiling, and by ensuring that they themselves may not face poverty in old age. Childcare can also play an important role in meeting other top level objectives, for example in improving health, boosting productivity, improving public services, closing the gender pay gap and reducing crime. The targets to achieve 70 per cent employment amongst lone parents by 2010 and to eradicate child poverty by 2020 are those that are most obviously related. Childcare is essential for these objectives to be met. (English Department for Education and Skills et al., 2002, p. 5; emphasis added)

As well as a raft of measures to boost supply and attendance, including an entitlement to free education for 3- and 4-year-olds and a new system of subsidising parents’ use of childcare services, the Labour government took the first steps towards developing a more integrated system. Policy-making and administrative responsibility were brought together in the national Education Ministry, with ‘daycare services’ (now commonly referred to as ‘childcare services’) transferred there from their original home in health; a single national inspection system was introduced, all early childhood services coming under the purview of the schools inspectorate; and a national curriculum emerged, in the form of the Early Years Foundation Stage. So by the end of the Labour administration, in 2010, all early childhood services were included within a common administrative and regulatory framework. But the integrating process then came to a halt. Nothing was done on the structural dimensions that might be deemed most difficult, not least because of their major

economic implications. A universal entitlement to free education remained confined to older pre-schoolers. The Labour government proposed and the subsequent Conservativeled coalition (2010–15) implemented free provision of early education to 2-year-olds, but confined to those coming from lowerincome families; while even for these children, a yawning gap remained between the end of high-paid leave, just six weeks after birth, and the start of any kind of entitlement to services. Two systems of funding (demand and supply) continued to run alongside each other, with ‘childcare services’ heavily dependent on parental fees, now subsidised in part through a tax credit system that channelled some public money to parents; while school-based services were free to parents, with public money paid direct to them and other providers of the early education entitlement.3 Despite efforts to raise the qualification levels of the poorly educated ‘childcare workforce’, it remained far less qualified than the school-based workforce with its graduate teachers; while the earnings gap between relatively well paid school teachers and poorly paid childcare workers remained as wide as ever. Amidst early years provision, a clear fault line remained between so-called ‘childcare services’, mainly private day nurseries and individual childminders, and schoolbased services, mainly in nursery and reception classes located in primary schools. A new form of integrated provision, Children’s Centres, was introduced, but was added to the existing fragmented mix of childcare and school-based services, instead of developing as a universal service that would eventually replace the existing jumble of provision. Why did integration stall? Successive governments gave no stated reason, indeed never acknowledged that they had halted part way along an integration path. So we can only speculate. Three possible, related reasons seem plausible. First, as already hinted, the next steps would have involved major increases in expenditure, by extending entitlements, moving to a new system of integrated provision

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and creating a well-qualified and well-paid early childhood workforce. That such fundamental workforce reform is possible can be seen not only in Sweden, but also from the experience of another Anglophone country, New Zealand, which, as part of its integration move, developed a new graduate early years teacher profession, which by 2013 accounted for 76 per cent of staff in early childhood services (New Zealand Ministry of Education, 2014), supported by services receiving a commensurate rise in funding as their teacher numbers increase. By contrast, successive English governments have toyed with the idea of a new early years professional worker – but always at a lower level of pay and status than school teachers and always envisaged in a ‘leadership’ role rather than as a classroom worker (as in Sweden or New Zealand). Second, the Labour government from the start opted for a policy of more of the same as the basis for its expansion of early childhood services, and in particular the encouragement of a marketised ‘childcare’ system heavily reliant on private, for-profit providers. This was partly ideological, symptomatic of the administration’s attraction to private provision and competitive markets and its deep suspicion of public services. But it can also be seen as pragmatic, more of the same being the quickest way to get an increased supply of ‘childcare’, avoiding the delays and disruption that might well have followed from more fundamental, integrative reform. Third, the first steps in structural integration were never accompanied by work on the conceptual front. Despite paying lip service to ‘care’ and ‘education’ being inseparable, despite ‘childcare services’ being able to deliver the ‘early education’ entitlement, ‘care’ and ‘education’ remained distinct both in the official psyche and among the wider public and media. The language of ‘childcare for working parents’ never went away (and the significant point about this commonly used term is that it defines services not only in terms of ‘care’ for children, but also as being primarily for the benefit of parents); nor was

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there ever a discussion about the meaning of care and its relationship to education. Moreover, early childhood services have conceptually become more, not less, divided under the governments that have succeeded the Labour administration, with early childhood services and entitlements increasingly referred to in terms of ‘childcare’. The two main policy papers of the Conservativeled coalition government (2010–15) were titled ‘More Great Childcare’ and ‘More Affordable Childcare’ (English Department for Education, 2013a, b). Eager to jump on the bandwagon, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and parliamentary committees have poured out reports on ‘childcare’, not one of which addresses the issue of the meaning of and relationship between education and care or the question of the desirability and feasibility of full integration (see, for example, ‘Quality Childcare: Improving early years childcare’ by the think tank Policy Exchange (2013); ‘No more baby steps: a strategy for revolutionising childcare’ by the think tank IPPR (2014); ‘London Childcare Report’ by the Family and Childcare Trust (2014); a report on ‘Affordable Childcare’ by a House of Lords Select Committee (2015); and, not to be undone by the English, ‘Meeting Scotland’s Childcare Challenge’ by a Scottish Commission on Childcare Reform (2015)). Most tellingly, what was (and still is) an entitlement to ‘early education’ becomes increasingly spoken of in terms of ‘childcare’. Schools and local authorities advertise the extension of 15 hours per week of free early education for 2-year-olds from lower income families as ‘free childcare for 2-yearolds’. A report from the current Conservative government (2015–) on the use made of this educational entitlement, though specifically described as ‘early education’ in its first paragraph, is titled ‘Take up of government funded childcare by two-year-olds’ (English Department for Education, 2016); while a recent national study, an annual ‘Childcare Survey’ conducted by an organisation titled the Family and Childcare Trust, is reported

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in the following confused terms in a national newspaper under the heading ‘More than 40,000 young children miss out on free early education, report says’: Tens of thousands of three-year-olds are missing out on free early education, according to research that comes amid growing concerns over local authorities’ capacity to deliver expanded free childcare. The report, by the Family and Childcare Trust, claims that 41,000 three-year-olds are being denied the free childcare to which they are entitled … [The chief executive of the Trust] said: ‘extra free childcare is of no use to working parents if they can’t find a place for their child. To make childcare really work for parents, we want to see the right to an early education place brought in line with the right to a school place’. (The Guardian, 24 February 2016; emphasis added)

Perhaps most striking of all, the Conservative government in 2015 announced a doubling of the free entitlement for 3- and 4-year-olds, from 15 to 30 hours a week. However, this additional time is not to be ‘early education’ for all children but ‘a free childcare entitlement’ that is to be limited to children with employed parents. The targeted measure is being legislated for in a ‘Childcare Act’. Rather than evolving a broad concept of education, able to incorporate both care and the needs of working parents within an integrated whole, the split in thinking between ‘early education’ and ‘childcare’ remains. Indeed, the trend seems to be moving away from integration within education towards the increasing dominance of ‘childcare’ in early childhood services. The image of early childhood services that emerges is as, first and foremost, a place to put children so their parents can go out to work.

What place for ‘care’ in early childhood services? In the second part of this chapter, I want to draw out four policy conclusions, about both the integration of early childhood services

and the place of ‘care’ in such services: (1) a fully integrated service – covering all eight structural and conceptual dimensions – needs to be situated within the education system and centred on providing education for children, but education understood in a broad sense; (2) ‘childcare for working parents’ is a necessary but not central function of a fully integrated service; (3) ‘care’ has a vital part to play in an integrated system, but understood as an ethic; and (4) the need for a wider and integrated range of policies to support employed parents. Let me develop these points.

A Fully Integrated System Centred on Education With one exception4 all countries that have fully integrated early childhood services have placed them within the education system, as have those countries (including England) that have started on the road to integration, without completing the journey. There are good reasons for placement in education rather than welfare. An ethos of universal and free entitlement sits comfortably in education, following many years of free, universal compulsory education. The education system recognises the need for well-qualified and (relatively) well-paid professionals to work with children. And the education system should provide the basis for a strong and equal partnership between early childhood services and compulsory schooling. Of course, this advocacy of education as the basis for an early childhood system carries potential dangers – not least, a process of what has been termed ‘schoolification’, where early childhood simply becomes the handmaiden of compulsory education, reduced to ‘readying’ young children for the next stage on an educational conveyor belt; and, in the process, experiencing (in the words of the first OECD Starting Strong report) downward pressure to ‘adopt the content and methods of the primary school’, with

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a ‘detrimental effect on young children’s learning’ (OECD, 2001, p. 129). That is a very real danger, though not inevitable; other relationships between early childhood and compulsory education are possible (for an exploration of some of these potential relationships, see Moss, 2013). Another danger is that an early childhood service based on education becomes narrowly focused, not only on a restricted idea of education, but unable to open itself up to other projects and possibilities or to open itself out to the wider world, becoming confined instead to what goes on in the classroom, unconcerned with the wider conditions and needs of the families and communities it serves. A narrowly conceived education service may, for example, pay no attention to the conditions and needs of working parents, providing school hours that bear little relation to working times, forcing parents into making contorted and costly arrangements to bridge the resultant gaps. These are indeed dangers associated with an education-based early childhood system, but again possibilities rather than inevitabilities, risks that are known and avoidable. When referring to an education in a broad sense, I mean an education that adopts a holistic approach to the child, rather than just a narrow focus on certain aspects of cognitive development and predefined learning goals. In the words of Loris Malaguzzi, the Italian educator who played a leading role in the evolution of the world-famous municipal schools in Reggio Emilia, ‘education is no longer the art of teaching; in its broadest sense it becomes assistance with the psychological growth and maturing of human beings, making possible the growth of a rich, original, socially and individually normal personality’ (Cagliari, Castegnetti, Giudici, Rinaldi, Vecchi & Moss, 2016, p. 41). He saw this broad educational approach as attempting to do justice to an image of the child that he referred to as the ‘rich child’. There are, he said,

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rich children and poor children. We [in the municipal schools of Reggio Emilia] say all children are rich, there are no poor children. All children whatever their culture, whatever their lives are rich, better equipped, more talented, stronger and more intelligent than we can suppose. (ibid., p. 397)

Rich children are born with a ‘hundred languages’, the term Malaguzzi used to suggest the many and diverse ways children have of expressing themselves and relating to the world – ranging from manifold forms of art, music and dance to maths, sciences and technologies. ‘Rich’ children are not only complex and holistic beings, but competent and determined from birth to make meaning of the world. They are protagonists, not ‘bottles to be filled … [but] active in constructing the self and knowledge through social interactions and inter-dependencies’ (ibid., p. 377); not bearers of needs, but of rights, values and competencies. Of the handful of countries that have fully integrated their early childhood services, as well as New Zealand (the Anglophone country that has gone furthest towards achieving full integration (Mitchell, 2015)), all have adopted this broad educational approach as the basis for integration.

‘Childcare for Working Parents’ as a Necessary but not Central Function Placing an integrated early childhood service in the education system and with an education focus does not preclude these services assuming additional functions and purposes, for example parental support, adult learning, acting as a community resource and as a site for the practice of democratic politics – and, of course, ensuring children attending are safe and secure during opening hours that are responsive to the working times of most parents. In such cases, services provide what is currently termed ‘childcare for working parents’: but this function is not particularly

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prominent, and certainly not central to their identity. An interesting example of determining the identity of early childhood services comes again from the Italian city of Reggio Emilia. From 1963, alongside a number of other towns and cities in Northern Italy, Reggio Emilia began to provide its own services for young children, starting first with 3- to 6-years-olds, then adding provision for children under 3-years-old. A key role in this development was played by Loris Malaguzzi, employed by the city council first as a consultant for early childhood services, then as director. For him, it was vital in the early days to establish the identity of these new city services, and in particular to distinguish them from the negative identity that clung historically to such provision – as welfareorientated services that substituted for mothers and whose staff were primarily to display motherly qualities (the old term of ‘scuola materna’ – motherly school – captures this idea). The identity he wanted to construct was very different: of services as schools that were first and foremost for young children and their education, understood as education-inits-­broadest-sense (the new term adopted by Malaguzzi and his fellow reformers for services for 3- to 6-year-olds – scuola dell’infanzia – embodies this concept). Speaking in 1986 about services for children under 3 years, Malaguzzi highlights the issue of identity: what is needed today is to try and give the asilo nido an identity of a philosophical nature, an ideological nature if you like, a pedagogical and cultural nature, where nidi are set up as institutions with a profile not so much of welfare, care and substituting the family, or only of these; but as institutions that instead take up the task of participating and co-participating in children’s education. (ibid., pp. 315–316)

Passionate though he was about the educational identity of the city’s schools and its integrated 0–6 system, he recognised there were other considerations, not least the need to pay attention to parents’ employment when

considering opening times and children’s hours of attendance. In a speech in 1975, he says that with regard to opening hours: our feeling is hours should be based on the principle that schools are offered as a social service for families as well as being tools for children’s education. The time children spend in school must therefore be assessed in relation to real family situations. Generally it is true that long and undifferentiated school hours conflict with children’s need for other situations and experiences (in the family, in the neighbourhood etc.). However it is also true that the reality of a working family is determined by the working hours of mothers and fathers and the practical impossibility of guaranteeing real family relations outside school hours. In the light of these considerations we feel obliged to say schools must adapt to factory hours, progressively opening up to workers’ children with improved responses to family needs, while maintaining as far as possible the opportunity for parents to collect children at different times. (ibid., p. 212)

So while Malaguzzi saw tensions and contradictions in aligning school days with working days, he accepted the need to recognise the reality of family lives and to adapt to it. He understood that schools had to take account of the world outside and of the employment of parents – they needed to incorporate what today is called ‘childcare for working parents’. But while he acknowledged the need for ‘childcare for working parents’, Malaguzzi put it in its rightful place: not at the centre of the Reggio project, but as something that the core educational project in Reggio needed to factor into its organisation; while care, understood in its broadest sense as the showing of love and the bestowing of sensitive attention, was something owed to all children, whatever the employment status of their parents.

‘Care’ is Vital in an Integrated System – but Understood as an Ethic The integration of early childhood services, I have argued, should be based on education,

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for positive reasons already outlined; but there are also negative reasons that concern avoiding problems that arise when identifying a service with ‘care’ – be it ‘childcare’, ‘daycare’ or ‘social care’. Typically, the meaning of ‘care’ in such ‘care services’ is rarely articulated, and becomes by default understood as a package of practical activities applied to dependent others, children or adults, and as a commodity that needs to be delivered to and paid for by customers, in the case of England’s ‘childcare services’ meaning parents purchasing care in a private market. Not only is ‘care’ in this context far too narrow to ensure a holistic approach to working with children, or anyone else, but ‘care’ as a descriptor applied to services and workers invariably becomes synonymous with work that has low status, qualifications and pay. For conceptualising services in terms of care is a recipe for low quality employment and low valued work. Perhaps it should not be, but in reality it is, most likely because it expresses a particular understanding of the work: as something akin to what is done ‘naturally’ by women in the home, especially as mothers, and as such assumed to require little in the way of education, reflection or judgement when transferred to the public arena (Cameron & Moss, 2007). Even when this quasi-maternal image shifts, with an acknowledgement of the need for a better qualified care workforce, it moves up only a notch to the image of a low-skilled technician, with basic training in how to apply technologies to children consistently and without much need for thought and analysis of practice. To say that services should not be defined or described in terms of ‘care’ does not mean that care is unimportant and irrelevant. Quite the reverse: ‘care’ is vital and highly relevant to early childhood services – and indeed to schools, universities, hospitals or virtually any other public service or institution that you care to name. But not ‘care’ understood simply as a commodity, as a package of activities, something done

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to ‘poor’ children or adults, who are understood to be dependent and deficient. Rather ‘care’ understood as an ethic that should pervade all relationships, and not just in early childhood services. What is an ethic of care? Joan Tronto describes it as involving both particular acts of caring and a general habit of mind that should inform all aspects of life and which includes attentiveness, responsibility, competence and responsiveness (Tronto, 1993). With Berenice Fisher, Tronto further defines caring as a species activity that includes everything we do to maintain, continue and repair our ‘world’ so we can live in it as well as possible … That world includes our bodies, our selves and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web. (Fisher & Tronto, 1990, p. 40)

Note that care as an ethic is both about what we do and about a certain sensibility; and it should pervade everything we do and cover all relationships – to ourselves, to others and to our planet. Care as an ethic, as a relational ideal, moves us well away from a narrow view of care as simply a bundle of tasks that can be commodified and traded. My policy proposal is therefore very simple. That early childhood services should be fully integrated, within the education system and with a primary function of providing ­ education-in-its-broadest-sense for all children. That the hours of opening of these services should take account of parents’ employment, since we live in a world where most parents, women and men, are employed. That the place of care in these primarily educational services should be as an ethic, part of the relational ethics that should be inscribed into all relationships and practices. And that care as an ethic, as a relational ethic, should apply to everyone and everything within a service as well as everyone and everything outwith to which the service relates: so children certainly, but also all adults, the community and the environment.

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The Need for Wider Policy Support of Employed Parents As a footnote, I want to make one more policy-related point. Early childhood services have an important part to play in supporting employed parents, or to adopt Eurospeak in helping to achieve ‘a reconciliation of employment and family responsibilities’, and in a way that is consistent with, indeed promotes, gender equality. I have argued that they play this part not by being ‘childcare services’, but rather education services that recognise parental employment in their opening hours and that adopt an ethic of care that applies to everyone within and related to the service, irrespective of employment status. But such services are not enough for ‘reconciliation’; they are necessary but not sufficient conditions. An effective reconciliation policy requires a number of complementary and integrated policies. These include well-paid and flexible leave policies, designed to ensure use by mothers and fathers, and which dovetail with entitlements to early childhood services; changes in the organisation of work and the culture of the workplace, that accommodate the care responsibilities of the workforce; and a range of measures to promote and sustain more equal sharing of the upbringing of children between women and men. And all premised on a new way of thinking about how we organise and live life, what Nancy Fraser has called a ‘universal caregiver model’: [T]he trick is to imagine a social world in which citizens’ lives integrate wage earning, caregiving, community activism, political participation, and involvement in the associational life of civil society – while also leaving time for some fun. This world is not likely to come into being in the immediate future, but it is the only imaginable postindustrial world that promises true gender equity. And unless we are guided by this vision now, we will never get any closer to achieving it. (Fraser, 1997, p. 62)

Note here how ‘caregiving’ is understood in a broad sense, as in the ethics of care, extending its application to many relationships: to care of the self, of others and the wider society.

Conclusion I have argued that ‘care’ should have an important place in early childhood services, and that it can live in a comfortable relationship with ‘education’. But to arrive at this point has called for thinking about what meaning is to be given to both terms, and in particular to apply thick, rich descriptions: of care as an ethic and of education as a broad concept, both integral to human wellbeing and flourishing. Care then becomes one of the defining features of a service with a strong educational identity, contributing to the relational practice that is at the heart of education. Can an ethic be part of policy? I think it can and should, just as policy can and should enunciate the fundamental values of a service and the image of the child that it chooses to adopt. Near the end of his life, Loris Malaguzzi during an interview insisted that ‘a declaration [about the image of the child] is not only a necessary act of clarity and correctness, it is the necessary premise for any pedagogical theory, and any pedagogical project’ (ibid., p. 374). I think he was right. And just as a declaration, a statement, about the image of the child should form part of any policy, so too I believe should a declaration of the meaning we attach to ‘care’ and ‘education’, and of how we conceptualise the relationship between them.

Notes 1  Entitlement to a place in a preschool is from 12 months of age, before which age virtually all children are at home with a parent, taking advantage of the well-paid parental leave entitlement. An entitlement to a preschool place for children of employed or studying parents was introduced in 1995.  2  For example, the maximum monthly cost for a first child is SKK1,260 (GBP110), and reduces for subsequent children.   3  To increase choice and competition, the early education entitlement can be provided not only by schools but by all ‘childcare’ services that meet certain conditions.  4  The exception is Denmark, whose early childhood services have a social pedagogic focus, not dissimilar to the notion of education-in-its-broadest-sense discussed below but seen as distinct from school-based

What Place for ‘Care’ in Early Childhood Policy?

education. Danish services have been placed, alongside other social pedagogic services, within the social welfare system (for a discussion of social pedagogy in services for children, see Cameron and Moss, 2011).

References Cagliari, P., Castegnetti, M., Giudici, C., Rinaldi, C., Vecchi, V., & Moss, P. (2016) Loris Malaguzzi and the Schools of Reggio Emilia: A selection of his writings and speeches 1945–1993. London: Routledge. Cameron, C., & Moss, P. (2007) Care Work in Europe: Current understandings and future directions. London: Routledge. Cameron, C., & Moss, P. (eds) (2011) Social Pedagogy and Working with Children and Young People. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishing. English Department for Education (2013a) More Great Childcare: Raising quality and giving parents more choice. https://www. gov.uk/government/publications/moregreat-childcare-raising-quality-and-givingparents-more-choice English Department for Education (2013b) More Affordable Childcare. https://www. gov.uk/government/publications/moreaffordable-childcare English Department for Education (2016) Take up of government funded childcare by twoyear-olds. https://www.gov.uk/government/ uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/ file/504568/take-up_of_government-funded_ childcare_by_2-year-olds.pdf English Department for Education and Skills and other government departments (2002) Delivering for Children and Families: Interdepartmental Childcare Review. http://dera. ioe.ac.uk/8814/2/su%20children.pdf European Commission/EACEA/Eurydice/Eurostat (2014) Key Data on Early Childhood Education and Care in Europe. 2014 Edition. Eurydice and Eurostat Report. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. http://eacea.ec.europa.eu/education/eurydice/documents/key_data_series/166EN.pdf Fisher, B., & Tronto, J. (1990) ‘Toward a feminist theory of caring’, in E. Abel and M. Nelson (eds) Circles of Care, Work and Identity in Women’s Lives. New York: State University of New York Press.

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Fraser, N. (1997) ‘After the family wage: A postindustrial thought experiment’, in Justice Interruptus: Critical reflections on the ‘postsocialist’ condition. New York: Routledge. Kaga, Y., Bennett, J., & Moss, P. (2010) Caring and Learning Together: Cross-national research on the integration of ECCE within education. Paris: UNESCO. unesdoc.unesco. org/images/0018/001878/187818E.pdf Korpi, B.M. (2007) The Politics of Pre-school: Intentions and decisions underlying the emergence and growth of the Swedish Pre-school. Stockholm: Swedish Ministry of Education and Research. http://www.government.se/contenta ssets/4b768a5cd6c24e0cb70b4393eadf4f6a/ the-politics-of-pre-school—intentions-anddecisions-underlying-the-emergence-andgrowth-of-the-swedish-pre-school Lenz Taguchi, H., & Munkammar, I. (2003) Consolidating Governmental Early Childhood Education and Care Services Under the Ministry of Education and Science: A Swedish case study. Paris: UNESCO. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/ images/0013/001301/130135e.pdf Mitchell, L. (2015) ‘Shifting directions in ECEC policy in New Zealand: from a child rights to an interventionist approach’, International Journal of Early Years Education, 23(3), 288–302. Moss, P. (2012) ‘Caring and learning together: Exploring the relationship between parental leave and early childhood education and care’, European Journal of Education, 47(4), 482–493. Moss, P. (ed.) (2013) Early Childhood and Compulsory Education: Reconceptualising the relationship. London: Routledge. New Zealand Ministry of Education (2014) Teachers in Early Childhood Education. https://www.­educationcounts.govt.nz/statistics/archived/ece2/ece-indicators/541900 OECD (2001) Starting Strong I. Paris: OECD. Skolverket (2010) Curriculum for the Preschool Lpfö 98 Revised 2010. Stockholm: Skolverket. http://www.skolverket.se/om-skolverket/ publikationer/visa-enskild-publikation?_ xurl_=http%3A%2F%2Fwww5.skolverket.se% 2Fwtpub%2Fws%2Fskolbok%2Fwpubext%2Ft rycksak%2FBlob%2Fpdf2704.pdf%3Fk% 3D270 Tronto, J. (1993) Moral Boundaries: A political argument for the ethics of care. London: Routledge.

16 Early Childhood Education and Care: Poverty and Access – Perspectives from England Eva Lloyd

Introduction English early childhood education and care (ECEC) provision has featured on governmental policy agendas and benefitted from public funding for a long time compared to ECEC in other high- and medium-income nations. Yet, the recent history of ECEC policy change in England illustrates how shifts in the relative weight accorded to different policy aims over time may have farreaching consequences for children in low-income families’ access to high quality provision (Moss, 2014a; Penn, 2009). This relates to their access within the private-forprofit childcare market, a prominent feature of the English early childhood service system, as much as to access to early childhood education within state-funded primary and nursery schools (Gambaro, Stewart & Waldfogel, 2013; Mathers & Smees, 2014). The decision to focus on English data in this chapter stems from the similarities and differences that characterise the ECEC policy and

funding systems of the four nations making up the UK. After 1998, when a Devolution Act was implemented (HM Government, 2013), local jurisdictions gained the power to legislate in the area of early education policy and practice, notably around the size of the early education entitlement, the curriculum, workforce qualifications and funding streams (Fitzgerald & Kay, 2016). Recent early education policy change in England has often preceded that in the other UK jurisdictions, although within the four systems similarities outweigh difference. In contrast, responsibility for childcare policy and funding mechanisms via the tax and benefits systems remains the responsibility of central government departments and there are no national differences in this respect. Although developments in early education policy implementation in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are intrinsically interesting, an English ECEC case study was deemed adequate to illustrate this chapter’s main argument. First, this chapter sets out the policy rationale framework which now tends to underpin

ECEC: English perspectives on poverty and access

public support for ECEC systems in OECD countries. During a period of Labour government between 1997 and 2010, the English early childhood policy framework underwent a substantial transformation. Although some of this period’s achievements have been diluted or abandoned since 2010, several structural features were consolidated under two subsequent governments. After exploring the impact of the 1997– 2010 Labour government on ECEC expansion and innovation in some detail, this chapter proceeds to analyse the barriers to ECEC access that continue to affect children growing up in low-income families in England. This is followed by a brief examination of international evidence for policies and strategies aimed at ensuring more equitable access to high quality ECEC services within similar marketised ECEC systems. Finally, some lessons are drawn from recent English early childhood policymaking experience and their impact. In this way this chapter aims to highlight potential implications for other nations at different stages of developing their ECEC policies.

ECEC policy rationales OECD Member states employ several policy rationales to justify state support for early childhood education and care provision (Penn, 2011a). The first is the social mobility rationale for investment in ECEC, which has been a major policy driver since the middle of the twentieth century. It aims for a longerterm impact. This presupposes that ECEC helps close the gap in educational attainment between children growing up in low-income families and their better-off peers and improves their life chances. In England this policy rationale is reflected in publicly provided early education delivered in state nursery schools or nursery classes attached to primary schools, or in public subsidies to private childcare businesses, like day nurseries, to deliver this provision (Lloyd, 2012a).

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In contrast, a second, more recent, policy rationale is an economic wellbeing rationale for public support for ECEC, aiming for more short-term impact. This posits that such provision enables parental – particularly m ­ aternal – employment and hence helps eliminate or avoid poverty within families with young children (Lloyd & Potter, 2014). In England and across the UK this rationale is reflected in a system of parental subsidies through the tax and benefits system to help parents pay for childcare costs over and above their children’s early education entitlement for children aged under 3 and for out-of-school care for older children (Penn & Lloyd, 2013). Finally, in England and the three devolved UK administrations, as well as in other European and OECD countries, a third, social justice, rationale is also in evidence. This assigns ECEC a role in eliminating social and cultural inequalities and underachievement and in promoting the inclusion of children with transient or permanent learning or physical disabilities (Leseman, 2009). Elsewhere, especially in the Nordic countries, the promotion of gender equality and equitable labourmarket access for men and women is also clearly seen as part of ECEC’s social justice rationale (Ellingsaeter & Leira, 2006). ECEC rationales interact with other measures aiming to support families with young children, notably parental leave policies (Kamerman & Moss, 2009) and direct fiscal support for childrearing (OECD, 2011). These interactions add to the challenges facing governments in agreeing a coherent programme of parental leave policies and financial support for families and for ECEC provision (Plantenga & Remery, 2009). Such challenges are magnified in majority world countries, where state support for ECEC is more variable or absent altogether (Penn, 2012). In recent policy discourses in England and beyond, the first rationale has become closely associated with the approach of Nobel Prize winning economist James Heckman. He applied human capital theory to the role of early childhood education and care in

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human development (Heckman, 2000). This approach emphasises economic returns from public investments in ECEC and favours the use of cost–benefit analyses to measure this. Heckman concluded that substantial public investment in ECEC and its infrastructure, such as the workforce, are highly effective and his theory became influential in policy circles across the world, helping raise ECEC’s profile and promote investment. Nevertheless, Heckman’s arguments also attracted considerable criticism. For instance, Buzelli (2015, p. 216) argues that it undervalues ECEC’s contribution to development as it ‘provides a limited view of the goals and impact of early education programs on children’s development’, which is a concern shared, for instance, by Moss (2009) and Campbell-Barr and Nygård (2014). At times, the three main ECEC rationales may be in competition, while the relative importance attached to each in national policymaking may also change between different governments. Shifts in policy emphasis may even occur within the same administration (Lloyd, 2015). Moreover, there may be striking contradictions between the policies informed by these rationales, the chosen policy instruments such as direct service provision, or parental tax credits and benefits, and the format of a country’s ECEC services and service systems. This may also be evident where public funding levels are comparable. An example of such effects is provided in a comparative study by Van Lancker and Ghysels (2011). They demonstrated differences between the social distribution of publicly funded childcare in Sweden and Belgian Flanders. Despite identical per capita expenditure, Sweden, which does not employ a marketised ECEC system, had a more equal social distribution of ECEC services than Flemish Belgium. ECEC policy rationales may be affected by prevailing attitudes (Plantenga & Remery, 2009, p. 53), national politics (Moss, 2012) and changing perspectives on the role of welfare states (Hemerijck, 2012). They are directly linked to how and how much state

support is invested in an ECEC service system (Penn & Lloyd, 2013) and to how its costs are allocated between governments, parents and service providers. The way in which state support is allocated and its delivery model may lead to differences in impact on the services and hence on the children using them. Frequently, the ECEC funding system’s format militates against the successful realisation of the impacts intended by the rationales underpinning public funding. Children growing up in poverty are most at risk from this lack of synergy between ECEC policy intentions and their implementation where a marketised early childhood system is the dominant model (Lloyd & Penn, 2012). This applies to England and indeed to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The following sections of the present chapter will clarify the nature and operations of so-called marketised ECEC systems and provide a more detailed description. While in principle state support for ECEC is meant to benefit all young children, the three rationales each clearly imply that states must make extra efforts to ensure services reach children at risk of exclusion from ECEC. National (Sylva, Melhuish, Sammons, Siraj-Blatchford & Taggart, 2010) and international (Lindeboom & Duiskool, 2013) research has also produced convincing evidence of the need for high service quality in all forms of ECEC provision if it is to promote children’s present well-being and their future life chances. Low-quality provision not only poses a greater risk to the life chances of children growing up with disadvantage, but also negatively affects children’s direct ECEC experience (Bennett, Gordon & Edelmann, 2012). Persistent variety both in ECEC services and in the social, legal, regulatory and financing systems supporting them, is a characteristic of early childhood service systems in most OECD member states (OECD, 2006). Such variety is best explained with reference to these systems’ differing historical, cultural and institutional context (Rigby, Tarrant & Neuman, 2007; Scheiwe & Willekens, 2009). In Europe for instance, many ECEC systems continue to be split functionally between early education

ECEC: English perspectives on poverty and access

and childcare services, and between services for children aged zero to 3 and those aged 3 to school starting age, usually at 6 (European Commission, 2014); local and central government level responsibilities may be assigned to different departments (Kaga, Bennett & Moss, 2010). In practice this means that the social mobility rationale primarily underpins services for children aged 3 to 6, whereas childcare provision building on the economic well being rationale may apply to either age group. The cross-­cutting social justice rationale may be reflected across early education and childcare policies and their associated policy instruments. The English early childhood service system arguably embodies one of the more problematic manifestations of such dichotomies and contradictions, as this chapter aims to demonstrate. This aspect of the English ECEC system, recent policy developments and their impact on children in low-income families may be easier to interpret if they are first briefly placed within their historical context.

A brief history of twentieth century English ECEC Alongside the introduction of free and nonreligious compulsory education for children aged 5 and over in 1880, non-compulsory early education developed in England from the late nineteenth century onwards. It was only after 1918 that such provision, then largely provided by charitable bodies and faith-based organisations, became eligible for limited and geographically uneven public funding. State-funded nursery schools and classes attached to primary schools made an appearance during the 1930s. However, stateprovided education for 3- to 5-year-olds remained firmly targeted at children in lowincome families and was mostly found in disadvantaged areas, thus reflecting the social mobility rationale for investment. Early education would not become a

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universal entitlement in England and across the UK until after 1997 (Penn, 2009). The parallel growth of childcare provision for the children of employed parents – in practice, mothers were to remain the primary target of any policy interventions in this area – ­followed a different and equally slow trajectory. With the exception of the World War II (WWII) period 1939–1945, when state day nurseries were rapidly set up to care for the children of the many mothers employed in munitions factories, childcare largely remained a private parental responsibility, apart from some state day-nursery provision catering for the children of lone mothers. The resulting mixed childcare market was made up of small community day nurseries and small private-for-profit childcare businesses, including family daycare businesses run by so-called childminders (Penn, 2009). The institution of the British nanny remained firmly outside the remit of policymaking (Gregson & Lowe, 1994). Alongside these two strands of provision a third – social welfare – strand of family support provision had emerged, embodied by a variety of family centres aiming their services at families with young children on low incomes, or with other kinds of problems, including child protection issues. These centres were either run by local government themselves, on their behalf, or independently by national non-governmental organisations (NGOs) like Save the Children and Barnardo’s. Alongside a variety of family support services, parenting training, job-seeking help and adult education, some of these centres also provided early childhood education and care (Lloyd, 2012b). Free and universal maternity and child health services came into existence in 1948 as a result of the establishment of the British National Health Service (NHS). Although since then there have been attempts to integrate some maternity and child provision into what have come to be known as Sure Start Children’s Centres, overall these services remain quite separate from ECEC provision. They are therefore not discussed further within this chapter. Worth noting is that this situation in England

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contrasts with that in middle- and low-income countries, where health interventions are much more integrated with Early Childhood Development (ECD) provision (Lloyd, 2012c). As a result, England’s ECEC system in the late twentieth century featured an entrenched early education and childcare divide; differences between the remit, qualifications, training, employment conditions and remuneration of the three different early education, childcare and family support workforces; and split responsibilities between several departments at central and local government level (Penn, 2009). The three workforces deserve further attention. Qualified early years teachers supported by assistants with childcare qualifications were responsible for delivering early education in state-funded early education; childcare practitioners, many with minimal or no qualifications, worked in the private childcare sector, while a more highly trained family support workforce, including qualified social workers, delivered family support services in family centres.

Table 16.1 illustrates the early childhood service system inherited by the social-­ democratic Labour government that came to power in 1997. Most surprising perhaps about the ECEC system illustrated in Table 16.1 is the fact that until 1997 there was no universal entitlement to early education for 3- and 4-year-old children. Such provision was mainly found in Labour Party controlled municipalities. As a response to the continuing absence of sufficient early education, the pre-school playgroup movement had emerged. This was a major maternal self-help initiative where groups were sustained with the help of volunteers, mostly mothers (Penn, 2009). Only three countries in Europe would develop this type of private, not-for-profit early education provision the UK, the Netherlands and Ireland (Statham, Lloyd, Moss, Melhuish & Owen, 1990). Furthermore, until the late 1990s there was no state support for parental childcare costs. Childcare was delivered within a mixed market of mostly small private-for-profit and not-for-profit day nurseries and day nursery

Table 16.1  English early childhood service system up to 1997 Provision

Format

Ages

Location

Funding

Issues

Early education

Part-time (3 to 3.5 hours) or full- time (6 to 7 hours) daily during term-time; not universal

3 and 4

State nursery schools, Free to parents; Insufficient places; nursery classes and central very uneven reception classes1 government geographical in state primary funded via distribution of schools; playgroups/ local authority provision pre-schools schools budgets; parental fees for playgroups/ pre-schools

Childcare

Flexible up to 50 0 to 5 and weeks annually ‘wraparound’ for school-age children

Social welfare provision

Targeted In 0 upwards response to identified need

Private-for-profit/ not-for-profit day nurseries; family daycare (childminders); municipal day nurseries and family centres

Parental fees; Insufficient income-related places; uneven parental fees geographical or free in local distribution; government socially funded segregated provision provision; variable quality Municipal and not-for- Local government Insufficient profit family centres provision

Source: Author Note1: The most junior class in state primary schools admitting children during the year in which they attain compulsory school age

ECEC: English perspectives on poverty and access

chains. The provision of social welfare services for families with young children in different types of family centres was often very patchy (Lloyd, 2012b).

English ECEC between 1997 and 2010 When a Labour government assumed office in 1997, this heralded a 13-year period of sustained ECEC and social welfare innovation and expansion, as Labour won a majority in three elections in a row. The new government set out straight away to make a reality of an accessible, affordable and high quality ECEC system. The policy framework developed to guide this process reflected a neoliberal economics approach, translated into the injection of public funding into the existing mixed market economy of small private childcare businesses (Lloyd, 2008). This had major consequences for children’s equitable access within the resulting ECEC system, as will be discussed below. These developments also generated potentially valuable lessons for other countries wishing to build or expand ECEC systems with the help of private sector partners. The consolidation of the mixed market ECEC economy in England persists today. Within such a mixed ECEC economy as now found in England, private and state ECEC provision co-exist and this system is often referred to as a ‘childcare market’ (Lloyd & Penn, 2012). Since the turn of this century, early education in England has been delivered within this childcare market as well as in a parallel system of state provision (Lloyd, 2012a). This contrasts with the situation in the Netherlands (Plantenga, 2012) and in France (Martin & Le Bihan, 2009), where state-funded early education is delivered in nursery departments within primary schools and the market model only characterises the childcare system. Among the private-for-profit childcare providers that operate in such markets may be corporate businesses (Penn, 2011b). Different geographic and socio-economic contexts, rural versus urban locations and well-to-do versus

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disadvantaged areas, may lead to a variety of childcare markets within the same country, as in England (Dickens, Taylor & La Valle, 2005). In contrast, direct and significant public funding of universal ECEC services has continued in several European countries, including provision for 3- to 6-year-olds in France (Martin & Le Bihan, 2009) and for children aged 0 to 6 in the Nordic countries (Hiilamo, 2008). These countries regard ECEC as a ‘public good’, a concept within economics justifying substantial public investment in both the services themselves and their infrastructure (Cleveland & Krashinski, 2003). Services and infrastructure are seen as key to ensuring equitable and universal access for all children, irrespective of their parents’ socio-economic position (Bennett et al., 2012). A trend emerged towards the introduction of market principles in ECEC and other educational and social services (Penn, 2013). This did not remain confined to England, but featured in other European and OECD countries, including those which had previously featured ECEC systems dominated by public provision. This trend reflected the view that market forces were more efficient and more effective than public agencies in securing ECEC’s provision and funding. Guaranteeing children equitable and universal access to quality ECEC services becomes particularly problematic if a substantial proportion of providers within such a market are forprofit businesses, as is the case in England (Lloyd & Penn, 2012). The dynamics of competition may drive provision into economically more prosperous areas, as happened in the Netherlands (Noailly & Visser, 2009), where it also affected quality (Akgunduz & Plantenga, 2014). It may also put pressure on staff pay, conditions and inservice training, the largest cost in any business and one of the key factors in ensuring service quality (Moss & Bennett, 2010). As Woodrow describes elsewhere in this Volume (Chapter 32), an over-reliance on inadequately regulated sizeable private forprofit nursery chains may lead to major problems for parents and policymakers if such a dominant chain collapses, as happened in Australia in 2008 (Press & Woodrow, 2005, 2009).

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In only three European nations, the UK (for children from birth to 5 years of age), Ireland (for some children from birth to 5 years of age) and the Netherlands (for children up to 3 years of age), are parents offered income-related public subsidies such as tax credits or vouchers, to help them buy early childhood provision in such a market (Penn, 2013, p. 3). For the Labour government the mixed market became the preferred site for ECEC public subsidies; as a result, the marketisation and privatisation of childcare provision became much more pronounced after 1997 (Cohen, Moss, Petrie & Wallace, 2004; Penn, 2007). By 2007, private for-profit providers, both corporate chains and sole traders or small partnerships, made up 78 per cent of the UK children’s day nursery market, as compared with 11 per cent each supplied by the private not-for-profit and public sectors (Laing & Buisson, 2007). The parallel system of state nursery schools and nursery classes attached to state primary schools did not receive a comparable public funding boost during this period (Lloyd, 2008). A major positive development under the Labour government was the introduction of an ‘entitlement’ to universal part-time early education for 3- and 4-year-olds in England and in the rest of the UK. Simultaneously, this government consolidated the other two strands of the early childhood service system it had inherited, childcare and social welfare provision, rather than engaging in much more radical reform of the system (Moss, 2014a). No change occurred in the unequal geographical distribution of state nursery schools and classes, which were mainly found in disadvantaged areas, while playgroups were incorporated into the childcare system and effectively became day nurseries. Private-forprofit and not-for-profit childcare businesses, including childminders, but not private nannies, became eligible for direct public subsidies to deliver early education, provided certain quality, including staffing, and safeguarding criteria were met (Penn, 2007). At central government level ECEC became the responsibility of the Department for Children, Schools and Families. From 2004

ECEC became the responsibility of local government children’s services departments, removing the split between education and social services departments. Regulation and inspection duties were transferred from local government to the Office for Standards in Education and Skills (Ofsted) in 2000. By force of the 2006 Childcare Act, such requirements were transformed into the Early Years Foundation Phase, the statutory programme setting standards for the learning, development and care of children from birth to 5 years old (DCSF, 2008). It soon transpired that poor families, predominantly large families, families with a disabled child or parent, and Black and minority ethnic families, were no more likely to access early education for their 3- and 4-year-olds than before (Kazimirski, Southwood & Bryson, 2006; Speight, Smith, Coshall & Lloyd, 2010). The decision to introduce a targeted service in order to improve the uptake of universal early education among disadvantaged 3- and 4-year-old children (HM Treasury, 2004), led to the piloting of early education for two year old children living with disadvantage (Smith et  al., 2009). As it turned out, these children would mostly find places within the private childcare market, where provision quality was demonstrably less (Gambaro et al., 2013), rather than in state nursery schools and classes. Table 16.2 illustrates the format of the English early childhood service system and its main public funding by late 2010, after 13 years of a Labour government. Under Labour, the 2006 Childcare Act (England and Wales) also provided the legal underpinning for a diminished role for local government in respect of coordinating early education and childcare provision and the provision of ECEC (HM Government, 2006). The Act imposed on them a ‘childcare sufficiency duty’. This meant that they must ensure that enough early education and childcare places were available to meet parental demand. At the same time, there was no longer an expectation that the public authorities themselves would be responsible for filling gaps in provision by themselves providing parallel services within local early education and childcare

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markets. Municipalities could now only be ‘providers of last resort’. This meant that they could only directly provide services if it had proved entirely impossible to locate private providers to deliver these instead. The Labour government also introduced support for parents to help them afford the costs of childcare needed in addition to early education for 3 and 4 year olds, for children aged from birth to 3 and for after-school and holiday childcare. Parental childcare subsidies in the form of tax credits and employer childcare vouchers were introduced with the express intention of stimulating competition and quality within local childcare markets, thus promoting choice for employed parents (Lewis & Campbell, 2007). Many nursery schools in disadvantaged areas were transformed into ‘neighbourhood nurseries’ designed to prove that even here access to quality childcare provision could be realised, avoiding market failure (Smith, Coxon & Sigala, 2007). A new workforce development strategy, coupled with strategic funding, was aimed at promoting the employment of graduates

(Mathers et  al., 2011) and increasing the level of qualifications of the early childhood workforce as a whole. By gradually bringing the qualifications of the childcare workforce up to a level equivalent to that of the qualified graduate teachers working in state nursery education, the government intended to improve service quality overall. Targets were set for the employment of graduates to lead all ECEC provision, but no true parity was created with qualified teachers in state provision. Even now it remains the case that up to half of practitioners working in childcare provision can be unqualified, as long as they do not have any supervisory responsibilities (DfE, 2014). Within the third, social welfare, strand of provision, local authority provision, both day nurseries and multi-functional family centres (Lloyd, 2012b) were largely phased out in favour of the establishment of the multiagency Sure Start Centre initiative, a targeted programme for children aged 3 and under and their families living in disadvantaged areas. Designed to improve both children’s quality of life and school readiness (Belsky, Barnes

Table 16.2  English early childhood service system in 2010 Universal early education Format

15 hours weekly for 38 weeks annually 3 and 4

Targeted early education

Childcare

15 hours weekly Flexible up to for 38 weeks 50 weeks annually annually Ages 2-year-olds in 0 to 5 and ‘wraplow-income around’ for schoolfamilies age children Private for-profit Location State nursery schools State nursery schools and and not-for-profit and classes; classes; day day nurseries; state primary nurseries; family daycare school reception pre-schools (childminders); classes1; day nurseries; some municipal pre-schools family centres Funding Provider subsidy via Provider subsidy Parental fees; incomelocal government via local related parental government fees or free in local government-funded provision

Social welfare provision

Issues

Targeted in Flexible delivery only response to in private sector identified need provision 0 upwards 4-year-olds increasingly in state primary reception classes Municipal and Lack of access, choice not-for-profit and diversity in family centres disadvantaged areas; socially segregated provision; variable quality – lower in disadvantaged areas Local Parents always pay government up to 33% costs; only 33% parents receive any subsidies, retrospectively; fee increases

Source: Author Note1: The most junior class in state primary schools admitting children during the year in which they attain compulsory school age

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& Melhuish, 2007), across the UK more than 500 Sure Start centres came to deliver family support along community development lines, with considerable parental involvement (Belsky et al., 2007). The centres’ mix of family support provision included parenting education, drop-ins and crèches, family health provision and employment advice. In contrast, early education and childcare were only introduced in a limited number of Sure Start centres after 2004. The Labour government’s failure to create a much more integrated early childhood service system in this and in other respects reflected ‘path dependence’ in the design of policies and institutions (Penn, 2009). Pierson (2004, p. 10) used this concept to refer to ‘the dynamics of self-­reinforcing or positive feedback processes in a political system’. He illustrated how it could be usefully applied to the analysis of evolving social processes, dominant institutional arrangements and the power relations operating within these. By 2004 the government had already decided to extend the reach of Sure Start Children’s Centres to every community, some 3000 in all. The resulting ‘Children’s Centre’ model diverged from that of the original Sure Start centres to become more focused on families with young children growing up with disadvantage, rather than offering services to all families within areas of disadvantage (Bate & Foster, 2015). Despite having dramatically transformed the ECEC landscape in England and the rest of the UK, and having remained committed to the triple policy rationale for investing in ECEC, the Labour government ultimately failed to revisit the neoliberal principles underlying the marketisation of ECEC. Nor did it question the very basis on which services for young children were being provided (Moss, 2014b). Instead it consistently promoted market principles for the delivery of social welfare services, including ECEC. By the end of Labour’s third term, public funding levels for ECEC were being seriously affected by the economic recession (Lloyd & Penn, 2014).

Poverty and ECEC under Labour There were several, often profound, changes of ECEC policy direction during the three successive Labour administrations between 1997 and 2010. The triple rationale underpinning their policy framework, on the other hand, remained unchanged throughout. The policy reorientation almost invariably related to the need to address issues of lack of ECEC quality and accessibility for children growing up in poverty. Quite early on, the Labour government announced its intention to eradicate child poverty by 2020, that is within a generation (Blair, 1999). This commitment was prompted in part by an international focus on poverty eradication (UN, 1995), as well as by Britain’s ranking in terms of relative poverty among other industrialised nations (Hills, 2004). By the Millennium up to one third of British children’s lives were being affected by poverty (Pantazis, Gordon & Levitas, 2006). Among the children growing up with disadvantage those from Black and minority ethnic, lone parent or households with a disabled child or parent and those in the private rented housing sector were disproportionally represented. Then, as now, half of all children in poverty in the UK did live within working households (Lloyd, 2006). Consequently, increasing employment opportunities alongside boosting childcare provision in disadvantaged areas could only be part of the policy answer. Low pay was and is a key issue for England. On a par with its economic and academic repercussions for children’s life chances (Feinstein, Duckworth & Sabates, 2008), the social costs of poverty for children warranted an urgent and multifaceted response (Bradshaw, 2001). Child poverty levels arguably posed the greatest challenge to realising the government’s Ten Year Strategy for Childcare (HM Treasury, 2004) ambitions for consolidating the early childhood system so that it would reach all children. Truly equitable access to high quality early education and childcare for children growing up in poverty failed to materialise fully, despite a genuine policy intention

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to achieve this and the Labour government’s commitment to redistributive policies (Lloyd, 2006, 2008). Instead, the gap in educational attainment at primary school entry between children from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds and their better-off peers refused to close (Mathers, Sylva & Joshi, 2007) and private sector childcare prices steadily rose (Paull, 2014). Given the evidence of the potential impact of good quality early education on England’s disadvantaged children’s life chances (Apps, Mendolia & Walker, 2012; Sylva et al., 2010), emerging evidence of the risks to ECEC quality within the private childcare sector was especially disturbing. Low quality was identified as a possible risk factor in 3- and 4-year-old children’s unchanged educational outcomes at the end of primary education in a major qualitative study of outcome data for English children at ages five and eleven (Blanden, Del Bono, McNally & Rabe, 2016). Cost constraints limited choice for lowincome parents of 3- and 4-year-old children who wanted to buy childcare hours over and beyond the early education entitlement, particularly in disadvantaged areas (Dickens, Wollny & Ireland, 2012). Although generally of better quality, the available state provision offered less flexibility than the private ECEC sector. Hence the social stratification persisted that has characterised English ECEC provision for over a century (Ball & Vincent, 2005). This situation remains unchanged. Within the English childcare market, there is little choice for parents merely seeking free part-time education for their 3- and 4-year-olds, but not wanting to pay for additional hours to cover any childcare needs. Most 4-year-olds anyway now enter primary reception classes in the September following their fourth birthday. These children may find places in nursery classes in state primary schools or in a dwindling number of nursery schools. While in disadvantaged areas three-quarters of 3-year-olds now attend state nursery classes and schools, the majority of English 3-year-olds receive their free early education in private childcare

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provision: 64 per cent in 2015 according to official statistics (DfE, 2015a). However, parents in search of ‘free’ early education are not especially welcome in private day nurseries, as the nurseries’ business model relies on the childcare fees parents pay for hours over and above the 15 free hours. This acts as a perverse incentive to childcare businesses to find strategies to discourage parents from using only the free hours for their children or indeed from using them at all (Hignell, 2014). Private childcare businesses may only offer these hours in restricted sessions or over restricted days and charging parents additional (‘top-up’) fees appears to be a common practice (House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, 2016). Such are the challenges for equitable access to quality provision arising from the marketised early childhood system in England. The effect of parental childcare subsidies within such markets turns out to be particularly problematic. At the level of supranational bodies, such problems have also been identified. For instance, an analysis of Eurostat data suggested that direct provision of social welfare services, including ECEC, reduces income disparities and inequality more than tax breaks for parents (Atkinson & Marlier, 2012). Two papers for OECD also made a strong case for the redistributive impact, i.e. the impact on poverty, of publicly provided services, including childcare, in comparison with individual, including parent, subsidy models (Förster & Verbist, 2012; Verbist, Förster & Vaalavuo, 2012). As part of its concerted effort at reducing poverty and social exclusion among young children and their families, Labour chose to target not just social welfare services at such children, but also ECEC provision. Targeting early education became a prominent approach intended to address equitable ECEC access issues for children growing up with disadvantage. Its discussion merits a separate section in this chapter, as this has remained a key policy tool for securing quality and access.

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Targeted versus universal ECEC provision Several of the Labour government’s policy initiatives took the form of targeting public support for additional provision within a universal ECEC service system, as already described. This aspect of its ECEC policy framework has been adopted and extended by the two successive governments, the 2010–2015 Coalition government (Lloyd, 2015) and the current Conservative government. But targeting raises issues for practice and of principle. After the far-reaching ECEC policy developments of the previous 13 years, further ECEC policy change was slow to appear under the 2010 Coalition government. The Coalition government honoured its pledge to extend the education entitlement for 3- and 4-year-olds to 15 hours. But following serious cuts to local government budgets, as part of a programme of economic austerity measures, the number of Children’s Centres declined rapidly (Bate & Foster, 2015). Families with young children bore the brunt of cuts in public spending, such as on benefits and social welfare provision and lowering the level of parental eligibility for childcare tax credits (Stewart & Obolenskaya, 2015). Targeting services remained on the Coalition’s ECEC policy agenda. An additional subsidy for primary schools to promote the learning of disadvantaged pupils, the ‘pupil premium’, was extended to 3- and 4-year-olds in early childhood provision, although the ‘early years pupil premium’ was very low. The Coalition rapidly expanded the targeted offer of part-time education to disadvantaged 2-year-olds, introduced under Labour. No less than 40 per cent of disadvantaged 2-year-olds were meant to benefit by autumn 2014, but 2015 statistics confirmed this target was missed by 40 per cent, while 96 per cent of these children ended up in private provision (DfE, 2015a). Official data confirm its quality is variable (Ofsted, 2015). Another major targeted initiative is on track for a national roll-out in England by the Conservative government that came to power

in 2015. This is a doubling of the early education entitlement for 3- and 4-year-old children of parents who meet certain employment conditions. Instead of qualifying for 15 hours weekly, they will be entitled in term time to 30 hours weekly (Frontier Economics, 2016). At the time of writing, eight local government areas are making preparations to trial the 30 hours entitlement before its September 2017 rollout in all 152 English local authorities. These municipalities are receiving a clear steer from government to promote uptake of the additional 15 hours among families facing disadvantage (DfE, 2015b). These include families living in rural areas, families where a young child has special educational needs or disabilities (SEND) and Black and minority ethnic families. Yet families in these situations are often disadvantaged and may not meet the employment conditions attached to receipt of the additional entitlement. It remains to be seen how such contradictions are resolved. Implementation problems, including a failure to reach children in low-income families, are widely predicted (Rutter, 2016). There is a noteworthy contradiction between any forms of ECEC targeting and the approach promoted in an influential review of health inequalities facing England (The Marmot Review, 2010). One of its recommendations was that public funding of early years development, including ECEC, should be focused progressively across the social gradient in an approach that has come to be known as ‘proportionate universalism’. The term implies that ‘[policy] Actions must be universal, but with a scale and intensity that is proportionate to the level of disadvantage’ (The Marmot Review, 2010, p. 15). The issue of targeting has been both topical and controversial for some time within European discussions on quality within evolving ECEC systems (Lindeboom & Duiskool, 2013). The European Commission made its position on targeting clear in a special statement. This addressed the condition of disadvantaged children most at risk from the austerity engulfing Europe:

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The most successful strategies in addressing child poverty have proved to be those underpinned by policies improving the well-being of all children, whilst giving careful consideration to children in particularly vulnerable situations. (European Commission, 2013, p. 2)

Arguably, the apparent need for targeting of English services originates in the ECEC service system itself, the childcare market, whose challenges were discussed in earlier sections of this chapter. England is virtually unique within the EU in relying on this market to deliver early education, not just childcare. In fact, the English ECEC system is one of the most privatised and marketised ECEC systems in Europe (Penn, 2013). Some ten years ago, the comparative study of 20 ECEC systems in OECD member states (OECD, 2006) argued that funding models involving parental subsidies in particular, i.e. ECEC markets, may neither ensure children’s equal access nor ECEC affordability and quality: Without strong state investment and steering of this field, the result will be an insufficient supply of services for those who need those most, leading to increased numbers of children with special needs and learning difficulties; a lack of equity for poorer families; and overall poor quality of provision. (OECD, 2006, p. 256)

Since 2010 English ECEC policy decisions have become less transparent in terms of their underpinning policy rationales. The phenomenon of successive ECEC policy decisions becoming increasingly opaque in terms of their aims, prompted the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a respected economic think tank, to observe: It is not clear whether the main aims are to improve child development, increase parental labour supply or reduce socio-economic inequalities: a clear overarching strategy would help bring some much-needed focus to the debate in this area. (Brewer, Cattan & Crawford, 2014, p. 172)

It is not just the social justice rationale informing English and other nations’ ECEC systems, but also its economic wellbeing and social mobility rationales, that are at risk from the economic austerity and growing inequality that

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is gradually becoming embedded in England. Austerity magnifies the risks associated with childcare markets (Lloyd & Penn, 2014). It affects targeted services as much as universal ones. And its main risk is to children growing up with disadvantage, who stand to benefit the most from such provision, but only if quality is high (van Huizen & Plantenga, 2015). If no improvement materialises, the outlook for English 2-year-olds in disadvantaged families might be rather bleak in terms of educational outcomes, as 91 per cent received their 15 hours within the private childcare sector, according to the latest official statistics (DfE, 2016). The fact that only 68 percent of eligible 2-year-olds took up a place under the scheme in 2016 suggested that the market was not yet working perfectly for them, their parents, childcare businesses and indeed for the government. Are there lessons for England to learn from other childcare markets on how to lift children out of poverty and offer them equal access to high quality ECEC provision? Can governments introduce policies which capitalise on the strengths of the private market, enable it to work more effectively and possibly make it more resilient against economic pressures?

Reducing risk within ECEC markets Economic pressures within childcare markets attract a variety of governmental responses. Some may be detrimental to access, quality and affordability, such as when governments reduce the level of parent subsidies, as happened in the Netherlands (Akgunduz & Plantenga, 2014) and in England (Lloyd & Penn, 2014). Alternatively, measures can be introduced addressing threatened market failure; these include targeting additional support at children most likely to miss out on access to quality and affordable ECEC. The offer of education to English 2-year-olds forms an example of this. The challenges posed by targeting were already discussed. System transformation, i.e.

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a thorough re-organisation at multiple levels of existing processes, institutions and relevant policies, is another option, although heavily constrained by economic pressures. In the wake of the collapse of the Australian childcare corporation ABC Learning, Sumsion (2012, p. 221) recommended an ‘ethical audit’ framework as an analytical tool for closely monitoring developments within childcare markets and to inform policy developments. Several publications, including the 2006 OECD thematic survey, a more recent analysis of OECD data (Penn & Lloyd, 2013, p. 7) and an overview of government strategies to ensure quality in childcare markets (Penn & Lloyd, 2014), have suggested ways to improve childcare market operations through various system transformations. Among the most successful forms of government intervention appear to be the promotion of supply-led systems, where providers receive substantial state subsidies and parents pay a reasonable share of costs by means of the introduction of parental fee-capping regulations. Where these operate, the growth of the private for-profit childcare market has been contained in favour of an increased reliance on voluntary, co-operative and state provision (Gambaro, Stewart & Waldfogel, 2014). Stringent regulation needs to be paired with any subsidy increases, if price inflation is to be controlled for. This requires a new type of partnership with the private ECEC sector (Penn & Lloyd, 2014). The case of Norway’s viable mixed ECEC economy illustrates these dynamics well (Jacobsen & Vollset, 2012). More than 50 per cent of Norwegian ‘kindergartens’ for children aged 1 to 6 are now run by private providers, mostly not-for-profit ones (Haug, 2014). Since the early 2000s this mixed market has featured the fastest increase in uptake among low-income groups; these rates are among the highest for low-income groups anywhere (Ellingsaeter, 2014). Longer-term positive educational and economic outcomes have been demonstrated for children who progressed through this system (Havnes & Mogstad, 2011). Unlike present day Norway, most countries where a marketised model of ECEC provision

prevails have a long way to go in ensuring not only that the services and their infrastructure reflect the underlying policy rationales, but that they serve all children equitably. The 2006 OECD thematic survey acknowledged that greater choice and opportunities for innovation associated with markets may be preferable to stagnation in public ECEC systems, but it emphasised the need for further research on how to create effective social markets, that is, networks of mixed provision in which choice and innovation exist, while maintaining a sense of national and community responsibility for services. (OECD, 2006, p. 119)

England appears to be at a crossroads in terms of the further development of its ECEC system. At present its policies, services and the funding model fail to fully meet the needs of children growing up in poverty. The apparent disconnect between policy rationales and the choice of policy instruments can be traced back to the English ECEC market model (Lloyd & Potter, 2014). Introducing a social market as envisaged by OECD could mean a new beginning for English ECEC policy. But ‘any initiatives need to be systematically developed, and well-funded, for improvements to be sustainable; in other words changes need to be implemented at a macro as well as at a micro level’ (Penn & Lloyd, 2014, p. 46).

Conclusion The need to reconsider the direction of current ECEC policy and the triple rationales for government support is undeniably urgent, it also appears useful to reflect on the strengths of the current English ECEC system. Three characteristics stand out when attempting to take the perspective of any country trying to learn from the English experience: 1 There exists a genuine commitment on the part of the state to invest substantial public money in the ECEC system, guided by three rationales which emphasise the importance of longer-term

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outcomes for children, the immediate economic well-being of families with young children and children’s present enjoyment of ECEC services. 2 There exists a genuine commitment to achieving an inclusive ECEC system which reaches out to children growing up in low-income households, children with transient or permanent physical or learning disabilities and children with English as an additional language. 3 There is a clear awareness of the crucial role played by early childhood leaders, teachers, practitioners and entrepreneurs in ensuring beneficial outcomes and good quality experiences for all children using ECEC provision and a commitment to developing a commensurate workforce strategy.

The present overview of critical junctures in English ECEC policy development demonstrates the challenge of finding appropriate and interconnected policy instruments to make a reality of these commitments. For example, the uncomfortable interface between supplyside and demand-side funding for early education and childcare respectively highlight the importance of a logical and simple funding model; information on childcare costs (Rutter, 2016) demonstrates the risks of price inflation in the absence of appropriate government intervention in market operations and the lack of consistency in the provision of ECEC within children’s centres highlights the need to revisit the role and location of ECEC within social welfare provision. If the English ECEC system is to make a serious contribution to lifting poor children out of poverty and improving their life chances, then the prevailing hegemonic childcare market discourse should itself become an issue for debate. Any debate aimed at achieving public consensus about optimal ways forward should not be centred on the perfection of a system based on competition and individual choice, as Moss argues strongly (2014b). In contrast, this should form part of a much wider examination of the values and principles underpinning the present ECEC system. One point should guide any such debate. This is that, by itself, even universal, comprehensive good-quality ECEC does not ‘inoculate’ against the adverse effects of child

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poverty (Lloyd & Potter, 2014). Multiple approaches by multiple actors as part of a comprehensive anti-poverty strategy are needed for reducing poverty and addressing its consequences for young children’s educational achievements, health and safety, nutrition, housing and access to public services within the families and communities in which they grow up. This constitutes the greater challenge.

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from: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ cm201617/cmselect/cmpubacc/224/22402. htm (accessed 1 November 2016). Jacobsen, K., & Vollset, G. (2012) ‘Publicly available and supported early education and care for all in Norway’, in E. Lloyd & H. Penn (eds), Childcare Markets – Can they Deliver an Equitable Service? (pp. 115–130). Bristol: Policy Press. Kaga, J., Bennett, J., & Moss, P. (2010) Caring and Learning Together – A Cross-national Study on the Integration of Early Childhood Care and Education within Education. Paris: UNESCO. Available from: http://unesdoc. unesco.org/images/0018/001878/187818E. pdf (accessed 1 November 2016). Kamerman, S., & Moss, P. (eds) (2009) The Politics of Parental Leave Policies: Children, Gender, Parenting and the Labour Market. Bristol: Policy Press. Kazimirski, A., Southwood, H., & Bryson, C. (2006) Childcare and Early Years Provision for Minority Ethnic Families. London: National Centre for Social Research. Laing & Buisson (2007) Children’s Nurseries. UK Market Report 2007. London: Laing & Buisson. Leseman, P. (2009) Tackling Social and Educational Inequalities through Early Childhood Education and Care in Europe. A Eurydice report. Brussels: European Commission. Available from: http://eacea.ec.europa.eu/ about/eurydice/documents/098EN.pdf (accessed 1 November 2016). Lewis, J., & Campbell, M. (2007) ‘Work/family balance policies in the UK since 1997: a new departure?’, Journal of Social Policy, 36(3), 365–381. Lindeboom, G.-J., & Duiskool, B.-J. (2013) Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care. Brussels: European Parliament. Available from: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/ etudes/etudes/join/2013/495867/IPOL-CULT_ ET(2013)495867(ANN01)_EN.pdf (accessed 1 November 2016). Lloyd, E. (2006) ‘Children, poverty and social exclusion’, in C. Pantazis, D. Gordon & R. Levitas (eds), Poverty and Social Exclusion in Britain: The Millennium Survey (pp. 315– 345). Bristol: Policy Press. Lloyd, E. (2008) ‘The interface between childcare, family support and child poverty strategies under New Labour: tensions and contradictions’, Social Policy & Society, 7(4), 479–494.

Lloyd, E. (2012a) ‘The marketisation of early years education and childcare in England’, in L. Miller & D. Hevey (eds), Policy Issues in the Early Years (pp. 107–121). London: Sage. Lloyd, E. (2012b) ‘Centre-based services in the early years’, in M. Hill, G. Head, A. Lockyer, B. Reid & R. Taylor (eds), Children’s Services: Working Together (pp. 104–115). London: Longman Pearson. Lloyd, E. (2012c) ‘Childcare markets: an introduction’, in E. Lloyd & H. Penn (eds), Childcare Markets – Can they Deliver an Equitable Service? (pp. 3–18). Bristol: Policy Press. Lloyd, E. (2015) ‘Early childhood education and care in England under the Coalition Government’, London Review of Education, 33(2), 144–156. Available from: http://ingentaconnect.com/­ content/ioep/clre/2015/0000 0013/00000002/ art00012 (accessed 1 November 2016). Lloyd, E., & Penn, H. (eds) (2012) Childcare Markets – Can they deliver an equitable service? Bristol: Policy Press. Lloyd, E., & Penn, H. (2014) ‘Childcare markets in an age of austerity’, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 22(3), 386–396. Lloyd, E., & Potter, S. (2014) Early Education and Childcare and Poverty. Working Paper prepared for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. London: University of East London. Available from: http://roar.uel.ac.uk/3865/ (accessed 1 November 2016). Marmot Review, The (2010) Fair Societies – Healthy Lives.Strategic Review of Health Inequalities in England Post-2010. London: University College London. Available from: http://www.instituteofhealthequity.org/projects/fair-society-healthy-lives-the-marmotreview (accessed 1 November 2016). Martin, C., & Le Bihan, B. (2009) ‘Public childcare and preschools in France’, in K. Scheiwe & H. Willekens (eds), Childcare and Preschool Development in Europe – Institutional Perspectives (pp. 57–71). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mathers, S., Ranns, H., Karemaker, A., Moody, A., Sylva, K., Graham, J., & Siraj-Blatchford, I. (2011) Evaluation of the Graduate Leader Fund. Final Report. Research Report DFERR144. London: DfE. Mathers, S., & Smees, R. (2014) Quality and ­Inequality – Do Three- and Four-year-olds in Deprived Areas Experience Lower Quality Early Years Provision? London: Nuffield Foundation.

ECEC: English perspectives on poverty and access

Available from: http://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/sites/default/files/files/Quality_inequality_childcare_mathers_29_05_14.pdf (accessed 1 November 2016). Mathers, S., Sylva, K., & Joshi, H. (2007) Quality of Childcare Settings in the Millennium Cohort Study. Research Report SSU/2007/ FR/025. London: Department for Education and Skills. Moss, P. (2009) There are Alternatives! Markets and Democratic Experimentalism in Early Childhood Education and Care. Working Papers in Early Childhood Development. The Hague: Bernard van Leer Foundation and Bertelsmann Stiftung. Available from: http:// www.portaldahabitacao.pt/opencms/export/ sites/intranet/pt/intranet/documentos/gepa/ 2010/0112_doc_there_are_alternatives.pdf’ (accessed 25 April 2017). Moss, P. (2012) ‘Need markets be the only show in town?’ in E. Lloyd & H. Penn (eds), Childcare markets – Can they Deliver an Equitable Service (pp. 19–208). Bristol: Policy Press. Moss, P. (2014a) ‘Early childhood policy in England 1997–2013: Anatomy of a missed opportunity’, International Journal of Early Years Education, 22(4), 346–358. Moss, P. (2014b) Transformative Change and Real Utopias in Early Childhood Education. Abingdon: Routledge. Moss, P., & Bennett, J. (2010) Working for Inclusion: An Overview of European Union Early Years Services and their Workforce. Edinburgh: Children in Scotland. Available from: http://www.bottegadigeppetto.it/_bdg_ /bdg_internazionali/working_inclusion/ WFIreport.pdf’ (accessed 25 April 2017). Noailly, J., & Visser, S. (2009) ‘The impact of market forces on the provision of childcare: Insights from the 2005 Childcare Act in the Netherlands’, Journal of Social Policy, 38(3), 477–498. OECD (2006) Starting Strong II: Early Childhood Education and Care. Paris: OECD. OECD (2011) How Can We Do Better For Our Families? Paris: OECD. Ofsted (2015) Early Years: The Report of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Education, Children’s Services and Skills 2015. London: Ofsted. Pantazis, C., Gordon, D., & Levitas, R. (eds) (2006) Poverty and Social Exclusion in Britain: The Millennium Survey. Bristol: Policy Press.

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Paull, G. (2014) ‘Can government intervention in childcare be justified?’, Economic Affairs, 34(1), 14–34. Available from https://iea.org. uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/ecaf_feb13_ childcare.pdf (accessed 25 April 2017). Penn, H. (2007) ‘Childcare market management: How the United Kingdom government has reshaped its role in developing early childhood education and care’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 8(3), 192–207. Penn, H. (2009) ‘Public and private: the history of early education and care institutions in the United Kingdom’, in K. Scheiwe & H. Willekens (eds), Child Care and Preschool Development in Europe: Institutional Perspectives (pp. 105–125). Ashgate: Palgrave Macmillan. Penn, H. (2011a) ‘Policy rationales for early childhood services’, International Journal of Child Care and Education Policy, 5(1), 1–16. Penn, H. (2011b) ‘Gambling on the market: the role of for-profit provision in early childhood education and care’, Journal of Early Childhood Research, 9(2), 150–161. Penn, H. (2012) ‘Raw and emerging childcare markets’, in E. Lloyd & H. Penn (eds), Childcare Markets – Can they Deliver an Equitable Service? (pp. 173–187). Bristol: Policy Press. Penn, H., (2013) ‘The business of childcare in Europe’, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 21(4), 432–456. Penn, H., & Lloyd, E. (2013) The Costs of Childcare. London: Childhood Wellbeing Research Centre. Available from: http://www.cwrc.ac.uk/ documents/CostsofchildcareJuly2013.pdf (accessed 25 April 2017). Penn, H., & Lloyd, E. (2014) ‘How can government ensure that early care and education is of high quality in a market system? Learning from international experience’, in T. Wolfe (ed.), ‘Childcare’: Business or Profession? (pp. 11–52). Dublin: Start Strong. Available from: http://www.startstrong.ie/files/Childcare_ Business_or_Profession_Full_Report_Web_ Version.pdf (accessed 1 November 2016). Pierson, P. (2004) Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Plantenga, J. (2012) ‘Local providers and loyal parents: competition and consumer choice in the Dutch childcare market’, in E. Lloyd & H. Penn (eds), Childcare Markets – Can they Deliver an Equitable Service? (pp. 63–78). Bristol: Policy Press.

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Plantenga, J., & Remery, C. (2009) The Provision of Childcare Services: A Comparative Review of 30 European Countries. Brussels: European Commission. Available from: http://www.fruehe-chancen.de/fileadmin/ PDF/Archiv/the_provision_childcare_services. pdf (accessed 1 November 2016). Press, F., & Woodrow, C. (2005) ‘Commodification, corporatisation and children’s spaces’, Australian Journal of Education, 49(3), 278–297. Press, F., & Woodrow, C. (2009) ‘The giant in the playground: investigating the reach and implications of the corporatisation of child care provision’, in D. King & G. Meagher (eds), Paid Care in Australia: Profits, Purposes and Practices (pp. 231–252). Sydney: University of Sydney Press. Rigby, E., Tarrant, K., & Neuman, M.J. (2007) ‘Alternative policy designs and the socio-political construction of childcare’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 8(2), 98–108. Rutter, J. (2016) Childcare Costs Survey 2016. London: Family and Child Care Trust. Available from: https://www.familyandchildcaretrust. org/childcare-survey-2016-0 (accessed 25 April 2017). Scheiwe, K., & Willekens, H. (eds) (2009) Child Care and Preschool Development in Europe – ­Institutional Perspectives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Smith, R., Schneider, V., Purdon, S., La Valle, I., Wollny, Y., Owen, R., Bryson, C., Mathers, S., Sylva, K., & Lloyd, E. (2009) Early Education Pilot for Two Year Old Children – Evaluation. Research Report DCSF-RR134. London: Department for Children, Schools and Families. Available from: http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/10651/1/ DCSF-RR134.pdf (accessed 1 November 2016). Smith, T., Coxon, C., & Sigala, M.(2007) National Evaluation of the Neighbourhood Nurseries Initiative: Implementation Study, SSU Research Report 021. London: Department for Education and Skills. Speight, S., Smith, R., Coshall, C., & Lloyd, E. (2010) Towards Universal Early Years Provision: Analysis of Take-up by Disadvantaged Families from Recent Annual Childcare Surveys. Research Report FE-RR066. London: Department for Education. Available from: http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/11574/1/DFE-RR066WEB.pdf (accessed 1 November 2016). Statham, J., Lloyd, E., Moss, P., Melhuish, E., & Owen, C. (1990) Playgroups in a Changing

World. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. Stewart, K., & Obolenskaya, P. (2015) The Coalition’s Record on the Under Fives: Policy, Spending and Outcomes 2010–2015. Working Paper 12, Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion. London: London School of Economics. Available from: http://sticerd.lse. ac.uk/dps/case/spcc/WP12.pdf (accessed 1 November 2016). Sumsion, J. (2012) ‘ABC Learning and Australian early education and care: a retrospective ethical audit of a radical experiment’, in E. Lloyd & H. Penn (eds), Childcare Markets – Can they Deliver an Equitable Service? (pp. 209–225). Bristol: Policy Press. Sylva, K., Melhuish, E., Sammons, P., SirajBlatchford, I., & Taggart, B. (2010) Early Childhood Matters: Evidence from the Effective Pre-School and Primary Education Project. London: Routledge. United Nations (1995) The Copenhagen Declaration and Programme of Action. World Summit on Social Development, 6–12 March, New York. New York: UN Department of Publications. van Huizen, T., & Plantenga, J. (2015) Universal Child Care and Children’s Outcomes: A Metaanalysis of Evidence from Natural Experiments. Utrecht School of Economics Tjalling C. Koopmans Research Institute Discussion Paper Series 15–13. Utrecht: University of Utrecht. Available from: https://www.uu.nl/ sites/default/files/rebo_use_dp_2015_15-13. pdf (accessed 25 April 2017). Van Lancker, W., & Ghysels, J. (2011) Who Reaps the Benefits? The Social Distribution of Public Childcare in Sweden and Flanders. GINI Discussion Paper 10. Amsterdam: AIAS. Available from: http://www.uva-aias.net/uploaded_files/ publications/DP10-VanLancker,Ghysels-1.pdf (accessed 1 November 2016). Verbist, G., Förster, M., & Vaalavuo, M. (2012) The Impact of Publicly Provided Services on the Distribution of Resources: Review of New Results and Methods. OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Paper No. 130. Paris: OECD. Available from http://www.oecdilibrary.org/docserver/download/ 5k9h363c5szq-en.pdf?expires=1493119852&id=id&ac cname=guest&checksum=696D7F6531494C A23761FA5D2B6B7468 (accessed 25 April 2017).

17 School Readiness C h r i s t o p h e r P. B r o w n

Introduction An increasing number of early childhood (EC) stakeholders across the globe are focusing on the policy problem of ensuring all children enter school ready to succeed (UNICEF, 2012). This issue emerged on their policy agendas as a result of empirical studies demonstrating that a large number of children enter school lacking the academic and/or social skills needed for success (e.g. Wildy & Styles, 2008) and that there appears to be a correlation between being ready at school entry and later success in school and in life (e.g. Matthews, Kizzie, Rowley & Cortina, 2010). These research studies have led many EC stakeholders to frame their reforms that address improving children’s school readiness as both an educational and economic issue (Landers, 2013). Moreover, policymakers have tied their support for these initiatives to improve children’s readiness for school to their ability to improve students’ performance on a range of academic and social

measures at particular points in their schooling (e.g. Jensen, Broström & Hansen, 2010). While the theory of action (Argyris & Schon, 1974) that underlies this solution to the policy problem of school readiness seems logical – early intervention in children’s lives teaches them a specific set of knowledge, skills, and behaviours that leads to later academic and economic success – it fails to take into account the complexity of the construct itself as well as the multiple factors that affect children’s growth and learning across all of their developmental domains during childhood and later life. To address these issues in this chapter, I begin by defining the construct of school readiness. Next, I briefly outline the history of how this issue became a policy problem in the United States (US) while making connections to other international contexts such as Australia. Doing so illuminates the core constructs and arguments put forward by many stakeholders across the globe who advocate for all children entering school ready to learn. I then investigate what is known about

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the relationship between school readiness and children’s performance in school. With these empirical findings in mind, I then examine how policymakers’ focus on standardization, the investment argument, and publicly-funded preschool programs has altered the school readiness debate. I then raise questions about possible effects of policies addressing the issue of school readiness on children, their families, policymakers, and education systems themselves. Lastly, I end this chapter by raising questions about future directions of the debates surrounding school readiness policies specifically and early childhood education in general.

Defining School Readiness Policy debates over school readiness first emerged in the US in the 1960s. At that time, many within early education questioned whether and/or when children were ready to learn. Those debates have long been settled, and it is now a given within the scientific and policy communities that children are born ready to learn (Kagan, 1999; May & Campbell, 1981). However, there is no consensus in the US or globally on what it means for children to be ready for school (Britto, 2012; Graue, 2006). Ackerman and Barnett (2005) point out that to improve all children’s readiness for school an agreed upon understanding of what school readiness entails must first be established. For this chapter, I turn to the work of Sam Meisels (1999) to identify the varying understandings of school readiness. According to Meisels (1999), conceptions of school readiness within the discourses of educational reform typically centre around one of four framings of this construct: the nativist, empiricist, social constructionist, and interactionist perspectives. How stakeholders frame this construct informs the ways in which they understand the process by which children are ready for school, the problem of school readiness itself, and the means through which government should address this issue. For instance,

the idealist/nativist perspective frames this construct of readiness as being ‘a within-the-child phenomenon,’ which leaves little room for the role of environment in explaining a child’s readiness (Meisels, 1999, p. 50). Children are ready for school when their ‘level of development is ready’ (Kagan, 1990, p. 272). The family, teacher and school system are absent in this understanding of school readiness. An empiricist conception of this construct views readiness as ‘something that lies outside the child’ (Meisels, 1999, p. 52), meaning families, teachers, and their school programs prepare unready children to be ‘successful in a school context’ by providing them with the necessary skills, knowledge, and experiences (Carlton & Winsler, 1999, p. 338). Through the empiricist lens, early education programs are framed as an apparatus that provide children with the skills, knowledge, and experiences needed to be ready for elementary school. Many of the current education reforms across the globe that focus on ensuring young children are ready for elementary school, such as preschool or prekindergarten (Pre-K) in the US, reflect this understanding of school readiness (e.g. Allen, 2011; US Department of Education & US Department of Health & Human Services, 2011). The social constructionist framework ‘looks to the setting for its definition of readiness’ (Meisels, 1999, p. 49). A child being ready for school is dependent on the social context in which s/he operates, and as such, a child can be seen as ready in one family and/ or community and not another. For instance, Graue’s (1993) examination of the practices of kindergarten across three different communities in the US led her to contend that ‘meanings of readiness were locally developed and used,’ and as a result of this, the purpose of kindergarten was determined by the local ‘actors’ within each social context (p. 248). Thus, expanding that to a global perspective, being ready for school in one nation may look very different in another nation. Lastly, an interactionist perspective frames readiness as a ‘bidirectional concept’ that is coconstructed ‘from the child’s contributions to

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schooling and the school’s contribution to the child’ (Meisels, 1999, p. 49). This lens views school readiness as an interaction between what teachers do at school with children and the knowledge, skills, and experiences children bring with them to the school context; meaning school staff must also be ready for the children that enter their programs (Kagan, 1990). Such a view frames school readiness as being ‘complex, multidimensional, and process oriented,’ which in turn means a more detailed conception of this construct (Graue, 2006, p. 51). Many EC advocates (e.g. Educational Transitions and Change Research Group, 2011), organizations (e.g. Professional Association for Childcare and Early Years (PACEY), 2013), and researchers (e.g. Shaul & Schwartz, 2014) across the globe tend to promote this view of school readiness. While these four conceptions of readiness reflect the educational and political debates that have been occurring in the US and globally over the last several decades (e.g. OECD, 2015; Shepard & Smith, 1986; UNICEF, 2002), they by no means represent the totality of understandings of this construct (e.g. Kim, Lee, Suen, & Lee, 2003). Furthermore, critical researchers within EC, such as Bloch (1992) and Moss (2012), have demonstrated that this or any construct within EC should be questioned and examined to understand its underlying conceptions of such things as power or the framing of the child, family, practitioner, and the systems of EC across the globe. For instance, critical researchers’ work has demonstrated how conceptions of readiness can be used to exclude rather than include the very children and families that policymakers and early educators are trying to address in their early education reforms (e.g. Kummen, 2011). While these critiques, as well as the varied conceptions of the construct of readiness, are invaluable for the EC community so that its members can understand, address, and respect the variability that exists among children, their families, and early education programs, Meisels’ (1999) heuristic device outlined in the above is employed in this entry to examine how school

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readiness, as a policy problem, is conceptualized in nations like the US.

School Readiness as a Policy Problem Historically, the marker through which children’s readiness for school is determined is age (Gifford, 1992). For instance, this nativist conception of school readiness results in most public education systems, which in the US are run at the state level of governance, declaring children are ready for school when they reach the age of 5 by a specific date. In the US and across much of the globe, when a child can enter formal schooling varies. In the US, each state, and even within local school districts, determines when children begin kindergarten, meaning the date can range from June to January (Workman, 2014).

A Problem for Some School readiness did not become a policy problem until the 1960s in the US when the federal government established Head Start through the Economic Opportunity Act and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which was as a part of the Johnson Administration’s ‘War on Poverty’.Policymakers designed Head Start to address the issue of poverty through a two-generation approach that would remedy ‘the educational inequalities borne by impoverished children’ (Zigler, Marsland, & Lord, 2009, p. 23).1 Head Start was to do this by readying young children who carried particular risk markers for school by providing them with learning experiences that would put them on a trajectory for success. This legislation identified the root cause of academic failure, which leads to economic failure, as the result of impoverished development and learning experience in the child’s home environment. To help stop poverty from being passed on from one generation to

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the next, the government needed to intervene and provide publicly funded early intervention programs that would ready poor children for school. Policymakers did this not only to ensure that poor children were just as ready as their more affluent peers when they started elementary school, but it would also put children on a trajectory where this school success would help them rise out of poverty. The establishment of Head Start is significant because it put in place a policy discourse that framed particular children ‘at risk’ for school success, which reflects an empiricist conception of school readiness. Moreover, the solution to ridding this ‘risk’ from these children’s lives was to help them develop a specific set of skills and knowledge so that they would be ready for school. Thus, this ‘set’ of knowledge and skills became the marker(s) that US and now international policymakers and members of the early childhood community did use and continue to use to define particular populations of students and their families, and this conception of school readiness continues to pervade the politics and policies of EC in the US (e.g. Neuman, 2009) and internationally (Landers, 2013).

A Problem for All While the establishment and funding of Head Start continues to be a contentious political issue in the US, the program was designed to ready a particular and very limited population of children for school. Not until the 1980s did the readiness of all children for school become a policy problem. In the US, the publication of the National Commission on Excellence in Education’s (NCEE) A Nation at Risk (1984) questioned the academic readiness and abilities of all school-age children. As such, the federal government and the nation’s governors began to pursue a range of educational reforms2 (e.g. National Governors’ Association, 1986) that sought to improve the US public education system by promoting a decentralized system of education that emphasized the development of educational goals that named the content and skills that students are to learn

while assessing their performance in relation to that content. These shifts in education policy escalated the curricular expectations for students in the early grades and framed school readiness as something that children need to possess when they enter elementary school (e.g. Hatch & Freeman, 1988). This led to the increased use of readiness tests for kindergarten and first grade entry (Meisels, 1987; Shepard & Smith, 1986). In 1989, then President Bush and the state governors put forward proposed legislation titled America 2000, and while Congress did not pass this policy agenda, it did establish six goals for public education across the US. The first goal stated that ‘by the year 2000, all children in America will start school ready to learn’ (US Department of Education, 1991, p. 9). The Clinton Administration, which followed the Bush Administration, did get Congress to pass Goals 2000 legislation and made this goal of all children starting school ready law (National Education Goals Panel, 1991). This call by policymakers for all children to start school ready caused many within the field of EC (e.g. Meisels, 1992) to worry that this goal would continue to promote inappropriate practices such as the use of assessments to determine kindergarten entry (e.g. Gnezda & Bolig, 1988). Not only did such gateway exams contradict empirical studies that demonstrate children are poor test-takers (e.g. Gullo, 1994), but they also ‘excluded children from participating in the school curriculum’ that they needed to learn to succeed in elementary school (Shepard, 1994, p. 207). As part of the Goals 2000 legislation, the National Education Goals Panel (1991, 1995) was established. The National Education Goals Panel (NEGP) defined school readiness as encompassing five dimensions: (1) physical well-being and motor development; (2) social and emotional development; (3) approaches to learning; (4) language development; and (5) cognition and general knowledge. To ensure all children were ready for school, the NEGP offered three objectives for families and communities: (1) all children will have access to

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high quality preschool programs; (2) every parent will be a child’s first teacher; and (3) all children will receive the health care, nutrition, and physical activities that they need to arrive at school healthy (NEGP, 1991, 1995). Combined, these efforts reflect an interactionist rather than nativist or empiricist conception of school readiness, and by doing so, it expanded the construct of school readiness beyond the child. The work of the NEGP also began to be felt by nations beyond the US (Dockett & Perry, 2015). For instance, Australian researchers began to take an interest in the age of children at school entry in the 1990s (Gifford, 1992), and even today, UNICEF (2012) uses similar language as the NEGP when advocating for providing opportunities to prepare children across the world for school success.

A Shift Towards the Standardized Child The NEGP attempted to expand conceptions of school readiness and advocate for a framing of the process of readying children for school through an interactionist framework. However, its work, as well as the other policies that emerged out of the Goals 2000 initiative, were eventually overtaken by US policymakers and others across the globe shifting their framing of education reform towards a view of standardizing public education systems and holding stakeholders at all levels of its implementation accountable for improving students’ academic achievement (Gillborn & Youdell, 2000). Doing so appeared to move the conversation around school readiness towards the ability of the public education system to ensure/improve students’ preparedness to perform on p­ olicymakers’ high-stakes exams, which reflects an empiricist understanding of school readiness. In the US, the most poignant example of this shift was the implementation of the US federal government’s No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). This policy made holding students, schools, districts, and states accountable for improving the academic performance

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of all children a national issue (O’Day, 2002). In nations such as Australia (Sumsion & Wong, 2011) and New Zealand (Duhn, 2010), policymakers adopted national curricula that inform all stakeholders about what children should be learning and doing each step of the way in their early education systems. Such policies have been shown to alter the expectations (e.g. Jones & Osgood, 2007) and practices (e.g. Booher-Jennings, 2005) of public school teachers in varying countries around the world (e.g. Jensen et al., 2010). This focus on creating standardized education systems that promote particular types of students who are ready to perform academically and socially in nations such as Australia advocate for a ‘technocratic “quick fix” model of change’ (MacNaughton, 2007, p. 193). Such systems, as Woods and Jeffrey (1998) have found in the United Kingdom, lead to an educational environment in which students are ‘to learn a prescribed set of things in order to be able to survive’ in school and in the larger ‘competitive market’ (p. 548). In the US, NCLB triggered a series of systemic changes for educators prior to kindergarten entry at the national, state, and local levels (e.g. Barrett, 2009). Nationally, the Bush Administration implemented the Good Start, Grow Smart (GSGS) initiative (Office of the White House, 2002) shortly after the passage of NCLB. Part of GSGS directed early childhood stakeholders at the state level to define and align a set of pre-­reading, language, and mathematics knowledge and skills with the content and performance standards that define their state’s kindergarten through grade 12 (K-12) education system (Brown, 2007).3 Scott-Little, Kagan and Frelow (2006) summarized the effect of this reform initiative by stating, ‘As states develop early learning standards they are, in effect, defining the skills and knowledge viewed as important for later success in school’ (p. 155). For Scott-Little and colleagues (2006), this ‘de facto’ conceptualization of readiness that emerged in this reform process ‘could translate into a concept of readiness that focuses primarily on the child and minimizes the importance of the

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other elements of school readiness which play an important role in the degree of success children experience in school’ (pp. 167–168). With early learning standards in place, states have also begun to launch a series of kindergarten readiness assessments (e.g. Kentucky’s Common Kindergarten Entry Screener), which they use to quantify children’s school readiness skills (Daily, Burkhauser & Halle, 2010). Moreover, the standardized image of what it means to be a ready and successful student in school continues with the implementation of such policy initiatives in the US as Common Core (http://www.corestandards.org) and the Obama Administration’s Early Learning Challenge Grants under its Race to the Top initiative.

The Role of Research in Feeding into this Empiricist Conception of School Readiness and the Standardized Child While empirical research has played a significant role in current policy discussions surrounding school readiness and the construction of the standardized child within education policy, its history does not align directly with the narrowing of policymakers’ policy agendas around the issue of student performance. This is not to say that researchers were and/or are ignoring policymakers’ concerns. Rather, their work on the issue of school readiness began with a different point of emphasis, a nativist construction of this construct.

Redshirting and Retention Much of the early empirical work around school readiness in the US conducted prior to the implementation of NCLB examined the issues of kindergarten retention and academic ‘redshirting’, which is the process of purposively holding a child out of kindergarten even though he or she has met the age requirement for entry (Graue, Kroeger & Brown, 2002). Researchers were interested in why teacher and families might suggest redshirting and/or

retaining young children. For instance, Smith and Shepard (1988) found in their work that some families felt pressure from teachers to hold their children out by being told by the teachers ‘that the school would not be held responsible for the subsequent success or failure of the pupils if the parents insisted on promotion’ (p. 322). What is interesting about this research is that teachers, families, and other school personnel primarily located the process of improving children’s school readiness, be it academic or social, in increasing the age of the child, which appears to make the role of the teacher, parent, or school absent from the process. Furthermore, they were trying to improve children’s school readiness without any pressure from policymakers. When examining the issue of retention, which means to repeat the same grade level, some studies have shown an immediate increase in retained students’ test scores (e.g. Alexander, Entwisle & Dauber, 1993), but retention also dramatically increases the likelihood that the retained student will leave the education system and continue to perform poorly on these standardized assessments (e.g. Allensworth, 2004; Reynolds, 1992). For instance, Alexander, Entwisle and Dauber (1993) found the students’ test scores in their sample increased after retention, but they also found that retaining students significantly increased the likelihood that they would not complete high school. While these reforms measures produce an uneven set of results, many educational researchers believe that the immediate short-term gains in test scores do not outweigh the long-lasting negative effects that result from this intervention (e.g. Roderick & Nagaoka, 2005).

What Empirical Research Has Found Regarding School Readiness Generally speaking, the academic and social skills, knowledge, and dispositions children enter public elementary school with, which in the US is typically at age 5, are significant predictors of their later academic achievement

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(Duncan et  al., 2007; Sabol & Pianta, 2012). Children entering kindergarten at age 5 lagging their peers in cognitive and social measures are less likely to be successful in grade school, more likely to drop out of high school, and are projected to earn less as adults (Fryer & Levitt, 2004; Halle, Hair, Wandner & Chien, 2012). Furthermore, once in kindergarten, in the US or across the globe, children’s performance on reading, mathematics, and social-emotional measures provides insight into their later school achievement and chances for success in adult life (Claessens, Duncan & Engel, 2009; Rouse & Fantuzzo, 2009). These gaps in children’s academic and social achievement tend to increase across their time in school (Alexander, Entwisle & Olson, 2001; Feinstein, 2003). Thus, no matter in which nation children live, entering school ready appears to be a significant issue for them and their larger communities. Furthermore, teachers continue to indicate that large numbers of children enter school lacking the academic and/or social skills needed for success (e.g. Rimm-Kaufman, Pianta & Cox, 2000), and the implementation of such high-stakes reforms as NCLB appears to have narrowed their focus on what this means for children to be ready for school to those skills and knowledge found within these policies (Brown & Lan, 2015). The significance of both these findings is that children’s level of readiness at school entry impacts on the relationships they establish with their teachers (Howes et  al., 2008). Children who enter school ready are more likely to develop positive and close relationships with their teachers, which in turn are correlated with improved academic and social-emotional outcomes and long-term school adjustment (e.g. Palermo, Hanish, Martin, Fabes & Reiser, 2007). Scholars also contend that how families frame their role in preparing their children for school may impact the ways in which they respond to as well as support their children’s developmental needs, which can influence children’s school readiness (e.g. Hindman, Miller, Froyen & Skibbe, 2012). Researchers typically examine the issue of school readiness and families by either trying to identify their beliefs

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about school readiness (e.g. Diamond, Reagan & Bandyk, 2000), the actions they take to prepare their children for school (e.g. Downer & Pianta, 2006), or possible differences that exist across families who vary across such variables as socio-­economic status (e.g. Winsler et  al., 2008) and/or cultural background (e.g. Lahaie, 2008). Children who live in supportive and stimulating home environments typically enter school ready to perform (e.g. Bradley & Corwyn, 2005), and thus, much of this research tries to unpack how such issues as poverty affect children’s readiness for school (e.g. Duncan, Ziol-Guest & Kalil, 2010). Generally speaking, these bodies of research appear to demonstrate that families frame what it means for children to be ready for school through a range of academic skills such as counting, reading, and writing (e.g. Piotrkowski, Botsko & Matthews, 2000). This is not to say that they do not take into consideration their children’s health, social skills, or emotional development (e.g. Diamond et al., 2000). Rather, there appears to be a gap in their understanding of the range of academic, developmental, and social skills elementary school teachers prioritize in their conceptions of school readiness (e.g. Wildenger & McIntyre, 2011). Still, when examining the interactions between teachers and families in school, researchers continue to demonstrate that such relationships have the potential to shape children’s academic and social development (Powell, Son, File & San Juan, 2010).

How Standardization, the Focus on Human Capital, and the Rise of Publicly Funded Preschool Altered the School Readiness Debate When examining the evolution of the policy problem of school readiness alongside the empirical research that documents the significance of this issue, it appears there is good reason for policymakers to be focused on the issue of how prepared children are for

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school success when they enter the kindergarten classroom. However, up until the 1990s, few children in the US outside of the federal government’s Head Start program had access to the publicly funded preschool programs that might prepare them for school entry. In fact, only 10 states offered access to pre-kindergarten (PreK) programs by 1980, 28 states by 1991, and still now, only 42 of the 50 states offer some form of Pre-K program (Barnett et al., 2016). Globally, the proportion of children attending early education programs varies widely across regions and nations (UNICEF, 2016). Like Head Start, most of these state-based Pre-K programs are intervention programs for 4-year-old children who policymakers deemed ‘at risk’ for school success – be it poverty, being part of the foster care system, homeless, being a non-native speaker of English, etc. These programs almost exclusively take on an empiricist conception of school readiness in which early educators are to provide these children with a particular set of experiences that teach students their state’s early learning standards so that they enter school ready to succeed. Many states also have academic achievement measures which children must take to measure whether they acquired the knowledge and skills outlined in the early learning standards (Daily et al., 2010). From a policy perspective, the expansion of Pre-K has not been the direct result of the empirical literature documenting the impact of children’s preparedness for school on later academic and economic achievement. Rather, policymakers across the globe have become interested in such preschool programs as Pre-K due to the work of researchers such as James Heckman (Heckman, Moon, Pinto, Savelyev & Yavitz, 2010) and others (e.g. Schweinhart et al., 2005) who make the case that offering preschool/Pre-K programs to young children is a good investment of public monies (e.g. UNICEF, 2016). This framing of EC as a ‘return on investment’ (e.g. Bagriansky & Engle, 2009) contends that for every dollar invested in particular types of

early childhood programs, a return of a particular amount of money in savings (depending on the program) will be produced for taxpayers. These researchers define savings as the money saved from not having to spend additional money on future social and educational services on the children who participated in the program. This argument shifts the premise for funding EC programs slightly from the Johnston Administration’s arguments for Head Start. Rather than break the cycle of poverty for particular children, funding EC programs will save taxpayers money in the long run. Moreover, it positions EC as an addend in Heckman’s (Heckman, 2000) notion of human capital theory whereby EC is not seen as a right for the youngest citizens within a nation, but rather, as an investment for taxpayers that provide dividends in the form of more capable and productive workforce members who will not burden the nation’s social services and will contribute to its tax payrolls. Some have picked up this human capital argument as a vehicle to frame access to high-quality early education as an equity issue (Britto, 2012) – failing to provide access to such programs perpetuates the status quo (Ahmad & Hamm, 2013) and ignores empirical evidence that demonstrates the significance of high-quality early learning experience for children’s development (High, 2008). Others have employed the investment argument to advocate for high-quality early learning experiences for young children so that they are either ready to enter the workforce or military and/or are prevented from making choices that might cost society additional money (see www.readynation.org; www.shepherding thenextgeneration.org; www.fightcrime.org; www.missionreadiness.org; http:// www.championsforamericasfuture.org). For instance, the US military’s program titled ‘Mission: Readiness’ contends that failing to provide children with high-quality early learning experiences has limited the potential of the pool of enlistees who can meet the required criteria to enlist in the US military, which jeopardizes the military readiness of the

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US and future national security (Christeson, Bishop-Josef, Taggart & Beakey, 2013).

Quality Rating Systems Because investing in early childhood education so that children enter school ready to succeed is now the dominant narrative for why governments should fund and/or expand such programs, policymakers and others are focusing on what types of experiences children are having in these preschool programs. This focus is tied to empirical researchers consistently demonstrating that high-quality early care and education relates to higher language, academic, and social skills, and fewer behaviour problems (e.g. Burchinal, Kainz &Yaping, 2011). Yet, a substantial number of children are attending EC programs in the US and in other countries that are mediocre at best, even among state-funded/supported Pre-K programs (Barnett et  al., 2016). Moreover, children addressing such factors in their life as living in poverty are disproportionately exposed to programs with lower quality (Orkin, Yadete, & Woodhead, 2012). This means that they often participate in EC programs with less-educated teachers who offer low-quality interactions and learning experiences as well as have large class sizes (Burchinal & Cryer, 2003). One way policymakers and EC stakeholders have sought to improve preschool quality is through the establishment of a Quality Rating Improvement System (QRIS). In the US, these systems have been developed at the state level and have expanded rapidly with the support of the Obama Administration’s Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge Grant (RTT-ELC). Now, almost every state in the US is developing or implementing a QRIS (Tout et  al., 2010). Other nations, such as Australia, have created national programs such as the National Quality Framework (Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, 2011), and organizations, such as UNICEF, are prioritizing issues of quality as they attempt to scale

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up access to early education programs in such nations as Ethiopia (American Institutes for Research, 2016). QRIS is meant to improve the quality of EC programs by creating an accountability system that scores EC programs on a range of quality measures that are then converted into an overall quality program-level rating. This rating is designed not only to inform families and the community about the quality of specific EC programs, but it also gives the programs themselves information relevant to improving their quality in relation to the items scored on the QRIS (Zellman & Fiene, 2012). These rating systems vary from nation to nation and state to state in the criteria they include, but some of the most common elements are: licensing compliance, learning environments, staff qualifications, family involvement, and accreditation (Tout et al., 2010). Additional criteria may include such variables as the use of national and/or research-based curricula, teacher:child ratios, assessment measures of children’s varying developmental domains, health and safety requirements, provisions for children with special needs, and community involvement. While conceptually QRIS appears to be a logical policy response to improve the quality of EC programs for children to start school ready to succeed, empirical research in the US has demonstrated that its impact on children’s academic and social development is mixed at best (e.g. Burchinal et al., 2011). For instance, Sabol and Pianta (2015) found that the apparent short-term benefits in children’s understanding of basic literacy concepts, such as alphabetic knowledge, that appear to be the result of the implementation of a QRIS system in the state of Virginia are lost by the time children enter kindergarten. In all, the policy problem of school readiness across the globe appears to be dominated by an empiricist conception of this construct. As such, policymakers are focusing in on a very limited understanding of what it means for children to enter school ready to succeed. This narrow viewpoint leads to a set of solutions that are to provide specific sets of knowledge,

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skills, and experiences to young children; causing many who work with or conduct research in EC to raise questions about this empiricist understanding of school readiness.

Concerns About the Current Empiricist Framing of School Readiness Both politically and empirically, there appears to be no end in sight to the debate over what it means for children to be ready for school (Brown & Lan, 2015). As the world becomes more global and as citizens across nation-states compete with each other for limited natural and economic resources, expectations for children will more than likely continue to rise. With each new type of education reform to address this policy problem, the focus appears to be on improving and/or increasing the academic achievement of children so that they are all successful in school and the global economy. Such an emphasis has systemic and personal implications. Systemically, tying the success of early education to improving children’s readiness for school defines the value of such programs through their ability to improve students’ academic achievement at a reasonable cost. Failure to improve children’s readiness for school may lead to the elimination of EC programs or reduced political and/ or fiscal support. It also narrows policymakers’ focus and understanding of the learning and development of young children to a very specific time in their schooling, which might also eliminate their willingness to support programs that serve children prior to or after school entry. Furthermore, by framing and/ or viewing EC programs as a form of inoculation against poor academic achievement (Heckman, 2008), this policy solution ignores the other factors that contribute to children’s readiness for school, such as access to health care and a consistent/reliable source of food as well as such family issues as employment, parental leave, and so on (Britto, 2012; High, 2008). Addressing such issues appears to

have as much impact on children’s success in school as access to high-quality preschool. On a personal level, this almost singular focus by policymakers on academic success, which is tied directly to economic success, will continue to intensify the debate over what it is children need to know and be able to do when they enter the kindergarten classroom. Doing so places much of the onus of being ready for school on children (Brown, 2011). For instance, Moss (2012) noted that this framing of EC as a vehicle that readies children for school, or for the next transition within the system, e.g. college readiness, creates a monologic discourse in which ‘each successive stage of the system is … to make clear to those in the stage below them what they expect and need from children when passed up to them’ (p. 14). This discourse creates a policy environment in which children take the blame if they are deemed unready by the educational system. Such a singular emphasis on each child to demonstrate that s/he is ready for school also ignores the call by professional organizations and stakeholders around the world for school readiness to be framed through an interactionist understanding of this construct (e.g. PACEY, 2013). By doing so, there appears to be little space for early educators within the public schooling process that allows them to engage in instructional practices that reflect what is known about how young children develop and learn (Bowman, Donovan & Burns, 2000; Rogoff, 2003). Whitebread and Bingham (2011), who reviewed readiness policies in England, warned: The idea that rushing young children into formal learning of literacy, mathematics etc as young as possible is misguided. This leads to a situation where children’s basic emotional and cognitive needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness, and the opportunity to develop their metacognitive and selfregulation skills, are not being met. (p. 4)

They and others within the field of early education in the US (e.g. Brown & Lan, 2013) and internationally (e.g. Sofou & Tsafos, 2010) argue that this emphasis by policymakers and school systems on academic skill development are creating schools that are not ready to

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prepare the whole child for school success. This empiricist focus on school readiness deemphasizes the significant aspects found within an interactionist conception of this construct – developing a positive interaction between early educators, their programs, and the children and the families they serve, which in turn affects children’s readiness for school (e.g. Peisner-Feinberg et  al., 2001; Pianta, Barnett, Burchinal & Thornburg, 2009). Additionally, there is a worry (e.g. Hatch, 2002) that such reforms can limit the opportunity for teachers to provide children with play-based activities that foster their planning, problem-solving, and goal-setting skills, which have been correlated with later academic achievement (e.g. Bodrova & Leong, 2007; Brown, 2013). Lastly, this singular focus in the US education system appears to project what Brown and Lan (2015) term the standardized White, middle-class conception of school readiness. This vision of school readiness fails to take into account what Yosso (2005) termed the ‘cultural wealth’ of children and their families so that it may be utilized as an ‘asset’ to them in school. Such a prototype has the potential to further disengage and/or disempower them and their families as they progress through school.

Future Directions in Addressing the Policy Problem of School Readiness When considering future directions in addressing the policy problem of school readiness, many (e.g. Demma, 2010) focus on systemic policy issues that further entrench an empiricist understanding of this construct. Such policy suggestions include improving the training of and/or offering professional development for early educators; continuing to improve the quality of EC by expanding such things as QRIS systems; aligning and integrating funding across EC systems; establishing professional standards as well as aligning academic and skills standards across EC and elementary education systems;

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providing parental support in and outside EC; and implementing a range of reforms that can develop safe and supportive communities. The goal of these policies appears to be fostering a robust and comprehensive system of EC that provides children with learning experiences from birth, which will put them on a trajectory for school and eventually economic success (Britto, 2012; Landers, 2013). While it is difficult to argue against such logic, I, and others (e.g. Moss, 2012), contend that the linear nature of the current policy framing of the issue of school readiness specifically and EC in general needs to be rethought. Children are not simply investments that need to be developed through intervention programs. They are human beings who act upon the world around them in significant ways. Still, for an interactionist conception of readiness to emerge, which captures the bi-directional nature of this construct, it not only requires a better understanding of the construct itself, it also necessitates incorporating the complicated educational and familial experiences of children locally as well as globally. Children’s experiences prior to school vary significantly based on where they live and whom they live with (UNICEF, 2016). While little is known about these experiences for children in and out of school occurring in local and global contexts, even less is known about children living in low-income nations (see Woodhead, Rossiter, Dawes & Pankhurst, Chapter 13 in this Handbook), making it difficult to understand what they and their families might need to help them live the lives they wish to lead (UNESCO, 2007). Thus, there is an empirical need to better understand children, families, and schooling across a range of communities and nations as well as what it means for these communities to be successful in and out of school. Moreover, there is a need for examining how these communities think about schooling in general and school readiness specifically. As I note in the above, school readiness is being framed in a very narrow manner by policymakers and many members of the EC community. Thus, for a robust vision of school readiness to emerge, all EC stakeholders need

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to expand their conception of this construct so that children, families, and communities can work together to develop an understanding of school readiness that moves away from searching for deficits and allows children and their families to become the productive members of the community that they want to be. Such a policy goal may never be achieved, but as EC programs continue to expand across the globe, how they define children and their families must be examined, and what it is they are asking them to do and to become should be questioned so that a more interactional process of EC might emerge.

Notes  1  Currently, this population of students includes those whose families are economically disadvantaged or have limited English-speaking skills and children with special needs.  2  The governor’s initiatives traded a decrease in state policymakers’ governance over school districts and other academic issues for an increase in the role of academic accountability in ensuring improved student performance (Elmore, 2003).  3  In the US, children typically enter kindergarten at age 5 and graduate from high school 13 years later upon completing the 12th grade.

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Gifford, J. (1992). A stitch in time: Strengthening the first years of school. Canberra: Australian Government. Gillborn, D., & Youdell, D. (2000) Rationing education: Policy, practice, reform and equity. Buckingham: Open University Press. Gnezda, M. T., & Bolig, R. (1988). A national survey of public school testing of prekindergarten and kindergarten children. Paper prepared for the National Forum on the Future of Children and Families and the National Association of State Boards of Education. Graue, M. E. (1993). Ready for what? Constructing meanings of readiness for kindergarten. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Graue, M. E. (2006). The answer is readiness – now what is the question? Early Education and Development, 17(1), 43–56. Graue, M. E., Kroeger, J., & Brown, C. (2002). Living the gift of time. Contemporary Issues in EarlyChildhood, 3(3), 338–353. Gullo, D. F. (1994). Understanding assessment and evaluation in early childhood education. New York: Teachers College Press. Halle, T. G., Hair, E. C., Wandner, L. D., & Chien, N. C. (2012). Profiles of school readiness among four-year-old Head Start children. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 27(4), 613–626. Hatch, J. A. (2002). Accountability shovedown: Resisting the standards movement in early childhood education. Phi Delta Kappan, 83(6), 457–463. Hatch, J. A., & Freeman, E. B. (1988). Who’s pushing whom? Stress and kindergarten. Phi Delta Kappan, 70(2), 145–148. Heckman, J. J. (2000). Policies to foster human capital. Research in Economics, 54(1), 3–56. Heckman, J. J. (2008). Schools, skills and synapses. Economic Inquiry, 46(3), 289–324. Heckman, J. J., Moon, S. H., Pinto, R. R., Savelyev, P. A., & Yavitz, A. Q. (2010). The rate of return to the HighScope Perry Preschool Program. Journal of Public Economics, 94(1–2), 114–128. High, P. C. (2008). School readiness. Pediatrics, 121(4), 1008–1015. Hindman, A., Miller, A., Froyen, L., & Skibbe, L. (2012). A portrait of family involvement during Head Start: Nature, extent, and predictors. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 27(4), 654–667.

Howes, C., Burchinal, M., Pianta, R., Bryant, D., Early, D., & Clifford, R. (2008). Ready to learn? Children’s pre-academic achievement in pre-kindergarten programs. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 23(1), 27–50. Jensen, A. S., Broström, S., & Hansen, O. H. (2010). Critical perspectives of Danish early childhood education and care: Between the technical and the political. Early Years, 30(3), 243–254. Jones, L., & Osgood, J. (2007). Mapping the fabricated identity of childminders: Pride and prejudice. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 8(4), 289–300. Kagan, S. L. (1990). Readiness 2000: Rethinking rhetoric and responsibility. Phi Delta Kappan, 72(4), 272–279. Kagan, S. L. (1999). Cracking the readiness mystique. Young Children, 54(5), 2–3. Kim, J., Lee, Y., Suen, H., & Lee, G. S. (2003). A Delphi study of young children’s readiness in Korea: Challenges and implications for early childhood schooling. Educational Research and Evaluation, 9(4), 345–55. Kummen, K. (2011). Once upon a time there was a ready child: Challenging readiness as a single story. In A. Pence & J. White (Eds), Child and youth care: Critical perspectives on pedagogy, practice, and policy (pp. 199– 218). Vancouver: UBC Press. Lahaie, C. (2008). School readiness of children of immigrants: Does parental involvement play a role? Social Science Quarterly, 89(3), 684–705. Landers, C. (2013). Getting ready for school: A child-to-child approach, strategic framework. New York: United Nations Children’s Fund. MacNaughton, G. (2007). Doing Foucault in early childhood studies: Applying poststructural ideas. New York: Taylor & Francis. Matthews, J. S., Kizzie, K. T., Rowley, S. J., & Cortina, K. (2010). African American boys: Understanding the literacy gap predicting academic trajectories and evaluating learning-related skills. Journal of Educational Psychology, 102(3), 757–771. May, C. R., & Campbell, R. M. (1981). Readiness for learning: Assumptions and realities. Theory into Practice, 20(2), 130–134. Meisels, S. J. (1987). Uses and abuses of developmental screening and school readiness testing. Young Children, 42(2), 4–6, 68–73. Meisels, S. J. (1992). Doing harm by doing good: Iatrogenic effects of early childhood

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enrollment and promotion policies. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 7(2), 155–74. Meisels, S. J. (1999). Assessing readiness. In R. C. Pianta & M. J. Cox (Eds), The transition to kindergarten (pp. 39–63). Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes Publishing. Moss, P. (2012). The relationship between early childhood and compulsory education. In P. Moss (Ed.), Early childhood and compulsory education: Reconceptualizing the relationship (pp. 2–49). New York: Routledge. National Commission on Excellence in Education. (1984). A Nation at Risk: The Full Account. Cambridge, MA: USA Research. National Education Goals Panel. (1991). Goal 1 Technical Planning Group report on school readiness. Washington, DC: Author. National Education Goals Panel. (1995). Reconsidering children’s early development and learning: Toward common views and vocabulary. Washington, DC: Author. National Governors’ Association. (1986). Time for results. Washington DC: Author. Neuman, S. B. (2009). Changing the odds for children at risk. New York: Teachers College Press. O’Day, J. A. (2002). Complexity, accountability, and school improvement. Harvard Educational Review, 72(3), 293–329. OECD. (2015). Starting Strong IV: Monitoring quality in early childhood education and care. Paris: Author. Office of the White House. (2002). Good start, grow smart: The Bush administration’s early childhood initiative. Retrieved from http:// www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/earlychildhood/sect1.html Orkin, K., Yadete, W., & Woodhead, M. (2012). Delivering quality early learning in lowresource settings: Progress and challenges in Ethiopia, Working Paper in Early Childhood Development 59. The Hague: Bernard van Leer Foundation. Palermo, F., Hanish, L. D., Martin, C. L., Fabes, R. A., & Reiser, M. (2007). Preschoolers’ academic readiness: What role does the teacher– child relationship play? Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 22(4), 407–422. Peisner-Feinberg, E. S., Burchinal, M. R., Clifford, R. M., Culkin, M. L., Howes, C., Kagan, S. L., & Yazejian, N. (2001). The relation of preschool child-care quality to children’s cognitive and social development trajectories through second grade. Child Development, 72(5), 1534–1553.

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Pianta, R. C., Barnett, W. S., Burchinal, M., & Thornburg, K. R. (2009). The effects of preschool education: What I know, how public policy is or is not aligned with the evidence base, and what I need to know. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 10(2), 49–88. Piotrkowski, C. S., Botsko, M., & Matthews, E. (2000). Parents’ and teachers’ beliefs about children’s school readiness in a high-need community. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 15(4), 537–558. Powell, D. R., Son, S. H., File, N., & San Juan, R. R. (2010). Parent-school relationships and children’s academic and social outcomes in public school pre-kindergarten. Journal of School Psychology, 48(4), 269–292. Professional Association for Childcare and Early Years (PACEY) (2013). What does ‘school ready’ really mean? Bromley, England: Author. Reynolds, A. J. (1992). Grade retention and school adjustment: An explanatory analysis. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 14(2), 101–121. Rimm-Kaufman, S., Pianta, R., & Cox, M. (2000). Teachers’ judgments of problems in the transition to kindergarten. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 15(2), 147–166. Roderick, M., & Nagaoka, J. (2005). Retention under Chicago’s high-stakes testing program: Helpful, harmful, or harmless? Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 27(4), 309–340. Rogoff, B. (2003). The cultural nature of human development. New York: Oxford University Press. Rouse, H. L., & Fantuzzo, J. W. (2009). Multiple risks and educational wellbeing: A population-based investigation of threats to early school success. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 24(1), 1–14. Sabol, T. J., & Pianta, R. C. (2012). Patterns of school readiness forecast achievement and socioemotional development at the end of elementary school. Child Development, 83(1), 282–299. Sabol, T. J., & Pianta, R. C. (2015). Validating Virginia’s quality rating and improvement system among state-funded pre-kindergarten programs. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 30(Part B), 183–198. Schweinhart, L. J., Montie, J., Xiang, Z., Barnett, W. S., Belfield, C. R., & Nores, M. (2005). Lifetime effects: The High/Scope Perry Preschool Study through Age 4, Monographs of

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the High/Scope Educational Research Foundation, 14. Ypsilanti, MI: High/Scope Press. Scott-Little, C., Kagan, S. L., & Frelow, V. S. (2006). Conceptualization of readiness and the content of early learning standards: The intersection of policy and research? Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 21(2), 153–173. Shaul, S., & Schwartz, M. (2014). The role of the executive functions in school readiness among preschool-age children. Reading and Writing, 27(4), 749–768. Shepard, L. A. (1994). The challenge of assessing young children appropriately. Phi Delta Kappan, 76(3), 206–212. Shepard, L., & Smith, M. L. (1986). Synthesis of research on school readiness and kindergarten retention. Educational Leadership, 44(3), 78–86. Smith, M. L., & Shepard, L. A. (1988). Kindergarten readiness and retention: A qualitative study of teachers’ beliefs and practices. American Educational Research Journal, 25(3), 307–333. Sofou, E., & Tsafos, V. (2010). Preschool teachers’ understandings of the national preschool curriculum in Greece. Early Childhood Education Journal, 37(5), 411–420. Sumsion, J. and Wong, S. (2011). Interrogating ‘belonging’ in belonging, being and becoming: An early years learning framework for Australia. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 12(1), 28–45. Tout, K., Starr, R., Soli, M., Moodie, S., Kirby, G., & Boller, K. (2010). Compendium of quality rating systems and evaluations. Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, US Department of Health and Human Services. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) (2007). EFA global monitoring report 2007: Strong foundations – Early childhood care and education. Paris: Author. United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (2002). A world fit for children. New York: Author. United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (2012). Inequities in early childhood development: What the data say. New York: Author. United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (2016). Too few children are attending pre-school programmes, especially

among the poor. Retrieved from http://data. unicef.org/topic/early-childhood-development/ early-childhood-education/#_ftn1 US Department of Education (1991). AMERICA 2000: An education strategy sourcebook. Washington, DC: Author. US Department of Education, & US Department of Health & Human Services. (2011). Race to the top: Early learning challenge, guidance and frequently asked questions. Washington, DC: Authors. Whitebread, D., & Bingham, S. (2011). School readiness: A critical review of perspectives and evidence. TACTYC Occasional Paper No. 2, TACTYC. Wildenger, L. K., & McIntyre, L. L. (2011). Family concerns and involvement during kindergarten transition. Journal of Family Studies, 20(4), 387–396. Wildy, H., & Styles, I. (2008). Measuring what students entering school know and can do: PIPS Australian, 2006–2007. Australian Journal of Early Childhood, 33(4), 43–52. Winsler, A., Tran, H., Hartman, S. C., Magigan, A. L., Manfra, L., & Bleiker, C. (2008). School readiness gains made by ethnically diverse children in poverty attending center-based childcare and public school pre-kindergarten programs. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 23(3), 314–329. Woods, P., & Jeffrey, B. (1998). Choosing positions: Living the contradictions of OFSTED. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 19(4), 547–570. Workman, E. (2014). 50-state comparison: State kindergarten policies. Education Commission of the States. Retrieved from: http:// www.ecs.org/kindergarten-policies/ Yosso, T. J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race, Ethnicity, and Education, 8(1), 69–91. Zellman, G. L., & Fiene, R. (2012). Validation of quality rating and improvement systems for early care and education and school-age care, Research-to-Policy, Research-to-Practice Brief OPRE 2012-29. Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, US Department of Health and Human Services. Zigler, E., Marsland, K., & Lord, H. (2009). The tragedy of childcare in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

18 Educare: A Model for US Early Childhood Services D i a n e H o r m , N o r e e n Ya z e j i a n , P o r t i a K e n n e l and Cynthia D. Jackson

Introduction The overall goal of this chapter is to describe Educare, a comprehensive early childhood education program model designed to serve young children, birth to age 5, and their families who live in poverty (Educare Learning Network, 2015). Since its inception in 2000, Educare has grown to be a network of schools spread across the United States (US). These schools collaborate with the common goals to increase the visibility and availability of high-quality early childhood services and to demonstrate their potential to reduce or eliminate the income-linked achievement gap that has been a persistent problem in American and international contexts. In addition to recounting Educare’s initiation and growth, descriptions of Educare as a program, place, partnership, and platform for change (Yazejian, Bryant & Kennel, 2013, p. 209) will be provided by authors who include the co-founder of Educare

(Kennel), a current national-level Educare administrator (Jackson), and two program evaluators – one at the local level (Horm) and one at the national level (Yazejian). Educare’s logic model, with its emphasis on data use; the role of embedded research to inform local and national programming; and Educare’s research agenda will be highlighted as strategies to impact programming and policy. Additionally, Educare’s research findings will be reviewed. Attention will be placed on how Educare is similar to and different from typical early childhood services in the US. This discussion will address service access, program costs and funding, program components and implementation, quality, and the role of research. Based on this contrast, Educare will be highlighted as a program positioned to challenge existing practice and policy and primed to inform initiatives to optimize the life chances of young children growing up in the context of poverty.

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Poverty and Early Childhood Programs Designed for Children and their Families Living in Poverty: Overview and History in the US In the US, young children are the most likely of any age group to be poor (CLASP, 2016). Unfortunately, childhood poverty in the US is not a new phenomenon. After dropping in the late 1990s, the poverty rate for children under 6 increased between 2000 and 2012 with rates the last few years averaging at or near 25% (Children’s Defense Fund, 2012). Additionally, childhood poverty is not restricted to the US. Although child poverty rates vary widely across the 34 democracies with market economies that participate in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), from approximately 3% in Finland and Denmark to roughly 25% in Israel and Turkey, children are more likely to live in poverty than the general population across international contexts (OECD, 2015). Concerns about the pervasive impacts of poverty have prompted the US federal government to implement programs. For example, in 1964 President Lyndon Johnson declared ‘The War on Poverty’ and created federal programs, including Head Start, to support children and families living in poverty. Initiated in 1965, Head Start was designed to help break the cycle of poverty, providing preschool children of low-income families with a comprehensive program to get a ‘head start’ on school (Zigler & Muenchow, 1992). Head Start provides high-quality early childhood education and comprehensive family support services to 3- and 4-year-old children and their families who meet the eligibility criterion of living at or below the federal poverty level (Schmit & Walker, 2016). In addition to early education, children and families in Head Start programs have access to a range of services including health screenings and referrals, social services, and parent engagement and support. In 1995, Early Head Start

was created to serve children birth through age 2, their families, and pregnant women living in poverty (Office of Head Start, 2015). Federal Head Start/Early Head Start funding is determined by the US Congress through the annual appropriations process. In 2016, these programs were funded at $9.2 billion (Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2016). While sobering, the statistics cited above on contemporary US child poverty become even more daunting when compared to the number of children receiving Head Start or Early Head Start services. Based on the most recent data, a total of 885,410 preschool children, ages 3 to 5, and 159,607 infants and toddlers under age 3 were enrolled in Head Start or Early Head Start in 2014 (Schmit & Walker, 2016). These numbers represent fewer than half of all eligible preschool children being served by Head Start and only 5% of eligible infants and toddlers being served by Early Head Start (Schmit & Walker, 2016). This gap between the number of eligible children living in poverty and available Head Start services is troubling due to the body of literature documenting pervasive negative outcomes associated with poverty. Poverty experienced birth to age 5 has been found to have both short- and long-term negative consequences for education, health, and other key outcomes (Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000). Children growing up in poverty experience poorer health, higher incidence of developmental delays and learning disabilities, greater hunger, and lower academic achievement compared to their peers (Schmit & Walker, 2016). Poverty has been found to be a strong predictor of children’s success in school and adult employment and earnings, with the longer a child lives in poverty associated with worse adult outcomes (Duncan & Magnuson, 2011). However, the literature also documents that high-quality early childhood education improves outcomes for young children, especially those whose families are poor or lowincome. For example, the recent Head Start Impact Study found that at the end of Head

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Start, prior to kindergarten enrollment, the program was associated with positive effects on children’s language and pre-reading abilities and adults’ parenting skills (Puma et al., 2010). A national evaluation of Early Head Start found benefits across a wide range of child, parent, and family self-sufficiency outcomes at the end of the program, when children were 3 (Vogel, Xue, Moiduddin, Kisker, & Carlson, 2010). Impacts were broader and stronger for programs that fully implemented the Head Start Performance Standards, suggesting that program quality and comprehensiveness play important roles. Two years after the end of the program, prior to entering kindergarten, positive impacts of the Early Head Start program remained for children’s socialemotional outcomes, parenting, and parent well-being (Vogel et al., 2010). These findings bring us to Educare, the focus of this chapter. Building on Head Start and Early Head Start, Educare has been developed based on the existing research about high-quality programs for young children and their families living in poverty. As an enhanced Head Start and Early Head Start program, Educare offers comprehensive, high-quality early childhood services to children and their families to reduce the income-linked achievement gap (Yazejian et al., 2013). As will be discussed more fully below, Head Start and Early Head Start provide a foundation for Educare through use of the federal Performance Standards and the fact that across Educare schools, approximately 50% of the funding is drawn from federal Head Start and Early Head Start dollars. Before describing the Educare model, the factors that led to the creation of Educare will be reviewed.

History of Educare In the late 1990s, many families living in poverty experienced great upheavals as US federal welfare reform policies were enacted.

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At the same time, new research about brain science and child development showing the power of early childhood education as a potential lever to lift children and families out of poverty was receiving increasing attention by scientific and lay audiences. The 2000 publication From Neurons to Neighborhoods (Shonkoff & Phillips) by the National Academy of Sciences, and Time magazine’s 1997 cover story on How a Child’s Brain Develops and What it Means for Child Care and Welfare Reform (February 3, 1997) are two examples of the increasing visibility and public awareness of the importance of the early childhood period to short- and long-term development. The Ounce of Prevention Fund was keenly aware of the realities experienced by families living in poverty and the emerging scientific evidence as they served children and families on Chicago’s South Side in the Robert Taylor Homes. The Robert Taylor Homes were a public housing project where 26,000 families lived in eight square blocks, composing the poorest Census tract in the US. The Ounce operated a comprehensive early childhood development and family support program called the Beethoven Project (New York Times, December 28, 1986). Although intentions were good, after 10 years the Ounce declared its work there a failure. Although providing healthcare, family support, and early learning – all good things, all sorely needed – they were spread too thin and thus not achieving the desired child outcomes. In addition to their disappointing child outcomes, the Robert Taylor Homes were scheduled for demolition. Educare was born out of the ashes of the Beethoven Project. The Ounce redirected its focus and built a program incorporating what the emerging research suggested would prepare young children for success. By starting early, in the earliest possible weeks and months of a child’s life, Educare aimed to prevent the academic achievement gap before it developed. Educare Chicago opened in

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2000 as a public–private partnership of the Ounce, the Irving Harris Foundation, and the Chicago Public Schools. The Ounce did not set out to build a replicable model with the opening of Educare Chicago. However, in 2001, Educare Chicago attracted the interest of Susie Buffett, an American philanthropist, who wanted to improve education outcomes in Omaha, Nebraska. The Ounce partnered with the Buffett Early Childhood Fund (BECF) to create an Educare school in Omaha in 2003. These Educare schools attracted interest from program providers, school districts, and philanthropists across the US who wanted to create high-quality early learning opportunities in their communities. So the BECF and the Ounce joined forces with these early learning champions and together forged a national network of schools, called the Educare Learning Network. The current (2016) network consists of 21 schools spread across

the US. Figure 18.1 shows a map of the currently operating Educare schools. Numbers are used to indicate the presence of more than one Educare school in a city.

Description of Educare As noted above, Educare is a comprehensive early childhood education program designed to serve young children, birth to age 5, and their families who live in poverty (Educare Learning Network, 2015). Educare has been described as a program, place, partnership, and platform for change. Specifically, ‘local public-private partnerships create and support an Educare school – the place – ­following the Educare model – the program – which serves as a platform for broader policy and systems change’ (Yazejian et  al., 2013, p. 209).

Figure 18.1 Map of Educare schools Note: Numbers indicate the presence of more than one Educare school in a city.

Educare: a model for US early childhood services

Based on the research available at the time, the Head Start Performance Standards, and the wisdom of best practices in early childhood education, the Ounce developed Educare on the following guiding principles: • Start early, deliver early care and education from birth to age 5 • Offer full-day, full-year services • Employ professional staff with specialized preparation in early childhood education • Staff classrooms with the needed number of qualified teachers able to differentiate and individualize care and instruction • Keep teachers engaged and strong through ongoing, job-embedded professional development • Evaluate, refine and continuously improve ­programs • Keep parents engaged and involved in their child’s development

Educare school buildings, designed to serve 150–200 young children, provide state-ofthe-art developmentally appropriate settings. The architecture of each school is unique, including local features such as work by local artists. Children have space for indoor and outdoor play. Family support staff have meeting space for private conversations with parents. Staff have collaborative space for reflective supervision and joint planning. Meeting rooms are included for use by the Educare school and community partners.

Educare’s Theory of Change Four core features compose Educare’s theory of change: data utilization, embedded professional development, high-quality teaching practices, and intensive family engagement. These features are embedded in the context of strong leaders who are responsible for implementing the model and cultivating a culture of high-quality early childhood education and family engagement support services. In addition, community linkages provide myriad community-based services that support access to resources for children, families, and staff.

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Educare’s theory of change additionally posits that the coordinated implementation of the four core features leads to strong family– school partnerships, parent support for children’s learning, and that Educare reduces or eliminates the income-linked achievement gap and prepares children for kindergarten and long-term academic and life success (Figure 18.2). Each core feature is discussed in more detail below.

Data Utilization Data utilization is the driver in the Educare model and includes the use of internal and external research and evaluation to inform professional development, improve program practices, and support policy development in state and national arenas. Each Educare school maintains a research program partnership (RPP) with a qualified local evaluation partner (LEP), typically affiliated with a university or research institution, to implement ongoing local program evaluation and the national, longitudinal Educare Implementation Study. Educare staff engage in a regular cycle of reciprocal data dialogues for continuous program improvement and individualized planning for children, families, and staff. All quality improvements – in the classroom, in individual work with families, for program policies and systems, and for professional development – are informed by data collected under the system of data utilization established by each Educare school as part of its RPP. Teams at Educare schools engage in data dialogues in order to understand, discuss, and interpret data to set goals and develop corresponding action plans to drive exemplary practice. Specific examples of how the program staff and LEPs work together to intrepret and use data can be found in Stein, Freel, Hanson, Pacchiano and Eiland-Williford (2013) and Guss, Norris, Horm, Monroe and Wolfe (2013). Both articles, co-authored by LEPs in partnership with Educare program leaders, were featured in a special issue of Early Education and

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EDUCARE MODEL EDUCARE CORE FEATURES

CHILD AND FAMILY OUTCOMES

STRONG LEADERSHIP High-quality Teaching Pracces

Data Ulizaon

Strong parent–child relaonships, school–family partnerships and parent support for learning

Embedded Professional Development

Intensive Family Engagement

COMMUNITY LINKAGES

Increased student achievement and kindergarten readiness

Parent and family outcomes

©2015 Ounce of Prevenon Fund. All rights reserved.

Figure 18.2 Educare model: theory of change

Development devoted to use of data (Horm & Norris, 2013).

Embedded Professional Development Job-embedded professional development opportunities are built into the program structure to occur routinely and are grounded in teachers’ and family support staff’s dayto-day practice. This core feature begins with a well-qualified staff and increases their competence through intensive staff development using an interdisciplinary approach with reflective practice and supervision. Lead classroom teachers hold bachelor’s degrees in early childhood education or a related field with 18 college credits in early childhood education. Master teachers, who typically have a master’s degree in early childhood education, act as coaches facilitating full and effective implementation of Educare’s core features and evidence-based instructional practices in classrooms. Family support staff typically hold bachelor’s degrees in social work or a related field, and

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are supervised by experienced staff who typically hold master’s degrees in social work or related mental health fields. Supervision relies on reflective practice – designated time to consider, think about, examine, or question what someone is observing or doing (WestEd, & Ounce of Prevention Fund & Educare Learning Network, 2013). An interdisciplinary approach encourages communication and collaboration among all the professionals who touch the life of a child and family. For example, education and family support staff meet regularly to discuss and understand the child in the context of his or her family and conduct individual family and child reviews a minimum of three times a year. Similarly, parent conferences include teachers, family support, and other appropriate staff.

High-Quality Teaching Practices Both structural and process features of quality are important to provide the best care and early education for all children, especially those who have been exposed to challenging

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environments (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Early Child Care Research Network [NICHD ECCRN], 2002, 2005). Each Educare school provides full-day, full-year services with small class sizes and high staff:child ratios (3 adults for 8 infants/toddlers; 3 adults for 17 preschoolers) with the goal to enroll children for multiple years. Educare research findings confirm that program intensity and duration matter (Yazejian, Bryant, Freel, Burchinal, & Educare Learning Network, 2015). Following the continuity of care model, children stay with the same teaching team and cohort of children from entry into the program until transition to Head Start at age 3, and then with a second team until they transition to elementary school at age 5. Every child has a primary caregiver who is assigned no more than four infants and toddlers or nine preschoolers. Stable, nurturing, and responsive relationships and interactions, such as those facilitated by primary caregiving, promote secure attachments and enhance social-­ emotional and cognitive development (Ahnert, Pinquart, & Lamb, 2006; Raikes, 1993). Social-emotional developmental theory informs all aspects of the Educare model, including the work with children, families, and staff (see Ounce of Prevention Fund, 2008 for additional details).

Intensive Family Engagement Family engagement in Educare schools is defined as partnering with families to build mutually respectful, goal-oriented relationships that support strong parent–child relationships, family well-being, and ongoing learning and development for both parents and children. To achieve positive outcomes, the Educare model is based on the principle that practitioners can only address a child’s needs within the context of the family. Through systematic approaches, the entire staff works collaboratively with parents across home, school, and community to support children’s participation, health, learning, and development and to build strong family

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ties with other Educare families and various community resources. For example, families collaborate with staff to assess their child’s developmental progress through regular interactions. Families partner with staff to engage their child in activities in their home, neighborhood, and community to facilitate and extend children’s growth and development both in and outside of Educare schools.

Partnerships and Funding The program core features and logic model described above require resources to implement. Educare uses a private–public partnership strategy to develop and fund schools. The development of an Educare school is an organic, community-driven effort. Local partners must work together to assemble the necessary expertise, community engagement, and resources required to realize an Educare school. Technical assistance and support are available from the Network to assist communities in exploring whether Educare is a good fit. The foundation of every Educare school is a public–private partnership involving several partners who come together to develop, launch, and sustain the school over the long run. Core partners agree to share governance of the Educare school and include: • Anchor or lead philanthropic partner – provides initial ‘seed money’ for a new, state-of-theart early learning school; engages the private sector to contribute to Educare operational costs, evaluation, and extension of quality efforts in the broader community. • Program provider – contributes to Educare’s operating budget through Head Start and Early Head Start funds and other operational support; implements the core features of Educare. • School district – may provide operating funds and support; may provide land for the Educare school. • Parents and other local community partners – contribute their experience, expertise, and ­leadership.

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Efforts to develop an Educare school and become part of the Educare Learning Network begin with an intensive focus on establishing this foundational partnership. The foundational Educare partnership allows the school to garner the level of expertise, resources, and commitment needed to achieve Educare levels of quality and have a broader impact in the community. To ensure high-quality programming, each Educare school is funded through a mix of public and private revenue. Public funds are used to support school operations and include a mix of Head Start, Early Head Start, childcare, and state preschool funding streams. Private revenue is required to fund the building and contributes to maintaining favorable teacher:child ratios in the classroom and low caseloads for family engagement staff. Private funding also supports supplemental research, evaluation, and program refinements. As noted above, Educare schools are enhanced over and above what typical Head Start or childcare programs can provide, given their levels of funding. Educare programming costs an average about $20,000 per child and family per year. As noted in the discussion, this is higher than the level

of funding provided through Early Head Start, Head Start, and subsidized childcare. Figure 18.3 shows how the average Educare program is funded.

Research Findings Research is an integral component of the Educare model. As described above, the first Educare was built on existing research, and the model continues to evolve as new findings emerge about how best to support children and families living in poverty. Data use is the keystone in the Educare logic model; data gathered by embedded researchers and findings from the field drive professional development toward the provision of highquality classroom, instructional, and family support services. In addition to these functions, Educare has launched other research initiatives that have produced data to inform Educare and the larger early childhood field. As noted in the previous section, the Educare model includes a data utilization component that drives professional development and continuous quality improvement.

OPERATING REVENUE BY SOURCE 5% 16% Early Head Start and Head Start Education–State and Local 49%

10%

Child Care Private Sector Other

20%

©2015 Ounce of Prevention Fund. All rights reserved.

Figure 18.3 Educare operating revenue by source

Educare: a model for US early childhood services

Progress monitoring and the latest research evidence are used to ensure that children and families receive high-quality services. A developmental evaluation framework guides the work, in which information is used in support of learning, innovation, and change (Patton, 2011). Educare’s model of data utilization is embedded with LEPs situated at Educare schools to guide the collection and interpretation of data. The data-use model is also collaborative, involving teams of researchers, program staff, and parents discussing the design of data collection systems, the collection of data, the interpretation of results, and the implications for practice. Finally, the data-use model is comprehensive, incorporating multiple levels of data, from child to family to programs to systems (Yazejian & Bryant, 2013). At the Network level, data are used to design professional development and program improvement efforts, to guide policy change, and to inform the broader early childhood field. The Educare Implementation Study was planned in 2005 among the Educare schools to gather a set of common measures, on a standard timeline, in order to track the progress of schools and the Network as a whole in implementing the model, delivering quality services, and improving outcomes for children and families. The study is led by researchers at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute (FPG) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. FPG provides training, reliability testing, and certification of local data collectors; maintains quality control of the data and serves as the central data repository; and provides data analyses to inform continuous quality improvement efforts within Educare and across the broader field. The study battery includes staff questionnaires that document qualifications and perceptions of the school and model; global and instructional quality observation measures; parent interviews that gather aspects of parent engagement with their children’s learning and demographic information; teacher ratings

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of children’s social-emotional development; and direct assessments of children’s language and cognitive skills. Data from the Educare Implementation Study have shown that classroom quality is higher than scores seen in other programs (Yazejian & Bryant, 2012). Unpublished analyses have also shown that global quality scores, as measured with the Environment Rating Scales (Harms, Clifford, & Cryer, 1998; Harms, Cryer, & Clifford, 2003), are associated with the length of time a school has been in the Network, suggesting that aspects of Educare’s quality improvement efforts may be improving classroom quality over time. Data also demonstrate that children in Educare score higher on standardized assessments than other samples of children from low-income families (Yazejian & Bryant, 2012). In addition, analyses of longitudinal data on Educare children found that both length of time in care and earlier entry into care were associated with children’s language scores (Yazejian et  al., 2015). These results have led Educare program leaders to examine their child and family retention policies and practices to maximize children’s tenures in the program. Results like these have also informed the broader early childhood field, including the recent proposed changes in Head Start Performance Standards requiring full-day, full-year programming (DHHS, 2015). The consortium of evaluators working with Educare schools collaborates on analyses of the cross-site Educare data set to answer questions of interest to the Network and to the larger field. For example, papers have addressed family adversities and associations with child outcomes (Guss, JonesHarden, Stein, Yazejian, & Forestieri, 2016), practices in classrooms with dual-language learners (Raikes et al., 2017), effects of peers on individual children’s development (Choi et al., 2017), and effects of continuity of care (Horm et al., 2017). A dozen other paper topics are being investigated with the cross-site data set.

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Several Educare schools are also currently conducting coordinated follow-up studies to examine how Educare children fare once they enter compulsory education for children ages 5 and older compared to children from similar socio-economic backgrounds who did not attend Educare. Unpublished results from these ongoing studies suggested that children who attended Educare for at least 2 years outperformed their matched peers on standardized assessments in 3rd grade at age 8. In addition, the studies have found that children generally maintain their higher receptive language scores from the time they leave Educare at ages 4 or 5 through the early elementary grades up to age 8. Additionally, Educare parents remain involved in their children’s educations (Stein et  al., 2013). One Educare school has used the results of its longitudinal follow-up study to inform program improvement efforts and to guide practices in multiple ways. For example, when data showed that a majority of Educare children attended low-performing elementary schools after leaving Educare, school leaders obtained registration information from higher quality schools and increased transition activities to inform parents of these options. Over time, a greater percentage of children have attended the higher quality schools (Stein et al., 2013). Finally, the Network undertook in 2010 a random assignment study to test the effectiveness of Educare. Infants and toddlers (less than 19 months of age) were randomly assigned to Educare or a control group. Assessments have tracked children over time one year after randomization and at ages 3 and 5. One year after randomization, children in Educare outperformed the control group on measures of auditory comprehension and expressive communication, problem behaviors, and positive parent–child interactions (Yazejian et al., 2017). These findings mirror those of the Abecedarian Project (Campbell & Ramey, 1994) and other studies and suggest that a comprehensive early childhood education program can improve the outcomes of infants and toddlers from low-income

families. Sharing the results of the study will support early childhood providers’ efforts to strengthen program quality and advocates’ calls for increased public investments in early learning to reduce the achievement gap.

Educare’s Policy Impacts Educare schools strive to offer high-quality direct services to children and families while also sending a bold message about the value of investing in early childhood education. Educare leaders work to unite policymakers, private-sector leaders, education professionals, parents, and other allies in efforts to increase access to high-quality early childhood education to close the achievement gap. Together, the collective voices of school leaders, researchers, and advocates amplify the call for change. Educare schools employ a range of strategies to effect policy changes that support best practices in early childhood education at the city, state, and national levels. For example, Educare schools: • Demonstrate best practices in early childhood education: data-utilization, embedded professional development, high-quality teaching practices, and intensive family engagement • Model the power of public–private partnerships • Generate and disseminate research showing the positive child outcomes that high-quality programs can achieve • Partner with state early childhood advocates to identify policy barriers and prioritize policy proposals that support high-quality, evidence-based programs • Engage in broader policy efforts with allies such as the First Five Years Fund, the Alliance for Early Success, and the Ounce of Prevention Fund

Each of these strategies is discussed in more detail below. Educare schools model early childhood best practices and serve as a demonstration site or ‘showroom’ for what high-quality

Educare: a model for US early childhood services

comprehensive services look like for young children and their families. Educare schools host tours for community groups and serve as practicum and field placement sites for students from a range of college majors. These types of strategies serve to spread the word about quality at a local level. At the state and national levels, bipartisan leadership from cities, states, the US Congress, and the Executive branch have toured Educare schools to see high-quality early childhood education in action. For example, a former US Secretary of Education held a joint press conference with the Colorado Lieutenant Governor at Educare Denver in 2013. The two promoted President Obama’s proposed expansion of funding for high-quality early learning that ultimately resulted in the Early Head Start–Child Care Partnership and Preschool Development Grant programs. Educare schools strive to create policy change by modeling the power of public– private partnerships in policy discussions; creating strong links to elementary, secondary, and higher education systems; and demonstrating the impact of blending funding streams for early childhood education. In 2014, 11 Educare schools were awarded federal grants totaling $29.1 million to work with childcare partners to improve the quality of services they provide to low-income infants, toddlers, and their families. The grants were part of the $435 million in Early Head Start–Child Care Partnerships awarded by the US Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families (ACF). From application through the initial implementation phases, Educare schools have worked closely together to collect lessons learned, share best practices, and address the challenges of raising quality standards for more than 2,200 infants and toddlers in 121 childcare centers involved across the funded projects. What the Network has learned about public–private partnerships has been and will continue to be shared formally with the US federal agency and the early childhood education field. Independent

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researchers will also complete a formal evaluation of Educare’s impact through these Partnership grants to ensure lessons learned are disseminated to the larger early childhood education community. As discussed above, research is an important component and Educare leaders and LEPs have disseminated the results of their local and national research through a variety of mechanisms. Presentations have been delivered to civic groups and at local-, state-, and national-level professional meetings and conferences. As detailed previously, the Network has started a successful record of publishing its results in high-quality scientific journals as well as other venues designed for practitioners. Thus, working together, the Network has used the talents and skills of their various partners to generate and disseminate Educare findings to varied audiences. Educare schools and their state advocacy partners have played critical roles in winning policy victories at the state and local level as well. Educare Kansas City worked closely with Kansas Action for Children to protect investments in the state’s youngest and most vulnerable learners. Despite a hostile political climate and a widening state budget gap, a coalition of early learning leaders convinced the Kansas governor to keep the Children’s Initiative Fund intact in his 2016 budget. Educare Central Maine worked to develop critical relationships with the United Way and area business leaders to form the Maine Early Learning Investment Group (MELIG) and a campaign called the Elevate Maine Initiative. Together, Educare Central Maine and MELIG work to provide all children and families in Maine with access to high-quality early learning. Educare schools partner with national advocacy groups such as the First Five Years Fund, Alliance for Early Success, and the Ounce national policy team, who help to shape policy in ways that benefit all early learning programs throughout the country. The First Five Years Fund provides federal policymakers with the information necessary

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to make informed investments in high-quality early childhood education. The Alliance for Early Success promotes partnerships within and among state and national organizations to advance state policies that lead to better outcomes for young children. Similarly, the Ounce national policy team works with state and local leaders to build, coordinate, and protect early childhood services and infrastructure. The Educare Network advocates to encourage public officials to increase investments in early learning to reach more of the 6 million young children who live in poverty across the US. The Educare approach itself, its core features and their implementation, can offer significant lessons to a wide range of programs. No individual funding stream currently supports the full range of practices embedded at Educare. The schools are a strong reminder to state policymakers that they should adopt policies that allow programs to combine multiple funding streams, including Head Start, childcare and preschool dollars. The Network also shows the power of philanthropy and community collaboration in supporting early childhood services.

Educare’s Future Goals During Educare’s first 10 years, the focus was on developing a research-based program to help reduce the income-linked achievement gap in young children. Initial results have been positive with research findings documenting that the programs are highquality and are making positive contributions to children’s and families’ development. A network of like-minded educators, researchers, and community leaders has been built. The Educare Learning Network provides tools, consultation, and peer-learning opportunities to help schools effectively advocate with, and on behalf of, the children and families they serve. Advocacy efforts have made a mark on policy at multiple levels.

While Educare has made much progress in its first 10 years, challenges remain. Educare schools strive to deliver high-quality services while facing many of the same challenges common to the broader US early childhood field. For example, low staff salaries contribute to teacher turnover, state childcare subsidy policies contribute to child attrition, and the multiple funding streams introduce multiple standards and accountability demands. Educare program leaders, affiliated researchers, and policy advocates, individually and collectively, will continue to address these and related program and policy issues to influence needed changes. Guided by an ambitious research agenda, the Network will continue to build a national body of evidence on effective strategies for closing the achievement gap. The four core features of the Educare model will serve as the critical areas of inquiry as researchers work to understand the active ingredients in preparing children and families for success in school and in life (see http://w ww.educareschools.org/our-results/researchagenda/ for more details). The goals for Educare’s future were outlined in a strategic plan developed and adopted by the entire Network. The Educare Learning Network’s vision for the future is to leverage ‘lessons learned’ to further influence practice and policy at the local, state, and national levels. Together, the Network will: • Innovate: Through planning, reflection, peerlearning, and evaluation research, the schools develop and share new strategies for closing and preventing the achievement gap. What works in one school can be shared, tested, and evaluated in others, including those outside the Educare Network. • Scale: To fulfill Educare’s vision that all children and families, especially those at greatest risk, will have access to effective early learning, Educare leaders are working with others in the early childhood field to develop strategies to raise the quality of programs across the US. The Educare Learning Network systematically shares Educare’s best practices through

Educare: a model for US early childhood services

c­ollaborations with community-based organizations, state and federal systems, and other strategic partners. Educare schools will provide professional development trainings in each core feature that defines the Educare model – data utilization, embedded professional development, high-quality teaching practices, and intensive family engagement. The trainings will be supplemented by products and services to strengthen the leadership of programs and their capacity to cultivate the organizational climate and conditions supportive of teacher and practitioner continuous learning, improvement, and effectiveness. Through the professional development hub pilot with a formal independent evaluation, the Educare Learning Network plans to collect lessons learned, measure outcomes, and share the experience with the broader field of early childhood education. • Connect: The momentum for high-quality early childhood education has never been stronger in the US. According to a 2015 poll commissioned by the First Five Years Fund (2015), 76% of voters, including 59% of conservative voters, support increasing federal investments in high-quality early childhood education. A growing number of governors have called for increased investments in early learning in their states. The Network is positioned to demonstrate the power of highquality early childhood education, lead the field through exemplary program practice and cuttingedge research, build coalitions of strong leaders, and advocate for smart, effective policy and investments in the US’s youngest and most vulnerable learners. Through relationship-based and research-based approaches and strong partnerships, the Network is poised to achieve its mission to help ensure that all children and families, especially those at greatest risk, will have access to effective early learning, and that the first five years will be an integral part of the future US education system.

Conclusion The purpose of this chapter was to describe Educare and highlight its role in promoting early childhood education in the US. It is important to note that Educare is atypical of

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commonly-available early childhood programming in the US, especially for children growing up in poverty. Educare uses its enhanced funding to offer enhanced services, over and above what typical Head Start funding or community-based programs can provide. For example, although Head Start now requires that 50% of lead teachers have a bachelor’s degree, Educare strives to have 100% of lead teachers with bachelor’s degrees. It is important to note that both Head Start and Educare have a higher lead teacher qualification than most US states for programs serving children birth through age 5, regardless of the income level of the families served. Educare expands on Head Start and differs from community-based programs in several other ways. Figure 18.4 summarizes similarities and differences. While this chart highlights only a few of the many variables that could be used to compare and contrast programs, it illustrates the fact that the US early childhood landscape where most children receive services (the right column) has been described as a non-system (Kagan & Cohen, 1997) characterized by lack of public investment, program models, and meaningful quality monitoring. It is evident that Head Start, long considered a model for the US (Zigler & Muenchow, 1992), offers a level of program coherence and quality that is not widely available across the US. Educare, while serving fewer children than Head Start, provides a model that can be considered aspirational. Educare shows what can be achieved if funding and commitment are available to implement research-based practices with an intentional focus on continual program improvement. As described above, Educare and its partners are working at local, state, and federal levels to advocate for this type of programming to be available to more, ideally all, US children and families. Educare demonstrates that it is possible to consistently offer high-quality direct services to young children growing up in

Targeted for children living in poverty A total of approximately 3,400 children are served across the US in the 21 operational Educare schools; a very small % of US children growing up in poverty. However, program intended to be a model, not to offer universal services No cost, if eligible

Service eligibility Coverage

No cost, if eligible

Targeted for children living in poverty Fewer than half of all eligible children are served by Head Start; just 5% of eligible children are served by Early Head Start (Schmit & Walker, 2016)

Head Start Varies, but generally open to all for fee Varies, but the demand for low-cost care by low-income families is typically more than the supply

Community-based child care

Source: Authors drafted this as original work for this chapter; not copyrighted

Fees vary, but US average for 4-year-old ranges from $344 to $1472 per month; costs for infants/toddlers much higher (Cook, 2015) Funding Multiple funding streams; federal, state, local, Generally federal; some states add funding Generally parent fee-based; some subsidy available to philanthropy The national cost per child for preschool Head support enrollment of low-income children Recent estimate is approximately $20,000 cost per Start in FY 2009 was $7,600 (Office of Head In 2005 the average cost of full-time, center-based child/family for birth to age 5 programming Start, 2010); the estimated annual cost per childcare for 4-year-olds ranged from a low of about child for Early Head Start (infants/toddlers) $3,016 to a high of about $9,628 per child across US was approximately $10,500 per child in states (NACCRA, 2006) 2006 (Isaacs & Roessel, 2008) Program Well-specified Well-specified Varies by provider; state may require certain components components such as learning centers as part of licensing Model Educare Implementation Checklist done annually and Compliance with Head Start Performance Generally no monitoring for implementation of specific implementation compliance with Head Start Performance Standards Standards regularly monitored by federal model; compliance to state childcare licensing laws regularly monitored by federal review teams review teams which tend to focus on health and safety monitored Quality monitoring Classroom quality assessed annually by LEP using Program quality monitored through regular Varies widely, most states have initiatives to improve multiple measures; participate in regular Head Head Start performance reviews, including quality but classroom/program monitoring rarely Start Performance Reviews classroom quality checks in-depth, universal, or frequent Use of data Expected; viewed as driver of program’s logic model Expected; guidance emerging from federal No overt expectation level about how to implement Role of research Program was developed based on research; ongoing Program was developed based on research; Federal and state regulations often informed by research applied research is expected to inform program; external program evaluation completed findings; no overt expectation at the individual qualified research staff embedded in program; periodically to ensure program is meeting program level other than to be consumers of cross-site data collection and resulting database goals; national datasets available for research to inform programming permits analyses that informs Educare and the secondary analyses broader field

Cost to families

Educare

Feature

Figure 18.4 Comparison of US birth to age 5 programming

Educare: a model for US early childhood services

poverty to a level that reduces the achievement gap. Educare also demonstrates that, through a research-based approach that shares lessons across a network of schools, programs can improve and maintain quality over time. By sharing its program wisdom and research findings with advocates and policymakers, Educare also demonstrates that it can influence public policy. But, these programs also demonstrate that funding and systems are needed to support program coherence, quality, and access. Current policy initiatives, including the Early Head Start–Child Care Partnership Grants, are a step in importing higher-quality practices to the broader community. But, funding, personnel, and administrative systems will need to be expanded or created to accomplish this on a larger scale. The lessons learned from Educare combined with the growing public commitment to early childhood education, as evidenced by recent polling, suggest that the US may be moving to the next generation of early childhood education programming, and Educare serves as an aspirational model to optimize the life chances of young children growing up in poverty. Across the globe, Educare can serve as a model of how to build quality – through networks, research-informed programming, innovative funding, and coordinated a­ dvocacy – in other countries, including efforts in low- and middle-income countries.

References Ahnert, L., Pinquart, M., & Lamb, M. E. (2006). Security of children’s relationships with nonparental care providers: A meta-analysis. Child Development, 77(3), 664–679. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2006.00896.x Campbell, F. A., & Ramey, C. T. (1994). Effects of early intervention on intellectual and academic achievement: A follow-up study of children from low-income families. Child Development, 65(2), 684–698. doi: 10.1111/ j.1467-8624.1994.tb00777.x

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Children’s Defense Fund. (2012). Child poverty in America 2012: National analysis. Retrieved from http://www.childrensdefense.org/library/ data/child-poverty-in-america-2012.pdf Choi, J. Y., Castle, S., Horm, D., Guss, S., Burchinal, M., Bingham, G., & Taromino, C. (2017). Peer effects on low-income children’s learning and development. Manuscript submitted for publication. CLASP. (2016). CLASP DataFinder: Most recent data from Head Start Program Information Report (PIR). Retrieved from http://www. clasp.org/data Consolidated Appropriations Act. (2016). H.R. 2029, 114 Congress. Retrieved from https:// www.congress.gov/114/bills/hr2029/BILLS114hr2029enr.pdf Cook, L. (2015). These charts show the insane cost of child care. Featured in US News & World Report. Retrieved from http://www. usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2015/ 10/08/these-charts-show-the-insane-costof-child-care Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). (2015). 45 CFR Chapter XIII, Subchapter B RIN 0970–AC63, Head Start Performance Standards. Federal Register, 80(118), 35430–35564. Retrieved from https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2015-0619/pdf/2015-14379.pdf Duncan, G. J., & Magnuson, K. (2011). The long reach of early childhood poverty. Retrieved from http://inequality.stanford. edu/_media/pdf/pathways/winter_2011/ PathwaysWinter11_Duncan.pdf Educare Learning Network. (2015). What is Educare? Retrieved from http://www.educareschools.org/about/what-is-educare.php First Five Years Fund. (2015). 2015 poll. Washington, DC: Author. Available from http:// ffyf.org/2015-poll/ Guss, S., Jones-Harden, B., Stein, A., Yazejian, N., & Forestieri, N. (2016). Relationship of adversity to indicators of child well-being in a high quality early education context. NHSA Dialog, 18(4), 1–23. Guss, S. S., Norris, D. J., Horm, D. M., Monroe, L. A., & Wolfe, V. (2013). Lessons learned about data utilization from classroom observations. Early Education and Development, 24(1), 4–18. doi: 10.1080/10409289.2013. 739543

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Harms, T., Clifford, R. M., & Cryer, D. (1998). Early Childhood Environment Rating ScaleRevised edition. New York: Teachers College Press. Harms, T., Cryer, D., & Clifford, R. M. (2003). Infant/Toddler Environment Rating ScaleRevised edition. New York: Teachers College Press. Horm, D., & Norris, D. J. (Eds.). (2013). Special issue: Infants and toddlers in group care. Early Education & Development, 27(2), 145–302. Horm, D., File, N., Bryant, D., Burchinal, M., Raikes, H., Forestieri, N., Encinger, A., & Cobo-Lewis, A. (2017). Associations between continuity of care in infant-toddler classrooms and child outcomes. Manuscript submitted for publication. Isaacs, J., & Roessel, E. (2008). Impacts of early childhood programs, Research Brief #3: Early Head Start. Washington, DC: Brookings Institute. Available from http://www.brookings. edu/∼/media/Research/Files/Papers/2008/9/ early-programs-isaacs/09_early_programs_ brief3.PDF Kagan, S. L., & Cohen, N. (1997). Not by chance: Creating an early care and education system for America’s children. New Haven, CT: Bush Center in Child Development and Social Policy. National Association of Child Care Resources and Referral Agencies [NACCRA]. (2006). Breaking the Piggy Bank: Parents and the High Price of Child Care. Arlington, VA: NACCRRA. Available from http://www.naccrra.org/docs/policy/breaking_the_piggy_ bank.pdf National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Early Child Care Research Network. (2002). Early child care and children’s development prior to school entry: Results from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care. American Educational Research Journal, 39(1), 133–164. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Early Child Care Research Network. (2005). Duration and developmental timing of poverty and children’s cognitive and social development from birth through third grade. Child Development, 76(4), 795–810. New York Times. (December 28, 1986). A cradle-to-kindergarten aid plan in Chicago.

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efforts. Early Education and Development, 24(1), 19–41. doi: 10.1080/10409289.2013. 739542 Time. (February 3, 1997). How a child’s brain develops and what it means for child care and welfare reform. Vogel, C. A., Xue, Y., Moiduddin, E. M., Kisker, E. E., & Carlson, B. L. (2010). Early Head Start Children in Grade 5: Long-term follow-up of the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Study Sample. OPRE Report # 2011-8. Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, US Department of Health and Human Services. WestEd, Ounce of Prevention Fund, & Educare Learning Network (2013). Reflective curriculum planning: A guide to implementation. Chicago, IL: Authors. Yazejian, N., & Bryant, D. (2012). Educare Implementation Study Findings – August 2012. Chapel Hill, NC: Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute, UNC-CH. Yazejian, N., & Bryant, D. (2013). Embedded, collaborative, comprehensive: One model of data utilization. Early Education and

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Development, 24(1), 68–70. doi: 10.1080/1040 9289.2013.736128 Yazejian, N., Bryant, D., & Kennel, P. (2013). Implementation and replication of the Educare model of early childhood education. In T. Halle, A. Metz, & I. Martinez-Beck (Eds), Applying implementation science in early childhood programs and systems (pp. 209–225). Baltimore, MD: Brookes. Yazejian, N., Bryant, D., Freel, K., Burchinal, M., & the Educare Learning Network Investigative Team. (2015). High-quality early education: Age of entry and time in care differences in student outcomes for Englishonly and dual language learners. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 32, 23–39. doi: 10.1016/j.ecresq.2015.02.002 Yazejian, N., Bryant, D., Hans, S., Horm, D., St. Clair, L., File, N., & Burchinal, M. (2017). Child and parenting outcomes after one year of Educare. Child Development. doi: 10.1111/cdev.12688 Zigler, E., & Muenchow, S. (1992). Head Start: The inside story of America’s most successful educational experiment. New York: Basic Books.

Part III

Extending Practice: The Role of Early Childhood Services in Family Support

19 A Childcare Social Enterprise: The London Early Years Foundation Model June O’Sullivan

Education is not a way to escape poverty – it is a way of fighting it. (Julius Nyerere, former president of the United Republic of Tanzania International Workshop on Education and Poverty Eradication, Kampala, Uganda, 30 July–3 August 2001)

Every society should take great care of its children, including educating its youngest members, because generally what is good for the child is good for society and that extends even further when applied to the most vulnerable and disadvantaged children. Research findings from the OECD (2001), Heckman and Masterov (2007), Hirsch (2007) and Bertelsmann Foundation (2014) show the benefits of education for small children and its importance in determining life chances and increasing social mobility. The UK has one of the widest gaps in educational achievement between advantaged and disadvantaged children among similarly developed countries (Hirsch, 2007), thus making it a cause for concern. One of the responses to

addressing this issue is to invest in the earlyyears sector: Getting the early years right benefits the whole of society. Through economic research, psychology, biology and neuroscience, the answers came out the same; treat what happens in the first years as gold … early engagement pays a very high rate of return. The dividend is 12–16% per year for every £1 of ­investment – a payback of four or five times the original investment by the time the young person reaches their early twenties and the gains continue to flow throughout their life. (Sinclair, 2006, p. 5)

A recent study funded by the Bertelsmann Foundation shows that in Germany education reforms could bring returns up to €2.81 trillion by 2090 – more than its current GDP. Evidence from the US, meanwhile, shows that for every dollar invested in a child, returns vary between US$2.50 and US$16. The same report indicates that in Ireland returns would range between €4 and €7 for every €1 invested in ECEC.

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For both individual children and their families, longitudinal studies demonstrate that participation in high-quality ECEC programmes has a long-­ lasting impact on educational outcomes and attainment, as well as on their overall social, emotional, and physical development; in short, their well-being. These benefits are even stronger for vulnerable or marginalized children, and studies in the US show that high-quality early learning can be especially beneficial for children with a migrant background, particularly those who speak a minority language at home and children living in poverty. (www.kbs-frb.be and www.inclusive-early-years. org [accessed on November 2016], p. 3)

Just 67 days into the New Labour Government’s administration in 1997, the Department for Education (DfE) produced a White Paper entitled Excellence in Schools. It emphasised the close relationship between education, childcare and wider economic benefits. Childcare was seen as a useful means of supporting parents’ access to training, employment and social networks, which in turn would improve the quality of their children’s lives and reduce the risks of child poverty. The predominant emphasis was economic and with it the risk that childcare was seen within a narrow transactional focus: a means of enabling parents to work without any attention paid to what constituted childcare. However, it soon became apparent that investment in early years education and childcare would only benefit children if and only if the provision was of good quality (Melhuish, 2013). This required the government to think carefully about what that would look like and how it could be funded and provided in order for it to be genuinely accessible for poorer families, especially given the cross-governmental long-term strategic intention to eradicate child poverty altogether (Stewart, 2012). The existing options for provision remained the market and the state, with some contribution from the voluntary sector. In 2012, Lloyd and Penn noted the continual dominance of the market model in childcare provision, including the increase in outsourcing public services to the private sector. This was

driven in part by the Childcare Bill (2006), which required local authorities to actively manage the local market for childcare and be responsible for providing sufficient childcare in every area. The marketisation of education was something of concern to many in the sector, begging the question: how can outsourced services ensure not only the quality of education but also that disadvantaged families are being given the same access to quality education as the more affluent? While this debate was growing I had been looking outside the sector to see if there were other ways of responding to the problem. I was sure we could develop a hybrid model that would weave social good and market forces into an alternative model. I found the answer in the newly emerging social-­ enterprise world. The result was the London Early Years Foundation (LEYF), the foremost childcare social enterprise designed to ensure that children from poor and disadvantaged families and communities could access highquality early childhood education. The purpose of LEYF was to demonstrate that social and commercial goals could be blended together in the pursuit of a fairer society; in this case, community nurseries using a pedagogy designed to build social capital in order to benefit all children and families but especially those most disadvantaged. Ten years before the Childcare Bill, Charles Leadbetter warned us that: Britain needs a long wave of social innovation to develop a new philosophy, practice and organisation of welfare. This wave of innovation must develop a problem-solving welfare system, to take over gradually from the current system that often simply maintains people in a state of dependency and poverty. It must be an active welfare system designed to create social capital by encouraging people to take greater control over their lives. (Leadbetter, 1997, p. 3)

By 2006, I was becoming ever more convinced that what was needed was a hybrid model of providing education and care, where a sustainable childcare business could be designed with social equality and

The London Early Years Foundation Model

social justice at its core – a model that could challenge the entrenched social problems whereby poverty remained a significant determinant of a child’s future. I was running a small childcare charity with a rich history and elements of enterprise running through its early history before the development of the welfare state. I did not think the charity model would change childcare. We needed to design something different that would, by its very structure, tackle those differentiating social factors such as problem families, poverty, social exclusion and poor social capital which influence educational success or failure. At this time, limited research was available as to how nurseries could address these social issues, but some schools had begun to shift the link between place, ability and social mobility in communities which were stagnating, collapsing and continuing to fail. There were emerging characteristics of early success: • A shared belief in the potential for growth and development in all students and staff; • A distributed leadership approach; • Investment in staff development; • Emphasis on high-quality personal relationships; • A commitment to the interconnectedness of home, school and community; • Strategies to foster social and emotional development as a precursor to learning (Warren, 2005).

In England, these findings began to influence the revision of the National Standards for Head Teachers (DfES, 2004). Within this document was included Strengthening Community through Collaboration to acknowledge that schools exist in a distinctive social context which has a direct impact on what happens outside school. Therefore, the leadership within the school should be committed to engaging with the internal and external school community to secure equity and entitlement and reduce educational failure. This was the evidence I needed to drive forward my thinking. If it was possible to

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raise the standards of achievement and economic well-being through a school then it was possible to do it for childcare. I became more convinced that I could create an independent, sustainable and equitable method of delivering childcare to challenge the existing two-tier system. In simple terms, children from poor backgrounds tended to be in statefunded or voluntary-run subsidised services, and those from more advantaged families attended playgroups often run by their mothers, private nurseries or home care, including nannies, childminders or at home, where there was a more shared parental work–life balance. A social business has to be the actual solution. It would also be more effective if it was scalable and replicable so many more childcare social enterprises could be developed. Borzaga and Defourney (2001) found that in increasingly complex societies social exclusion becomes resistant to simple solutions like fiscal measures and standardised services. What was needed was a new approach. Social enterprises were beginning to show a potential to identify, support and address the different and new emerging needs of communities and of individuals most at risk. Former president of the US Bill Clinton gave a further boost to social enterprise when he wrote in the Financial Times on 20 January 2012 that the most effective global citizens will be those that succeed in merging their business and philanthropic missions to build a future of shared prosperity and shared responsibility. A good social entrepreneur can leverage the power of the market in order to use the functionality and efficiency of market exchange to build a business with some speed – important when too many children remain at the mercy of a failing system. Leadbetter (1997) described the social entrepreneur as visionary but realistic, good at establishing networks, socially confident, driven by a need to confront real problems, capable of dealing with people and with problems by bringing together approaches that have traditionally been kept separate. As a pragmatist, I wanted

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to start doing something as quickly as possible. Children have no time to wait for us to ponder, debate, cogitate and ruminate. However, the task of creating an independent and sustainable social-enterprise childcare model was not to be underestimated. Francis (2011) noted that any social enterprise would need to be comparable in terms of price, service and quality if it was to succeed in the market. Social entrepreneurs are not known to balk at a challenge, especially as they make quite deliberate decisions to solve social problems and usually understand the consequences of challenging the status quo. Mohammed Yunus (2007, p. 79) threw down a gauntlet when he said, ‘It would seem that indifference is the enemy. If it doesn’t matter to you don’t get involved’. I picked up the gauntlet and set about building the LEYF.

Challenges getting established The first challenge facing any charity wishing to reshape as a social enterprise is to resolve the governance structure. This can be difficult as there is no legal social-enterprise definition in the UK. Businesses and organisations which describe themselves as such all

operate under the ‘third sector’, an umbrella term which refers, but not exclusively, to charities, Community Interest Companies (CIC), cooperatives and mutuals, fair-trade organisations and social firms. The diagram in Table 19.1 by Martin and Thompson (2010) gives a very clear overview of the range of options and why they may cause confusion to those trying to understand why each model can be described as a social enterprise. Social Enterprise UK (SEUK) defines a social enterprise as a business that trades for a social and/or environmental purpose with a clear sense of its ‘social mission’, which means it will know what difference it is trying to make, who it aims to help and how it plans to do it. It will raise most or all of its income through selling goods or services and have clear rules about what it does with its profits, reinvesting these to further the ‘social mission’. Social enterprises are often characterised by high levels of innovation and by participatory, transparent and collaborative governance based on solidarity and active citizenship. The Department of Trade and Industry (Moyles, Adams & Musgrove, 2002) describes social enterprises as ‘businesses with primarily social objectives whose surpluses are principally reinvested for that

Table 19.1 Hybrid spectrum Hybrid spectrum

Traditional non-profit

Non-profit with income-generating activities

Social enterprise

Socially responsible business

Mission motive • Stakeholder accountability • Income reinvested in social programmes or operational costs •

Source: Alter, S., Dawans, V., Morgan, and Miller, L, Virtue Ventures LLC (2007)

Corporation practising social responsibility

Traditional for-profit

• Profit-making motive • Stakeholder accountability • Profit redistribution to shareholders

The London Early Years Foundation Model

purpose in the business or in the community, rather than being driven by the need to maximise profit for shareholders and owners’. The second challenge is how to ensure the social business is designed to secure social value through its very DNA. Social value would be the additional benefits the business would bring, such as improving local economies, creating employment or providing nurseries in areas of deprivation. The third challenge is what kind of pedagogy we should offer that would create and embed social capital in its very heart – social capital where the nurseries would be key catalysts for community engagement in such a way as to build a network of relationships which could foster a culture of cooperation, shared values and trust.

The London Early Years Foundation The result was the LEYF, which in 2009 was reconfigured as a charitable social enterprise with a long-term plan to grow. We retained our charitable status so we could use our Memorandum and Articles or the rules of being a charity as an asset lock. ‘Asset lock’ is a term used by many social enterprises to describe the means by which they ensure they deliver their services in line with and supporting the aims and purpose of the organisation. At LEYF this is best summarised as creating good-quality nurseries, providing staff training and development and campaigning to improve services for children and their families. What changed was our approach and how we would do this. We would become a social enterprise and develop a sustainable and independent business by providing a range of nurseries, selling places directly to parents, businesses, local authorities and other organisations using a crosssubsidy fee strategy which would allow us to support up to 50 per cent of children who attend the nurseries.

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Most nurseries would be situated in neighbourhoods where families from both professional backgrounds and more disadvantaged backgrounds lived, so the children could be educated together in order to build trust and social capital and reduce social segregation (Burke et al., 2002). However, we would also run nurseries in areas of high deprivation, as these were often places without nurseries or the nurseries’ quality was poor. The OECD’s Starting Strong II (2006) report and Ofsted (2009) both warned that nurseries which catered only for families experiencing disadvantage would lead inevitably to a lower-quality service. Shocked by this, I was determined to show that the social-enterprise childcare model could challenge this situation and run outstanding nurseries in often forlorn neighbourhoods, characterised by high levels of social-care intervention and political and economic exclusion and disenfranchisement. The LEYF approach with its emphasis on building social capital through community engagement would be the basis from which we would deliver childcare as well as providing local employment, staff and parent training, apprenticeships and local business partnerships in order to drive the widest possible social impact. All this would be delivered within a pedagogy designed on the basis of social capital which would be delivered fairly, coherently and robustly. Many social entrepreneurs, and I include myself, are driven by a persistent, almost unshakable optimism, persevering because of the belief that they will succeed in spite of messages to the contrary. I am frequently accused of transmitting high levels of optimism, enthusiasm and commitment, although I recognise that this optimism can border on overconfidence. Within every social entrepreneur is a belief that even the most intractable problem offers an opportunity for change. Instead of cursing the darkness, social entrepreneurs shine a light on what might be different. They confront the societal structures that leave too many behind, roll up their sleeves, and set about the hard, exhilarating, and important work

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of transforming what is into what can and should be. (Martin & Osberg, 2015, p. 200)

The LEYF Pedagogy The LEYF business and pedagogical model is intended to mitigate four social factors which influence educational success or failure by applying the concept of social capital to every aspect of its model. These four factors are: • • • •

The quality of family life; The level of wealth or poverty; The level of social capital in the community; The social class of the family.

When these factors are all positive then educational, work, personal and social success are much more likely. In designing the pedagogy

around this, LEYF used Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) Five Element social-ecology model to highlight that a child’s development cannot be explained by a single factor but instead by a complex system of relationships where children fit into their immediate and wider world. We strengthened this with the work of Putnam (2000), who stated that: child development is powerfully shaped by social capital … trust, networks and norms of reciprocity within a child’s family, school, peer groups and larger community have wide ranging effects on the child’s opportunities and choices and, hence behaviour and development. (Putnam, 2000, p. 296)

The LEYF model was best exemplified using the simple diagram in Figure 19.1, which places the child at the centre, sustained by the concentric circle of support. Having established the broad purpose of our pedagogy, we started to consider

The LEYF model is centred around the child

Community Research Training Nursery Parent Child

We run 38 community nurseries in 11 London boroughs supporting 4500 children. We are in areas of high economic disadvantage employing 650 + staff. We guarantee high quality through the LEYF pedagogy. We actively engage with parents through home learning approach. We have a multi-generational, whole family and community approach.

Figure 19.1 The LEYF impact model

The London Early Years Foundation Model

the purpose of education at LEYF within the ideology of reducing social inequality by increasing social capital. Gardner et  al. (2004) reminds us: We should remember that one of the most magnificent of human inventions is the invention of education – no other species educates its young like we do. At this time of great change we must remember that ancient value of education and preserve it – not just facts, data, information but knowledge, understanding, judgement, wisdom. We must use the ancient arts and crafts of education to prepare youngsters for a world that natural evolution could not anticipate and which even we ourselves as conscious beings cannot fully envision either … And, as science and technology gain increasing hegemony over our lives and our minds, we must keep alive the important values of responsibility and humanity. (Gardner et al., 2004, pp. 234–5)

We started from Horgan (2007), who identified the belief that the importance of education was strong among school pupils from both advantaged and disadvantaged backgrounds. Thus, negative attitudes were not based on children feeling that education does not matter but that the educational relationships inside and outside the classroom were significant in boosting the chances of children from disadvantaged families. We continue to balance that against the continuing view, confirmed more recently by Simpson (2015), who examined the role of early years in reducing child poverty and found that generally practitioners held negative views of parents in poverty, attributing their poverty to individual factors despite the fact that 65 per cent of those in poverty are working households. The consequence was a negative bias against parents, of which practitioners were unaware, but which had negative implications for how they engaged and supported these parents. The staff recognised that while many disadvantaged children had additional learning needs, they did not consider it necessary to provide any extra support other than that required by the national early years curriculum, known as the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS). Sadly, a

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similar view was found in research commissioned by the former Health Secretary Alan Milburn, with up to a quarter of teachers believing that children from poorer backgrounds were being allowed to fail at school because of lower expectations and teachers giving up on them. Therefore, in developing the business and pedagogical shape of the organisation it was imperative that children, especially disadvantaged and vulnerable children, needed to be in a setting where an understanding of and a responsive approach to the factors that limit children’s horizons ran through every element of the service. The result was the seven elements of the LEYF pedagogy, which will be more fully explained in the following sections: • • • • • • •

Leading for a Culture of Excellence Spiral Curriculum Enabling Environments Harmonious Relationships Safe, Fit and Healthy Home Learning Environment Multi-generational Approach

Leading for Excellence We began by analysing the different elements of leading and managing a childcare social enterprise. Good quality is highly dependent on the calibre and engagement of the leader, and we paid a great deal of attention to this. Children, especially disadvantaged and vulnerable children, need to be in a setting where high quality runs through every element of the service. Running a social enterprise requires nursery managers to demonstrate ‘creativity, courage and fortitude as qualities characteristic of social entrepreneurs’ (Martin & Osberg, 2015, p. 251). Social-enterprise leaders need to be able to operate confidently and competently in every aspect of leading a social business, as described in Figure 19.2. While each individual element was considered important, the power to succeed was the leaders’ ability to

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Leading Pedagogy Developing Leadership of Self and Others

Leading and Managing a Service Leadership Leading within the Community

Leading Learning Spaces Leading with Parents

Figure 19.2 Leadership model

bring together all the elements to achieve its purpose. Good social enterprises are not just valuesled but also lead for excellence. As well as a thoroughly researched pedagogy and solid monitoring, good childcare social enterprises drive quality and improvement through practitioner-led action research, reflective practice and innovation. Pascal and Bertram (2002) talk about the importance of involving practitioners in the delivery of a service – not just trying out something new but instead deeply questioning why, what and how things are done. This is an important trait of the social entrepreneur because we need to be constantly alert to societal changes which often affect poor children first. At LEYF, practitioners get involved in systemically gathering evidence to gain a greater knowledge of their own impact on the services, which builds their confidence and understanding to make constructive changes for the better. This is the basis of high-quality practice, as their research is the means to evaluate the effectiveness of regular practice or to develop ways of testing the value of new developments. Recent examples include our work on men working in childcare, qualifications

in food production (Level 2 Diploma in Food Production and Cooking for Chefs in the Early Years) and the Twoness of Twos report, researched and written when we were considering how to extend our service to accept more 2-years-olds from disadvantaged families in London. The best way to begin the leadership journey is through self-development, and social enterprises need to be learning organisations, whether in collaboration with another organisation or, as at LEYF, through a virtual academy embedding learning and development at every level of the organisation from performance management to meetings, coaching, training and qualification programmes, apprenticeships, conferences and visits. This approach is a significant part of how we standardise the way we do things in order to replicate our service. There are currently 38 LEYF nurseries and we have grown in order to expand our social impact across London. Successful growth demands effective integration and this method has proved to be a positive route to successful replication.

Spiral Curriculum Influenced by the theories of Froebel (1782– 1852), Pestalozzi (1746–1827), Vygotsky (1896–1934), McMillan (1860–1931), Montessori (1876–1952), Gardner (1993 [1983]) Bruner (1915) and the Te Whariki (1996) curriculum in New Zealand, as well as emerging knowledge about brain development, the LEYF approach encompasses the learning requirements of the current statutory Early Years Foundation Stage. The LEYF curriculum is portrayed as a spiral because coiling around the child is an enabling environment, harmonious relationships, a strong home-learning environment and local community. Inside the spiral is the teaching and learning designed to nurture, inspire and extend the creative and curious child. How children are enabled to learn is just as important as what they learn. LEYF staff are

The London Early Years Foundation Model

required to support children at a suitable pace, stretching and encouraging and celebrating as they move onwards on their learning adventure. This means staff must know the child and their unique ways and understand their own role in helping children make friends, find their place in the nursery and their community and value their thinking and independence. Social-enterprise nurseries need to have systems to make this happen as too many poor children are never given a voice. Sutton et al. (2007) found that children were highly aware of their social position and the limitations it placed on them from an early age. At LEYF, the cultural capital gap is directly linked to the children’s access to an abundance of rich language. Fernald, Marchman and Weisleder (2013) found that by 3 years of age, there could be a 30-million-word gap between children from the wealthiest and poorest families. Therefore, a social-enterprise nursery must have at its core language and literacy. It must be so heavily language and literacy rich that droplets of gold fall from every interaction: ‘Literacy unlocks the door to learning throughout life, is essential to development and health, and opens the way for democratic participation and active participation and active citizenship’ (Kofi Annan, 1997). Language does not consist only of words, sentences and stories: it incorporates art, dance, drama (including pretend play), mathematics, movement, rhythm and music. Children are learning to communicate their experience in many ways and to understand the ways in which others have communicated and represented experience. They are developing increasing competence in symbolic, abstract, imaginative and creative thinking. Language develops in meaningful contexts, when children have a need to know and a reason to communicate. Adults will need to understand and respect both verbal and non-verbal communication styles. All LEYF nurseries use Makaton, a language programme using signs and symbols, to help people to communicate (they have a display with the key 20 symbols).

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Staff development is designed to encourage language and literacy development, and great emphasis is placed on children hearing grammatically correct language, especially those bi-lingual children at whose homes limited English is spoken. During the week, children at LEYF conduct their own planning meetings to ensure their voice is heard and staff are familiar with their interests. This is particularly important for those children coming from disadvantaged backgrounds, who often feel they don’t have a voice. Children should have control over their own learning and play a role in learning how to learn and think about things. Like Montessori, we consider the importance of the absorbent mind and the limitless motivation of the young child to achieve c­ ompetence over their environment and to perfect their skills and understanding. Children are also offered their own opportunity to assess the nursery through their exit interviews, which help us see the nursery from their perspective and then make the necessary amendments. Vygotsky (1836–1934) describes children as apprentices who learn and contribute to the development of their own generation’s knowledge. At LEYF we translate this into supporting children’s active learning and their willingness to learn from the past as well as their surrounding world. Our activities and experiences offer breadth and balance and mean each child is given access to a wide variety of experiences in order to develop a range of skills, concepts and positive attitudes towards learning and knowledge. We, like Froebel, believe that play is the best vehicle for children’s learning and is never trivial but highly serious, with deep significance. It is vital for children’s development and welfare. Play is the means by which they express strong feelings, rehearse experiences and interact socially, often with great enjoyment. Play is the main medium through which we teach and include a daily balance between free flow and child-initiated play, with planned activities that stimulate children’s

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curiosity, creativity, wonder, fun, enthusiasm and enjoyment. Social-enterprise nurseries need also to weave weekly outings into parts of the community that may seem closed to the children, like galleries, theatres, markets, restaurants and local-interest sites. Too many children live near parks or the sea or areas of outstanding interest to tourists and remain unfamiliar with them. Social-enterprise nurseries like LEYF must have inclusivity, equitable opportunities for participation and diversity at their heart. Celebrating and making children familiar and comfortable with their family heritage and, in the LEYF case, the predominant London cultures actively supports a positive self-esteem, thereby developing open and confident people, which contributes towards countering racism and racial prejudice. We also believe that children need to share their experiences with friends from many social and cultural backgrounds as early as possible, as it has a significant impact on how they view themselves within their world as well as preparing them for their role in a globally connected world.

Enabling Environments Most LEYF nurseries are sited right at the heart of the community. Goldschmied and Jackson (2004) argue that many environments, particularly in poor areas, were often ill thought out and ugly and not designed from a pedagogical-leadership perspective. We at LEYF believe children deserve the right to be educated in appealing and attractive environments – places of beauty and order – and therefore every LEYF nursery now conforms to a particular set of design principles, whether a new build or a refurbishment. This is particularly important for social-enterprise nurseries as many have been set up in poor areas, often forlorn and neglected environments. Like Montessori, we believe that environment includes not only the space the children

use and the furnishings and materials within that space but also the adults and the children who share their days with each other. We want to provide a stimulating, child-oriented space where children can explore, touch and learn without fear, using tools and utensils that fit their small hands and tables and chairs that match their small bodies. The adult has a responsibility to provide wonderful sights, textures, sounds and smells for children; these are also a means of increasing cultural capital, and all LEYF nurseries provide the children with a selection of fresh and unusual vegetables in the role-play areas as a provocation to learning and new language. We designed the LEYF Urban Outdoors Approach on the basis that children who display curiosity about their local and natural environment are able to explore, experiment, discover, interpret and evaluate their findings, and so are more likely to continue to engage in these learning processes. Great socialenterprise nurseries can lead the way in how they collaborate within the community to create glorious natural wildernesses in the most unsightly abandoned spaces, which nevertheless have the potential to be transformed. The focus is on giving children space, freedom and learning: from fire pits to mud kitchens and growing and digging, whether in window boxes or allotments, while playing an active role in exploring their local community spaces through daily walks and outings.

Harmonious Relationships Harmonious relationships promote children’s well-being and help them to grow up as strong and independent people. Children who are nurtured by adults learn to form, develop and sustain positive, harmonious and empathetic relationships. Sensitive, tuned-in adults support children’s learning by the warmth and encouragement of their responses. The LEYF adult is best described as ‘tuned in’, which means staff:

The London Early Years Foundation Model

• Apply strong child-development knowledge; • Know how children learn; • Sustain sensitive and positive relationships with everyone; • Develop a warm relation with their key child; • Help children to know they are lovable and valuable; • Understand children’s personalities and idiosyncrasies; • Scaffold and extend learning – always one step ahead; • Enjoy being with children and have lots of fun; • Create the right environment; • Are great conversationalists; • Understand children’s emotions and can calm and reassure them; • Understand attachment and the impact this has on children; • Listen carefully to children so they know they are heard and understood; • Involve them appropriately in discussions and decisions, such as planning meetings, feedback projects and exit interviews; • Provide appropriate help as soon as possible so children learn to feel safe; • Support children with problem-solving; • Help children understand and put into words their feelings and learn to regulate emotions and reason solutions to problems; • Help children learn that their distress and discomfort do not last forever so they can gradually learn to manage these; • Always reflect on and think of how to make improvements.

A LEYF nursery should be homely with an emphasis on creating a secure and safe place where each person is entitled to respect and the best of care. This feeling of belonging contributes to inner well-being, security and identity. Our approach is akin to the view expressed in the United Nations Education for All: Achievements and Challenges (2015) documents, which noted that education should not only include literacy and numeracy but also life skills, such as the ability to make well-balanced decisions, to resolve conflicts in a non-violent manner and to develop healthy lifestyles, good social relationships and responsibility, critical thinking, creative talents and other abilities which give children

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the tools they need to pursue their option in life. This vision is entwined in all aspects of the day. To help children become independent each nursery has a visual timetable and children need to understand how the day operates so they are safe and secure. Independence is also encouraged by teaching a child ‘practical life’ skills through the routine, such as helping them learn to dress themselves, prepare and share meals, put their toys and clothes away and take an active part in their nursery and their neighbourhood.

Safe, Fit and Healthy Children attending a social-enterprise nursery need to be provided with a healthy, wellbalanced diet with varied menus using fresh seasonal foods and simple ingredients. LEYF tries to buy locally produced goods to support sustainable communities locally. Healthy food for healthy children is important if we look at the ongoing child health crisis in the UK, with obesity acutely affecting children from disadvantaged backgrounds (National Obesity Observatory, 2012). At LEYF, chefs are employed and are invited to complete the Council for Awards in Children’s Care and Education (CACHE) Level 2 Diploma in Food Production and Cooking for Chefs in the Early Years. This qualification was designed by LEYF because there was no specific qualification to teach chefs about feeding nursery children. The calibre of an early years chef needs to be high, especially when feeding children where poverty or disadvantage impedes them receiving nutritious food at home. Many children from poor neighbourhoods attend nurseries either hungry or undernourished. They are often obese, because poor families often rely on high-calorie, low-cost food. Children cannot learn if they are hungry, and therefore it’s imperative we address this as a matter of course. Eating habits are developed from a young age and messages about

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healthy lifestyles are best absorbed then. Nurseries can open children’s eyes to foods they may never have eaten, and mealtimes are particularly important at LEYF as children learn to eat correctly, using good table manners, so they can be socially confident in any type of environment from restaurants to the school canteen. It is unacceptable not to broaden children’s horizons from the earliest age in order to build their social capital. Many children live in tiny, cramped spaces or in high-crime neighbourhoods where they are kept indoors because parents are fearful of letting them play outside. In order not to curb children’s enthusiasm, curiosity or sense of spirit, LEYF places a high emphasis on active movement, the urban outdoors and lots of local outings, balancing fun with wellbeing and safety.

Home Learning Environment (HLE) A wide range of research has concluded that the quality of the Home Learning Environment (HLE) is one of the main determinants of children’s development. The findings from the Effective Preschool, Primary and Secondary Education Project (Sylva et al., 2015) confirm that the quality of the HLE is more important for children’s intellectual and social development than parental occupation, education or income. Interventions that supported high-quality HLEs were considered to be a powerful lever in raising the attainment of disadvantaged children, tackling inequalities and having a significant impact on reading, maths and pro-social behaviours. The quality of home learning was also examined, finding, not unsurprisingly, that high-­ quality HLEs brought more benefits for all children but especially those from disadvantaged families or with special educational needs. When examining the quality of the HLE it was found that its level in particular groups tended to be lower – for example, parents

with lower educational qualifications. They also noted that parents with English as an additional language lacked confidence about the best ways to support their child’s development at home. There were also gender differences – for example, fathers were less likely to read to their children than mothers. Given the importance of home learning in addressing disadvantage, LEYF conducted action research to design our own approach. We found that trust was the keystone and once that was assured we could begin to lead pedagogical conversations with parents and introduce them to children’s learning needs and interests. Conversations with a pedagogical twist have proved to be the most effective means of introducing parents to their children’s learning in a way that built on the relationship with the parents. Staff, once confident and trained in ‘LEYF HLE knowhow’, could adapt their conversation to each parent’s needs, interests, language and opportunity. It is less intrusive and more inclusive. In addition, there are home-learning resources to support and provoke conversations as well as a dialogic reading scheme designed to support parents who are less confident in reading to their children.

Multi-Generational Approach The final element of the LEYF pedagogy is the multi-generational approach. This is based on the premise that nurseries are an essential part of the local community, with a key role in promoting children’s sense of belonging while also contributing to the local heritage and future. The LEYF multi-­ generational model places significant value on children being able to connect with the wider community, nurture extended kinship, become familiar with their neighbourhood and develop a positive attitude to forming relationships with adults of all ages. Research from the Beth Johnson Foundation (2015) supports multi-generational practice as important in promoting health, development

The London Early Years Foundation Model

and equality across multiple generations through interdisciplinary practice, education, research and community-based partnerships. Creating communities where sharing and support are fostered leads to a community associated with better health, lower crime, improved educational performance and greater life satisfaction, and it is beautifully brought alive by Archbishop Desmond Tutu in his definition of Ubuntu, a Southern African concept which best translates as ‘I am because we are’ or ‘a person is a person through other people’: We say a person is a person through other persons. We don’t come fully informed into the world. We learn how to think, how to walk, how to speak, how to behave, indeed how to be human from other human beings. We need other human beings in order to be human. We are made for togetherness, we are made for family, for fellowship, to exist in a tender network of interdependence … This is how you have Ubuntu – you care, you are hospitable, you’re gentle, you’re compassionate and concerned. (quoted in Battle, 1997, p. 65)

Conclusion Today, the LEYF is the largest charitable childcare social enterprise in the UK, with 38 community nurseries, employing 650 staff to provide 4500 children with higher than average quality care and education. The social-enterprise model as defined by the LEYF is one way of providing childcare to children from disadvantaged families or living in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. The key factor is that the business is designed in such a way that it will deliver social impact. The LEYF model has been replicated across London by accessing social investment to provide the capital and the infrastructure to drive growth. We aim to continue to deliver sustainable, high-quality community nurseries using a fee strategy that allows us to subsidise up to half the available places. Many colleagues from other parts of the world,

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including China, Turkey, India and Kenya, can see the benefits of the social-enterprise childcare model in helping create fair and inclusive childcare for children from all backgrounds while ensuring those from poor and disadvantaged families are at the centre. The model is sufficiently flexible to be applied in other countries by flexing the fees in a way that subsidises those families unable to pay the full costs of a place. The success of replication depends on applying the business model that integrates strong commercial opportunities, a well-considered fee strategy, systematic integration and social capital within the local context. However, improving education for the poorest children is as much a political as a pedagogical challenge, and there remains much to do to provide children with a guaranteed means of accessing good-quality childcare consistently. Small children are rarely placed at the centre of any national conversation about education. Furthermore, it is unacceptable that for too many children getting a place at a good nursery is a lottery. The social-enterprise model is built on trust and generating social capital. It is a newer source of positive social change, navigating between the different modes of business-led and government-led transformation and, according to Osberg: although still nascent, social entrepreneurship’s early results point to a promising future, in large part because of its ability to draw on and combine key features from the crucibles of business and government innovation, an ability that promises almost unlimited potential and many ways forward. At the heart of equilibrium transformation is a unique model that social entrepreneurs design for their particular context. (Martin & Osberg, 2015, p. 73)

Social entrepreneurs seek to transform the systems that fail to address seemingly intractable problems. However, this change is often done from the margins, with little power to drive political change and limited capacity to pay the cost of an initiative to challenge the equilibrium. Martin and Osberg (2015) sum it up when they notes that creativity is required to design a

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transformative solution, one that addresses the dynamics of cost and value in a new way. However, as more social entrepreneurs succeed in challenging injustice and improving the world in so many different fields, there is no reason why childcare models such as LEYF cannot be replicated and extended to provide many more children with a fairer start in life. If poverty is to be reduced or eliminated, the next generation must be our focus. We must prepare them to peel off all the signs and stigmas of poverty and instill in them a sense of human dignity and hope for the future. (Yunus, 2007, p. 55)

References Annan, Kofi quote from United Nations Press Release 5th September 2003 Battle, M. (1997). Reconciliation. Ohio: Pilgrim Press. Bertelsmann Foundation. (2014). Globalization Report: Who Benefits Most from Globalization? Beth Johnson Foundation. (2015). Intergenerational Community Development. Blanden, J. and Gibbons, S. (2006). The Persistence of Poverty across Generations: A view from two British cohorts. Bristol: Policy Press. Borzaga, C. & Defourney, J. (2001). The Emergence of Social Enterprise in Europe. London: Routledge. Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The Ecology of Human Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Burke, S., N. Homer, C. Lines, P. Tarazona, K. Graham & C. Mills. (2002). Child’s Play – New Mutual Models for Childcare. London: Mutto. Department for Education. (1997). Excellence in Education. Department for Education. (2004). National Standards for Headteachers. Retrieved August 2017 from http://www3.nccu.edu. tw/~mujinc/teaching/9-101principal/refer4-2 (2004%20national%20standards).pdf Department for Education. (2011). Supporting Families in the Foundation Stage. Retrieved August 2017 from https://www.gov.uk/

government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/184868/DFE-01001-2011_ supporting_families_in_the_foundation_ years.pdf DfES (2006) Social Mobility: Narrowing social class educational attainment gaps (page 14; retrieved December 2016 from http://www. dfes.gov.uk/rsgateway/DB/STA/t000657). Fernald, A., V.A. Marchman & A. Weisleder. (2013). ‘SES Differences in Language Processing Skill and Vocabulary are Evident at 18 Months’. Developmental Science 16 (2): 234–48. Francis, N. (2011). The End of Charity. London: Allen and Unwin. Gardner, H. (1993 [1983]). Frames of Mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. New York: Basic Books. Goldschmied, E. & S. Jackson. (2004). People under Three: Young children in day care. London: Routledge (second edition). Hart, B. & T.R. Risley. (2003). ‘The Early Catastrophe: The 30 million word gap by age 3’. American Educator 27 (1): 4–9. Heckman, J. & D. Masterov. (2007). ‘The Productivity Argument for Investing in Young Children’. Review of agricultural Economics, American Economics Association 29 (3): 446–93. Hirsch, D. (2007). Experiences of Poverty and Educational Disadvantage. York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Horgan, G. (2007). The Impact of Poverty on Young Children’s Experience of School. York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Koshy, V. & C. Pascal. (2011). ‘Nurturing the Young Shoots of Talent: Using Action Research for Exploration and Theory Building’. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal 19 (4): 433–50. Leadbetter, C. (1997). The Rise of the Social Entrepreneur. UK: Demos. Lloyd, E. & H. Penn. (2012). Childcare Markets: Can they deliver an equitable service? Bristol: Policy Press. Martin, F. & M. Thompson. (2010). Social Enterprises: Developing Sustainable Business. UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Martin, R. & S. Osberg. (2015). Getting Beyond Better: How Social Entrepreneurship Works. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press.

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Melhuish, E. (2013). Early Childhood Education and Care and Long-term Effects. Retrieved November 2016 from http://www.europe-kbf. eu/∼/media/Europe/TFIEY/ TFIEY-1_PP/Edward_ Melhuish.pdf Moyles J., S. Adams & A. Musgrove (2002). SPEEL: Study of pedagogical effectiveness in early learning. Department for Education and Skills. National Obesity Observatory. (2012). Slideset. Prevalence of obesity among children. Retrieved August 2017 from http://media. dh.gov.uk/network/261/files/2012/05/ Obesity-Review-Group-19-April-2012-Background-Slide-Set-1-Prevalence-and-Trends.pdf OECD. (2001). Education at a Glance: OECD Indicators. Paris: OECD Publishing. OECD. (2006). Starting Strong 11: Early childhood education and care. Paris: OECD Publishing. Ofsted. (2009) Retrieved November 2016 from https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/ system/uploads/attachment_data/file/ 247591/0559.pdf Ofsted. (2016). Unknown Children: Destined for disadvantage. London: Crown Publications. Pascal, C. & T. Bertram. (2002). Early Years Education: An International Perspective. London: Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. Plowden Report. (1967). 188. Central Advisory Council Education HMSO. Putnam, R.D. (2000). Better Together. NY: Simon & Schuster. Scottish Government. (2016). Internationalising Social Enterprise. Crown Publications. Simpson, D. (June 2015). A UK–US Investigation of Early Years Practitioners’ Opinions

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about Child Poverty. Teesside University. Retrieved August 2017 from https://www. tees.ac.uk/docs/DocRepo/.../Simpson%20 report.pdf Sinclair A. (2006). 0–5: How small children make a big difference. The Work Foundation 3 (1). Stewart, K. (2012). Child Poverty: What have we really achieved? Child Poverty Action Group. Sutton, L., N. Smith, C. Dearden, & S. Middleton. (2007). A Child’s-eye View of Social Difference. Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Sylva, K., E. Melhuish, P. Sammons, T. Siraj-Blatchford & B. Taggart. (2015). The Effective Provision of Pre-school Education (EPPE Project). Technical Paper 12. Department for Education/ Institute of Education, University of London. United Nations. (2015). Education for all 2000–2015: Achievements and Challenges. UNESCO Publishing United Nations. (1989). The Convention on the Rights of the Child. United Nations. United Nations. (2001). The Rights of the Child. United Nations using action research for exploration and theory building, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal 19 (4): 433–50. Warren, M. R. (2005). ‘Communities and schools: a new view of urban education reform’. Harvard Education Review 75 (2): 133–75. Woessmann, L. & M. Piopiunik. (2013). What Inadequate Education Costs Society. Bertelsmann Stiftung. Retrieved December 2016 from http://www.bertelsmann-stiftung.de/ cps/rde/xchg/SID-6FE66C6A-8C78859C/bst_ engl/hs.xsl/93522.htm. Yunus, M. (2007). Creating a World without Poverty. NY: Public Affairs.

20 Supporting Young HIV-AIDS Survivors and Disabled Children in Family Households in Rural South Africa: The Isibindi Model Merle Allsopp, Hloniphile Dlamini, Lucky Jacobs, Seeng Mamabolo and Leon Fulcher

Introduction Contemporary South Africa is administered through nine provinces, each with responsibilities for implementing national policy. In the social-development context this means that the provinces oversee the provision of social welfare services, including prevention and earlyintervention services, as well as child protection services. Such services are much needed in a population of 54 million, where 19.7 million are children under the age of 18 and seven out of ten children are still living below the national poverty line; while 12.2% (6.4 million) of the population are infected with HIV, of which 3.1 million are on anti-retroviral treatment, and 15% of all children have been orphaned. Of those orphaned, over 500,000 are maternal orphans and over 600,000 are double orphans (UNICEF, 2016). While most orphaned children are in family-based care, many such families are still considered vulnerable, and a small number of children live in child-headed or youth-headed households.

Comprehensive legislation seeks to guide service provision to children, and in keeping with international legislation children’s rights are constitutionally identified. The Social Service Professions Act, 1978 (Act 110 1978) as amended requires social service professionals, including child and youth care workers, to be registered in order to practise. South Africa needs novel approaches to the provision of social services for children to realize its legislated rights imperatives. This chapter seeks to describe the nature of services being provided to families in the context of the unique Isibindi model – where community members are formally trained to provide home visiting and other child and youth care services to children and their families. This chapter tracks the development of child and youth care work as a social service profession in South Africa, introducing the Isibindi model and the work carried out by Isibindi child and youth care workers in families. The National Association of Child Care Workers (NACCW) has played a leading role

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in support of early-child-development policies and practices in South Africa since well before the end of the apartheid era. In 1975, when the NACCW was established, the claws of apartheid scratched every surface of daily living, separating, subjugating and sabotaging even interpersonal relations. South Africa was becoming more and more isolated, and a nuclear-armaments programme was ready to defend the country from the influences of a permissive external world. Mysteriously, some did not comprehend the ‘God-given right’ of white supremacy! The present was dangerous to all who questioned, and the destiny of South Africa appeared disastrous. Under these socio-political conditions, South Africans concerned about child and youth care started to connect, and in 1975 the NACCW was formally established (Theron, 1977, p. 9). Such ‘child care’ as was taking place in South Africa at that time was restricted to what happened in children’s homes, which, along with foster care, was the primary service available for children. As with every other aspect of life, these were divided into separate facilities for different racial groups, with little provision for African children. The facilities were characteristically poorly staffed, with few if any specialist workers, and a custodial approach was commonly used to manage the children. The ‘father’ of South African child and youth care work, Brian Gannon, once captured in a lighthearted fashion what he called the state of the residential child care art in his country at the start of the 1970s: I had the opportunity to go and start a new [children’s home] and bring with me what I thought was the very best thing that we could do. I brought ‘extraordinary’ things with me like soccer as one of the great methodologies of child and youth care work with boys. It was a great methodology, because soccer for these children … this was not just a game where they kick a ball around; it’s being picked for a team, belonging to a team, training to do better at the next match, looking forward to the next match and being empathetic with each other when you lost the game. … We

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always used to have this philosophy that every [residential care] group should consist of 22 children and two adults … the one adult can play a soccer match with 21 kids and the other one get to do some one-on-one time with the other kid! It was a fairly desperate way of trying to address the group experience and the individual. Where is this person headed, and where is he in his life? Now those kind of philosophies were absolutely new – that you tried to unstitch, as it were, from the group, the individual and then begin to see the individual as really the focus of what you do and the group just the context. Whereas in the past the group was the focus. (Gannon, 2005, p. 31, as cited in Allsopp, 2015)

The coalescing of the ‘child care’ field into a professional network in South Africa, as it did across Canada, happened quite naturally at first. Very soon, networks were operating in all four of the apartheid-era provinces of the country. Fundamental to the longevity of this organization was the integrity of its beginnings. In a country divided along racial lines, the NACCW established itself constitutionally as a non-racial organization. It rejected the policy orientation of children being valued differently on the basis of race, and its first conference statement read: ‘This Conference does not accept that there should be differences in standards of care as are implied by the differences in subsidies paid for various race groups [for children in children’s homes]’ (National Association of Child Care Workers, 1977, p. 55). The first decade and a half of the NACCW was not without its challenges. Holding the organization together through the years of South African apartheid politics was a complex process as the apartheid regime ramped up its brutality – not excluding children from its vicious responses. Regional meetings, training courses and a local, accessible and informative journal kept people connected between constitutionally mandated biennial conferences (Gannon, 1988, p. 2). In an international world which began to articulate the concept of children’s rights, South Africa was moving backwards with respect to human rights. South African

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child and youth care workers needed each other, to affirm a shared vision of social justice and a future where child and youth care services would be fairly accessible to all children. Efforts by the NACCW to influence policy in those apartheid years were steadfastly ignored. By September 1989, when the 7th NACCW conference was held, a number of the streets of host city Cape Town were quite literally ablaze, and conference attendees were escorted to and from the airport by armoured vehicles. The NACCW was manoeuvred through a conference of volatility and anger as the country teetered towards national chaos (Allsopp, 1990, p. 2). But in February 1990, news came that sense had prevailed, Nelson Mandela would be released and the ban would be lifted on the African National Congress, as the move began towards establishing a democratic South Africa. Peace was a possibility along with national joy and relief. With its strong foundation, the NACCW set about assisting children’s homes to become normal, non-racial organizations, demonstrating how the child and youth care sector could contribute to the rebuilding of the country. While this may sound straightforward, an excerpt from a 1990 editorial in the NACCW journal – The Child Care Worker – helps to put this in perspective: Children’s home staff have a particularly difficult task in accompanying children across the historic watershed we are in now … the majority of our children have grown up in separate residential areas and separate schools, and simply do not know the others with whom they share their land. (Gannon, 1990, p. 2)

It was at this point that the formal registration of child and youth care workers became a matter of entrenched advocacy for the NACCW. In the absence of state petitions to make the registration of child and youth care workers a legal requirement, the NACCW set up a ‘shadow registration’ process (Du Toit, 1993, p. 3). Across South Africa, hundreds of child and youth care workers voluntarily

became registered practitioners with the NACCW after completing training courses and committing to a set of professional ethics. The foresight demonstrated by NACCW leaders in setting up the regulation process became evident a few years later when real negotiations for statutory regulation of child and youth care work began. During the transitional period after apartheid, the number of ‘street’ children spiralled as rural–urban migration intensified. The country remained tense, as a new constitution was negotiated – a process that was by no means certain to end in peace. During that period of struggle to reach consensus about a ‘new’ South Africa, a new enemy began making its stealthy way across the land, killing the people – especially youths and young adults. The HIV virus began taking its toll.

Child and Youth Care and the HIV Health Pandemic in a New Democratic State As hard as it is to describe South Africa under apartheid, it is just as difficult to describe life in the immediate post-apartheid nation. Against all odds, South Africa had the miracle of becoming a democratic state under incredibly just leadership. President Nelson Mandela led the country away from bloody dissolution to a unifying nation. During that first term of legitimate government, it seemed as if anything positive was possible for South Africa! This was the ‘moment’ when all could change for the better. The apartheid state had characteristically dealt unequally with children. In the years before democracy, following the 1976 ‘Children’s Revolution’, large numbers of Black children had been imprisoned. This meant that the institutionalization of children was a deeply concerning and sensitive issue. Two decades later, a White Paper for Social Welfare was released, providing a blueprint for the delivery of social welfare services.

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Strong advocacy resulted in the White Paper acknowledging the role of other social service professions as well as social work, providing policy foundations for the statutory regulation of child and youth care workers. By 1998, the Social Work Act was amended to be the Social Service Professions Act, thus providing a legal mechanism for the statuary regulation of child and youth care ­workers – and other social service professions – ­administered by the South African Council for Social Service Professions (SACSSP). This laid the foundations for the emergence of child and youth care work as a profession – a profession operating both within the confines of residential care centres and with families in local communities. By 1999, work by an Inter-Ministry Committee on Youth at Risk on ‘developing children’s rights-compliant norms and standards for the administration of care institutions’ was translated into ‘extensive amendments to the regulations to the Child Care Act 74 of 1983’ (Sloth-Nielson, 2007, p. 300), most of which were later incorporated into a transformed Children’s Act (Act 38 2005). The Inter-Ministry Committee had made extraordinary achievements during this window of national opportunity, including: policy and legislative initiatives; testing and replication of new models for children’s services; introduction of comprehensive, accessible minimum standards for residential care; introduction of ‘developmental assessments’ for all children in the care and protection system; a quality assurance approach to residential care; and the initiation of degree programmes for child and youth care workers (Allsopp & Thumbadoo, 2002, p. 4). The complexity of residential care for children achieved legislative recognition. In leading South Africa’s child and youth care work sector into the new millennium, Lesley Du Toit, a keynote speaker at the 12th NACCW conference in 1999, reflected the growing maturity, responsibility and positive identity of the South African field, claiming, ‘We can learn from our friends and

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colleagues from around the world, and it is always a pleasure to do so, but many of the answers for Africa’s children lie in Africa’ (Du Toit, 1999, p. 5).

The Isibindi Response to South Africa’s HIV-AIDS Pandemic The new millennium saw NACCW energies directed towards the painful national reality of an HIV-AIDS pandemic and spiralling numbers of children being orphaned throughout the nation. In some children’s homes, staff were (almost overnight, it seemed) called upon to help children not to live but to die, and also to live alongside staff colleagues in children’s homes who were also dying. It was an agonizing time, and as the numbers of children orphaned and made vulnerable grew, it became apparent that children’s homes provided neither a desirable nor affordable intervention for the large numbers of children orphaned and made vulnerable by the pandemic. Children were often called upon to look after terminally ill parents and caregivers as the delay in the introduction of anti-retroviral medication in South Africa took its toll. Those most affected by the HIV-AIDS pandemic were those with the least resources to manage the burden of care. In seeking an African answer to the plight of South African children, the NACCW developed a child and youth care response to children made vulnerable by the pandemic: the Isibindi model (an isiZulu word meaning courage). The Isibindi initiative trains unemployed community members in child and youth care work and deploys them to support vulnerable children and households. The Isibindi mix of child and youth care methods and skills has been profoundly helpful to children and families, and the model has transported comfortably into poverty-stricken rural areas most affected by the pandemic. Past chairperson of the NACCW, Donald Ngonyama noted

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this natural ‘fit’ between child and youth care work and rural communities when noting that ‘child and youth care work is talked about in the rural areas’ (Ngonyama, 2002, p. 15). Crucially, Isibindi projects demonstrated that broad, community-based early intervention and prevention services could be suitably provided by child and youth care workers. At a time when children’s homes were mushrooming as a response to the orphan crisis, Isibindi took child and youth care workers into family homes in local communities, moving beyond the dominant colonial paradigm of institutional responses to child vulnerability. And at a time when solutions to the burden of care focused primarily on volunteer deployment, Isibindi began training local people in highrisk communities to become registered child and youth care workers, part of an internationally recognized profession. Recognizing potential with the Isibindi model, the South African Government embraced its potential for delivering prevention and early intervention requirements under the new Children’s Act. The Minister of Social Development announced in 2011 that government would support a roll-out of the Isibindi model and approach to practice across the entire country (NACCW, 2015). Isibindi child and youth care workers had demonstrated the capacity to visit identified orphans and vulnerable children in their homes and provided comprehensive services, accompanying and representing children at schools, health services and government offices, when necessary, [providing] psychological support through memory-box activities, grief work, building relationships, identifying needs and feelings, providing developmental care, behaviour management, activity programming, risk-assessment and life-space counselling. Isibindi child and youth care workers also facilitate access to social assistance grants; help with homework and accessing citizenship documents; encourage adherence to treatment schedules if the young person or family member is HIVpositive; and look after the overall well-being

of the children and young people within their unique family circumstances (Mamabolo et al., 2015). The South African Government began the process of training an additional 10,000 child and youth care workers – in just five years! (National Association of Child Care Workers, 2015). Through a combination of state and donor funding, Isibindi projects began rolling out across all nine provinces of South Africa in 2013, with more than 320 projects operating by July 2016, supporting close to 285,000 children. More than 280 local organizations are engaged in managing these projects with support from the Department of Social Development and the NACCW. Implemented on a social franchise basis, Isibindi projects are ‘owned’ by community-level implementing partners. The NACCW is contracted to provide technical assistance to the projects by the provincial Departments of Social Development. This includes supervision by trained and experienced child and youth care workers, who are known as Isibindi Mentors. This partnership between the state and the NACCW as an NGO has proven invaluable in both reaching the ambitious expansion targets and for building capacity in rural and deeprural areas, where access to professional social service expertise is severely limited. Central to the Isibindi ‘identity’ is the notion of ­partnership – ­relationships between the government official, local implementing partners and NACCW Isibindi Mentors are nurtured through regular engagement on project activities and progress. Monitoring and evaluation tools have been designed to feed from local level into a nationally held database providing information on the well-being of children and the nature and intensity of services provided by child and youth care workers. Data is collated for reporting to government and donors and for programme decision-making – in particular for project management to ensure consistently tailored service delivery to beneficiaries.

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Attracting USAID and the United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief funding and growing exponentially, the Isibindi projects have been subjected to ­evidence-based scrutiny while providing child and youth care services to South African children (Thurman, Yu & Taylor, 2009). Isibindi projects support places where there are children with specialized needs, providing child development and disability-support opportunities for children and young people in rural communities, along with short-term residential treatment support for child victims of abuse in rural areas, where services are limited. Central to the Isibindi model of child and youth care practice is the provision of services to children and young people in their own homes and places of safe play by trained, supervised and registered child and youth care workers. Isibindi workers use daily interactions with children in life-space contexts, seeking opportunities to provide basic developmental care that meets the physical, cognitive and emotional needs of children (National Association of Child Care Workers, n.d.). Isibindi workers provide direct support in the lives of children, being in their family home at the start of the day with breakfast and assisting them to prepare for school, then being available in the afternoon to receive them home from school and provide a meal. The workers help to establish family routines that provide security and predictability in a child’s home. Isibindi child and youth care workers facilitate family meetings, participate in multi-disciplinary team assessments and serve as advocates to ensure that children’s rights to education, healthcare and social services are accessed, with care and protection for each child or young person realized in challenging community and family circumstances. For those unfamiliar with South Africa, it may be helpful to share a brief vignette that illustrates the family circumstances facing 56-year-old Manzi, a grandmother who is HIV-positive and who cares for a 9-year-old granddaughter and two pre-school grandsons

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in a rural South African community. This vignette introduces international readers to a social context that is different from their own. In so doing, we seek to nurture greater appreciation for the work carried out by Isibindi workers across South African communities, especially in rural areas.

Managing Family Challenges with Isibindi Support Fifty-six-year-old grandmother and head of household Manzi (all names have been changed) looks after her 9-year-old granddaughter, Babsie, and grandsons, Bennie (5) and Paul (3). The family was brought to Isibindi attention by another Isibindi family in the village. Because of her HIV-positive status, Manzi was often sickly and struggled to care for her grandchildren. The mother of the children (Manzi’s oldest daughter) was living in the city, far away from the family. The children and their mother came home for the Christmas holidays, because the mother didn’t have a job and had no suitable place to stay in Johannesburg. She often left the children alone or with other people while looking for employment. The family agreed that the children should stay with their grandmother. The young mother was reluctant, because of her own childhood experience of sexual abuse by an uncle while living with her mother. The abuse was seen as a family matter to be discussed by the adults and was never taken to the police. Nothing was discussed with the mother at the time and she received no counselling. The incident left this young mother not trusting her own mother with the safety and security of her children. At the age of 2, Babsie was also sexually abused when left without supervision while her mother was away seeking work. She too had not received therapeutic help following this trauma. The grandmother noticed that Babsie was often angry and withdrawn. She started bed-wetting, cried

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easily and frequently shouted at the grandmother and the other children. The grandmother told the Isibindi worker about Babsie’s behaviour and learned about the rape when following it up with the child’s mother. The other children were struggling, because there was not enough food at home. They were also experiencing communication challenges as they only spoke Sesotho and neither understood nor spoke Xhosa, the local language in the community, including schools. She was supposed to be ‘on treatment’, but because no one at home was working, there was no way of getting her medication regularly, since she needed taxi fares to get to and from the clinic. The situation worsened and the children started to wander in the community begging for food as the grandmother could no longer meet their basic needs for food and clothing. The children’s child-support grants were paid out to their mother in Johannesburg, but as she was still unemployed, she did not send the money to her mother for the care of her children. A positive indication was that all the children were attending school.

Expansion of Isibindi Projects through South African Government Policy The Isibindi roll-out has addressed two key South African Government policy objectives. First, Isibindi projects recognize and address the rights of children and child protection while mitigating the impact of HIVAIDS. Second, Isibindi projects represent social-enterprise investment in work-skills development and purposeful employment generation in the social services workforce for people living in the poorest communities with limited access to opportunities. During the five-year roll-out, 10,000 unemployed people (mainly young women) living in poor communities were trained and received a Further Education and Training Certificate

(FETC) in child and youth care work (National Association of Child Care Workers, 2015). Close to 7,000 workers are now supporting children and young people with home visits aimed at nurturing developmental opportunities and promoting family preservation. Each child and youth care worker has a caseload of up to 12 children at a time and 48 children in a year – depending on the terrain and accessibility of families, mostly reached by foot. Isibindi projects also create and support spaces called Safe Parks, where children and their families, as well as other community members, participate in activities. By mid2015, just over 400 Isibindi Safe Parks were operating across the country. In addition to a safe place for children to play, study groups and youth development activities are also facilitated by Isibindi workers offering educational sessions and awareness campaigns as well as supporting recreational activities and Safe Gardens. A formal park is fenced, within which structured play equipment is managed by the Isibindi project. An informal park is ‘fenced’ in a public space by Isibindi child and youth care workers using emergency tape, plastic or string to demarcate a ‘risk-assessed’ park boundary, offering children the psychological security of feeling that they are playing in a safe space. Toys maintained in the community are used in the park during opening times, then packed up at the end of the afternoon and stored until the next day’s activities – often in shipping containers that have been donated and converted for Safe Park storage. In October 2014, during the scale-up phase of Isibindi, the South African Minister of Social Development, Bathabile Dlamini, signed regulations to the Social Services Professions Act (Act 110, 1978), which require all child and youth care workers to register with the SACSSP, officially acknowledging the role of child and youth care workers in social service delivery and formalizing their status as a recognized professional group. This official ‘vote of

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confidence’ has further endorsed the role of child and youth care workers in South Africa, strengthening their place as equal partners in multi-disciplinary team meetings.

Isibindi Child and Youth Care Success Stories As well as Manzi’s story, two other family stories are summarized below to further illuminate Isibindi practices – first, a grandmother-headed household caring for ­ pre-school children; second, a household headed by an HIV-positive father and stepmother with teenagers and a pre-school child; and, third, a family with a 7-year-old disabled daughter and toddler son living in rural South African villages and townships. Each family story is followed by a short reflection about the work carried out with these families. Characteristics of a child and youth care approach are then used to illuminate the distinctive features of Isibindi child and youth care practices providing care and protection support for challenged and challenging families living in rural places with high unemployment, irregular transport and few professional supports.

Isibindi Support for HIV-positive Grandmother Manzi and her Three Grandchildren As introduced earlier, grandmother Manzi was experiencing major challenges with the care of her 9-year-old granddaughter and two pre-school grandsons. She was unable to manage her HIV-positive health status because of travel costs to and from the clinic. A family group meeting was convened with the aim of strengthening the relationship between the grandmother and her daughter, the mother of Babsie, Bennie and Paul. The Isibindi worker convinced the daughter to return home to work out better plans for her

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children. At that time, the grandmother and her daughter were not talking to one another. During discussions about transferring the grants into the grandmother’s name, the young mother expressed anger in an emotional exchange towards her mother for not protecting her when she was a child. The Isibindi worker and her supervisor helped the two women express their emotions and also to listen to each other. The young mother was also referred to a psychologist for additional support after the meeting. Babsie was taken to the crisis centre for assessments around her suspected rape, which, sadly, was confirmed. She was treated for infections as well as tested for HIV status and, thankfully, the results were negative. Babsie, together with her grandmother and the Isibindi worker, participated in a therapeutic programme offered through Isibindi as a short-term residential child protection programme during the mid-year school holidays. The grandmother was also supported by the Isibindi worker to take her medication regularly. Application was made for a disability grant, and a food parcel was sourced from the Department of Social Development. A food garden was introduced by the Isibindi worker, and this has been well maintained by the entire family. The garden has helped the family to work together and eat food that they themselves have grown. A memory box containing photos and Babsie’s artwork was completed with the aim of helping her express what she was feeling. A family tree and other historic information about their family were introduced and used by the Isibindi worker regularly to help Babsie deal with her fears and emotional scars. The relationship between the grandmother and her daughter is much improved and healthier. All three children moved to a new school and are now coping well. Babsie is in Grade 3; Bennie is in his first foundation year of primary school; and Paul is attending a crèche. The Isibindi worker has assisted the children with learning to speak Xhosa, and they are also involved in the Safe Park reading club

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that helps them practise their new language and basic reading skills. The grandmother has received counselling from the psychologist at the local hospital and indicates that she is coping better now with her own health and the behaviour of her grandchildren. The child support grants were successfully transferred to the grandmother and she now also receives her disability grant. The Isibindi worker is advocating for the follow-up of Babsie’s rape case and continues working with the parties involved to ensure that the perpetrator is apprehended. This is a long process through which the worker is supporting the 9-year-old granddaughter. The family is also supported in budgeting the grants received and guided towards saving money between grant payments for a funeral insurance policy and other essential needs. The Isibindi worker offers the family ongoing life-space counselling, using daily activities to help meet the developmental, emotional, physical and social needs of the three young children.

Nimo Family Challenges with HIV and Community Child Care The Nimo family (again, all names have been changed) were referred to the Isibindi worker by a school teacher, because the children were not attending school. When they did attend, the children’s behaviour was difficult to manage, and they were stealing from teachers and other learners. Thwala, aged 15, and Noni, aged 12, used to go to the neighbouring village to ride horses instead of going to school. Soso, aged 5, stayed home with his stepmother, Vuyiswa. Their father, Mguqi, was unemployed and HIV-positive but not on treatment. He was using his children’s child support grant to abuse alcohol. The children’s mother, Bongiwe, had passed away two years earlier of HIV-AIDS. This family of five lived in a one-room house, and everything was done in the same room – cooking, washing and sleeping. Thwala and Noni were smoking

dagga, or cannabis, and sniffing glue. Mguqi used to beat his sons to try to get them to stop this behaviour. Instead of cooperating, the older boys started running away from home. The children had received no grief counselling after the death of their mother and were rejecting Vuyiswa. She decided to leave them alone, realizing that Thwala and Noni did not accept her. The children’s clothes were torn, dirty and inappropriate for the cold season, and there was not enough to eat. They sometimes went to sleep on an empty stomach, because the father was misusing the support grant. Thwala began isolating himself from other children and didn’t like to talk to them. He preferred sitting alone, answering adults only when spoken to.

Isibindi Family-oriented Community Practices with the Nimo Family The Isibindi worker started visiting often with the aim of building a relationship between herself and the family. She spoke to the father and convinced him to stop beating the older boys. At first, the boys ran away to a nearby forest whenever they saw the Isibindi worker come round. She went looking for them every time but did not reprimand them. In the beginning, she only managed to connect with them during morning and evening visits. Still, she spent time with them, was respectful of their opinions and did not force them into doing anything they didn’t want to do. The Isibindi worker introduced basic household routines, as the house was not clean. She called a family meeting in which everyone took part in order to introduce the family routines. It took a while for the boys to get used to this, but the Isibindi worker persisted and supported them with their chores. After a few weeks, the worker invited the boys to the Isibindi Safe Park, where they met with other children from the community. They saw that other children came to the Safe Park daily after school. The Isibindi worker spoke with them about the

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value of going back to school, and after agreeing to do this, she arranged a meeting with the school principal. He was unsure about allowing them back, due to their past behaviour and poor attendance. The Isibindi worker promised to work with the family and support their school attendance as well as discussing their substance abuse and other behaviour. The principal called a meeting with the school governing body, community leaders and the Isibindi worker. After a long meeting, the children were allowed back at school. Noni started attending the Safe Park daily and received structured homework supervision in order to help him catch up on what he had missed. He also joined a soccer team, where he learnt about the importance of rules and being a team member. Noni became a leader of a singing group at the Safe Park and also part of the Siyakhula Substance Abuse Prevention Programme, assisting the facilitator in educating others about the dangers of using drugs. Soso now attends the Safe Park too and also attends a pre-school. The Isibindi worker visits him regularly with toys from the toy library at the Safe Park to provide early education and stimulation at home. The Isibindi worker introduced a memory box at home and taught the family how to use it therapeutically, looking at family photos kept there and talking about their mother. As they spoke, it became clear that the two older boys had had a very good relationship with their mother. The stepmother, Vuyiswa, also participated in these grief-work activities, and the Isibindi worker helped Vuyiswa understand that, if she loved the father, she needed to build a relationship with his boys, too. Vuyiswa was taught some basic parenting skills and this made some positive differences to her relationship with the boys. There is still much work to be done, and the Isibindi worker continues to provide Vuyiswa with support. The father began to talk about his HIV status with the Isibindi worker, who encouraged him to go to the clinic, which he did and immediately started ARV treatment. Vuyiswa too was encouraged to be tested and, unfortunately,

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also tested positive. The couple now support each other in their new health status awareness. The Isibindi worker taught Mguqi about the rights of his children and his responsibility to ensure they attend school. He was encouraged to see that beating them as punishment was a violation of their rights, and he needed to consider alternatives to physical chastisement. The Isibindi worker encouraged him to talk to the boys and support them, and she introduced the family to budgeting together. They now all sit down and discuss what the family needs. Mguqi is happy that, with the help of the Isibindi worker, Thwala, Noni and Soso are all attending school. Vuyiswa has a very good relationship with Soso as she spends most of her time with him when he is not attending pre-school or at the Safe Park. Her relationship with the two older boys is strengthening slowly as she encourages them to do things as a team and to communicate their feelings. Thwala has been referred to a substance-abuse programme.

Engagement with the Mulaudzi Family and their Challenges The Mulaudzi family (again, all names have been changed) consists of two parents with two children, aged 7 and 2 years. The older child is unable to walk except by using her knees, and her speech is not clear. The mother had been unable to take the older child to a physiotherapist or speech therapist, because the hospital where these professionals are located is far away, and carrying both children on the long walk was too much of a struggle for her. The family stayed in a shack which leaked when it rained, adversely affecting the children and robbing the mother of hope. The housing was unsuitable for the children to play in or walk around. The boyfriend – the father of the children – was the only person bringing income into the family. The mother had applied for a Care Dependency grant for her older child but no real progress had been made.

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Isibindi Family-oriented Community Practices with the Mulaudzi Family The Isibindi worker started building a relationship with this family through playing with the children during home visits, making sure that she visited the family once or twice a week. After summarizing her assessment of family challenges with her supervisor/mentor, together they visited the family, where she introduced the mother and children, and the Isibindi mentor offered the mother individual counselling. Together, the Isibindi worker and mentor visited the hospital to advocate for a speech therapist and a physiotherapist to see the 7-year-old child and sought further social work support for this family, which was clearly struggling. The Isibindi worker accompanied the mother and her child to the hospital for therapy, using transport offered by the centre, and learned more skills on how to stimulate the child. The mentor referred the case to the early child development supervisor, as she saw the need for offering the 7-year-old child more stimulating activities. The supervisor engaged with the family and on her second visit agreed to a Family Assessment Plan and then Individual Development Plans for both children with the Isibindi worker and the mother. Routines for both children were developed through the involvement of both parents, using pictures and stimulation activities with Lego blocks; toy materials were created using improvised toys crafted from recycled plastics and cardboard; and both children were invited to playgroups so that they could learn to socialize with peers. The parents were also invited to the local caregivers’ group for further support. The mentor-supervisor, Isibindi worker and mentor for the site/area advocated for the child to receive a helpful positioning device from the physiotherapist to help manage her disability. The family is now happy to see the Isibindi workers and the 7-year-old smiles excitedly and actively tries to talk when the Isibindi worker visits with stimulating activities. The

mother is happy to see her children associating with others; and she enjoys watching her children use Lego blocks to build things.

Isibindi Services that Mobilized Resources around this Family The family now stays in a rainproof, good condition, two-bedroom house with electricity. A family budget is now operational. The older disabled child now assists her mother with household chores – something that was unthinkable before. The little girl is now mobile with a walking device and is able to go to the toilet without her mother’s assistance. She sees a speech therapist and physiotherapist on a monthly basis. Both children have Individual Development Plans supported by a Family Assessment Plan with written routines which they follow. The 2-year-old now touches things and knows the names of different colours. The 7-year-old receives a care dependency grant mobilized through followups carried out by the Isibindi worker and mentor. The 7-year-old is on the waiting list for 2017 at the nearby Resource School. The parents have become very supportive of their children, doing everything asked to assist in the children’s development and are really positive towards life, as they value the impact of good childcare work in their home. The family has a good relationship with their neighbours now, as they have learned to socialize with other community members.

Isibindi Child and Youth Care Work with Families Isibindi child and youth care practices are based on being in relationship and working in-the-moment with children and family members – experiencing their life with them as it unfolds (Fulcher & Garfat, 2015). Isibindi practices involve directly responsive community-based helping using ‘applied learning to

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inform more responsive daily encounters with children or young people’ (Fulcher, 2004). It happens where children and young people live, focusing on interactions in the moment – as these opportunity moments are occurring. Isibindi child and youth care enables children and young people to learn and rehearse new thoughts, feelings and actions in the most important arena of their lives – where they live, while life is happening. The diagram below (Figure 20.1) identifies 25 characteristics of relational child and youth care practice – all of these are demonstrated through daily Isibindi practices. The characteristics are themed around Being Available (B), Noticing and Interpreting What’s Happening (I) and Doing Something Purposeful (D) in the daily lives of children and young people. The purposeful

use of daily life events involves identifying moment-by-moment opportunities (Being; Interpreting; Doing) as Isibindi child and youth care workers engage with young people and family members and others in the local community.

Relational child and youth care characteristics with BID opportunities Each characteristic and grouping – Being; Interpreting; Doing – illustrated in Figure 20.1 is enmeshed with characteristics in the other groupings. Together, they help guide decision-making and planning by focusing on the following questions:

Figure 20.1 Characteristics of relation child and youth care Source: Freeman & Garfat, 2014; Garfat & Fulcher, 2012b

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• How does my or our way of Being with this child or young person and family members influence our working relationship? • What am I noticing and how am I Interpreting what is happening with this young person and her or his family, at this particular time in their lives, and in the particular social and cultural context in which we are engaging together? • What might I or we be Doing to keep this child safe and help nurture her or his voice about what they need to make their life better, helping to restore diplomatic relations between this young person and her or his family members, or others most important to them?

Isibindi practices with families seek to make purposeful use of daily life events – Being, Interpreting and Doing with some of the world’s most vulnerable people living amid South Africa’s HIV-AIDS pandemic. Isibindi workers across all nine regions of the new democratic South Africa are recruited through involvement with the Department of Social Development for an applicant’s capacity to spend time participating with family members in their own family homes as they live their lives. Meeting families where they are at involves recruiting unemployed young adults (mostly women) in local villages and towns and training them to support children and young people in those communities. Those who have completed entry-level child and youth care training requirements can apply for registration with the SACSSP and a licence to practise.

Being Registered Isibindi child and youth care workers approach their work with a focus on child and family strengths and resilience, commonly meeting family members in meaningful moments as survivors of HIVAIDS. This requires that Isibindi workers are emotionally present with children who are grieving, where families live. Demonstrations of personal generosity and love during such times are essential. Working in the now in

families such as these requires flexibility, recognizing individual development needs and strengths, so as to ensure that each child in a family is given personal attention. Isibindi workers seek to recognize how the needs of different family members contribute to daily and weekly family rhythms.

Interpreting Meaning-making in daily moments with children and young people grows as Isibindi workers enter into meaningful rhythms with particular families, engaging in and nurturing positive rhythms of family life. Examining and attending to contexts influential in the lives of particular families is essential, whether they are living with HIV-AIDS or other socio-economic challenges. A basic household timetable needs to keep track of school commitments, homework routines, visits to health clinics, routine appointments, and so on. Central questions involve asking: ‘Where does this family live now and who are their people and neighbours? What extended family members are around and involved with this family and its children and young people? What connections might there be with people who live in the neighbourhood or somewhere else from where this family lives?’ Learning what rituals of encounter are required – practising tribal, religious and ethnic rituals of engagement – in order to connect with these family members in a culturally safe and respectful manner is the responsibility of each child and youth care worker. When family members seek help, they should not have to ‘teach’ their child and youth care worker how to engage them in a culturally respectful manner.

Doing Connection and engagement with family members requires that an Isibindi worker be available when it suits the family members

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with whom they are engaging. Such an orientation is foundational to being in a relationship that means something to these family members. Connecting with family members and staying engaged with them is rarely easy. Isibindi workers engage family members, the most valuable potential resources available to children and young people in need of care. Intentionality of action means that Isibindi workers seek maximum family participation in decision-making around the futures of their children. Doing ‘with’ not ‘for’, or ‘to’ – about daily care routines, health, education and the futures of children or young people, is a fundamental requirement. If family members are not invited to participate in real decision-making and children’s voices are also not heard, then we fail to ‘walk the talk’ when supplying family-oriented services. Hanging Out and Being with children and young people at home around meal times and after school helps to build powerful relationship bonds. Hanging In with children and families with HIV-AIDS or with a disability is never easy but it means Being there with vulnerable children and families over time. It is one thing to seek connection and engagement with children and families. It is far more complicated, yet essential, that one’s very Being is in relationship with these children and family members. Each characteristic of child and youth care practice was illuminated through the Isibindi family stories summarized above. Sometimes, Being responsively developmental required Doing ‘parenting with a parent’, Interpreting ground rules and children’s rights around discipline, and coaching a grandparent about the developmental needs and safety of young children. Purposeful use of activities, such as the grieving rituals an Isibindi worker employed, highlights some of the many ways in which counselling on the go can be used. A needsbased focus offers opportunities for personal reflection – essential features of caring. Isibindi workers provide counselling on the go and demonstrate intentionality of action

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aimed at consciousness-raising around teenage risk-taking behaviours, sexual health and living safely when HIV-positive among young people. As Isibindi workers engage in developmental relationships with children, young people and surviving family members, they become an ‘adopted family member’ or ‘auntie’ (sometimes ‘uncle’) working in local communities. All of this involves Being in relationship, Interpreting meaningful moments that matter and Doing something intentionally to facilitate learning moments with children, young people and families. At the end of a day, an Isibindi worker operates in a small rural South African village, in a barely adequate house – knowing in her heart that it’s all about us! There isn’t anybody else. As highlighted in all three family life stories, Isibindi workers support South African children living in extremely vulnerable circumstances and assume very special meaning as caring adults in the lives of HIV-AIDs-surviving children: in the execution of their child care tasks, transforming the quality of their caring into a unique expression of love and compassion. Children who experience this love are able to respond with love. Expressions of mutual love re-kindle experiences of joy, hope, happiness, dreams and spirit. (Thumbadoo, 2013, p. 197)

Isibindi workers live in the communities in which they work, supporting local children, youths and family members impacted by HIV-AIDS. Initial evaluative feedback is encouraging for African solutions to African challenges (Allsopp, 2015). As one young person concluded: When Auntie came, things changed. I started dreaming my dreams again because she said this is not the end of the world. There are so many children around us and she quoted some examples. Then I could see that I – my situation – is maybe better than others. Then I think I feel very good when Auntie came. Ya, I started dreaming my dreams. (Thumbadoo, 2013, p. 198)

The success of Isibindi in South Africa has stimulated interest in the model from

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elsewhere. A group in Lebanon is currently using the Safe Park aspect of the Isibindi model to provide services to Syrian refugee children. UNHCR has partnered with the NACCW in implementing the model in the Meheba Refugee Settlement in Zambia. At the time of writing, the child and youth care workers were servicing refugee children, and a UNHCR representative commented thus: ‘Where resources are very few and social protection skills are lacking, Isibindi has given us a tested model for how to build a skilled community-based child protection workforce to reach children at risk, which simultaneously engages refugee talents and builds their capacity for the future’ (Global Social Service Workforce Alliance, 2016).

References Allsopp, M. (1990). The association and the new South Africa [editorial]. The child care worker. 8(7): p. 2. Allsopp, M. (2015). A new beginning for child and youth care workers in South Africa. Relational child and youth care practice. 28(2): pp. 29–41. Allsopp, M. & Thumbadoo, Z. (2002). Child and youth care in post-apartheid South Africa: Innovative responses to the challenges of AIDS and poverty. CYC-online. 43 (retrieved on 27 April 2017 from http:// www.cyc-net.org/cyc-online/cycol-0802-allsopp.html). Direko, W. (2007). Speech during the second reading of the Report of Portfolio Committee on Social Development on Children’s Amendment Bill, South African parliament, Hansard, 6 November (retrieved on 27 April 2017 from http://www.naccw.org.za). Du Toit, L. (1993). The child and youth care profession comes of age. The child care worker. 11(3): p. 3. Du Toit, L. (1999). This child, this millennium, this continent. Child & youth care. 15(7): pp. 5–9. Freeman, J. & Garfat, T. (2014). Being, interpreting and doing: A framework for organizing the characteristics of a relational child and youth

care approach. CYC-online, 179: pp. 23–27. (retrieved on 27 April 2017 from http://www. cyc-net.org/cyc-online/jan2014.pdf). Fulcher, L. C. (2004). Learning metaphors for child and youth care practice. Journal of relational child and youth care practice. 17(2): pp. 19–27. Fulcher, L. C. & Garfat, T. (2015). Family participation in decision-making about the care and supervision of their children and young people. In L. C. Fulcher & T. Garfat (Eds), Child and youth care practice with families (pp. 42–59). Cape Town: The CYC-Net Press. Gannon, B. (1988). Quality or quantity? The child care worker. 6(7): p. 2. Gannon, B. (1990). Children and the future [editorial]. The child care worker. 8(3): p. 2. Garfat, T. & Fulcher, L. C. (2012a). Characteristics of a relational child and youth care approach. In T. Garfat, L. Fulcher & J. Digney (Eds), Making moments meaningful in child & youth care practice (pp. 7–28). Cape Town: The CYC-Net Press. Garfat, T. & Fulcher, L. C. (Eds) (2012b). Child and youth care in practice. Cape Town: Pretext Publishing. Global Social Service Workforce Alliance (2016). Navigating speed bumps ahead: Principles and competencies that drive the para professional workforce (retrieved on 27 April 2017 from http://www.socialservicework force.org/resources/blog/navigating-s p e e d bumps-ahead-principles-and-competenciesdrive-para-professional). Jamieson, L., Bray, R., Viviers, A., Lake, L., Pendlebury, S. & Smith, C. (Eds) (2011). South African child gauge: 2010–2011. Cape Town: University of Cape Town (retrieved on 27 April 2017 from http:// opencontent.uct.ac.za/Health-Sciences/ South-African-Child-Gauge-20102011). Mamabolo, S., Dlamini, H. & Fulcher, L. C. (2015). Isibindi family-oriented child and youth care practices. In L. C. Fulcher & T. Garfat (Eds), Child and youth care practice with families (pp. 189–204). Cape Town: The CYC-Net Press. National Association of Child Care Workers (1977). Recommendations. In B. Gannon (Ed.), The child in care: Report of the first biennial conference of the national association of child-care workers (pp. 55–60). Cape Town: NACCW.

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National Association of Child Care Workers (2015). NACCW 2014/2015 annual report (retrieved on 10 July 2015 from http://www. naccw.org.za/publications). National Association of Child Care Workers (n.d.). Isibindi: Circles of care (retrieved on 27 April 2017 from http://www.naccw.org.za/ isibindi-circles-of-care). Ngonyama, D. (2002). Bringing hope to the rural communities of the Limpopo province. Child & youth care. 20(6): p. 15–16. Sloth-Nielson, J. A. (2007). A short history of time: Charting the contribution of social development service delivery to enhance child justice 1996–2006. Cape Town: University of the Western Cape (retrieved on 28 April 2017 from http://hdl.handle.net/10566/ 1255). Thumbadoo, Z. (2013). Isibindi: Love and caring with a child and youth care approach. In L.

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C. Fulcher & T. Garfat (Eds), Child and youth care in practice (pp. 190–9). Cape Town: Pretext Publishing. Thurman, T., Yu, S. & Taylor, T. M. (2009). A case study of care for caregivers: A psychosocial support model for child and youth care workers serving orphans and vulnerable children in South Africa. A programme implemented by the National Association of Child Care Workers. Tulane University. Theron, E. (1977). Official opening address. In B. Gannon (Ed.) The child in care: Report of the first biennial conference of the national association of child-care workers 1997. Cape Town: NACCW. United Nations Children’s Fund (2016). The state of the world’s children: A fair chance for every child. New York: United Nations.

21 Children in Care in Early Childhood Sonia Jackson and Katie Hollingworth

Introduction Research and writing about young children in out-of-home care (known as ‘looked-after children’ in the UK) and the early childhood education and care (ECEC) of those living in their birth families have developed and progressed on quite separate tracks (Cameron, Connelly & Jackson, 2015; Jackson, 1994; Meloy & Phillips, 2012). In relation to older children in care there is now greater understanding of the importance of education for their development, well-being and life-course outcomes (Cameron et al., 2015; Connelly & Furnivall, 2013; Courtney & Dworsky, 2006; Courtney & Heuring, 2005; Flynn, Tessier & Coulombe, 2013; Jackson, 2001, 2007; Jackson & Cameron, 2012; Jackson & Höjer, 2013; Social Exclusion Unit, 2003; Welbourne & Leeson, 2012). In the UK the low educational attainment of children in and leaving care by comparison with the general population has been

a matter of concern for at least 25 years, and ‘closing the gap’ is a long-standing aim of public policy (APPG, 2012; Social Exclusion Unit, 2003). Despite some progress and greater interest in the issue, the educational achievement of children in state care and their participation in higher levels of education continues to fall far below that of the population not in care (Cameron et  al., 2015; Department for Education, 2015; Jackson & Cameron, 2012; Jackson & Cameron, 2014; Mittler & Jackson, 2002). This is true not only in the UK but in the US, Canada, Australia and most other European countries as well (Jackson & Cameron, 2014; Jackson & Höjer, 2013). In this chapter we propose that for some children the roots of the problem can be found in their earliest experiences of out-of-home care.1 We suggest that this is an issue which merits far more attention than it has received to date from researchers, policy makers and practitioners.

Children in Care in Early Childhood

The scope of the chapter After reviewing the limited literature on the topic we turn to the question of which children are cared for away from home and in what types of placement. This leads to a discussion of deinstitutionalization, which appears to be a worldwide movement among developed countries, with the UK one of the earliest to abandon the institutional care of young children. The proportion of children in foster care differs widely between countries, as do policies towards families and carers, which we go on to consider. Some countries are moving towards the professionalization of foster care, while in others the trend is in the opposite direction, giving more support to families and favouring kinship care. This chapter is written mainly from a UK perspective, with reference to research in other countries where available. Advances in the study of infant brain development, which we briefly review, have led to the understanding that babies and infants are active learners who need far more than physical care if they are to reach their potential, as we illustrate with two contrasting case studies. The next section, therefore, considers the characteristics and educational background of foster carers and how well equipped they are to promote optimal development. Because most foster carers are volunteers and demand exceeds supply, there has been a reluctance to lay down minimum educational standards or make training mandatory. The implications for children’s development are discussed, and the chapter concludes with recommendations for future research and policy.

The move to deinstitutionalization Although there are still many parts of the world where children separated from their

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birth parents are looked after in large ‘orphanages’, there is a general move towards caring for children in smaller units, including placement in families. The government inquiry and subsequent report which set up the UK child-welfare system after World War II established foster family care as the default placement option (Curtis, 1946). Over the next 50 years this policy position became increasingly entrenched, so that in the UK, group care in children’s homes is mainly reserved for adolescents, large sibling groups and children with special needs and severe behavioural problems. Social workers in the UK tend to treat residential care as a last resort, unlike in some countries, where the positive aspects of group living are better recognized (Bryderup & Trentel, 2013; Weiner & Weiner, 1990). France, Denmark and the Netherlands have over half of their care population in residential care, compared with England and Sweden, where 70 per cent are in foster care. Many of these children in all countries are very young: in Australia nearly half of the 11,581 children admitted to out-of-home care in 2014–15 were under the age of 5 (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2016). In the USA, of 269,509 children entering foster care during 2015, 18 per cent were under 1-year old and 48 per cent aged 5 years or under (US Department of Health and Human Services, 2016). Detailed consideration of what appears to be an international movement away from large group homes in favour of smaller units or foster family care is beyond the scope of this chapter, but it is worth noting that it is occurring in many different countries, especially those in transition from Communist regimes (Jackson & Höjer, 2014; Stein & Munro, 2008). In some countries, such as Spain, young children whose parents are unable to provide care of an acceptable standard are placed, whenever possible, with extended family in ‘kinship care’, but in the UK they are more often looked after by unrelated adults, referred to in this chapter as ‘foster carers’.

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We focus here on a particular group of children, those who are removed from their parents at birth or within the first years of life and placed in foster families.

Research on young children in care A comprehensive literature search was undertaken to find out what is known about children under school age in foster care. Nine databases were searched, namely IngentaConnect, JSTO, ERIC, Psychinfo, International Bibliography of Social Science, Wiley Online, Science Direct, Web of Science and Google Scholar. Reference and citation trailing was also conducted on any publications relating to out-ofhome care of pre-school children. The search revealed a dearth of evidence on the subject, both in the UK and other Englishspeaking countries. Only three relevant journal articles were found, two of them coming from the same research centre, in Oregon, US. Lipscomb and Pears (2011) note that, like us, they had been unable to find any published studies on the early care and education (ECE) experiences of children in foster care. They comment that ‘policy makers and practitioners alike are [therefore] left to make decisions for these vulnerable young children without an empirical knowledge base’ (p. 2304). Similarly, Meloy & Phillips (2012) regret the failure to integrate foster care services with ECE in the US and note the absence of research on the subject. A review of the research literature by the Oxford University Rees Centre was obliged to turn to evidence relating to disadvantaged young children generally, because of the lack of any specific research on pre-school children in foster care (Mathers, Hardy, Clancy, Dixon & Harding, 2016). Texts designed for early-childhood students and practitioners make only passing reference to fostered children, usually in the context of child protection (for example, Platt, 2014). They often use the formulation ‘parents or carers’ as if they were interchangeable, without in

any way exploring the great difference between the two relationships. Foster carers are always aware that their role is a temporary one. At any moment a social worker may come to tell them that a match has been found with prospective adopters. Or the child’s mother may have recovered from her depressive illness and is considered fit to look after the child again. In addition to the fact that repeated efforts are often made to return children to their birth families, numerous research studies have exposed the instability of foster care, particularly in England (Cameron et  al., 2015; Jackson & Höjer, 2013; Sinclair, Baker, Wilson & Gibbs, 2005; Ward, 2009). Harriet Ward and colleagues found that even babies and toddlers were frequently moved for administrative reasons. In their sample of 242 fostered children, 17 per cent of those aged 0–4 and 19 per cent of 5- to 9-year-olds had more than five placements over a three-year period. Over half of placements made in the first year in care lasted six months or less. The majority of moves for these young children were described as ‘planned transitions’ and initiated by the agencies rather than by carers. It is unsurprising that a high proportion of children in foster care are later diagnosed with attachment disorders, usually attributed to inconsistent and neglectful treatment in their families of origin. There has been too little attention paid to the additional harm caused by moving young children between foster placements (Ward, 2009). Cameron et  al. (2015), drawing on the theory and philosophy of social pedagogy (Cameron & Moss, 2011), argue that education and care are inseparable from the very beginning. Schools and early-education settings should make concern for every child’s social and emotional well-being central to their provision. Equally, care away from home should be as much about education, in its broadest sense, as about providing a safe and nurturing environment – hence the subtitle of their book, ‘learning placements and caring schools’. There is powerful evidence from the London-based Effective Provision of

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PreSchool Primary and Secondary Education (EPPSE) study that the quality of the homelearning environment is the strongest predictor of children’s developmental progress (Sylva et al., 2010). Later we illustrate what that may mean in the day-to-day care of young children.

Young children in the UK care system Statistics published by the Department for Education show that on 31 March 2015, there were 13,830 children under the age of 5 in localauthority care, almost a quarter of the total number (Department for Education, 2015). Moreover, nearly twice that number, 24,340 children, passed through the care system during the year. Some may have stayed only for a few weeks, in placements designed to help families in temporary difficulties, but 5,800 were looked after continuously for the whole 12 months. The figures for Scotland show an even higher proportion of very young children in care, but because they include those placed at home under supervision, they are not strictly comparable. The age bands in the English statistics are 0–1, 1–4, 5–9, etc., so it is not possible to identify how many of these children are in their second and third years. However, they show that 3710 were babies under 1 year old on the census date. This number showed a steep upward trend between 2012 and 2013 before beginning to level off (Table 21.1). The increase was probably due to the practice of removing children at birth in cases where

there are serious child-protection concerns, as discussed below.

Removal at birth Taking a newborn child away from its mother is a drastic action which has been criticized as an infringement of human rights (Broadhurst, Alrouh & Mason, 2016). What seems to have made it an increasingly common practice in the UK is a perception of the high risk incurred by leaving a young child with parents who have failed to provide a minimally acceptable standard of care or who have caused harm to an older sibling. The risk is not only to the child but to all the professionals involved (Sanders, Jackson & Thomas, 1997). The deaths of children at the hands of parents or their partners often attract intense media attention, and the decision-makers concerned, especially if they are social workers, experience much open hostility (Gilbert, Parton & Skivenes, 2011; Jones, 2014; Shoesmith, 2016). Notorious cases, widely reported in the press, often spark off a marked increase in the numbers of children taken into care, a trend which continues (National Audit Office, 2014). Statistics from the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (CAFCASS) show that care applications for children of all ages in the first half of 2016 were 20 per cent higher than in the comparable period the previous year (CAFCASS, 2016). An increased demand for out-of-home care has also been reported in other countries, usually along with a shortage of available carers.

Table 21.1 Number of children in care in England by age Under 1 1–4 years 5–9 years 10–15 16+ All children looked after

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

3,680 11,970 11,830 24,200 13,830 65,510

4,200 12,400 12,700 24,230 13,540 67,070

4,310 12,330 13,250 24,460 13,710 68,060

3,880 11,410 13,920 25,150 14,450 68,800

3,710 10,120 14,310 26,140 15,270 69,540

Source: Authors drafted this as original work for this chapter with data from the Department for Education (2015)

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Among the children who entered state care in England in 2016 were over 2000 removed at birth or soon afterwards. Between 2008 and 2013 13,248 babies were taken into care, and the annual rate rose from 802 to 2,018, an increase of 151 per cent. About half were taken from mothers with other children in care and a third from women who became mothers in their teens. Broadhurst and colleagues discovered a pattern of women whose babies were removed quickly becoming pregnant again, often with a different violent and abusive partner (Broadhurst et  al., 2016). The research team was unable to identify the reason for the huge rise in early removals but was severely critical of the lack of follow-up and support for women who lose their babies in this way. They do not argue, however, that the action taken was unnecessary. Other research points in the opposite direction, that too many children are damaged by being left in abusive or neglectful families when there are clear grounds for removing them. It is estimated that about 10 per cent of children removed at birth eventually return to their mother or another relative, and the remainder stay in care or are adopted. No young children in the UK are cared for in institutions, so the majority of those children will spend at least part of their infancy in foster care. Evidence on what happens if children are returned home is far from encouraging. A longitudinal study from Loughborough University of children identified before the age of 1 year as at risk of suffering significant harm found a fluctuating pattern, with temporary improvements in parental care alternating with episodes of further neglect or maltreatment, depending on the level of support provided for the parent(s) and what else was going on in their lives (Ward, Brown & Maskell-Graham, 2012). The NSPCC examined hundreds of serious case reviews carried out between 2010 and 2016 and found that a high proportion of the children concerned had been returned to their families but re-entered care following further abuse and neglect or were killed by a parent or carer (NSPCC, 2015).

Staying in foster care When children cannot be looked after by their birth parents or close relatives, the evidence is clear that adoption is the best alternative and is much more likely to offer stability and good outcomes than any other form of placement (Gilbert et al., 2011; Jackson & Thomas, 2001; Lloyd & Barth, 2011; Vinnerljung & Hjern, 2011). We know very little about what happens to young children who stay in foster homes. Both UK government policy and US federal policy are unequivocally in favour of promoting adoption whenever possible and of speeding up the process. In the US the 2008 Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoption Act offers financial incentives to states for each additional child adopted, with the amount doubled for every child over 9. However, UK social workers tend to prefer long-term foster care or other arrangements, such as special guardianship, despite the positive outcomes of adoption being one of the most robust findings in child welfare research (Berrick, 2011). Sinclair et al. (2005) suggest that there is scope for increasing by at least 10 per cent the numbers of children adopted by foster carers, taking into account the wishes of both children and adults. Even when a child has been freed for adoption and there are willing adopters anxiously waiting, it usually takes a long time, on a child’s timescale, between reception into care and the final adoption order. The UK government has made repeated efforts to speed up the adoption process but with only moderate success. The average time between placement and adoption in 2015 is almost three years (Table 21.2), during which the child is looked after in a foster home or a succession of different foster homes (Ward, 2009). Yet we know almost nothing from research about their care experience. Foster carers in England are not required to have any qualifications other than obtaining the Disclosure and Barring Service Certificate to confirm that they are not known to the police for any offence against a child. Some but not all local authorities expect them to attend pre-registration training, of variable

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Table 21.2 Total average time between entry into care and adoption in England (years and months) Aged under 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 and over

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

2:3 2:9 3:5 3:3 3:5 3:7 3:9 3:5

2:3 2:11 3:1 3:2 3:5 3:8 3:11 3:5

2:3 2:11 3:1 3:2 3:5 3:3 3:4 3:4

2:1 2:9 2:10 3:0 3:1 3:2 3:7 3:5

2:0 2:7 2:8 2:9 2:10 3:3 3:2 3:1

Source: Authors drafted this as original work for this chapter with data from the Department for Education (2015)

length and quality. Both this and any follow-up training are likely to be focused on the care of older children, who may be expected to present more problems. There is a move in several countries towards more demanding training standards (Dill, 2010; Strijker & Knorth, 2007; Trede & Winkler, 2013), from which kinship carers may be exempted. The UK Fostering website refers rather vaguely to the need for ‘a reasonable level of reading, writing and spoken English’. Foster carers, unlike childminders, are not obliged to deliver the Early Childhood Foundation Stage (the national curriculum for pre-school children). This suggests a failure to recognize that for those who look after young children, ‘education’ is as central to their role as ‘caring’ (Cameron et al., 2015; Jackson & Forbes, 2015). There is no specific guidance for foster carers looking after very young children, only generalized ‘standards’ for the agencies, both private and public, which employ them. It is an area where policy has notably failed to keep up with research.

Brain development in early childhood Technical advances now make it possible to see what is going on in the brains of very young children in real time. This has enabled investigators to confirm that there are dramatic increases in the dendrites and axons (conducting

fibres) and in the number of synapses (junctions between neurons that pass on signals) during the first weeks and months of life. These findings show that babies are learning from the moment of birth and actively contributing to the development of new brain circuits by constant practice (Johnson, 1997, 2000). More than 80 per cent of the growth in connections between nerve cells happens in the first two years (Johnson & de Hahn, 2015). Another method of studying the learning of pre-verbal babies is by using behavioural experiments, devising tasks using the natural interest babies have in looking at events or pictures and measuring their attention span. The baby will spend a long time looking at a new stimulus, but if it is repeatedly presented, the baby loses interest and only glances briefly at it, a process known as habituation. In other words, just like us, when babies are bored they switch off. A powerful technique for studying the thinking and behaviour of babies has been pioneered in the UK by Lynne Murray (Murray, 2014; Murray & Andrews, 2000). It consists of taking film or video footage of babies and toddlers in everyday life as well as in experimental conditions and then subjecting it to frame-by-frame analysis, thus giving researchers, parents and practitioners access to the psychological experience of very young children. It highlights the essential part played by attunement in facilitating or, conversely, getting in the way of the child’s cognitive and emotional development (Murray, 2014; Shemmings & Shemmings, 2011)

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It is now firmly established that the early weeks and months of life are a time of rapid learning, which, in good conditions, accelerates as the child grows and lays the foundation for future experiences (Gray, 2010). We cannot afford therefore to treat babies and toddlers as passive objects for whom it is sufficient to provide basic physical care. This is especially true for children in foster care, who will usually have had a poor start in life. The effects of abusive and neglectful parenting on children’s brain functioning and development is a growing body of knowledge (Belsky & de Haan, 2011).

Everyday life in foster care As noted earlier, there are no qualitative research studies looking systematically at the daily lives of young children in foster care, so we are dependent on anecdotal evidence. Children looked after in what are considered to be satisfactory foster placements may have very different experiences, as illustrated by the following case studies (names and details changed to preserve anonymity).

Case Studies Aisha Aisha’s parents were aged 16 and 17 when she was born. Aisha’s mother, Sally, suffered from post-natal depression and would forget to feed and change the baby unless reminded by her partner. His parents, originally from Pakistan, strongly disapproved of his relationship with Sally and encouraged him to move back home. After he left, Sally spent most of her time sitting on the sofa, smoking and watching television. When the health visitor came round she found the house in a dirty and neglected state. Aisha was crying to be fed and had a severe nappy rash. Aisha was placed under a care order with Pat Green, a foster carer who had looked after a succession of babies in similar circumstances. The plan was for intensive work with Sally to enable the child to return home, but 18 months later Aisha was still in the same placement.

Kevin Kevin’s mother, Karen, was a heavy drinker who had had four children removed as a result of neglect or injury by one of a series of abusive partners. Kevin’s father had served a prison sentence for a violent attack on his previous girlfriend. The decision was taken to remove Karen’s fifth baby at birth and place him with foster carers prior to adoption. The foster placement with Eileen Richards, when Kevin was nearly six months old, was already his fourth change of carer. Research evidence suggests that this is not untypical (Ward et al., 2012). Eileen was a divorced woman with grownup children. Before Kevin she had looked after several young children who had returned to their birth families or been adopted. She was determined to make it up to Kevin for his poor start in life. Eileen had read about treasure baskets for babies (Jackson & Forbes, 2015), but when she sat Kevin down by the one which she had painstakingly assembled for him he appeared to take no interest in it. The third time he stretched out a tentative hand and grasped a metal whisk, which he then mouthed and turned over in his hands for almost 20 minutes. A few days later he began to wave his arms and legs and make excited noises when he saw Eileen bring out the basket. She read him stories every day and as soon as he could crawl he would go to the book pile and try to pull out the one he wanted. Before long the pile had grown to 30 books and Kevin had clear favourites. Later, when they went to the library, he liked to spend a long time choosing his books, examining them closely and sometimes going back to one he had discarded. By the time he was a year old he had grasped the idea of turning over pages without tearing them and often liked to look at books at home by himself. Eileen aimed to give Kevin interesting experiences, taking him out every day, whatever the weather, and commenting on the sights and sounds they encountered. Eileen said she tried to do things that an ‘ordinary mother’ would do, counting steps when they climbed the stairs, singing nursery rhymes, taking Kevin to ‘baby music’ sessions, swimming (for which social services

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reluctantly agreed to pay) and to a weekly parent and toddler group in a local book shop.

The Foster Family Context The family situation of Pat Green, Aisha’s foster carer, was very different. She had one daughter at secondary school and two boys of 7 and 5. Keeping up with the washing and cooking meals for the children and her husband took up most of her time. Her reading was limited to the local weekly newspaper. When the children were home from school the house became very noisy and busy. The older children sometimes incorporated Aisha into their games and she would sit with them watching television. Aisha had two board books, given by her social worker, who also suggested visiting the local library, but Pat thought it was a bit too far to go. By the time these two case-study children were 18 months old, clear differences were apparent between them. Kevin was feeding himself with fingers and a spoon and always willing to try something new. He was walking and climbing confidently, enjoyed exploring indoors and out and taking small risks such as walking along a wall or tackling the bigger slide in the playpark, often giving a running commentary on his activities. Eileen started a book to write down his new words every day, but gave up when the list added up to over a hundred. He could name many objects, correctly identify colours, say numbers up to five and enjoyed scribbling with wax crayons on large pieces of paper. He loved to listen to stories and would protest if Eileen changed or abridged the ones he liked best. Aisha’s social worker was also pleased with her progress. The child was clearly attached to her foster carer, reaching her physical milestones at the expected time, beginning to say a few words, and seemed happy and settled in her placement. She was still mainly spoon-fed from jars of baby and toddler food and reluctant to try anything unfamiliar. She could ask for what she wanted by pointing, but otherwise her ability to express herself was limited. She mainly played quietly on her own with a few favourite soft animals.

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Both Aisha and Kevin had stable placements which were assessed as ‘good’ and were considered to be helping the two children to recover from earlier adversity; but already, by the age of 2, their developmental trajectories were diverging markedly. It is not hard to see that a caring adult who takes an active approach to the child’s learning, like Eileen, might have a different impact on future development than one who provides physical care and nurturing in a less stimulating environment (Trevarthen, 2004).

Exposure to Television One aspect of foster care that is frequently mentioned by adoptive parents is the amount of time that their children previously spent watching television, or at least being sat in front of a screen. The use of television as a babysitter is certainly not unique to foster carers and is understandable since foster carers are typically very busy people (Sinclair et al., 2005). There is no research evidence on the subject and no official guidance from the UK government. However, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued guidelines in 2013 urging that children under 2 years should not watch television or similar screen media at all (Murray, 2014). Interaction with a responsive carer is fundamental to language development, and over-exposure to television is likely to inhibit it (Mendelsohn, Berkule, Tomoupolos, Tamis-LeMonda, Huberman, Alvir & Dreyer, 2008). This was confirmed by a large-scale study in Canada by Pagani, Fitzpatrick, Barnett and Dubow (2010), which found a substantial inverse relationship between screen time and vocabulary. By contrast, shared book reading with young children has been found to enhance vocabulary acquisition and comprehension (Fletcher & Reese, 2005; Jackson & Forbes, 2015). One adoptive mother commented to the authors that every time she visited the foster home before the adoption was confirmed, she found her daughter, Polly, aged 11 months, propped up on cushions in front of baby

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television. The foster mother did look at books with her, but didn’t know what to do with them. She had never been taken to the park, which was less than five minutes’ walk away. Mrs Roberts, a 65-year-old widow living in a first-floor apartment, had looked after 15 other children before Polly. The employment of older, and possibly less mobile, women as short-term carers for young children appears to be common practice in England, but we have not found any systematic research to confirm this or to assess the impact on the children they look after. Although some social workers provide excellent support to foster carers of young children, this is not always the case (Cameron et al., 2015; Cosis Brown, Sebba & Luke, 2014). This makes it all the more critical that fostered children’s access to high-quality ECE at the appropriate age is monitored and supported.

Participation of foster children in ECE The field of early-years care and education in the UK has expanded enormously over the past 20 years (Jackson & Forbes, 2015; Maynard & Powell, 2014), but the focus of most of the literature is still on the 3–5 age range, the traditional period of nursery schooling. By age 3 there are already big differences between children of parents with high levels of education and those from lowincome and socially disadvantaged families (Feinstein & Brassett-Grundy, 2005). The value of high-quality ECEC is well proven, particularly for children from disadvantaged groups (European Commission, 2012; Sylva et  al., 2010). The effects can be long-lasting, strongly influencing the probability, as much as 14 years later, that the child will be entered for higher level school examinations (AS and A levels in England) (Goodman & Sianesi, 2005; Sammons, Toth & Sylva, 2015). The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) establishes that

children have a right to education, play, leisure and participation in cultural life and the arts (Articles 28 and 31), and ECEC makes an important contribution to social inclusion in these respects (Vandenbroeck & Lazzari, 2014). The UK, along with most countries in the world, is a signatory to the Convention and nearly all children do attend some form of ECEC before they reach the age of compulsory schooling (five years in the UK). From age 2, children classified as ‘disadvantaged’ on a number of criteria are entitled to up to 30 hours a week of free ECE. Children in local-authority care are one of the categories included in the list of those eligible for free ECE, but there are no national statistics on how many or what proportion of their caregivers take advantage of the opportunity. Local reports suggest that take-up is relatively low. Foster children are less likely to attend centre-based ECE than those in the general population (Mathers et al., 2016). Lipscomb and Pears looked at patterns of participation in ECE by children in foster care in Oregon and found that they varied in line with the children’s care histories and the characteristics of their foster families (Lipscomb & Pears, 2011). Their findings are in line with Belsky et al.’s study of a normative population, which found that attendance at an ECE setting for short sessions was beneficial, especially for children from disadvantaged family backgrounds; but children attending full-time day care at a young age showed some negative effects (Belsky, Vandell, Burchinall, Clarke Stewart, McCartney & Owen, 2007). We have been unable to find any comparable studies in the UK or other European countries relating to foster children. The people providing daily care for babies and young children, with whom they will spend most of their time, are obviously crucial to their satisfactory development. They often have a difficult job, because even babies placed soon after birth may be suffering from the effects of maternal substance or alcohol misuse, and those coming into care later will certainly have experienced neglect if not serious maltreatment (Brown, Sigvaldason & Bednar, 2005). That makes it even more important for their carers to

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understand the impact of these very early experiences on later development and behaviour.

Who are the foster carers? There is no national register of foster-care families in the UK, although they are estimated to number about 55,000, and, in contrast to the detailed information available on adoptive parents, we know rather little about their characteristics. Sinclair et  al. (2005) comment that their profile does not seem to have changed greatly since his earlier studies in the 1970s. McDermid, Holmes, Kirton and Signoretta (2012) reviewed six studies of foster carers carried out between 2000 and 2011, including a national survey by OFSTED (the official inspection body), which included both localauthority carers and those employed by independent fostering providers (IFPs). They found that the majority of foster carers in the UK are married couples in their 40s and 50s with school-aged or older children, with the woman usually taking the more active caring role. They tend to have a low level of education, only a minority having any formal qualifications, and, female carers especially, tend to be very home-centred, with few outside interests. At the time of this study, agencies were beginning to make more effort to recruit carers from minority ethnic populations and those willing to look after children with special needs, for example with physical disabilities or learning difficulties. A shortage of foster carers in some areas means that local authorities are now more open to considering families who might previously have been ruled out, such as same-sex couples, single people and individuals who identify as LGBT. In some countries it is not unusual for professionally qualified people, such as teachers, psychologists or health workers, to come forward as foster carers. In Poland many foster parents have university degrees, which is rare in the UK (McDermid et  al., 2012). It is a requirement for at least one partner in professional foster families in Germany.

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The proposal that local authorities should try to recruit better-educated carers is not usually well received (Jackson & McParlin, 2006). It is often countered by the argument that warmth and responsiveness are more important for successful placements than educational background. We believe that this is a false dichotomy. There is no reason why warmth and educational level should be inversely related. In fact, it is important for foster carers to have the capacity to understand how past trauma may affect children’s behaviour and emotional development rather than reacting to its surface manifestations.

Social-emotional competence and school adjustment As we noted at the beginning of this chapter, the educational attainment of children in out-ofhome care falls much below that of the general population. Some writers have argued that this is only to be expected because of the high proportion of children in care who are assessed as having special educational needs (SEN). However, a closer look at what is meant by SEN shows that the majority of these children fall within the normal intelligence range but have problems in adjusting to the school environment because of what are called ‘behaviour difficulties’. We have not found any study which looks in depth at the early-school adjustment of foster children in England, but Pears and her colleagues at the Oregon Social Learning Center have explored what happens to children in care as they make the transition from kindergarten (aged 5) to first grade (Pears, Fisher, Bruce, Kim & Yoerger, 2010). Their study compared the academic progress and school adjustment of 117 previously maltreated foster children with a matched community group. They argue that successful progress in school depends on ‘social-emotional competence’. This comprises three interrelated sets of skills: prosocial behaviour, emotion regulation and behaviour regulation. All three are necessary to enable children to focus on learning and interact peaceably with other

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children and teachers. Pears et  al. (2010) suggest that inconsistencies in fostered children’s early caregiving environments lead to deficits in inhibitory control, which in turn are associated with disruptive behaviour in the classroom. Foster children in their study were found to be markedly behind their peers in social-emotional competence as well as academic attainment by the time they entered kindergarten. Inhibitory control may provide a link between early experiences and school outcomes. Another important finding of this study was that foster carers were much less likely than parents to be closely involved in the child’s early schooling. There is no comparable research to tell us if this is also true in the UK. Another way of looking at this is to ask how far schools are prepared to meet the special needs of children in foster care. In this they may be helped by a uniquely English institution, the virtual school, which oversees the education of all children looked after in a local authority as if they were attending one school. Originally limited to those of compulsory school age, the majority of virtual schools have now extended their remit to include ECE and even the youngest children in foster care, aged 0–4 (Jackson, 2014).

Implications for policy and practice The official policy position both in the UK and US is that all young children in foster care should either be adopted or reunited with a birth parent or relative. We have shown that this is unrealistically optimistic. Only about half of looked-after children are adopted before the age of 5, after which they are increasingly unlikely to find an adoptive family (Table 21.3). There is a misperception that babies and toddlers are easy to care for and have simple needs by comparison with older children. That may go some way to explain the lack of policy or guidance specifically directed at the foster care of this age group.

Suggestions for future research As we have shown, there is an extreme dearth of empirical evidence relating to this most vulnerable group of children. More research is badly needed, especially in three areas: 1) who looks after pre-school children in foster care? 2) what is the quality of the children’s daily experience? and 3) what is the outcome of their period of out-of-home care?

Who are the Carers? • Do the foster carers of very young children differ from other foster carers in any way? Do they volunteer specifically to look after children in this age group? What is their demographic profile: age, marital status, ethnic background, income, education and employment, family and household composition? • What ongoing training and support do they receive from the agency that employs them? And where else do foster parents get their ideas about how best to look after babies and young children? • Do they recognize a therapeutic and educational element to their work or regard it simply as temporary caregiving? • Do they feel and express love towards the children they look after, or do they defend themselves by keeping an emotional distance?

Everyday life in Foster Care • Do fostered children attend centre-based or any other kind of formal childcare? • What is their pattern of attendance, and how closely involved are their carers with the ECE setting? • What are the physical conditions in which the children are looked after? What playthings and activities are available to them?

Outcomes from Foster Care • How does their developmental progress at age 2, 3 and 4 compare with that of non-fostered children of the same age? • How can children moving from neglectful and/ or abusive families be enabled to form secure attachments to foster and adoptive parents?

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Table 21.3 Number of children adopted in England by age Under 1 1–4 years 5–9 years 10–15 16+ All children adopted

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

60 2210 730 90 X 3,100

80 2570 740 80 10 3,470

90 2980 860 70 10 4,010

180 3840 960 70 x 5,050

230 4050 990 60 x 5,330

x Figure not shown to protect confidentiality Source: Authors drafted this as original work for this chapter with data from the Department for Education (2015)

• What contribution has the foster placement made to their social and emotional development? How well prepared are the children for participation in group ECE settings or school?

Conclusion Young children in foster care have been overlooked in both policy and research. There is an urgent need for information about what happens to them and the quality of the care they experience while they are waiting for more permanent placement. We need to recognize that this is not blank time when it is sufficient just to meet the child’s basic needs but a vitally important period for learning and development. It should be seen as an opportunity to compensate for the fact that these babies and infants have almost always had a poor start in life. Without skilled and effective intervention, those who spend their earliest childhood in foster care risk continuing to suffer from the effects of the abuse and neglect that brought them into the care system. We need to make use of the extensive knowledge available about what constitutes high-quality ECEC provision and ensure that foster care provides it. We should recruit foster parents for these very young children with the same care as for older children, if not more so. This is the time when the foundations of their social, emotional and cognitive development are being laid and which will shape their future relationships and educational trajectories.

Note 1  In the UK, the term ‘foster care’ is reserved for children looked after away from their birth parents, mainly in unrelated families. Placement in children’s homes or any other kind of institution is usually called ‘residential care’, unlike in the US, where foster care is sometimes used to denote out-of-home care more generally.

Acknowledgements Our grateful thanks to the parents, foster carers and adoptive parents who shared their experiences with us. The Leverhulme Trust provided support for the preparation of this chapter through the award of a Fellowship to one of the authors.

References APPG (All-Party Parliamentary Group) (2012) Education Matters in Care: A report by the Independent Cross-Party Inquiry into the Educational Attainment of Looked After Children in England. London: University and College Union (UCU). Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (2016) Child Protection Australia 2014–15. Child welfare series no. 63. Cat. no. CWS 57. Canberra: AIHW. Belsky, J. & de Haan, M. (2011) Annual Research Review: Parenting and children’s brain development – the end of the beginning. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 52 (4): pp. 409–28.

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Belsky, J., Vandell, D., Burchinall, M., Clarke Stewart, A., Mc Cartney, K. & Owen, M. (2007) Are There Long-term Effects of Early Child Care? Child Development, 78 (2): pp. 681–701. Berrick, J.D. (2011) Trends and Issues in the US Child Welfare System. In N. Gilbert, N. Parton & M. Skivnes (eds), Child Protection Systems: International trends and orientations (pp. 17–35). New York: Oxford University Press. Broadhurst, K., Alrouh, B. & Mason, C.S., with Yeend, E., Kershaw, S., Shaw, M. & Harwin, J. (2016) Women and Infants in Care Proceedings in England: New insights from research on recurrent care proceedings. Family Law, 46 (2): pp. 2008–114. Brown, J.D., Sigvaldason, N. & Bednar, L.M. (2005) Foster Parent Perception of Placement Needs for Children with a Foetal Alcohol Syndrome Spectrum Disorder. Children and Youth Services Review, 27 (3): pp. 209–327. Bryderup, I.M. & Trentel, M.Q. (2013) The Importance of Social Relationships for Young People from a Public Care Background. European Journal of Social Work, 16 (1): pp. 37–54. CAFCASS (2016) Care Applications in July 2016. https://www.cafcass.gov.uk/leaflets-resources/ organisational-material/care-and-private-lawdemand-statistics/care-demand-statistics. aspx. Accessed August 2016. Cameron, C. & Moss, P. (2011) Social Pedagogy: Current Understandings and Opportunities. In C. Cameron & P. Moss (eds) Social Pedagogy and Working with Children and Young People: Where Care and Education Meet (pp. 77–32). London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Cameron, C., Connelly, G. & Jackson, S. (2015) Educating Children and Young People in Care: Learning placements and caring schools. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Connelly, G. & Furnivall, J. (2013) Addressing Low Attainment of Children in Public Care: The Scottish experience. European Journal of Social Work, 16 (1): pp. 88–104. Cosis Brown, H., Sebba, J. & Luke, M. (2014) The Role of the Supervising Social Worker in Foster Care. Oxford: Rees Centre University of Oxford. Courtney, M.E. & Dworsky, A. (2006) Early Outcomes for Young Adults Transitioning from

Out-of-home care in the USA. Child and Family Social Work, 11 (3): pp. 209–19. Courtney, M.E. & Heuring, D.H. (2005) The Transition to Adulthood for Youth ‘Aging Out’ of the Foster Care System. In D.W. Osgood, E.M. Foster, C. Flanagan & G.R. Ruth (eds), On Your Own without a Net: The transition to adulthood for vulnerable populations (pp. 27–67). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Curtis, M. (1946) Report of the Care of Children Committee. Cmd. 6922. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. Department for Education (2015) Children Looked After in England Including Adoption 2014–2015. London: DfE. Retrieved from https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/ children-looked-after-in-england-includingadoption-2014-to-2015 in August 2016. Dill, K. (2010) Fitting a Square Peg into a Round Hole – Understanding Kinship Care Outside of the Foster Care Paradigm. University of Toronto, Toronto. European Commission (2012) Youth on the Margins of Society: Policy review of research results. Brussels: European Union Directorate General for Research and Innovation, SocioEconomic Sciences and Humanities. Feinstein, L. & Brassett-Grundy, A. (2005) The Life Course Outcomes for Looked-after Children: Evidence from the British Cohort Study 1970. London: Institute of Education. Fletcher, K. & Reese, E. (2005) Picture Book Reading with Young Children: A conceptual framework. Developmental Review, 25 (1): pp. 64–103. Flynn, R.J., Tessier, N.G. & Coulombe, D. (2013) Placement, Protective and Risk Factors in the Educational Success of Young People in Care: Cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses. European Journal of Social Work, 16 (1): pp. 70–87. Gilbert, N., Parton, N. & Skivenes, M. (eds) (2011) Child Protection Systems: International trends and orientations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goodman, A. and Sianesi, B. (2005) Early Education and Children’s Outcomes: How long do the impacts last? Fiscal Studies, 26 (4): pp. 513–48. Gray, C. (2010) Understanding Cognitive Development: Automaticity and the early years child. Child Care in Practice, 10 (1): pp. 39–47.

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Jackson, S. (1994) Under Fives in the Care System. In T. David (ed.), Working Together for Young Children: Multi-professionalism in action (pp. 119–32). London: Routledge. Jackson, S. (2001) The Education of Children in Care. In S. Jackson (ed.), Nobody Ever Told Us School Mattered: Raising the educational attainments of children in care (pp. 11–53). London: British Agencies for Adoption and Fostering. Jackson, S. (2007) Care Leavers, Exclusion and Access to Higher Education. In D. Abrams, J. Christian & D. Gordon (eds), Multidisciplinary Handbook of Social Exclusion Research (pp. 115–36). Chichester: Wiley. Jackson, S. (2014) The Virtual School for Children in Out-of-home Care: A strategic approach to improving their educational attainment. Children Australia, 40 (4): pp. 327–34. Jackson, S. & Cameron, C. (2012) Leaving Care: Looking ahead and aiming higher. Children and Youth Services Review, 34 (6): pp. 1107–14. Jackson, S. & Cameron, C. (2014) Improving Access to Further and Higher Education for Young People in Care: European policy and practice. London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Jackson, S. & Forbes, R. (2015) People under Three: Play, work and learning in a childcare setting. London: Routledge. Jackson, S. & Höjer, I. (2013) Prioritising Education for Children Looked After Away from Home. European Journal of Social Work, 16 (1): pp. 1–5. Jackson, S. & McParlin, P. (2006) The Education of Children in Care. The Psychologist, 19 (2): pp. 90–3. Jackson, S. & Thomas, N. (2001) What Works in Creating Stability for Looked After Children? Ilford: Barnardos. Johnson, M.H. (1997) The Neural Basis of Cognitive Development. In W. Damon, D. Kuhn & R.S. Siegler (eds), Handbook of Child Psychology (pp. 1–49). New York: Wiley. Johnson, M.H. (2000) How Babies’ Brains Work. The Psychologist, 13 (6): pp. 298–301. Johnson, M.H. and de Haan, M. (2015) Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience: An introduction. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Jones, R. (2014) The Story of Baby P: Setting the record straight. Bristol: Policy Press.

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Lloyd, E.C. & Barth, R.P. (2011) Developmental Outcomes after Five Years for Foster Children Returned Home, Remaining in Care, or Adopted. Children and Youth Services Review, 33 (8): pp. 1383–91. Lipscomb, S.T. & Pears, K.C. (2011) Patterns and Predictors of Early Care and Education for Children in Foster Care. Children and Youth Services Review, 33 (11): pp. 2303–11. Mathers, S., Hardy, G., Clancy, C., Dixon, J. & Harding, C. (2016) Starting Out Right: Early education and looked after children. London: Nuffield Foundation. McDermid, S., Holmes, L., Kirton, D. & Signoretta, P. (2012) The Demographic Characteristics of Foster Carers in the UK: Motivations, barriers and messages for recruitment and retention. Loughborough: Childhood Wellbeing Research Centre. Maynard, T. & Powell, S. (2014) An Introduction to Early Childhood Studies (3rd edition). London: Sage. Meloy, M.E. & Phillips, D.A. (2012) Rethinking the Role of Early Care and Education in Foster Care. Children and Youth Services Review, 34 (5): pp. 882–90. Mendelsohn, A.L., Berkule, S.B., Tomoupolos, S., Tamis-LeMonda, C.S., Huberman, H.S., Alvir, J. & Dreyer, B.P. (2008) Infant Television and Video Exposure Associated with Limited Parent–Child Verbal Interactions in Low Socioeconomic Status Households. Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, 162 (5): pp. 411–17. Mittler, P. & Jackson, S. (2002) Social Exclusion and Education. MCC – Building Knowledge for Integrated Care, 10 (3): pp. 5–13. Murray, L. (2014) The Psychology of Babies. London: Constable & Robinson. Murray, L. & Andrews, A. (2000) The Social Baby. Richmond: CP Publishing. National Audit Office (2014) Children in Care. London: NAO. NSPCC (2015) Returning Children Home from Care: Learning from case reviews. London: NSPCC. Pagani, L., Fitzpatrick, C., Barnett, T.A. & Dubow, E. (2010) Prospective Association between Early Childhood Television Exposure and Academic, Psychosocial and Physical Well-being by Middle Childhood. Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, 164 (5): pp. 425–31.

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Parton, N. & Berridge, D. (2011) Child Protection in England. In N. Gilbert, N. Parton & M. Skivenes (eds), Child Protection Systems: International trends and orientations (pp. 60–88). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pears, K.C., Fisher, P.A., Bruce, J., Kim, H.K. & Yoerger, K. (2010) Early Elementary School Adjustment of Maltreated Children in Foster Care: The roles of inhibitory control and caregiver involvement. Child Development, 81 (5): pp. 1550–64. Platt, D. (2014) Child Welfare and Protection. In T. Maynard & S. Powell (eds), An Introduction to Early Childhood Studies (3rd edition) (pp. 185–96). London: Sage. Sammons, P., Toth, K. & Sylva, K. (2015). Preschool and Early Home Learning Effects on A-level Outcomes. Oxford: University of Oxford. Sanders, R., Jackson, S. & Thomas, N. (1997) Policy Priorities in Child Protection: Perception of risk and agency strategy. Policy Studies, 18 (2): pp. 139–58. Shemmings, D. & Shemmings, Y. (2011) Understanding Disorganized Attachment: Theory and practice for working with children and families. London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Shoesmith, S. (2016) Learning from Baby P: The politics of blame, fear and denial. Bristol: Policy Press. Sinclair, I., Baker, C., Wilson, K. & Gibbs, I. (2005) Foster Children: Where they go and how they get on. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Social Exclusion Unit (2003) A Better Education for Children in Care. London: Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. Stein, M. & Munro, E. (2008) Young People’s Transitions from Care to Adulthood. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Strijker, J. & Knorth, E.J. (2007). Family Fostering Behind the Dykes: Practice and research. In H. Grietens, E. J. Knorth, P. Durning & J.E. Dumas (Eds), Promoting Competence in Children and Families (pp. 125–148). Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press. Sylva, K., Melhuish, E., Sammons, P., SirajBlatchford, I. & Taggart, B. (2010) Findings

from the Effective Provision of Pre-School Education (EPPE): Pre-school to end of Key Stage 1. Retrieved from http://eppe.ioe. ac.uk/eppe/eppepdfs/RBTec1223sept0412. pdf in August 2016. Trede, W. & Winkler, M. (2013). Out-of-home Care: Institutional care, community-based care, foster care. In H.-H. Krüger & T. Rauschenbach (Eds), Introduction to the Fields of Education and Social Sciences. Opladen & Toronto: Barbara Budrich Publishers. Trevarthen, C. (2004) Learning about Ourselves from Children: Why a Growing Human Brain Needs Interesting Companions. Hokkaido, Japan: Hokkaido University Graduate School of Education (Report 26, 9–44). US Department of Health and Human Services (2016) AFCARS Report: Preliminary FY 2015 estimates as of June 2016. Retrieved from https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/ cb/afcarsreport23.pdf Vandenbroeck, M. & Lazzari, A. (2014) Accessibility of Early Childhood Education and Care: A state of affairs. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 22 (3): pp. 327–35. Vinnerljung, B. & Hjern, A. (2011) Cognitive, Educational and Self-support Outcomes of Long-term Foster Care versus Adoption: A Swedish national cohort study. Children and Youth Services Review, 33 (10): pp. 1902–10. Ward, H. (2009) Patterns of Instability: Moves within the care system, their reasons, contexts and consequences. Children and Youth Services Review, 31 (10): pp. 1113–18. Ward, H., Brown, R. & Maskell-Graham, D. (2012) Young Children Suffering, or Likely to Suffer, Significant Harm: Experiences on entering education. London: Department for Education RR209. Weiner, A. & Weiner, E. (1990) Expanding the Options in Child Placement: Israel’s dependent children in care from infancy to adulthood. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Welbourne, P. & Leeson, C. (2012) The Education of Children in Care: A research review. Journal of Children’s Services, 7 (2): pp. 128–43.

22 Community-based Family Support: Lessons from Sure Start Naomi Eisenstadt

Introduction This chapter will present a case study of policy development under the UK Labour Government from 1997–2010 and how subsequent developments of the policy fared during the Coalition Government, 2010–15. Sure Start was an initiative set up early in the Labour administration aimed at families in poverty with children under 4 years of age. It was meant to bring new services into disadvantaged areas as well as ensure existing services worked together. This chapter describes how Sure Start operated in England. Often seen as the poster child of the new government, Sure Start represented Labour’s commitment to new policies and new ways of making policy. This chapter will describe some of the highly unusual features of Sure Start and how its creation owed much to the increased power of the Treasury under Gordon Brown’s leadership. It will explain why early implementation was slow; it will describe the structure and results of a very

ambitious and expensive evaluation, and how the policy grew from an approach to improving outcomes for poor children to improving outcomes for all children and, lastly, to improving outcomes for children from families with complex needs. Finally, it will explore what has been learned about community-based early-years services, and, as importantly, what has been learned about the challenges of policy making in an ever changing political environment.

The Context Labour came to power in 1997, after 13 years of Conservative rule. There were two key features of the New Labour project that had a direct impact on the creation of Sure Start. The first was a result of an agreement that had been reached between Gordon Brown, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Tony Blair, the new Prime Minister, long before the

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election. After the untimely death of Labour leader John Smith in 1994, it was decided that Blair would become the leader of the party and Brown the shadow Chancellor. The deal that the two men made shaped domestic policy for years to come. They agreed that should Labour win in 1997, which seemed pretty likely at the time, the Treasury would have unprecedented influence over domestic social policy as well as its traditional role in setting economic policy. Soon after the election a new methodology for setting budgets was established, the Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) process. Each of the spending departments would negotiate an agreement with the Treasury on a three-year rolling budget. Funding was allocated on the basis of what became known as Public Service Agreements (PSAs). Each department would commit to a series of targets set out in their PSA, and funding would be based on the costs of delivering the targets. Progress would be measured and reviewed after two years, when the next CSR would take place. Historically, the Treasury negotiated departmental budgets but had little role in determining the purpose of the spend. The CSR process gave the Treasury enormous power not just over the budgets of departments but also over what the funding was meant to deliver for the taxpayer. At the same time as the development of the CSR process, policy makers working directly from the office of the prime minister were developing a set of proposals about policy making: The Modernizing Government Agenda. The Labour Government was interested not only in new policies but in new ways of making policy. Key principles were that all new policies should be designed around the needs of users, not the convenience of providers, that all new policies should be based on evidence, that they should be inclusive, innovative and measured by outcomes, not inputs, and that services should be flexible (HMSO, 1999). Commitments during the election campaign and set out in the Labour Party manifesto for the election

also had relevance to what was to become Sure Start: a promise of free early education for all 3- and 4-year-olds, a commitment to develop a national childcare strategy to promote female labour-market participation, and commitments on child poverty, although the formal pledge to end child poverty came later, in a Blair speech in 1999. The commitment on child poverty was driven both by the chancellor and the prime minister. While both were genuinely committed to this issue, it is also notable that child poverty was distinctively New Labour. Previous Labour governments would not have distinguished between groups for reducing poverty. For New Labour, though, children were in poverty through no fault of their own and therefore deserving of support. The provision of early education and childcare before 1997 was largely under the authority of local government. In England there are 150 local authorities. These varied enormously in their interest in and commitment to early education and care. The delivery of early education and care was mixed between the public sector, voluntary sector and private sector. The public sector through schools was delivering early education; the private sector delivered childcare suitable for working families; and the voluntary sector provided both, but also provided a mix of more informal community-based family-support services. These included benefits advice, parenting services, some health services and open-access drop-in services to provide social support for isolated families. As will be described below, all these services were patchy both in quality and quantity across England, depending on local-government policy.

The Foundations of Sure Start The CSR process was largely a departmentby-department exercise. However, a senior treasury official, Norman Glass, thought it

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would be useful to comprehensively review some areas of policy that are cross cutting: that involve policy and spend across more than one department. Reviews were commissioned on youth crime, drugs policy and services for children under 8. A feature of all of the reviews was the establishment of external advisory groups of experts, the commissioning of research and the involvement of officials and ministers from a variety of departments. The review on services for young children was chaired by Tessa Jowell, then public health minister. Norman Glass was the senior official overseeing the review. The key findings in the review provided the foundations for the setting up of Sure Start. Among the key findings were: • poverty is bad for children, and poverty experienced in families while children are very young has long term detrimental impact; • most public expenditure on young children was on children of primary school age – there was considerably less investment in under 5s; • several government departments had some involvement in services for young children but there was no overall strategy and no shared goals on what the services were meant to achieve; • the services that did exist had wide variation in quantity and quality, with decisions on provision usually up to local authorities; • the right kind of services could narrow the gap in outcomes, particularly those related to school readiness, between poor children and the wider child population. (Glass, 1999)

As a result of these findings, a new programme called Sure Start was announced in Parliament in 1998. The government was developing a three-pronged approach to services for pre-school children: early education for 3- and 4-year-olds would be a universal offer, initially of 12.5 hours per week, five days per week delivered from schools; expanding childcare would enable more women, particularly single parents, to go into employment. But the traditional five half days of early education would not be sufficient for full-time work, nor flexible enough

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for part-time work. The expansion of childcare, largely through the private and voluntary sectors, would enable female labour-market entry. The third prong, Sure Start, was an integrated approach to services aimed at children living in poor areas, designed to narrow the gap in outcomes between poor children and their better-off peers. The Glass Review found that both central and local government were spending significant amounts of money on young children, but there was no coordination, cooperation or shared aims across the various services relevant to young children and their parents. Health, education, social services and local community activities all had a role to play, but rarely were they working together to a shared set of principles. The implicit assumption was that the whole could be greater than the sum of the parts if, indeed, the various players with some responsibility worked more effectively together.

Sure Start: Key features and principles The Sure Start programme grew out of the two major changes in developing policy: the CSR process led by the Treasury and the Modernizing Government Agenda led by the prime minister’s advisers. The initial plan was for 250 local programmes to be established in the poorest areas of England. Sure Start was one of several area-based initiatives, including Health Action Zones, Education Action Zones and the New Deal for Communities. For Sure Start, data on poverty levels determined which areas would get funding to establish a Sure Start Local Programme (SSLP). Once an area was selected, all families in the area with children under 4 would be eligible for Sure Start services. Given that the areas chosen had high levels of poverty, offering services to all families meant that many poor families would be reached, while avoiding the possible stigma that often comes with offering services based

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on individual family circumstances. Each area was required to establish a partnership board with members of all the key services: health, education, social care and any voluntary organizations already delivering early-years family services, as well as local parents. The local board was required to develop a plan outlining what services were already available in the locality, what was spent on them by which agency and how much funding was required to ensure delivery of a core set of services: outreach and home visiting, support for families and parents, play and childcare, health advice and support for children with special needs. Sure Start had its own public service agreement, with targets on reduction in smoking during pregnancy, reduction in unplanned child hospital admissions, improved child language development and improvements in parents’ satisfaction with local children’s services. A Sure Start programme was meant to be the glue that brought together and strengthened existing services for young children in a specific area as well as additional funding to fill in the gaps of what was not already available. The PSA set the overall objectives and targets for the SSLP but there was considerable freedom to design local programmes to meet the targets. The commitment to local design of programmes, particularly the engagement of local parents in deciding what was needed, meant a high degree of variation in implementation. The issue of local variability of local programmes was hotly debated by the academics on the Sure Start advisory group, who argued that the local variability design would make Sure Start virtually impossible to evaluate as an intervention. There would be 250 different interventions. Moreover, the evidence used to argue for Sure Start was based on the rigorous evaluation of many American programmes that were tightly defined and highly standardized, with no notion of local involvement of services users in deciding what would be offered. Sure Start was clearly based on evidence of the critical importance of the early years to later success

in life (Glass, 1999). However, the design of the programme owed significantly more to the Modernizing Government Agenda than to the available knowledge of what works in early childhood programmes. Sure Start local programmes were meant to encompass flexible services responsive to local needs, joined up across different agencies and professions, focused on outcomes not inputs. As will be discussed later in the chapter, this not only posed significant challenges for the evaluation of the programme, it also made ongoing monitoring very difficult, as data systems were not in place to measure the PSA targets. Innovation was another goal of the Labour Government, and Sure Start was highly innovative in its governance, both at central government and local level. At central government level Sure Start was led by a crossgovernment steering group that included junior ministers from six different departments. The chair of the steering group was a health minister, but overall responsibility for Sure Start was held by the Secretary of State for Education and Employment. The head of the Sure Start Unit was the accounting officer for the programme. This meant she was personally accountable to Parliament for the Sure Start spend. At local level the Sure Start partnership board that put together the plan was meant to continue to oversee the implementation of the programme. In the beginning David Blunkett, Secretary of State for Education and Employment, was very keen that the board be chaired by a nonstatutory agency acting as lead body. Often a second organization acted as the accountable body, whose responsibility was to manage the funding allocated from central government for the programme. It was important that the decisions on spend should not rest wholly with the accountable body, but be genuinely shared with the partnership board. Both at the centre and locally, Sure Start funding was tightly ring-fenced: the money was to be spent only on services for children under 4 in the designated geographical area. Such areas were meant to be a ‘pram pushing’

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distance from services, so often smaller than a primary school catchment, with around 400–800 under-4s living in the catchment. Finally, there would be no competitive bidding process. Once an area was selected and a partnership board established, the task was to produce a plan that would describe what services were already available, the gaps in services, how the gaps would be filled and how the particular configuration of spend was likely to achieve the public-serviceagreement targets. For the first round of programmes, each area could bid for up to one million pounds per year for three years’ revenue spend and up to one million pounds of capital.

A constantly evolving programme The Blair government was characterized by frequent reshuffles and changes to the ministerial team. Several different ministers played a role in Sure Start, and with each change of minister the emphasis on what the programme was meant to achieve shifted. The core aim of better outcomes for poor children remained constant but ministers had different views on what kind of programme would most likely achieve that aim. Tessa Jowell, the first Public Health Minister under Labour in 1997, was particularly interested in the relationship between mothers and their babies. Yvette Cooper replaced Jowell as Public Health Minister; she emphasized the importance of poorer women entering the labour market, so was interested in Sure Start expanding childcare in poor areas. Catherine Ashton was a junior minister working across the Department for Education and the Department for Work and Pensions. Taking over responsibility for Sure Start in 2002, Ashton wanted to see better resonance between Sure Start and the wider early-years and childcare landscape. Sure Start started out as an area-based initiative with a

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commitment to 250 local programmes. Within two years of establishing the Sure Start Unit, the number of local programmes was doubled to 500. This expansion was announced before most of the initial 250 programmes were delivering services, and, critically, the evaluation of the programme had barely started, let alone delivered any results on outcomes. Sure Start quickly became an extremely popular initiative both with local parents and with politicians (Power, Willmot and Davidson, 2011). During the six years following the initial announcement of the first set of 60 areas to get a Sure Start programme, the initiative went through several key changes, the most significant of which were: • 2000: the CSR announces the doubling of the Sure Start programme; • 2002: a major review of childcare and early education recommends better coordination at local and national level between Sure Start and other government policies on early years. Sure Start local programmes are rebranded Sure Start Children’s Centres; local authorities are given more latitude on joining up Sure Start and other early-years funding for all early-years services (HMG, 2002); • 2004: a second major review sets out a ten-year ambition to have a Sure Start Children’s Centre in every local area, 3,500 in all. This ended Sure Start as an area-based initiative targeted at poor areas, promising Sure Start-type integrated services for all young children (HMT, 2004).

From 2004 onwards, the major effort was on getting as many Sure Start Children’s Centres set up and operating as possible, with many pre-existing early-years services, including nursery schools, becoming Children’s Centres. The intention was to have larger centres with more services in the poorest areas. However, the very rapid expansion meant that the funding was becoming thinner and thinner across all the centres. While the Coalition Government initially seemed committed to Sure Start, in 2011 the government rebranded the funding for all

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early-years services as an early-intervention grant. Most damaging of all, by 2013 all ringfencing for the funding of early-years services was removed. The Early Intervention Grant was folded into the local authority funding settlement. Cash-strapped local authorities experiencing major cuts were no longer required to spend designated resources on young children. The great expansion of Children’s Centres began to contract, with many centres closing and almost all centres losing some portion of their funding. The removal of the ring-fence on early-years spending meant establishing how much was being spent on Children’s Centres became increasingly problematic. Nevertheless, Kitty Stewart, an academic from the London School of Economics, estimated a real-terms cut in funding of 41% between 2009/10 and 2013/14 (Stewart and Obolenskaya, 2016). A Department for Education-funded research project, the Evaluation of Children’s Centres in England (ECCE), found that the focus of Children’s Centres was also changing, from area targeting to targeting individual families deemed to be in greatest need (Sylva, Goff, Eisenstadt, Smith, Hall, Evangelou, Smith and Sammons, 2015). The two key principles of putting most resources in areas with concentrations of low-income families and open-access services for all families with young children living in such areas, were both being seriously eroded.

The National Evaluation of Sure Start (NESS) In recent years there has been increasing interest in what works and the use of evidence in social policy design. Indeed, since 2012 the Coalition Government has set up and funded a number of what works centres to rigorously evaluate new programmes and, as importantly, to review the current literature on programmes to establish the robustness of the existing evidence of efficacy. The methodology for such

reviews was less established when Sure Start was being developed, but there was still a firm commitment to test out the assumptions that informed the Sure Start design. It was clear early on that a binary question of does it work, yes or no, would not be helpful. Given the size and diversity of Sure Start, it would be important to ask what aspects worked under what conditions with which families over how much time. The contract to evaluate Sure Start was awarded to Birkbeck College in January 2001. Both civil servants and ministers recognized very early on that evaluation of such a major initiative was essential and was going to be very complex. The government commissioned a feasibility study to establish what the key elements of an evaluation should cover, and the tendering process for the evaluation itself took several months. A particularly controversial issue was the decision that the evaluation would not use a randomized control trial (RCT) methodology. Most of the academics advising the government were convinced that findings would not be valid without the rigour required for an RCT. There were three reasons for not using an RCT design. Firstly, such a design is dependent on a consistency of inputs and a consistency of target group. That is, every area would have to deliver the same programme or set of programmes to what would need to be very similar populations. Given that the findings that generated the creation of Sure Start were in part about the variety of services on the ground, and given their patchy nature in quality and the differences in areas, a consistency in inputs and programme recipients was virtually impossible. Secondly, as described earlier, the government was committed to a community-development approach that valued the engagement of local parents in the design of activities and programme governance. Users had to be involved in key decisions on services. Thirdly, ministers believed that it would be unacceptable to randomly deny Sure Start services to eligible families.

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Ministers did not believe it would not be successful, so thought it would be unethical to withhold services. The National Evaluation of Sure Start Team (NESS) came up with a design that contained five workstreams:

This proposition created a very high bar to test effectiveness.

• implementation: how did local areas go about setting up Sure Start? • local community context analysis: what did the local areas look like? How poor were the areas, what were school results like, crime figures, unemployment? • cost-effectiveness: how did programmes spend their money, and did the public spend represent value for money? • support for local evaluations: each programme had a designated budget to carry out its own local evaluation. The NESS team was meant to help in designing these studies. • impact evaluation: what impact did Sure Start have on children and families? Did it improve family functioning and child development as was hoped? (Melhuish and National Evaluation of Sure Start Team, 2002)

A fuller discussion of the results of all the work streams of NESS can be found in Providing a Sure Start – How government discovered early childhood (Eisenstadt, 2011). The most important findings in understanding Sure Start in its early phases come from the local-context analysis, the implementation stream and the impact study. The initial aim of Sure Start was to reach the poorest 20% of children in England. The local-context analysis showed that the areas chosen were the right areas to reach the highest concentration of children living in poor families. Almost half of children under 4 living in the areas selected for an SSLP lived in a household where no adult was in work. Children living in the Sure Start areas had poorer health and poorer school results than the rest of the population. Sure Start areas were also typified by higher crime rates (Barnes, Broomfield, Frost, Harper, McLeod, Knowles and Leyland, 2003). The most important and disappointing finding of the implementation study was how long it would take an SSLP to become fully operational. In most cases it was taking three years from approval of a plan for an area to have a fully functioning programme. There was also significant variation in spend per child and variation in programmes’ success at reaching the poorest children in the areas (Tunstill, Allnock, Meadows and McLeod, 2002). These issues proved crucial in understanding the early disappointing impact results. The first impact study was published in 2005. The results shown in Table 22.1 shook all those involved in the programme and attracted significant negative publicity. The key concern from the results was the multiple negative outcomes for the children of teen parents. In further investigation it

Sure Start was an area-based initiative which was particularly challenging for the evaluation. The evaluation was not testing the impact of any single new service or, indeed, improvement to a current service. It was testing a set of core principles and assumptions; community-based services that involve local people in their planning and work with both parents and children could have an impact on child and family outcomes. The families chosen for the impact evaluation were randomly chosen from the areas and the design did not investigate whether they had contact with Sure Start services. Sure Start was meant to improve provision for families with young children, including ensuring existing services improved. Whether parents and children used additional services provided by Sure Start was less important than whether their experiences of all services for young children in the area were improving and whether improved satisfaction with services went along with improved child outcomes.

Key Findings

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Table 22.1  Impact evidence, 2005: findings for subgroups of families in Sure Start areas compared to families living in comparably disadvantaged non-Sure Start areas Among non-teen mothers (86% of the sample) Greater child social competence Fewer child behaviour problems Less negative parenting

Among teenage mothers (14% of the sample) Less child social competence More child behaviour problems Poorer child verbal ability Among lone parents (40% of the sample) and among workless households (33% of sample) Poorer child verbal ability

Source: National Evaluation of Sure Start Team, 2005

was clear that while the overall sample was low-income, teen parents were significantly poorer than the whole sample. Sure Start was having some small but measurable positive effects on a large proportion of the sample, but a significant minority were experiencing disadvantage from living in a Sure Start area (Eisenstadt, 2011). Ministers were both concerned about the results and frustrated at the inability to determine from the research the relationship between use of Sure Start services and family and child outcomes. However, even if the explanation was a failure to reach the poorest parents, it would not explain why their children were doing worse than families in non-Sure Start areas. Given that the implementation study established the length of time it took to get services established, it seemed plausible that many SSLPs were not yet having the intended reach, and that the moderately disadvantaged would probably avail themselves of services more quickly than the very poorest. However, it also seemed that the traditional base of statutory health and social-care services were withdrawing services as the very well funded Sure Start programmes came into an area. Hence an additional explanation for the results was that some of the most disadvantaged families in the Sure Start areas, particularly teen mothers, were not receiving the basic support that such families in non-Sure Start areas got as a matter of course from the National Health Service and the local authority (Eisenstadt, 2011). As a result of the findings, new funding was allocated for outreach workers, making

extensive efforts to improve reach for those families likely to benefit the most from engagement with Sure Start. The results of the 2008 impact study showed this to be an effective mitigation strategy. Evaluation is meant to inform what is effective, what is less effective and what, if anything, can be done to change course. In this respect NESS was extremely useful. The impact study published in 2008 found significant positive effects on seven of the 14 measured outcomes. There were no negative effects and no differences between subgroups. Teen parents were doing as well as the rest. Among the positive results were: • improved child positive social behaviour; • improved child independence and self-regulation; • less harsh discipline from parents, and less home chaos; • improved home learning environment; • parents making more use of local services; • higher rates of child immunizations and fewer child accidents. (National Evaluation of Sure Start Team, 2008)

There were two further impact studies for Sure Start, in 2010 and 2012. Both of these reports continued to find positive effects on parents and parenting style, but the earlier child effects had all faded by the time the children were 7 (NESST, 2010, 2012). The researchers themselves explain the failure to detect differences between poor children in Sure Start areas and those not in Sure Start areas to be the result of the provision of universal free pre-school education. The introduction of universal free pre-school education

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in 2002 meant that most of the Sure Start children would have benefited along with the non-Sure Start children, hence a levelling effect between Sure Start and non-Sure Start children. This would have meant the key differences in services available were the parenting services. Hence the parent effects were sustained. Furthermore, a London School of Economics study found that the poorest children are more likely to experience higher-quality pre-school services, as they are more likely to be in higher-quality school-based, rather than private or voluntary, provision (Gambaro, Stewart and Waldfogel, 2014). So the supposition that Sure Start and non-Sure Start children were benefiting from high-quality early education seems plausible.

And After Sure Start? The evaluation of Sure Start’s successor programme, Children’s Centres, found largely similar results. The Evaluation of Children’s Centres in England (ECCE) study was carried out by NatCen Social Research, Frontier Economics and the University of Oxford. It was originally commissioned by the Labour Government in 2010, but the size of the contract was halved by the incoming Coalition Government before the research got underway. The Oxford team looked particularly at centres that had been established in poorer areas, many of which evolved from Sure Start local programmes. Unlike NESS, the design of the study allowed for an analysis of service use, a complex task given that any single family could use any number of services over varying periods of time. Moreover, during this research project, funding for Children’s Centres was constantly under threat. The government’s approach to Children’s Centre services was also changing, from a community approach aimed at families in poor areas to a much more targeted approach, encouraging centres to work

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with families with complex problems. The use of highly structured, evidence-based programmes was also encouraged. Like NESS, ECCE found the main positive effects of Children’s Centres were on parenting, particularly the kind of activities that enhance learning for young children: reading, singing songs, trips to the library. An additional finding critical to current debates on childcare, and consistent with the explanation for the lack of child impact in the Sure Start study, was the evidence that childpositive outcomes were linked to Children’s Centres that offered high-quality early education and childcare and were prevalent in children attending childcare. The simple message from both studies is that services that work with parents are effective in improving parenting that may at some point improve child outcomes. Direct services with children, particularly high-quality early education, has a more immediate impact on child outcomes (Sammons, Hall, Smees, Goff, Sylva, Smith, Evangelou, Eisenstadt and Smith, 2015).

What did we learn? The National Evaluation of Sure Start was one of the most expensive evaluation contracts ever commissioned by the Department for Education. The subsequent Evaluation of Children’s Centres in England, while nowhere near as costly, also revealed some critical findings about the impact of services for young families on parent and child outcomes. These two research projects, along with the long-running Effective Pre-school and Primary Education Project (EPPE), offer a huge wealth of evidence on how to organize and deliver high-quality services for young children. Unlike NESS and ECCE, EPPE drew children from all classes and was able to establish that the benefits of highquality early-years education lasted well into the teen years for all children, but was particularly beneficial for poorer children

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(Sylva, Melhuish, Sammons, Siraj-Blatchford and Taggart, 2010). Additionally, we have learned a massive amount about policy making and the complex relationships across policy, practice and research.

Does a Community-Based Approach to Service Design Lead to Better Outcomes? The early results from Sure Start indicated that some fundamental assumptions were not demonstrated in evidence. Among these was the emphasis in the beginning of Sure Start on designing services with local parents and the inherent belief that building confidence in parents and improving their life satisfaction would inevitably lead to better outcomes for children. While both NESS and ECCE found improvements in many parenting features, they did not find improvements in the cognitive outcomes associated with school readiness. Indeed, on current evidence the most effective way to improve cognitive outcomes for children from disadvantaged backgrounds is the provision of teacher-led part-time early education (Sammons, 2010). Working with parents at local level can improve some aspects of parenting behaviour that may eventually lead to child outcomes, but neither the NESS or ECCE studies have followed children long enough to know.

Multiple Sponsors in Government Can Lead to Unrealistic Expectations and Loss of Focus Some of the challenges of running Sure Start were largely to do with the way it was organized at central government level. The complex cross-government arrangements at central government level created over-ambitious expectations. Each minister had a different view of what they wanted Sure Start to achieve, and ministers changed frequently, with each new minister wanting to change

the programme. Expectations grew greater and greater. Additionally, there was no understanding of how hard it would be at local level to spend money fast. Sure Start was injecting large amounts of cash into what was at the time a very weak infrastructure of neighbourhood-based support services for families with young children. Large capital spend was particularly challenging: finding appropriate sites in very poor neighbourhoods, commissioning large buildings, establishing local governance for capital and revenue spend all took much longer than anyone anticipated. Complex local partnership arrangements added to the delays. Hence the disappointing results in early evaluation could be attributed to the fact that in many early programmes not much was happening for the first three years.

Staff Training, Development and Ongoing Support are Crucial for Success Perhaps the most significant error in planning Sure Start was insufficient attention to workforce planning. Running a Sure Start local programme was a demanding role, requiring high-level influencing skills. Traditionally, people working in early-years services did not hold the professional status of staff in health services or mainstream education. Yet there was an expectation that Sure Start managers, who were recruited from a range of occupations, would be able to coordinate collaboration across local services. Frequently, there was no common core of knowledge and experience to share. This had some advantages in what was meant to be a highly innovative programme. However, much more effort should have been made to ensure cross-programme learning and development, especially for local managers. Quality of leadership continued to be an issue during the Coalition Government years, as savings requirements resulted in good managers being spread too thinly across a number

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of centres. In order to reduce staffing costs, many local authorities adopted cluster management of several centres in an area. Instead of having one manager for each centre, a single manager was put in charge of a number of centres, greatly increasing their responsibilities as well as reducing the number of well-qualified managers based in individual centres. The ECCE research found the move to clustering was detrimental to the quality of services in Children’s Centres (Goff, Hall, Sylva, Smith, Smith, Eisenstadt, Sammons, Evangelou, Smess and Chu, 2013).

Rapid Expansion Risks Quality of Implementation, Particularly for Innovative Programmes There continue to be arguments about whether it was a mistake to scale up Sure Start so quickly. Decisions to double the size of the programme before any evidence about what aspects of the programme were making any difference were questioned at the time. Certainly, going from 500 SSLPs to 3,500 Children’s Centres was also highly problematic. The rapid expansion required some level of standardization of offer at Children’s Centres before it was clear what was and what was not working, risking proper testing of innovation. However, in retrospect it is clear that if the programme had stayed as 500 SSLPs in 2010, it would have disappeared completely under Coalition cuts to local services. While Children’s Centres have been cut badly, there is considerable public opposition to closure at local level, and the majority are still in place, even with reduced services. This means there is a fragile but existing infrastructure on which to rebuild, using the considerable evidence now in place on what does work. There are lessons from Sure Start and its successor programmes that provide critical guidance for front-line staff, for academics and for policy makers. These lessons should be used to shape future policy as well as used to inform front-line practice.

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Lessons for Front-Line Staff and Managers For front-line staff and managers, the most difficult message from NESS is that parent satisfaction with services is not enough. Sure Start was, and Children’s Centres continue to be, immensely popular with local parents. Indeed, early-years services are not like school; parents are not required to use them, and if they do not like the services, they will not be taken up. But improving child outcomes depends on challenging some parenting practices, encouraging changed behaviours and offering critical advice as well as support. The very popularity of Sure Start was in part responsible for the difficulties in reaching the most disadvantaged families, as the 2005 results demonstrated. The many mothers – and it was mainly mothers – who did come to Sure Start were very appreciative of what was on offer and kept staff very busy. There was little time and effort put into who was not coming. Furthermore, a second problem for front-line staff has been the availability of local data. Outreach services to those who may benefit most from the services are of no use if there is no information on who those families are and where they live. Data sharing to identify potential users and data analysis to understand if local action is making a difference has always been difficult at neighbourhood level, but it is absolutely crucial if open-access services that avoid stigma are going to reach disadvantaged families. A third difficulty for front-line staff in the later stages of delivering the service offer in Children’s Centres was the increasing pressure to deliver evidence-based parenting programmes. Government became increasingly interested in early intervention and a move away from informal family support to more structured parenting programmes (Allen, 2011). These programmes were tightly defined and required adherence to a set of instructions on number of sessions and precise guidance on activities within the sessions. While this

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made sense, given the findings that the early Sure Start programmes were not focused enough on parent and child outcomes, the use of highly structured manualized programmes also proved to have difficulties. Firstly, they were very expensive to deliver and required highly skilled staff. Many programmes had very high drop-out rates, and staff were concerned about stigma associated with the targeting of such programmes. Actual participation rates were very low. Furthermore, both staff and managers had concerns that they did not have adequate training to work with highrisk families, the families most likely to benefit from these more formal approaches (Goff et al., 2013).

Lessons for Policy Makers The job at the front line was made more difficult by frequent changes of guidance from the top. It took considerable confidence to manage the tension between what local parents were asking for in terms of service offer, what ministers thought was most important at any one time and what officials at local and national level were requiring in terms of the monitoring of activities and outputs. As mentioned above, successive Labour ministers had varying expectations for Sure Start, and these aims changed again when the government changed in 2010. Indeed, all political parties claimed support for Sure Start in 2010, but all had a very different idea of what they were supporting. This leads to the key lessons from Sure Start for policy makers. All policy makers, both politicians and civil servants, believe they are acting on evidence on what is for the public good. But they often fail to make explicit gut instinct, personal experience and their own values. Particularly in family and children’s policy, these latter factors have a massive influence on policy direction, often without being properly debated. Furthermore, ministers are anxious to put their own stamp on policy. Sure Start was about major systems change and

building a new infrastructure of services for families. The frequent changes may have led to improvements, but often policy makers failed to restate the core purpose of the policy, so there was considerable drift without restating what was meant to be achieved and why the changes were likely to make the achievement more likely. In fairness, ministers held their nerve after the first disappointing impact results and made changes based on the results that significantly improved the programme. But most of the changes, and particularly the vast expansion from 2004 onwards, changed Sure Start from being about poor children to being about all children, without a proper analysis of what this would mean in resource terms. Policy makers also struggled with cross-government and interdisciplinary projects. Sure Start represented both. Departmental ministers were understandably working to the aims of their own departments. This created unresolved tension between the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Education. Was Sure Start about better cognitive outcomes for children or about helping parents enter the labour market? The Department of Health lost its key role in Sure Start in 2002. In 2003 children’s social care moved from the Department of Health to the Department for Education. While there were good reasons for these shifts in responsibility, they also carried risks that were not managed. Losing Department of Health involvement resulted in a weakening of Sure Start’s emphasis on pregnancy and infancy. For front-line providers and for policy makers alike, the biggest lesson from Sure Start is that implementation takes longer than anticipated. Ministers expected measurable results from Sure Start within months of announcing its creation. Civil servants believed that posting the guidance meant job done. It would be some years before impact measurement would yield any useful information. Ministerial reshuffles and the electoral cycle make long-term planning in any area highly problematic.

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Lessons for Academics Finally, what are the lessons for the research community, which has played a major role in shaping Sure Start and Children’s Centre policy from the beginning? While research and evidence is crucial, ideology also matters. For academics to provide wisdom that is useful to politicians, it is necessary to understand the ideology that is driving the policy. No one enters political life with the intention of making life worse for the public. The job of academics is to help policy makers find the most effective and efficient ways to make life better. Academic careers are built on rigour, analysis and arguments about methodology. Politicians want quick fixes and magic bullets. The job of the academic who wants to be influential is to communicate in plain English a few clear messages that are likely to be most useful. There is danger in simplifying messages to the point that they become understood as uncontested facts, rather than the most likely finding on the current evidence. The challenge is in navigating this tension between simplicity that may lead to bad policy and complexity that leads to no policy because it is all too difficult.

What was Achieved? Given the catalogue of mistakes listed above, it is important to close this chapter with some discussion about what was achieved. After all, considerable public money was expended on Sure Start and Children’s Centres. Should the public feel its taxes were well spent? Firstly, it is hard to separate the key achievements of Sure Start from wider policy on the under-5s. Put together, the investment in early education, childcare and integrated services for young families at neighbourhood level achieved a major transformation in how successive governments view young children and the importance of early childhood. Before 1997 it would have been rare to hear politicians promise improved services for

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children under 5 in their attempts to get elected. By 2010 and 2015 all three major parties in the UK had explicit early-years policies in their pre-election statements of policy. Most politicians now accept that government does have a role in supporting children and parents between birth and school. The debates on what that role should be continue: subsidized childcare to ensure that being in employment is financially worthwhile; early education led by fully qualified teachers to improve school readiness; or integrated locally based services that provide the first two, along with parenting advice, primary maternal and child health and employment support. The second significant achievement of Sure Start has been to demonstrate that services for poor people do not have to be characterized by stigma. Sure Start was the first public service designed expressly to reach low-income families that everyone wanted. Indeed, the vast expansion was largely down to the incredible popularity of Sure Start at local level. Sure Start was criticized because less needy families were using its services. Schools are deemed successful when middle-class families fight for places. Sadly, in some local areas the expansion meant funding was stretched too thinly to ensure an appropriate level of services to make a difference for the poorest families. However, without the expansion, Children’s Centres would by now have disappeared with the wave of local-authority budget cuts. Because they became visible everywhere, taking them away became more difficult. However, as both NESS and ECCE research has shown, inadequately funded Children’s Centres without highly trained staff are not likely to make a difference for children. So what should be the offer for families with children after birth and before statutory school age? Delivering a universal offer with intensity moderated according to need is a basic principle of the National Health Service and should become a basic principle of localauthority services. A universal platform of free early education for 3- and 4-year-olds is

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vital. But the quality of that offer will determine its effectiveness in narrowing the gap between poor children and their better-off peers. Childcare that is offered flexibly is useful for labour-market participation but less likely to deliver cognitive goals for children. An ideal Children’s Centre brings together quality early education, flexible childcare and parent support: a range of health advice and midwifery, employment support and benefits advice. This intense offer should be available in low-income neighbourhoods but with a range of open-access services that anyone can use. England currently has a shaky infrastructure with a huge diversity of offers between local authorities. There is a danger of losing some of the excellent work achieved and failing to learn from what did not work. But some version of Sure Start and Children’s Centres is likely to survive and hopefully thrive in the future.

References Allen, G. (2011) Early Intervention: The next steps. London: HMG. Barnes, J., Broomfield, K., Frost, M., Harper, G., McLeod, A., Knowles, J. & Leyland, A. (2003) Characteristics of Sure Start Local Programme Areas: Rounds 1–4. London, Institute for the Study of Children, Families and Social Issues, Birkbeck. Eisenstadt, N. (2011) Providing a Sure Start: How government discovered early childhood. Bristol, Policy Press. Gambaro, L., Stewart, K. & Waldfogel, J. (2014) Equal access to early childhood education and care? The case of the UK. In Gambaro, L., Stewart, K. & Waldfogel, J., An Equal Start: Providing quality early education and care for disadvantaged children. Bristol: Policy Press (pp. 29–52). Glass, N. (1999) Sure Start: The development of an early intervention programme for young children in the United Kingdom, Children and Society, vol. 13, pp. 257–64.

Goff, J., Hall, J., Sylva, K., Smith, T., Smith, G., Eisenstadt, N., Sammons, P., Evangelou, M., Smees, R. & Chu, K. (2013) Delivery of Family Services by Children’s Centres: Evaluation of Children’s Centres in England (ECCE Strand 3). Department for Education. London: University of Oxford HMG (Her Majesty’s Government) (2002) Inter Departmental Childcare Review: Delivering for children and families. Norwich: HMSO. HMSO (Her Majesty’s Stationery Office) (1999) Modernizing Government. London: HMSO. HMT (Her Majesty’s Treasury) (2004) Choice for Parents, the Best Start for Children: A ten year strategy for childcare. Norwich: HMSO. Melhuish, E.C. & National Evaluation of Sure Start Team (2002) Asking the right questions: the national evaluation of Sure Start, Interplay, no. 1, pp. 26–31. National Evaluation of Sure Start Team (2005) Early Impacts of Sure Start Local Programmes on Children and Families, Sure Start Report 13. London: DfES. National Evaluation of Sure Start Team (2008) The Impact of Sure Start Local Programmes on Three Year Olds and Their Families, Sure Start Report 27. London: HMSO. National Evaluation of Sure Start Team (2010) The Impact of Sure Start Local Programmes on Child Development and Family Functioning: Report of the longitudinal study of 5-year-old children and their families. London: DfE. National Evaluation of Sure Start Team (2012) The Impact of Sure Start Local Programmes on Seven Year Olds and Their Families. London: DfE. Power, A., Willmot, H. & Davidson, R. (2011) Family Futures: Childhood and poverty in urban neighbourhoods. Bristol: Policy Press. Sammons, P. (2010) Does preschool make a difference? In Sylva, K., Melhuish, E., Sammons, P., Siraj-Blatchford, I. & Taggart, B. (eds), Early Childhood Matters: Evidence from the effective pre-school and primary education project. London: Routledge, pp. 92–113. Sammons, P., Hall, J., Smees, R., Goff, J., Sylva, K., Smith, T., Evangelou, M., Eisenstadt, N. & Smith, G. (2015) The Impact of Children’s Centres: Studying the effects in promoting

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better outcomes for young children and their families. Evaluation of Children’s Centres in England (ECCE Strand 4). London: DfE. Stewart, K. & Obolenskaya, P. (2016) Young children. In Lupton, R., Burchardt, T., Hills, J., Stewart, K. & Vizard, P. (eds), Social Policy in a Cold Climate. Bristol: Policy Press, pp. 35–58. Sylva, K., Goff, J., Eisenstadt, N., Smith, T., Hall, J., Evangelou, M., Smith, G. & Sammons, P. (2015) Organisation, Services, and Reach of Children’s Centres: Evaluation of Children’s Centres in England (ECCE Strand 3).

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Department for Education. London: University of Oxford. Sylva, K., Melhuish, T., Sammons, P., SirajBlatchford, I. & Taggart, B. (2010) Early Childhood Matters: Evidence from the effective pre-school and primary education project. London: Routledge. Tunstill, J., Allnock, D., Meadows, P. & McLeod, A. (2002) Early Experiences of Implementing Sure Start. London: Institute for the Study of Children, Families and Social Issues, Birkbeck.

23 The Role of the Health Sector in Promoting Well-being in Early Childhood M a r y E m i n g Yo u n g

Healthy child development enables the realization of human potential and capability. It allows children to attain a sustainable maturity and, eventually, to participate as healthy adults in economic, social and civic life. The cognitive, social, emotional and language competencies so necessary for the modern world develop interdependently in early childhood. This development is shaped by early experiences and underlies the formation of lifelong capabilities. A major challenge for the world is to assure the healthy development of all young children, as a way to achieve equity and stable societies. To close the gap between what we know about early child development and what we do about it, all sectors must come together and work toward a unified strategy that promotes the healthy development of children (i.e. early human development). This chapter summarizes current knowledge on the importance of our early years

in shaping health, learning and behaviour for an entire life course. A large body of evidence supports the use of early childhood interventions as a promising new avenue for health policy, programmes and practices. Early child development (ECD) refers to the combination of physical, mental and social development in the early years of life – dimensions that are commonly addressed by integrated programmes of ECD. These programmes include interventions to improve the health, nutrition, cognitive development and social interaction of children in their early years. ECD interventions have been underway for years in industrialized and developing countries, and some have been scaled up as national initiatives. They offer the health sector a first opportunity to foster and promote health in families, communities and society at large.

The Role of the health sector in promoting well-being

Early Childhood: The Foundation for Health and Disease Moving from Child Survival to Early Human Development The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 2030 include ECD and move beyond goals for infant and maternal mortality to children’s right to thrive. Whereas the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 4, 5 and 6 were focused on reducing child and maternal mortality as well as infectious diseases, the SDGs broadly address children’s development. They specifically call for ensuring food security and safety (SDG 2), promoting mental and health well-being (SDG 3), providing universal access to reproductive health care (SDG 3.7) and health coverage (SDG 3), ensuring water and sanitation (SGD 6) and reducing violence against children (SDG 16.2) (UN, 2015). The knowledge base underpinning and driving the MDG agenda to improve child survival rests on public health measures, such as nutrition, clean water, sanitation, basic medical care, expanded immunization, oral rehydration, micronutrient supplementation, insecticide-treated bed-nets and ­ prevention of HIV infection. Over the past 20 years, however, we have gained much stronger evidence – from psychology, neuroscience, ­economics and evaluation sciences – to support broad investment in early childhood. In the majority world, where 92 per cent of children live, one in 20 children do not survive beyond their first five years (Liu et al., 2015). And, while the number of children surviving is expected to improve to one in 40 children by 2030 (Liu et al., 2015), most of these children will not be able to realize their full potential because of the deprivations they experience in early childhood. Poverty and under-nutrition, two of the most difficult and complicating factors affecting young

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children’s lives, account for a loss of more than two grades in school for children and, later, a more than 30 per cent loss in income when they become adults (Engle et al., 2007, 2011). In addition to poverty and under-nutrition, recent research highlights other risk factors, which include intrauterine growth restriction, malaria, lead exposure, HIV infection, maternal depression, institutionalization and exposure to societal violence. It also identifies protective factors, such as breastfeeding and maternal education. Evidence of risks resulting from poor prenatal maternal nutrition, maternal stress and living in families affected with HIV is emerging (Walker et al., 2011). Beyond sheer survival, children have a right to thrive, to develop to their full potential and to live in a sustainable world. These rights are highlighted in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which calls on global leaders and policymakers in all countries to end poverty and to transform the world to better meet human needs and the necessities of economic transformation while protecting the environment and ensuring equitable and sustainable development. With a focus on early child development, Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4.2 broadly aims to, ‘by 2030, ensure that all girls and boys have access to quality early childhood development, care, and pre-primary education so that they are ready for primary education’ (UNESCO, 2016). The emphasis on early childhood is supported by research in neurosciences, developmental genetics and economics – fields that are converging on a deeper understanding of human development that points to the importance of early childhood in creating and launching human capabilities. Given the evidence, ECD must be integrated into each country’s efforts to eliminate poverty and to achieve sustainable development. Moving toward 2030, all countries will benefit by redirecting their social policies

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to focus on young children aged 0–6 years and by expanding their public health models to incorporate the science on early human development. In doing so, they will need to collect and utilize data on how well their children are doing and to quantify levels of inequality in child development across population groups, so as to develop effective ECD policies and programmes that put the science of early human development into action.

Human Development over the Life Course The role of the health sector is ever more critical and challenging in this new era. The recent advances in knowledge suggest the need to adopt a new paradigm – that is, a lifecourse health-development model, which would allow for optimizing trajectories of individual and population health. This model defines health development as a dynamic process that begins before conception and continues throughout the lifespan (Halfon et al., 2014; Russ et al., 2014). The life-course health-development model brings together evidence from disparate disciplines (e.g. neuroscience, social science, developmental biology, health economics) and has the early years of life, beginning with fetal development, as its foundation. Since the 1980s, landmark epidemiological studies of fetal development by Barker (2002) and Gluckman et  al. (2008) have provided substantive evidence of events and experiences in fetal life that can influence and ‘program’ health in adulthood. Scientists are integrating the fetal and developmental origins of health and disease with approaches from sociology and psychology to derive life-course models of health and disease. Supported by studies in economics, this new paradigm posits that an individual’s early environment (i.e. risk and protective factors) affects his or her development of both cognitive and non-cognitive abilities and, thereby, sets a trajectory for

the individual’s health, learning and behavior throughout the course of his or her life (Heckman, 2012).

The Origins of Health in Early Brain Development An integration of genetics, epigenetics and neuroscience has transformed our understanding of how environment and biology jointly influence an individual’s development throughout the life course. The research decisively shows that early life events link with development of the brain’s circuitry and with dynamic gene–environment interactions; programming of immune, neurological and endocrine systems; trajectories of human development; and chronic diseases in adulthood (McCain, Mustard & McCuaig, 2011; Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000; Shonkoff et al., 2012). The convincing evidence shows that the combined influence of genes and early caregiving produce a unique health and behavioural phenotype for each individual (Ellis & Boyce, 2008; Ellis et  al., 2011). [A phenotype is the observable characteristics of an organism and the end product of biological, psychological and social development. It is distinct from genotype, which is an organism’s genetic blueprint, or DNA.] An individual’s phenotype captures the environmental features of the fetus – nutrition, pollutants, drugs, infections and ­ mother’s health, well-being and stress – all of which can influence the expression of the individual’s genes. These very early experiences, which begin at conception or even before, at pre-conception, shape the development of the brain’s architecture and function for life. Our current understanding of brain development can be summarized as four concepts: 1 The architecture and formation of skills are strongly influenced by neural circuits that develop from dynamic interactions between genes and early life environments and experiences.

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developmental outcomes is solid. How to embed this understanding into the practices of different sectors and stakeholders who work with children remains a challenge. Though no single sector can do it alone, the health sector plays a critical role, for it is here where the first connections are made with mothers and infants. Health professionals such as nurses and physicians from all disciplines, not just pediatricians, have a special opportunity to help parents and caregivers provide the best care and nurturance possible for their infants and young children. The actions of these professionals are critical to the healthy development of all children and, ultimately, the health of populations. Information on the critical windows of opportunity for healthy brain development is particularly germane to health professionals working with children and families. Figure 23.1 depicts the development of the brain’s structure and

2 Development of neural pathways and mastery of skills follow hierarchical rules sequentially ‘from the bottom up’, with later gains building on earlier foundations. 3 Cognitive, social, emotional and language competencies are interdependent and are shaped by early experiences. All contribute to the formation of lifelong capabilities. 4 Adaptation continues throughout life. Capabilities are formed in predictable sequences during sensitive periods (i.e. among the very young) when development of specific neural circuits is most plastic and receptive to environmental influences.

This knowledge has far-reaching implications. Clearly, ‘getting things right the first time’ (i.e. in early childhood) is far less costly than trying to fix (i.e. remediate) them later (e.g. in adolescence and adulthood) (Knudsen et al., 2006; Shonkoff et al., 2012). The evidence on the importance of children’s early years to long-term health and

Experience-dependent Synapse Formation

Adult levels of Synapses

Seeing/ Hearing Visual Cortex/ Auditory Cortex

Receptive Language/ Speech Production Angular Gyrus/ Broca’s Area

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Cell Migration 6–24 prenatal weeks

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Figure 23.1 Development of the brain’s structure and function Source: Thompson & Nelson (2001); slide from Heckman

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function over time. It shows that the formation of synapses in the brain is e­ xperience-dependent and begins prenatally.

Early Adversities Influence Health Trajectories Research applying genetic, molecular biology, genomic and brain-imaging tools confirms that significant exposure to adversity, especially in early childhood and in an environment of poverty and deprivation, can alter the structure and function of the brain’s circuitry and neurological pathways in ways that negatively affect health, learning and behaviour for life. A child’s brain is biologically primed to learn from experiences, and the environment of a child’s early formative years affects the architecture of his or her developing brain. Adverse childhood experiences that have detrimental effects on children’s development include chronic exposure to malnutrition, poor parenting and mother’s health and stress. Studies show that the roots of cognitive and social-emotional differences that appear in middle childhood and adolescence are already present by the time a child is 18 months old (Fernald, Marchman & Weisleder, 2013; Putnam, 2015). ECD interventions can make a difference. These interventions, formal and non-formal, range from parenting to community or centre-based early childhood services that address children’s basic needs, including food, protection, health care and early learning. Longitudinal follow-up of participants in the well-known Abecedarian Project showed that those who had been randomly assigned to the treatment group when they were 0–5 years old had in their mid-30s a significantly lower prevalence of risk factors for cardiovascular and metabolic diseases than those who had been in the control group. Also, the healthier body mass that males in the treatment group had by 18 months of age had persisted into their adulthood (Campbell et  al., 2012, 2014).

Low socioeconomic status (SES) and the stress of poverty in upwardly mobile societies are particularly damaging. For example, pregnant women with low SES have an increased likelihood of having premature births and infants with fetal-growth ­retardation – both of which may be explained by high stress, high rates of infection and poor or inadequate nutrition (Hackman, Farah & Meaney, 2010; Larson, 2007). These factors increase cortisol levels in mothers and fetuses, and this increase can reduce fetal growth and trigger prematurity. Studies in rhesus monkeys show that fetal exposure to increased levels of cortisol reduces the volume of the hippocampus, and the offspring of stressed mothers have lower birthweights, impaired neuromotor development and lifelong attention deficits and emotional dysregulation (Hackman et al., 2010). Neuroscientists are identifying affective and cognitive systems that are influenced by SES (Hackman et  al., 2010). Studies using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) show differences in brain growth that vary with SES (Hanson et  al., 2013). And Mitchell et al. (2014), using data from a birth cohort study, show that boys who grew up in disadvantaged social environments had shorter telomeres (a biomarker of chronic stress) – that is, the length of chromosomes (i.e. the protective end piece, or telomere) in children who grew up in stressful social environments was shorter than that in children who grew up in more nurturing families. Once the mechanisms of such influences are better understood, researchers may be able to design specific interventions to prevent and remediate the effects of low SES during childhood (Hackman et al., 2010; Shonkoff, Boyce & McEwen, 2009). For example, ECD interventions might target parents’ increased depression and their compromised interactions with their children, two variables that are associated with low SES postnatally. Yes, the stress of growing up poor can harm a child’s brain development even before birth – and even very small differences in

The Role of the health sector in promoting well-being

family income can have major effects on a child’s brain (Hanson et al., 2013). The possible factors accounting for these effects include stressful home environments, poor nutrition, exposure to industrial chemicals, such as lead, and lack of family access to good education. Children living in poverty generally experience less cognitive stimulation and enrichment, compared with children in wealthier families (Evans, 2004). Lowincome parents speak less often and in less sophisticated ways to their young children and are less likely to engage jointly with their children in literary activities, such as reading aloud or visiting a library, compared with middle-income parents. In addition, low-income households tend to have smaller designated play spaces (if any) for young children and have fewer learning resources (e.g. age-appropriate toys, books) at home. Not surprisingly, children who are reared in poor families and communities have elevated rates of learning, behavioural, mental-health and physical-health problems that persist into adulthood (Putnam, 2015).

Gene–Environment Interplay: Epigenetics and Genetic Modifications Scientists working in developmental genetics and molecular biology have made remarkable discoveries of the interplay between early experiences and the expression and function of genes. Fascinating research is under way on epigenetics and genetic modifications. Research on epigenetics focuses specifically on how genes are turned on and off by environmental factors – that is, how experience alters gene expression (phenotypic outcomes) without altering the genes themselves (Boivin & Hertzman, 2012; Gluckman, Beedle & Hanson, 2009; McCain et  al., 2011). The realization that epigenetic changes can occur after conception and can be modified by the environment is significant for young children, as it implies that their

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early caregiving environment can alter their phenotype. Leading this research are Meaney and Szyf (2005), whose pioneering experiments with rats demonstrate how early experience shapes the architecture of neural circuits involved in the stress response and coping. They show that the intensity of licking and grooming which rat pups receive affects the levels of cortisol they release – that is, reduced licking and grooming (reduced touch) increased cortisol levels in rat pups’ developing brains. Groomed and ungroomed pups differed in DNA methylation. Neglected pups had excessive methylation of the promoter region for the glucocorticoid receptor gene (a protein that regulates the reaction to stress hormone). Meaney and Szyf and other scientists conclude that maternal care during infancy ‘programs’ an offspring’s stress response by modifying its neural systems for coping [i.e. the limbic-hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (L-HPA) axis]. It is these coping pathways that enable individuals to adapt to their environment throughout life (McCain, Mustard & Shanker, 2007). Research on genetic modifications addresses how genes modify individuals’ susceptibility to environmental influences – that is, how genomic variation (polymorphism) results in phenotypes that may be influenced by the environment, without alteration of gene expression. Scientists have made considerable progress in understanding how environmental exposures interact with both genotype and phenotype to differentially shape human development (Ellis et al., 2011). Disadvantaged social environments are associated with adverse health outcomes. Caspi et  al. (2003) and Caspi et  al. (2010) shed light on how individuals with different characteristics vary in whether and how much they are negatively affected (e.g. in mental health) by an adverse environment or positively influenced by a supportive environment (Ellis et al., 2011). In the study by Mitchell et  al. (2014), there is a strong association between the length of children’s

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telomeres and low family income, low maternal education, unstable family structure and harsh parenting. This association with early adversity may contribute to explanations of how stress degrades physiological function or enhances inflammatory processes associated with chronic diseases or cellular aging (Drury et al., 2012; Price et al., 2013). The theory of ‘biological sensitivity to context’ (Ellis and Boyce, 2008; Ellis et al., 2011; Mitchell et  al., 2013), on variations in genetic sensitivity to social environments, suggest that the very characteristics that individuals have which make them disproportionately vulnerable to adversity also make them disproportionately likely to benefit from a supportive context. That is, individuals who may be characterized as having a heightened environmental susceptibility may display enhanced sensitivity to both negative (risk-promoting) and positive (development-enhancing) environmental conditions (Ellis et  al., 2011). In other words, an individual with a genetic variant, or polymorphism, of ‘reactive or sensitizing genes’, may react to the environment in different ways. There are several ‘gene variants’ that increase a person’s susceptibility to depression, anxiety, attention deficit, hyperactivity and antisocial or violent behaviour if and only if the person carrying the variant suffers a traumatic or stressful childhood. This vulnerability hypothesis (i.e. biological sensitivity to context) emphasizes not ‘nature or nurture’ but the complex gene– environment interaction. Ellis and Boyce (2008) use the metaphors of orchids and dandelions to describe different types of children – those who are highly sensitive to caregiving stress and thus more vulnerable or more successful, depending on their environment (orchids), and those who are less sensitive to caregiving stress and thus less vulnerable or less successful, depending on their environment (dandelions). This high or low reactivity may be advantageous depending on a child’s situation (Letourneau et al., 2014).

High-reactive children (orchids), when raised in adverse environments, exhibit greater signs of externalizing and internalizing behaviour but respond well to ‘lowstress’, supportive, stable conditions (Ellis & Boyce, 2008, page 184). ‘Low-reactive children (dandelions) are resistant to environmental influences. Their stress responses are less likely to be negatively impacted by adverse early rearing conditions than their high-reactive peers, but they will also benefit less from stable, nurturing environments’ (Letourneau et  al., 2014, page 91). In other words, Ellis and Boyce (2008), applying the ‘susceptibility to context hypothesis’, note that dandelion children, with resilient genes, do well anywhere no matter the environment, whereas orchid children will wilt if ignored or maltreated but bloom beautifully with greenhouse care. In these ways, a child’s early rearing environment may be seen as calibrating his or her biological sensitivity to context (Boyce & Ellis, 2005). Ellis et al. (2011) emphasize two important issues and ethical implications of differential susceptibility. The first concerns blaming and the perceived need to change susceptible persons. As is often interpreted in resilience research, the solution for addressing adversity is not eliminating harmful environments but bolstering children’s resilience. As Boyce and Ellis (2005) have argued, if 80 to 85 per cent of children are dandelions and are thus relatively insensitive to environmental threats, then perhaps an optimal solution is to simply increase the ‘adaptiveness’ of the smaller subset of children – those who are orchids. They caution, however, about adopting this approach and emphasize that there are environments in which even being a resilient dandelion is of little protection in the face of extreme abusive or threatening social contexts. Thus, the concept of differential susceptibility does not imply fixing what is wrong with children who are sensitive. Rather, making social environments safe and supportive for all children, including those who are most

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susceptible or vulnerable, is the important moral and social dictum. The implications of taking this stance extend beyond caregiving. For example, individuals have differential susceptibilities to lead. Evidence that individuals with a specific allele (ALAO2) are more susceptible to lead toxicity has influenced US Federal lead regulations (Ellis et al., 2011). And the finding that there is a sub-group of highly susceptible individuals has led to a revision of lead regulations and a reduction in risk of exposure for everyone (Ellis et al., 2011). The second issue relates to screening for interventions. The concept of differential susceptibility implies that intervention effects will not be homogeneous across all beneficiaries but will vary in duration and extent depending on the susceptibility of individuals to the environment and the modality used. Policymakers and programme planners who understand this concept will be better able to design and tailor ECD interventions for children who have different neurobiological susceptibilities (Ellis et al., 2011). Letourneau et  al. (2014) summarize the implications of this understanding of gene– environment interactions for caregiving, as follows: the more optimal caregiving environments produce the most optimal outcomes, regardless of children’s genotype or biological sensitivity (page 91). Health professionals who are engaged in advocacy for young children and whose practice supports at-risk families will want to incorporate this perspective into their work. Further, because of differential susceptibilities, it must be understood that measuring the average effect of an intervention might not be a valid measure of effectiveness across population groups (Ellis et al., 2011).

Early Adversity Predicts Poor Health Outcomes Numerous prospective, longitudinal studies in developed countries illustrate that the

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severity of early life experiences predicts difficulties in adult life. New Zealand’s Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study of a birth cohort showed that adverse conditions (neglect or abuse) in early life led to increased risk of depression in adult life for individuals who had the short allele for the serotonin transporter gene (Caspi et  al., 2003, 2010). And Danese et  al. (2007) reported linkages between childhood stressors (e.g. maltreatment) and immune dysregulation. The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study showed that young children exposed to traumatic or abusive childhood events were predisposed as adults to health problems, which included coronary artery disease, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, obesity, cancer, and depression, alcoholism, smoking and substance abuse (Anda et  al., 2006; Felitti et al., 1998; Hertzman & Boyce, 2010). The ACE researchers developed the Adverse Childhood Experiences scale to measure the incidence of risk factors that can produce extreme stress (Anda et al., 2006). They found that exposure to one or two risk factors in childhood was not typically associated with a bad outcome in adulthood, but as the number of negative experiences increased, the rates of lifelong adverse consequences increased (Anda et al., 2006). We know that children’s interaction with caring, responsive adults is an essential ingredient in their successful development. Chronic neglect can impede their development. For example, children who have been reared in institutions may suffer profound deprivation, with damaging effects on brain development (Nelson et  al., 2009). They tend to have lower intelligence quotients, stunted growth and behavioural problems, and the longer their institutional deprivation is, the more pronounced the negative outcomes are – and the effects are lifelong. Follow-up studies of children adopted from Romanian orphanages show that children left in orphanages for less than six months fared better at age 11 than did those who

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were adopted later. Children who were in the orphanages for more than six months were likely to have abnormal brain development, with abnormal electroencephalograms. They were more likely to display antisocial behaviour, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, ­aggression and poor cognitive development at age 11 (McCain et  al., 2011, page 44). Moreover, researchers report that the early adversity affected children’s chromosomes and hastened how quickly their cells aged and potentially increased their risk for cancer and heart disease as adults (McCain et al., 2011, page 44). Nobel laureate James Heckman summarizes the results of many studies when he concludes that: early adverse experiences correlate with poor adult health, high medical care costs, increased depression and suicide rates, alcoholism, drug use, poor job performance and social function, disability, and impaired performance of subsequent generations. (Heckman, 2013, page 20)

Parent–Infant Interaction: Role of Parenting For healthy brain development, infants must be connected with consistently caring adults. Children build their brains through pre-verbal, back-and-forth (i.e. ‘serve-and-return’) interactions with adults (National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, 2004). Both cognitive and non-cognitive, socialemotional skills develop in early childhood. Non-cognitive skills (e.g. ‘grit’, social sensitivity, optimism, self-control, conscientiousness and emotional stability) are very important for success in life. They are as important as cognitive skills in predicting success, especially in post-industrial, knowledge-based economies (Heckman, Stixrud & Urzua, 2006). Longitudinal follow-up studies of ECD interventions, as well as animal research, clearly show that positive parenting (i.e. quality adult–child interactions) in early childhood is the essential stimulation for

brain development. These interactions include back-and-forth communications with caregivers, vocalization, gestures, facial expressions and body movements. They may be warm expressions by mothers, physical contact and play, visual mutuality and/or vocal exchanges and timely and appropriate responses to infants by caregivers (Bornstein et al., 2008). Anand and Roope (2013) document how the frequency of children’s involvement in activities with parents connects with the development of children’s capabilities, notably speech and social and everyday motor skills. Their results suggest that there are connections between related activities and capabilities (e.g. visiting other families and development of social skills) and that children’s participation in arts and crafts or singing has a significant role in the development of capabilities. Parents’ communication with their children and sensitivity to their emotional needs mediate the effects of low SES on cognitive and social-emotional development (NICHD, 2006). Bornstein and Putnick (2012) highlight two specific domains of positive caregiving: cognitive (e.g. reading, telling stories, naming, counting and drawing) and socio-emotional (e.g. interpersonal playing and singing). Sadly, poor parenting is transmitted intergenerationally (Mayes, 2010). Children who experience adversity in early childhood may have a lower tolerance for stress and a heightened reactivity to stress in adulthood. Ultimately, as parents they will exhibit poor parenting skills. To mitigate this intergenerational transfer, interventions for at-risk children must include services to help parents understand their own responses to parenting and the needs of their infants and young children (Mayes, 2010). As Heckman (2013, page 24) notes, ‘A large body of evidence suggests that a major determinant of child disadvantage is the quality of the nurturing environment rather than just the financial resources available or the presence or absence of parents’. The

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correlation between poverty and a child’s cognitive and non-cognitive development is largely explained by differences in parenting style (e.g. cognitive stimulation, talking and reading) and social engagement. Parents’ verbal communication with a child – the amount of a mother’s speech (the quantity and quality of words exchanged with her child) – correlates with children’s development (Hart & Risley, 1995). In their book Thirty Million Words: Building a Child’s Brain, Suskind, Suskind and Lewinter-Suskind (2015) describe how a surgeon came to appreciate the role of parents in determining whether a medical procedure is successful. They relate the story of two infants who each received a cochlear implant for hearing loss. Afterwards, one infant experienced rich, intensive inputs from his parents (rich maternal speech), did well post-operatively and reached the third-grade level (a measure of the child’s developmental trajectory). The other parents did not expose their infant to a rich language environment, and that infant remained impaired and unable to communicate. Suskind et  al. (2015) conclude that it takes more than the ability to hear sounds for language to develop; it is learning that the sounds have meaning that is critical. And for that, a young child must live in a world rich with words and words and words. They go on to emphasize that: The cochlear implant, as incredible as it is, is not the missing puzzle piece. Rather, it is simply a conduit, a pathway for the essential puzzle piece, the miraculous power of parent talk, a power that is the same, whether a child is born hearing or has acquired hearing via a cochlear implant. Without that language environment, the ability to hear is a wasted gift. Without that language environment, a child will be unlikely to achieve optimally. (Suskind et al., 2015, pages 22–3)

Heckman (2013) underscores that the proper measure of a child’s adversity is the quality of parenting, not the traditional measures of family income or parental education, although these do correlate with quality of

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parenting. He states, ‘the scarce resource is love and parenting – not money’. He continues, to say that: Social policy should … be directed toward the malleable early years. And it should be guided by the goal of promoting the quality of parenting and the early life environments of disadvantaged children, while also respecting the primacy of the family, showing cultural sensitivity … And that means that effective strategies need to provide a menu of high-quality programs from which parents can choose. (Heckman, 2013, page 41)

In summary, the risks of chronic disease during adulthood are partially determined by experiences early in life. Knowing this, we need to focus investments on tackling the upstream determinants of health – the quality of infant and young children’s environments, particularly as it relates to poverty and poor parenting skills, which thwart the positive care, nurturance and stimulation that all children need for healthy development and a healthy life. To diminish the growing burden of chronic diseases, the health sector can lead the way in focusing on upstream determinants in early life, for the benefit of entire populations and society, rather than on the individual lifestyle factors of adults.

Early Childhood Interventions: Programmes and Policies – Implications for the Health Sector The importance of children’s early years for societies’ productivity and economic development is evident and well documented. Building on this evidence, Heckman (2013) discusses key policy issues, four of which are enumerated below. 1 ‘Who should be targeted?’ Heckman (2013, page 34) states, ‘The returns to early childhood programs are highest for disadvantaged children who do not receive substantial amounts of parental investment in the early years’. He ­further

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says, ‘The available evidence suggests that the quality of parenting is the important scarce resource’. This statement implies that to achieve more accurate targeting of interventions, better measures are needed to assess ‘risky’ family environments. 2 ‘With what programs?’ Heckman (2013, page 35) encourages the development of programmes that ‘affect the lives of the parents and create a permanent change in the home environment’ to complement centre-based interventions. He notes that programmes which ‘build character and motivation’ and are not focused on cognition exclusively appear most effective. 3 ‘Who should provide the programs?’ Heckman (2013, page 36) suggests that a broad-based engagement of the private sector, civil society and philanthropic organizations, along with increased public resources and community support, is needed to achieve the end goal of ECD programmes, which is ‘to create a base of productive skills and traits for disadvantaged children from all social, ethnic, and religious groups’. 4 ‘Who should pay for them?’ For this, Heckman (2013, page 36) suggests one solution: ‘to make the programs universal but to offer a sliding fee schedule based on family income’.

The Role of the Health Sector ECD programmes are intended to be comprehensive interventions for children aged 0–6 years, from before conception through entry to primary school. However, many governments still tend to pursue a silo-based approach, with the health sector focusing on ages 0–3 and the education sector coming into play at age 3, when a child enters some form of preschool. The life-course health-development model offers a framework that health policymakers can use to guide health-care planning and practices and to integrate maternal and child health care as the foundation for health and health care throughout the life course. In this model, the goal of the health sector moves beyond avoidance of disease to promotion of positive health for individuals and populations,

and the various disciplines are linked across a continuum from one stage of health and care to the next. This forward-looking, comprehensive approach is based on the recognition that an individual’s health at birth influences his or her health as an adult and that a mother’s health from pre-conception (i.e. her well-being, stress level, nutrition) and her exposure to pollutants, drugs and infections during gestation influence gene expression and brain development in her child (McCain et al., 2011). Engle, Young and Tamburlini (2013) describe possible health-care programmes to promote healthy development for different age groups of children. They note that promotive care, preventive care and curative care are all needed and comprise a complementary package of services. For example, promotive care would include family-based approaches that engage families (in particular, male partners) in support of pregnant women emotionally, as well as neonatal screening and surveillance of high-risk newborns. Preventive care would include interventions with pregnant women who are abusing drugs, alcohol or tobacco and support of women who experience depression during pregnancy and/or the postpartum period. Curative care would include managing maternal diabetes during pre-conception as well as during pregnancy. Underpinning these health-care services and paramount to a child’s development is the quality of parenting, a fact that health professionals must recognize. All health workers (e.g. nurses and practitioners in pediatrics, primary care and family health care) must value the importance of parent–child interactions and provide parents with the support they need. For example, practitioners can utilize their knowledge of the importance of mother–child bonding and skin-to-skin contact in the early hours after birth to promote a mother’s quality attachment to her child. And they can allocate sufficient time to help first-time parents establish health-care contacts. These are strategically important roles to play and help to set strong foundations for children’s developmental trajectories.

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Policy and Programme Considerations The ultimate goal of policies and programmes for early childhood is to promote the healthy development of children – a goal that can only be achieved by having a range of wellorganized and coordinated programmes that promote health during pregnancy and birth and continue on with infants and young children. The health sector’s overall role is to support parents in providing the best possible care and nurturance of children. Figure 23.2 charts essential interventions for young children and families from pregnancy through 5 years of age. As illustrated, the interventions in health overlap and

Nutrition

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complement those in nutrition, education and social protection. All must be wrapped into comprehensive, coordinated packages of care. As the first point of contact for parents and caregivers, the health sector can take the lead in helping families access the services that are available to support them and their children. For example, from mothers’ antenatal, perinatal and postpartum care to the management of newborns’ care, health practitioners can provide early detection of problems and support mothers’ mental health, prevention of exposure to environmental toxins and maternal infections, promotion of immediate and exclusive breastfeeding and skin-to-skin contact, and delayed cord clamping of newborns (Jensen et al., 2015).

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Supplemental feeding Education around optimal feeding practices Therapeutic zinc supplementation for diarrhea Growth monitoring and promotion Micronutrients: supplementation and fortification Parent support for nutrition and development (stimulation)

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Deworming Parent support for health and development (stimulation) Prevention of disease (malaria, mother-to-child transmission of HIV) and other childhood illnesses Hygiene and handwashing Identification and treatment of developmental delays and disabilities Prevention and treatment of maternal depression Quality early childhood and preprimary programs Preschool feeding

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Birth registration Parental leave and adequate childcare or daycare

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Targeted income support (i.e. child grant or allowance) and conditional cash transfers for human development Child protection regulatory frameworks Child protection interventions (i.e. prevention and response to child abuse, special protection to orphans) Parent support for families

Figure 23.2  Essential interventions of nutrition, health, education and social protection for young children Source: Denboba, Sayre, Wodon, Elder, Rawlings & Lombardi (2014)

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Sector Linkages No single sector in government, in developed or developing countries, covers all of young children’s health, nutrition, education and social protection, and various sectors claim responsibility for young children’s overall health and well-being. In all countries, the health sector assumes primary responsibility for the health and well-being of very young children, from prenatal care to children’s health services. Education and social protection sectors are often responsible for the development and well-being of older children. Comprehensive, integrated ECD services cross at least three government sectors, and ECD policies and programmes must do likewise. It is not as important to identify which sector or agency is responsible for what domain as it is to coordinate all aspects of ECD policies and programmes so that the focus is specifically, and holistically, on the child and so that inputs from all relevant ministries are embraced. Duncan et al. (2012) note that the effects of income support were significant for younger children, whereas the effect of added income during children’s middle years was smaller and not significant. Evaluations of conditional cash transfers (CCTs) show that transfer of cash to families for participation in services, such as health checkups, growth monitoring, nutrition and parenting education, results in positive outcomes for children’s development (Behrman & Hoddinott, 2004).

National–Local Collaboration For good public policy, national and local levels of government need to collaborate. Strong national institutions can generate technical capacity in health, nutrition and child development and provide the rigorous supervision needed to ensure quality programmes. Local government structures can team with communities to meet local needs

and conditions and to tailor programmes and services to heterogeneous populations. National institutions complement local capacity and commitment, but they do not, and cannot, substitute for local interests. The need for national–local collaboration applies equally to developing and industrialized countries. National–local collaboration is as necessary to the US Head Start programme, for example, as it is to Colombia’s Hogares Communitarios or Hogares Bienestar Infantil (HBI) programmes for children’s well-being (Engle et al., 2013).

Research A number of countries are scaling up ECD programmes from local initiatives to nationwide efforts. As programmes scale up, countries must continue to evaluate what works and to elucidate the specific ingredients of successful implementations. Many successful programmes incorporate ongoing research and monitoring (i.e. implementation research) to provide the necessary feedback for the continuation and modification of programmes and the rationale for continued advocacy of ECD intervention. In addition, there is much to be gained from research on the translation of theory into practice. Translational research has increased understanding of the risk factors and protective mechanisms in children’s development, and the knowledge that has been gained is providing evidence for ECD prevention and intervention policies. Still, ‘no one size fits all’, nor is there a ‘blueprint’ that is applicable to every intervention in every situation. Continued support is needed for research to identify what works and does not work, and for whom and in which settings, and to then translate this knowledge into appropriate and effective ECD programmes and policies. Consensus is emerging among development agencies on the critical need for a widely accepted population-based measure

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of children’s development and outcomes from birth to age 8. This measure would help countries assess the effectiveness of ECD interventions and the magnitude of children who are entering primary school not ready to learn. The measure would be far superior to the less-than-optimal ‘process’, or output, and ‘deficit’ measures currently used (e.g. morbidity or mortality, immunization coverage, access to health services, preschool enrollment, per cent of first graders who have attended preschool education).

recognize the central role of human capabilities in shaping society. Disparities in capabilities are major contributors to economic and social inequality’. As development agencies look forward to 2030, the framing of ECD in each country’s policy and programmes – and, in particular, by its health sector – really matters. To move forward, countries and agencies must shift their focus from child survival to children’s holistic development, nurturing and promoting their capabilities to the fullest. Key tasks include the following:

Convergence on Population Health

• Redirection of social policies to focus on young children ages 0–6 years (i.e. before they enter primary school) and, in particular, ages 0–3 years (the health sector’s immediate purview) • Expansion of public health models, i.e. vertical interventions such as immunizations, nutrition, maternal and child health care to incorporate the science of early human development • Collection and use of data to track how well children are doing and to quantify levels of inequality in child development across population groups • Translation of current and future knowledge of ECD into action on behalf of all children.

The science of ECD is substantiating the ‘common knowledge’ that early experiences affect health, learning and behaviour throughout the life course. We must recognize that a strictly health-sector approach (or individualized medicine) is not sufficient for promoting ECD (i.e. early human development). Other sectors (nutrition, education, social protection and welfare) and all levels of government (local, regional and national), as well as private and non-governmental bodies, need to embrace the goal to build strong, healthy families and communities, starting at the very beginning. For societies to grow and to be sustainable, the efforts of these stakeholders must converge and focus on the health of populations – a more specific and targeted notion than just health care.

ECD is the beginning of human development. It impacts a society’s education, health, social capital and equality. It is the foundation of economic growth. We must invest in the early years – the need is greater now than ever before.

References Conclusion Early childhood is the foundation for human capacity – that is, the window of opportunity for fulfilling life’s possibilities, resolving early inequities and ultimately achieving inclusive and sustainable social and economic development in and across nations. As Dugger, Durlauf and Heckman (2012, page 1) state, ‘Global development agendas should

Anand P, Roope L (2013) Happiness and development in very young children. Discussion paper, Economics Department, Open University, and Health Economics Research Center. Oxford: Oxford University. Anda RF, Felitti VJ, Walker J, Whitfield C, Perry BD, Dube SR, Giles WH (2006) The enduring effects of abuse and related adverse experiences in childhood: a convergence of evidence from neurobiology and epidemiology.

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European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience 56(3): 174–86. Barker DJ (2002) Fetal programming of coronary heart disease. Trends in Endocrinology and Metabolism 13(9): 364–68. Behrman J, Hoddinott J (2004) Program evaluation with underserved heterogeneity and selective implementation: the Mexican Progressa impact on child nutrition. Mimeograph. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. Boivin M, Hertzman C (eds) (2012) Early Childhood Development: Adverse Experiences and Developmental Health. Royal Society of Canada – Canadian Academy of Health Sciences Expert Panel. Ottawa: Royal Society of Canada. Available at: https://rsc-src.ca/sites/ default/files/pdf/ECD%20Report_0.pdf (accessed 16 May 2017). Bornstein M, Putnick D (2012) Cognitive and socioemotional caregiving in developing countries. Child Development 83(1): 46–61. Bornstein MH, Tamis-Lemonda CS, Hahn CS, Haynes OM (2008) Maternal responsiveness to young children at three ages: longitudinal analysis of a multidimensional, modular, and specific parenting construct. Developmental Psychology 44(3): 867–74. doi:10.1037/ 0012-1649.44.3.867. Boyce WT, Ellis BJ (2005) Biological sensitivity to context: an evolutionary–developmental theory of the origins and functions of stress reactivity. Development and Psychopathology 17(2): 271–301. Campbell F, Conti G, Heckman J, Moon SH, Pinto R, Punello E, Pan Y (2014) Early childhood investments substantially boost adult health. Science 343: 1478–85. Campbell F, Pungello E, Burchinal M, Pan Y, Wasik B, Barbarin O, Sparling J, Ramey C (2012) Adult outcomes as a function of an early childhood education program: an Abecedarian Project follow-up. Developmental Psychology 48(4): 1033–43. Caspi A, Hariri AR, Holmes A, Uher R, Moffitt TE (2010) Genetic sensitivity to the environment: the case of the serotonin transporter gene and its implications for studying complex diseases and traits. American Journal of Psychiatry 167(5): 509–27. Caspi A, Sugden K, Moffitt T, Taylor A, Craig IW, Harrington H, McClay J, Mill J, Martin J,

Braithwaite A, Poulton R (2003) Influence of life stress on depression: moderation by a polymorphism in the 5-HTT gene. Science 301: 386–89. Danese A, Pariante C, Caspi A, Taylor A, Poulton R (2007) Childhood maltreatment predicts adult inflammation in a life-course study. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 104: 1319–24. Denboba A, Sayre R, Wodon Q, Elder L, Rawlings L, Lombardi J (2014) Stepping Up Early Childhood Development: Investing in Young Children for High Returns. Washington, DC: World Bank. Drury SS, Theall K, Gleason MM, Smykel AT, De Vivo I, Wong JYY, Fox NA, Zeanah CH & Nelson CA (2012) Telomere length and early severe social deprivation: linking early adversity and cellular aging. Molecular Psychiatry 17(7): 719–27. Dugger R, Durlauf S, Heckman J (2012) The role of human capability in reframing the global development agenda. Working paper, Institute for New Economic Thinking, New York. Duncan GJ, Boyce WT, Kalil TA, Ziol-Guest K (2012) The long reach of early childhood poverty. Presentation at ECI/HCEO working group conference, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, April. Ellis BJ, Boyce WT (2008) Biological sensitivity to context. Current Directions in Psychological Science 17(3): 183–7. Ellis BJ, Boyce WT, Belsky J, BakermansKranenburg MJ, Van Ijzendoorn MH (2011) Differential susceptibility to the environment: an evolutionary–neurodevelopmental theory. Development and Psychopathology 23(1): 7–28. Engle PL, Black MM, Behrman JR, Cabral de Mello M, Gertler PJ, Kapiriri L, Martorell R, Young ME, International Child Development Steering Group (2007) Strategies to avoid the loss of developmental potential in more than 200 million children in the developing world. The Lancet 369(9557): 229–42. Engle P, Fernald L, Alderman H, Behrman J, O’Gara C, Yousafzai A, Cabral de Mello M, Hidrobo M, Ulkuer N, Ertem I, Iltus S, Global Child Development Steering Group (2011) Strategies for reducing inequalities and improving developmental outcomes for young

The Role of the health sector in promoting well-being

children in low-income and middle-income countries. The Lancet 378(9799): 1339–53. Engle PL, Young ME, Tamburlini G (2013) The role of the health sector in early childhood development. In Britto PR, Engle P, Super CM (eds) Handbook of Early Childhood Development Research and Its Impact on Global Policy. New York: Oxford University Press. Evans G (2004) The environment of childhood poverty. American Psychologist 59(2): 77–92. Felitti VJ, Anda RF, Nordenberg D, Williamson DF, Spitz Am, Edwards V, Koss MP, Marks JS (1998) The relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults: the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study. American Journal of Preventive Medicine 14(4): 245–58. Fernald A, Marchman VA, Weisleder A (2013) SES differences in language processing skill and vocabulary are evident at 18 months. Developmental Science 16(2): 234–48. Gluckman P, Beedle A, Hanson M (2009) Principles of Evolutionary Medicine. New York: Oxford University Press. Gluckman PD, Hanson MA, Cooper C, Thornburg KL (2008) Effect of inutero and earlylife conditions on adult health and disease. New England Journal of Medicine 359(1): 61–73. Hackman DA, Farah MJ, Meaney MJ (2010) Socioeconomic status and the brain: mechanistic insights from human and animal research. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 11(9): 651–9. Halfon N, Larson K, Lu M, Tullis E, Russ S (2014) Lifecourse health development: past, present and future. Maternal and Child Health Journal 18(2): 344–65. Hanson JL, Hair N, Shen DG, Shi F, Gilmore JH, Wolfe B, Pollak SD (2013) Family poverty affects the rate of human infant brain growth. PLoS One 8(12): e80954. Hart T, Risley TR (1995) Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children. Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes. Heckman JJ (2012) The developmental origins of health. Health Economics 21(1): 24–9. Heckman JJ (2013) Giving Kids a Fair Chance (a Strategy That Works). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Heckman J, Stixrud J, Urzua S (2006) The effects of cognitive and non-cognitive abilities on labor market outcomes and social behavior. Journal of Labor Economics 24(3): 41–82. Hertzman C, Boyce T (2010) How experience gets under the skin to create gradients in developmental health. Annual Review of Public Health 31: 329–47. Jensen SK, Bouhouch RR, Walson JL, Daelmans B, Bahl R, Darmstadt GL, Dua T (2015) Enhancing the child survival agenda to promote, protect, and support early child development. Seminars in Perinatology 39(5): 373–86. Knudsen E, Heckman J, Cameron J, Shonkoff J (2006) Economic, neurobiological, and behavioral perspectives on building America’s future workforce. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 103(27): 10155–62. Larson CP (2007) Poverty during pregnancy: its effects on child health outcomes. Paediatrics and Child Health 12(8): 673–7. Letourneau N, Giesbrecht GF, Bernier FP, Joschko J (2014) How do interactions between early caregiving environment and genes influence health and behavior? Biological Research for Nursing 16(1): 83–94. Liu L, Oza S, Hogan D, Perin J, Rudan I, Lawn JE, Cousens S, Mathers C, Black RE (2015) Global, regional, and national causes of child mortality in 2000–13, with projections to inform post-2015 priorities: an updated systematic analysis. The Lancet 385(9966): 430–40. Mayes L (2010) How stress impacts parental care and the intergenerational transmission of parenting abilities. Presentation at Brain and Biological Development: A Science in Society Symposium, Alberta Family Wellness Initiative, Banff, Alberta, Canada, 31 May–4 June. McCain M, Mustard F, McCuaig K (2011) Early Years Study 3: Making Decisions, Taking Action. Toronto: Margaret and Wallace McCain Family Foundation. McCain MN, Mustard F, Shanker S (2007) Early Years Study 2: Putting Science into Action. Toronto: Council for Early Child Development. Meaney MJ, Szyf M (2005) Maternal care as a model for experience-dependent chromatin

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plasticity? Trends in Neurosciences 28(9): 456–63. Mitchell C, Hobcraft J, McLanahan SS, Siegel SR, Berg A, Brooks-Gunn J, Garfinkel I, Notterman D (2014) Social disadvantage, genetic sensitivity, and children’s telomere length. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 111: 5944–9. Mitchell C, McLanahan S, Brooks-Gunn J, Garfinkel I, Hobcraft J, Notterman D (2013) Genetic differential sensitivity to social environments: implications for research. American Journal of Public Health 103(suppl 1): S102–10. National Scientific Council on the Developing Child (2004) Young children develop in an environment of relationships. Working Paper No. 1. Retrieved from www.developingchild.harvard.edu (accessed 16 May 2017). Nelson CA, Furtado EA, Fox NA, Zeanah CH (2009) The deprived human brain. American Science 97(May–June): 222–9. NICHD (Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development) (2006) The NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development: Findings for Children Up to Age 4½ Years. National Institutes of Health (NIH) Publication No. 05-4318. Bethesda, MD: US Department of Health and Human Services, NIH, NICHD. Price LH, Kao HT, Burgers DE, Carpenter LL, Tyrka A (2013) Telomeres and early-life stress: an overview. Biological Psychiatry 73(1):15–23. Putnam R (2015) Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. New York: Simon & Schuster. Russ SA, Larson K, Tullis E, Halfon N (2014) A life course approach to health development: implications for the maternal and child health research agenda. Maternal Child Heath Journal 18(2): 497–510.

Shonkoff J, Boyce W, McEwen B (2009) Neuroscience, molecular biology and the childhood roots of health disparities: building a new framework for health promotion and disease prevention. Journal of the American Medical Association 301(21): 2252–9. Shonkoff J, Phillips D (2000) From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. Shonkoff J, Richter L, VanderGaag J, Bhutta ZA (2012) An integrated scientific framework for child survival and early childhood development. Pediatrics 129(2): e460–72. Suskind D, Suskind B, Lewinter-Suskind L (2015) Thirty Million Words: Building a Child’s Brain. New York: Penguin Random House, Dutton. Thompson RA, Nelson CA (2001) Developmental science and the media: early brain development. American Psychologist 56(1): 5–15. UN (United Nations) General Assembly (21 October 2015) Resolution Adopted by the General Assembly on 25 September 2015. Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Available at http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc. asp?symbol=A/RES/70/1&Lang=E (accessed on 16 May 2017). UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) (2016) SDG Goal 4. Sustainable Development Goals. Global Education Monitoring Report. Available at: https://en.unesco.org/gem-report/ sdg-goal-4 (accessed April 2016). Walker SP, Wachs T, Grantham-McGregor S, Black MM, Nelson CA, Huffman SL, BakerHenningham H, Chang SM, Hamadani JD, Lozoff B, Gardner JM, Powell CA, Rahman A, Richter L (2011) Inequality in early childhood: risk and protective factors for early child development. The Lancet 378(9799): 1325–38.

Part IV

Participation, Rights and Diversity

24 Supporting (Super)Diversity in Early Childhood Settings M i c h e l Va n d e n b ro e c k

Introduction: A Note on Diversities and the Hegemony of the English Language Let us first acknowledge that writing in English about diversity, while respecting a diversity of approaches, is a difficult enterprise, especially in a European context. In contemporary Europe, English is the most widely spread language in academic literature, and it also represents a particular way of speaking about diversity. To give but one example, the terms race and ethnicity, so common in English-language discourse on diversity in education, are impossible to use in The Netherlands, France or Belgium, for instance, as they would unavoidably refer to a history of organising people in racial groups under Nazi occupation. Equally, the term community that has a positive connotation in English (as in ‘we need to relate to children’s families and to their communities’) may bear a negative meaning for many French authors

(e.g. communautarisme, as a way of dividing people; see, for instance, Dupraz, 2012), yet certainly not for all (see, for instance, Mony, 2011). Dupraz (2012, p. 457) fears what she believes to be ‘a differentialist approach from anglo-saxon inspiration’ that threatens the French nation state and its ‘laïcité’, while the separation of the private and the public in her view warrants the values of equality and individual freedom (and, as a result, wearing a veil is – according to Durpaz – unthinkable for an early childhood professional). Mony (2011), in turn, criticises this narrow concept of laïcité that excludes religion and thus also culture from public life, and therefore disables France to work with the given diversity in early childhood education or in programs for parents. The narrow interpretation of laïcité also makes it very hard to have an open discussion on issues such as the veil or multilingualism. Another example is the German concept of Bildung that is so much broader than the English terms ‘education’ and ‘pedagogy’ and includes how the child shapes her

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relation to the world, and thus cannot be thought of without thinking of diversity. While diversity is a separate dimension in dominant English language quality measurements (e.g. Harms, Cryer & Clifford, 2003), this is unthinkable for the Berlin early childhood provision as it is an inseparable part of all quality dimensions (Preissing, 2004). In sum, it would be rather paradoxical to think that the issue of diversity can be discussed without acknowledging how it is embedded in specific histories, geographies and identity policies and that what is considered good practice in one part of the world may be quite different in another. The hegemony of English as an academic language has the disadvantage of masking those diversities and putting forward certain concepts (e.g. ‘anti-bias education’) as universally valid (for a critical discussion, see also Vandenbroeck, 2007). It is, therefore, important to acknowledge this monolingual nature of the academic debate as a handicap, even when one is not capable of changing it. The least one should do is acknowledge the point of view from which one explores the issue. In my case, this is a Belgian point of view, that undoubtedly is Eurocentric. It is from that perspective that I explore how heterogeneity has been – and continues to be – constructed as a problem to overcome in two distinct but interrelated educational fields: early childhood education and social support programs for parents.

A Brief Historical Hindsight Nation states, as we now know them in Europe, are a rather recent phenomenon, as many were created in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century after long years of bloodshed. These politically fragile nation states were in need of an imagined community (Anderson, 1991), consisting of an alleged homogeneous population, speaking one language, adhering to one culture and sharing a single history as a selection of

self-chosen victories and forgotten defeats. Colonisation by European nations contributed to this construction of national identities. Confrontation with the ‘primitive’ other (or othered other) served as a mirror, constructing the own, dominant identity as civilised and educated (Smith, 2001). In so doing, the heterogeneity of the population (e.g. local languages, cultures, religions) had to be denied and where diversity was acknowledged, it was in order to frame specific groups that needed to be civilised (Elias, 1998). That was obvious when related to cultural and ethnic diversity; for example, the stolen generation of Australian aboriginal children who were taken away from their families to enrol them in border schools in order to ‘civilise’ them, an outrage that was also the case in many other ‘first nations’. In more subtle yet still pervasive ways, this was also the case when it was about heterogeneity of class. The very origins of day care have been analysed as a salient example of an attempt to overcome class heterogeneity by civilising the poor. It was indeed an explicit mission of the first childcare centre in Paris (Marbeau, 1845), and later also of childcare elsewhere in Europe (Vandenbroeck, 2003), to civilise the labourclass mothers in the bourgeois morale. Among the most powerful machinery to create the civilisation of those who were considered to be too different and to maintain the illusion of homogeneity was the educational system and the introduction of compulsory schooling. After the Second World War, this illusion of homogeneity was seriously challenged. Civil rights movements (of black citizens, of women) claimed the right to be different, yet equal; and minorities claimed their right to their language, culture or land (e.g. Inuit and Saami in Northern Europe, Basque in Spain, Breton in France and Gaelic in Ireland, all claimed the acknowledgement of their heritage in literature, in public service and in the educational system). In addition, several Western European nation states imported labour force from the Mediterranean countries and, one decade later, from Turkey and North

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Africa. This import of ‘foreigners’ as a cheap labour force coincided with the immigration of people from the former colonies in the post-war period of decolonisation. By the end of the twentieth century, it could not be denied anymore that we lived in what was then called ‘multicultural societies’. An international study on the beliefs of staff in early childhood education on how to deal with this ‘multiculturalism’, revealed that four different models prevailed (Vedder, Bouwer  & Pels, 1996). The submersion model proclaimed ‘same goals, same approach and same processes for all children’, who eventually will adapt to the dominant culture. The English-only policy in relation to multilingualism is an example of this approach. The approach assumes – both from a policy and from a practice perspective – that submersion in a monocultural and monolingual environment is the most efficient way to ‘assimilate’ or ‘integrate’ ethnic minority children and to give them a fair start in life. The transition model aimed at the same end result (assimilation), but pleaded for intermediate transitional adaptations (e.g. more intensive language courses, meetings with parents in early childhood education to explain ‘our values’ and ‘our ways of doing things’). While the submersion and transition models may differ in the means to an end, the end (a monocultural society) is common to both. The contact model aimed at cultural enrichment by having children learning from various cultures. This model includes attempts to provide bilingual education for all children, bringing children into contact with artefacts from different cultures (e.g. music, play materials, food) in order to teach tolerance to diversity. The cultural change model focused on the prevention of prejudice and emphasised solidarity, respect and interactions, to – ­eventually – come to some sort of melting pot that would take the best of both (cultural) worlds. It embraces an anti-bias education that actively goes against early signs of prejudice, it attempts to construct commonality in diversity and will, therefore, not only stress what is different, but also what is shared.

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The late twentieth and early twenty-first century was marked by profound changes in how the issue of diversity is presented to us. We just briefly sketch three important evolutions. A first game changer is the deep and recurrent economic crisis that hit affluent nations in the 1980s and was renewed with the banking crisis of 2008 and subsequent years. These subsequent economic crises came with rising unemployment, budgetary deficits and, subsequently, criticisms of the welfare state; in sum, with ‘a new social question’ (Giddens, 1998; Rosanvallon, 1995). These profound changes in the conceptualisation of the welfare state have questioned the unconditionality of allowances and other rights. ‘No rights without duties’ is now the slogan. The focus on economy and employment (Finn, 2003) further contributed to the contractualisation of the welfare state (Crawford, 2003). Social welfare has consequently been reconstructed as an expense of the state that needs to be avoided as much as possible, and thus early childhood education in particular is constructed as a social investment. Its aim today is to reduce later expenditure of the social investment state and its meaning is reduced to economic prosperity (see, for instance, Barnett, 2011; Heckman, 2006). As a result, early childhood education is reconstructed as a means to compensate for the failure of the family, leaving little place for reciprocal dialogue in contexts of diversity (Vandenbroeck, Coussée & Bradt, 2010). A second change is the rise of far-right, racist political parties in several European member states and the concurrent changes in policies towards the former migrant labour force. While these parties have seldom gained direct political power, they certainly impacted on other parties’ policies and the general public opinion, with national and European policies of return migration as but one salient example (Lietaert, 2016), or a renewed focus on learning the dominant language in preschool years as an alleged condition for further school success (e.g. Vandenbroucke, 2004).

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Thirdly, over the last few years, European countries have faced an increase of migration from Eastern European countries as well as from the Middle East. More than a million migrants and refugees crossed into Europe in 2015, a majority being from Syria and Afghanistan, but also from Kosovo and Albania (Eurostat, 2016). The demographic changes since the broadening of the European Union, and even more so with the recent arrivals of refugees, have profoundly changed the nature of ethnic and cultural diversities in most major European cities. While diversity was traditionally presented as the presence of rather large, well-­organised ‘minorities’ (e.g. African-Caribbean and South Asian in the UK; Turkish in Germany; Turkish and Moroccan in Belgium and The Netherlands; Tunisian and Algerian in France), we live today in what is labelled as super-diversity. Super-diversity is characterised by ‘a dynamic interplay of variables among an increased number of small and scattered, multiple-origin, transnationally connected, socio-economically differentiated and legally stratified’ populations (Vertovec, 2007, p. 1024). In most European cities, there is no majority, as the (various) minorities are the majority. In Brussels, Europe’s capital, for instance, the number of frequently spoken languages has risen to 104 and 50% of Brussels’ families are multilingual (Janssens, 2016). In stark contrast with these societal evolutions, educational and social policies and practices still seem to continue considering heterogeneity as a problem to overcome, rather than as a given or a pedagogical condition that can enrich classrooms, rather than hinder them. As a salient example, we could mention the recent coercive policies in the Belgian-Flemish community towards parents (especially those from migrant backgrounds) who do not send their children to preschool often enough (Vandenbroeck, De Stercke & Gobeyn, 2013), as it is believed that the diversity (of languages, of backgrounds) needs to be smoothed out in order for primary school

to be able to do its educational job. In the following sections this is explored for education and early childhood education in particular, as well as for its counterpart: parent support programmes and especially those which have focused on social support.

The Myth of Homogeneity in Education Homogeneity has historically and internationally been considered an ideal for teaching. There are many examples illustrating how homogeneity continues to be considered as a condition for teaching (and learning). A most obvious one is age segregation. It is generally assumed in educational systems that children of the same age ought to be together in one room and separate from children of different ages. There are notable exceptions, such as Japanese preschools, where it is considered an educational value that the older toddlers take up caring tasks for the youngest (Tobin, Hsueh & Karasawa, 2009). It is as if one can assume that children of the same age share similar learning dispositions, have similar needs, and as if children from different age groups have little to learn from each other. This age separation has been legitimised by the developmental psychologist colonisation of education with its developmental phases and developmentally appropriate practices, without much evidence to base these assumptions on (Burman, 1994; Canella, 1997). Despite historical educational pioneers such as Celestin Freinet, who was opposed to what he called the école caserne (military base school, a metaphor for its compartmentalisation) and favoured the classe unique (single classroom) with mixed-age groups as beneficial for learning (Devos, 2013), the dominant practice seems to remain that homogeneity is considered a condition for group-based learning. A consequence of this pursuit of homogeneity is not only the organisation of children by age within primary schools, but also the

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separation between preschool and compulsory school and – in many countries – between childcare and preschool (Kaga, Bennett & Moss, 2010). Again, these separations are based on remarkable assumptions: the assumption, for instance, that preschoolers need more education and less care than the younger toddlers and infants do (and the assumption indeed that care and education are separate entities), while these assumptions are increasingly unveiled as invalid (Moss, 2013; Van Laere  & Vandenbroeck, 2016). Consequently, early childhood education is all too often framed as the preparation for compulsory schooling (Moss, 2013). The mission of the preschool (as the term ‘preschool’ eloquently illustrates) is reduced to delivering school-ready children, meaning an alleged homogeneous group of children, matching the conditions that the compulsory school sets to consider children as teachable pupils. In other words, the issue of diversity needs to be tackled before children enter school. This means that the primary (or broader: the compulsory) school is believed to need ‘teachable’ children who do not differ too much from each other (in language, in competences) in order to do its job. In other words, this seems to indicate that the school is resigning from its mission to strive for equal opportunities and social mobility as it accepts that school is ‘too late to do so’. The point here is not that the educational system is now less well achieving its educational mission than before. As several authors have claimed in the 1970s (e.g. Bernstein, 1970; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1970) as well as in recent years (e.g. Downey & Condron, 2016), the educational system tends to reproduce social inequalities. Rather, the issue is that it claims to be able to fulfil this mission in contexts of diversity only when the diversity is smoothed out before proper schooling begins and, therefore, ignoring that there may be diverse ways of learning and ignoring the diversity of cultural repertoires (e.g. Rogoff, 2003). Another much-debated aspect of the pursuit of the myth of homogeneity concerns the

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language policies in early childhood education. Multilingualism in children is encouraged when it is about French, German, English or Spanish, as bilingual childcare centres appear in different places (see, for instance, www .kindertreff.fr for a French example). Yet, for immigrant minority children, multilingualism is considered a barrier to academic success (Van Avermaet, 2009). Despite the growing awareness among specialists that multilingualism is an added value for all children, practice and policy are still very much based on the myth of homogeneity, meaning, in this case, monolingual beliefs (Pulinx & Van Avermaet, 2014). This is reinforced by the PISA studies, showing that children with another than the dominant language at school seem to be less successful than their monolingual peers (OECD, 2014). It needs to be noticed that this is a misinterpretation or at least a false simplification of PISA results, as OECD itself warns us that it is not so much the home language but the strong correlation with socio-economic status, and the concentration of children from low socio-economic status in particular schools that explain the difference in achievement (see, for instance, OECD, 2012a). In addition, standardised testing of diverse pupils, as a one size for all, can of course also be criticised for contributing to the myth of homogeneity (Meyer & Benavot, 2013; Moss et  al., 2016). As a result, for many years, monolingual submersion models have prevailed and bilingual education has remained a controversial subject as teachers and policymakers continue to think that home languages are an obstacle to learning the school language (Sierens & Van Avermaet, 2014). Even in many European projects of bilingual education, the eventual aim is to facilitate monolingualism, as these projects are aimed at facilitating the transition to the dominant language, rather than at facilitating real multilingualism for all children (Hamers & Blanc, 2000). After all, the political conflict between the English only movement in the United States and the supporters of bilingual education (Köbben, 2003)

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has been and still is an ideological rather than a scientific debate. Moreover, the bilingual educational models are hopelessly outdated as they implicitly assume that a classroom is composed of two (or three) internally homogeneous language groups. In our present-day super-diverse cities that is definitely something of the past. Studies that take real multilingualism (or should we say ­super-multilingualism to distinguish it from the outdated bilingual support models?) for all children into account are only beginning to emerge (Hélot et al., 2017). As a result, we still know little about how functional multilingualism (Sierens & Van Avermaet, 2014; see also García & Flores, 2012) may serve all children (rather than keeping on searching for how migrant children should be remediated). We come back to this issue in the concluding section. But, for now, let us turn to the other side of the educational coin: the parents. Indeed, the educational gap has historically and internationally always included programs for parents with a focus on those parents who deviate from the norm. In that vein, programs that aim at providing social support seem to have gained importance over the last few decades, yet they tend to reinforce the myth of homogeneity.

The Myth of Homogeneity in Parent Support Early childhood education in general, and childcare in particular, bear the historical weight of their patronising attitude towards the parents they serve, both in Europe (Hendrick, 1997) and beyond (Cunningham, 1995). Indeed, until the women’s liberation movements of the 1970s, childcare was predominantly perceived as a necessary evil (Vandenbroeck, 2003). Necessary because female employment could not be denied (and was beneficial to employers, considering women’s lower wages). But evil as the bourgeois family model condemned female labour. The rise of attachment theory after the Second World War reinforced the ‘home as

heaven’ ideology and the blame on working mothers (Burman, 1994; Singer, 1993). Today, we can still find many examples of sedimentations of the distrust of parents in early childhood educational services and this distrust is gaining new momentum with the rise of parenting policies, ‘targeting parental behaviour as deficient and also parenting as a joyless task or job to be conducted under the watchful gaze of experts’ (Lee, 2014, p. 8). The distrust of parents is, of course, especially directed at parents who are in some way different, with a focus on ethnic minority parents and parents living in poverty. It seems as if parenting policies came to replace previous social policies, as Lee (2014, p. 16) claims: In conditions where ideas about how to effect wider social change are elusive, change is envisaged only where it seems possible to enact it, for example, in the management of the small-scale relations between individuals, especially those between parent and child.

A salient illustration of this ‘turn to parenting’ (Hopman & Knijn, 2015) is the change of tone in the OECD reports on early childhood education. While the second Starting Strong report (OECD, 2006) considered parental involvement as ‘a two-way process of knowledge and information flowing freely both ways’, the third issue (OECD, 2012b) reduced parents to beings that are instrumental in their child’s outcomes since parent involvement serves the home learning environment that matters for healthy child development and learning. We can speculate as to why this is the case and it is probably not a coincidence that the change of tone comes with restricting social welfare states as social investment states. In today’s social investment state, parents are increasingly framed as being responsible for their child’s development (and thus academic achievement as a predictor of later involvement in the labour market) as well as being responsible towards society (as a reduction of future welfare spending). In that sense, there is a growing concern for those parents who are believed not to be up to this double

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responsibility and are, therefore, labelled as ‘at risk’. This is particularly salient in the early years and is reinforced by the scientific claims that early childhood education has more positive effects on children from poor families (Engle et al., 2011). In sum, there is a renewed attention for parent support in which parents are believed to be in need of expert knowledge. This is particularly the case in relation to poverty, as poor parents are often associated with poor parenting (Georges, 2010). In this vein, social support benefits from a growing interest. Social support is the (rather informal) way in which parents support each other materially (by helping each other), knowledgeably (by sharing information) and emotionally. While social networks have been documented to also be a potential source of stress, social support is generally believed to be a buffer to parental stress and to be preventive of depression, child maltreatment and general parent and child wellbeing (e.g. Jack, 2000; Sarason, Sarason & Pierce, 1990; Weiss, 2002). In contrast with the growing awareness that social support may be a more universal form of parent support, a study of the dominant literature on this subject shows a remarkable tendency to be blind to diversity in parent support groups (see Geens & Vandenbroeck, 2014 for a more general discussion). The main focus in the academic literature is on parents ‘at risk’, and studies on the effectiveness of social support are mostly limited to alleged homogeneous at-risk groups: parents of a child with a disability (e.g. Horton & Wallander, 2001; Ow, Tan & Goh, 2004); teenage parents (e.g. McLeod, Baker & Black, 2006); low-income parents (e.g. Castillo & Fenzl-Crossman, 2010; Green & Rogers, 2001); single parents (e.g.  Winkworth, McArthur, Layton & Thompson, 2010); ethnic minorities (e.g. Crowley & Curenton, 2011); homeless parents (e.g. Tischler, Rademeyer & Vostanis, 2007); or parents with a mental illness (Sheppard, 2004), to name but a few. It seems to be taken for granted that parent support in general and social support in particular can

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only occur in groups that are at least homogeneous in one important aspect, that is defined according to criteria set by experts. There are many reasons to be sceptical about the assumptions of homogeneity as a condition for support. We briefly list four objections, yet there may be others. First, this is in tension with population studies on the need for support. To give but one example, a large-scale survey on a representative sample of 1219 parents in Belgium (Bradt et  al., 2015) showed that parental worries, expectations of support or perceived support are hardly moulded by traditional characteristics, including ethnicity, socio-economic status, marital status, employment status or a combination of these. While there certainly are differences in expectations and needs, these are much more individual matters than can be sociologically defined. Second, the pursuit of homogeneity in parent support is also in tension with the findings that bonding and bridging are both important when supporting parents (Putnam, 2007). Bonding can indeed be supportive when parents share a similar experience (e.g. being a teenage mother, or having left your country to ensure a better future for your child). Yet, bridging – connecting with parents of different origins, different socio-economic status, different neighbourhoods, etc. – matters equally to build social capital and facilitate social leverage. The organisation of parent groups, based on specific characteristics, assumes a homogeneity that is supposed to facilitate bonding. The extent to which this may be the case will depend on how parents experience the labelling that goes with it. It is not all that obvious that, let’s say, poor parents expect to identify with the criteria that experts or social workers have set to create the alleged homogeneity. What these groups certainly also do is jeopardise the bridging possibilities with other socio-economic or cultural groups, or explore what may connect the targeted parents with other parents who do not match the eligibility criteria. Thirdly, the organisation of parent support in previously defined target groups assumes that the supportive functions of the

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encounter are harder to fulfil in contexts of diversity and, therefore, artificial homogeneity is to be created. This is in sharp contrast with observations in many places where parents and children come together in the growing field of studies on such meeting places. Meeting places for parents and children together, that do not target specific families, have proliferated in diverse countries, including Italy, France, Belgium and Japan (HoshiWatanabe, Musatti, Rayna & Vandenbroeck, 2015; Musatti et  al., 2016). They are places staffed by early childhood educators, social workers or volunteers that welcome parents with their young children, offering them a place for social experiences and social support. Many of these places are situated in urban contexts of diversity. As Geens and Vandenbroeck (2013) observe, these places are used by very diverse parents (in ethnicity, language or social status, for instance), yet there are daily examples to observe of how children act as brokers of relations and of how parents of very diverse origins support each other. One of the more salient characteristics of these places that facilitate the effectiveness of social support is free confrontation. Parents are undoubtedly confronted with diverse ways of parenting, diverse judgements on what is good enough and diverse ways of performing parenthood (Musatti et  al., 2016). This confrontation may entail a reflexive attitude on one’s own beliefs, attitudes and behaviours. Yet the confrontation is free, meaning that the professionals do not serve as educational experts but are experts in warranting that not one single opinion dominates. They are also experts in creating a welcoming atmosphere that facilitates encounters (Musatti et  al., 2016). It is precisely this non-judgemental attitude that enables the free confrontation that parents experience as supportive (Geens, 2015). This is in line with the work of Lofland (2009) and others (e.g. Soenen, 2003) who warn us not to judge too lightly the ephemeral contacts or the light encounters among parents. It is precisely these light encounters, marked by ambivalence between recognition

and strangeness, that create a diverse urban context that is liveable and that helps to create a sense of belonging and citizenship. Finally, this brings us to a fourth critique. International organisations, including OECD (2012b), the Council of the European Union (2009) and the European Commission (2011) are increasingly stressing the role that education in general and early childhood education in particular has to play in fostering social inclusion and social cohesion. The societal mission of early years provision, therefore, needs to go beyond educational achievements and look at what role they can play in their diverse neighbourhoods. This means that early childhood staff are not merely concerned with their relationship with each individual parent, but also reflect on how they influence the relations among parents. Such an attitude may entail a shift in expertise from not only being an expert in education (and thus giving expert answers to the questions of individual parents) to also being an expert in relations (and thus relating parents with similar questions to each other).

Discussion and Ways Forward Over the last few decades, all European countries have faced an increase in diversity. The recent growth of immigration from the Middle East and from Eastern European countries has added to the previously existing diversities. At the same time, social inequalities between and within European countries have increased and the European Union has ceased to be a ‘convergence machine’ (Vandenbroucke & Rinaldi, 2015). The present (and future) reality in our European cities is one of superdiversity. As a consequence, traditional approaches of multiculturalism and educational policies of bilingual assistants definitely belong to the past. A hypothetical group of 15 toddlers that comprised two or at most three rather homogeneous ethnic and language groups in the 1980s, consists of seven to ten different origins and languages today. Minorities are the majority.

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Moreover, these diversities themselves have become more diverse. One can simply not assume anymore that an ethnic group corresponds to a language group, with a specific culture, or a specific social stratus. Identities today are multi-layered (gender, language, ethnicity, socio-economic status, family composition and other markers intersect in various ways), hyphenated (one can perfectly be from Moroccan descent and critical to specific aspects of that heritage) and nomadic (one can bring different layers of one’s identity to the fore, depending on context and situation) (Vandenbroeck, Roets & Snoeck, 2009). The kaleidoscope of diversities is there to stay. We therefore urgently need to unpack and revise our policies and practices in early childhood education and care, as well as in parent support, since these policies and practices continue to bear the historical sediments of the ideology of homogeneity. In doing so, the policies and practices of early years provision cannot be limited to their educational mission or to focus solely on offering each child the possibility to develop to its full potential, however important and just that is. Society is not merely the addition of individual needs and individual achievements. As Biesta (2011) argues, democracy occurs where private wants are changed into public needs. The educational mission of preschool needs, therefore, to be complemented with issues of belonging, connecting and social cohesion, with bonding and bridging. We look at a few domains where pioneers have begun to show directions of how we can revise early years policies and practices and what may be possible ways forward. These include installing reciprocity in the unequal relations with parents and creating spaces where diverse parents’ voices are heard, places that take into account family cultures and other forms of diversity in early childhood education and care, amongst others by embracing functional multilingualism. Dialogical spaces are equally important in parent support programs, as well as in research programs. Of course, rethinking policies and practices that support superdiversity is not limited to these domains.

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Housing policies, urban development, welfare and employment policies, adult education and many more equally matter and it would be presumptuous to think that early childhood education is the panacea for the new social question. This necessary acknowledgement of humility, however, cannot diverge us from being ambitious by taking up the challenges of social inclusion and social cohesion and from using the opportunities that belong to early years provision and may still be underexploited.

Creating Reciprocity in Unequal Relations Central in any way forward is the dialogue with parents or the ethics of an encounter, as Dahlberg and Moss (2005) have called this stance. One simply cannot take care of children without taking care of their family. The issue here is not to renew the illusion of having an equal relationship between professionals and parents in a dialogue without power relations. That indeed is just an illusion that will only mask the existing profound inequalities. As Spivak (1988) and, more recently, Tobin (2009) have explained, there are many reasons why some parents (e.g. immigrant parents) cannot and will not speak up for their needs and wants: unfamiliarity with the task and the conventions of discussions with early years professionals; discomfort in the early years setting; language barriers (and the fear of appearing stupid); lack of trust (it might be safer to say nothing); fatalism (whatever I say, it will not make a difference anyway); social isolation and economic stress, making it hard to keep appointments; deference to professionals; and probably many others. Our own qualitative studies with immigrant parents have shown that they may take up any advice from professionals, rather than expressing their own needs (Vandenbroeck et al., 2009). The challenge, therefore, is not to create equal relations, but rather twofold: how to install reciprocity in profoundly unequal relations and how to respond to questions one does not understand. A salient example of the

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latter is the deliberate non-take-up of early childhood services, as I explain further on. There is a shared concern among policymakers and researchers about the unequal use of high-quality early childhood education and care services, considering the robust research findings about their beneficial effects in the long term. A first generation of this research has concentrated on parental choice, somewhat neglecting the notion that differences in behaviour are, to a large extent, moulded by environmental constraints, rather than the result of choices (Vandenbroeck & Lazzari, 2014). Second-generation studies focused, therefore, more on accessibility, availability and affordability and unveiled how policies have profound effects on differential use, showing, for instance, that universal services reach more underprivileged parents than targeted services and that markets are quite inefficient when it comes to fairness (e.g. Van Lancker, 2014). Even more recently, it became obvious that even in regions where access, availability and affordability are universal, there is still an unequal use that can hardly be explained by environmental constraints. One example is that in Belgium, preschools for children from 2.5 years onwards are universally available, free of charge, full day, staffed by professional bachelor-degree teachers and quality is centrally monitored. While enrolment reaches almost 100%, there is an increasing inequality in the actual presence of children, children from migrant and poor families being more often absent than their better-off peers. Almost 15% of 3-year-old children from migrant and poor families have attended less than 150 half days of preschool, while this is hardly the case for middle-class children (Department of Education, 2015). This is countered by policymakers with massive campaigns explaining the educational benefits of early learning and by coercive measures including restricting child allowances when a child is absent from school too often (Vandenbroeck et al., 2013; Vlaamse overheid, 2016). However, the deliberate nontake-up of social and educational services can never be understood without a dialogue with

those who are concerned, in order to comprehend not only what they consider accessible, affordable and available, but also desirable and useful. An ongoing research including focus groups with almost 80 parents, many of whom share the sociological characteristics of the parents that are targeted by these policies (Van Laere & Vandenbroeck, 2016), shows quite a different picture. The participating parents were, without exception, well aware of the educational benefits of the preschool, meaning that the campaigns tried to persuade parents of issues of which they were already persuaded. Yet, they expressed many concerns about care (i.e. food, sleeping habits, potty training and – most importantly – showing love to children) and worried about how care and education are considered as separate entities in our preschool system. They also deeply discussed language issues, yet not merely as a learning issue (children need to learn the dominant language) but also as a care and a social issue (what happens if my child does not understand the instructions or cannot communicate with his peers?). The basis for creating reciprocity is obviously laid before the child arrives at the centre. It is a matter of creating the physical environment that invites parents to enter and stay in the centre, it is about the attitude of the staff who are open to the unexpected and the unconventional, and it is very much about this period of mutual adaptation, when a child is accompanied by her family – often several times – before she attends the centre regularly. This period of mutual adaptation is not the moment to explain ‘how we do’, yet a privileged moment to hear about the parents’ concerns, anxieties and expectations (Vandenbroeck et al., 2009). This is the period in which the staff balance this impossible paradox, eloquently described by Derrida: Pure hospitality is welcoming who is arriving, before any conditions are set, before knowing or asking whatsoever, not even a name or an ‘identity’ paper. But hospitality also supposes that one names him, whilst avoiding that this question becomes a ‘condition’. That is a subtle, yet fundamental difference, where politics and ethics are decided. (Derrida & Dufourmantelle, 1977, author’s translation)

Supporting (Super)Diversity in Early Childhood Settings

Welcome Disagreement We learn from Spivak (1988), Tobin (2009) and our own studies that it is not because immigrant parents do not raise questions that they do not have questions. A powerful way to include parents in the discussions on their children is pedagogical documentation (e.g. Dahlberg & Moss, 2005; Dahlberg, Moss & Pence, 1999; Lazzari, 2011; Rinaldi, 2005). This means that professionals document in many ways what children do and what they, as professionals, do with children. The staff use this documentation (writings, drawings, narratives, footage, etc.) to discuss the meaning of what they observed with each other and with parents in order to enhance their professional reflexivity (Lazzari, 2011) as well as the democratic level of their service (Dahlberg & Moss, 2005). Of course, this will inevitably entail disagreement as it is highly improbable that –when we reflect on what is happening in a classroom – we would all agree on its meaning (Vandenbroeck, 2009). Disagreements will inevitably occur regarding the use of home languages, potty training, meals, control of behaviour, disciplining practices and many more aspects of the daily practice of education. This disagreement is to be welcomed as a basis for reflexive practice (Kunneman, 2005; Peeters, 2008). It is precisely the disagreement – defined as the diversities of parental ­ethnotheories (Bruner, 1996) and practices – that favours the free confrontation in the meeting places with parents and children. Of course, this free confrontation can only flourish and form a basis for reflective practice (and thus also act as a source of support) in a climate of belonging, confidence and fairness (Geens, 2015). It also demands that we leave too simplistic assumptions behind on how specific groups of parents may have specific (and equal) needs. That would underestimate the power of children as brokers of relations (Geens, 2015).

A Final Note on Multilingualism How to deal with multilingualism is one of the issues that has profoundly divided practitioners,

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parents, researchers and policymakers between and among them. While some parents favour an assistant who speaks their child’s language, others may consider it to be a discriminating practice not to immerse their child in the dominant language (Tobin, Arzubiaga & Adair, 2013). Researchers have remained divided regarding the long-term effects of different approaches (Sierens & Van Avermaet, 2014; Van Avermaet, 2009). Rather than continuing the sterile historical battle between bilingual and immersion programs, we may wish to acknowledge that the context of superdiversity is a genuine game changer. In such a context, the dominant language serves not only as a form of cultural capital that is a condition for social mobility, but also as a possible lingua franca. The present-day generation of scholars in this field seem to agree that the knowledge of each language contributes to the learning of an additional language because it enhances language awareness (Young and Hélot, 2007). Therefore, multilingual children are better equipped to learn any additional language such as the school language (Cummins, 2000). Their linguistic repertoire can be a scaffold for learning the language of schooling and, more generally, for acquiring new knowledge (Sierens & Van Avermaet, 2014). This insight forms the basis for functional multilingualism, in which the teacher attempts to support all languages and language awareness, including the languages the teacher does not master himself (Hélot et al., 2017). This may be done by building on the multilingual capacities of some children to assist their monolingual peers, as well as by including parents of different origins in the classroom. As Sierens and Van Avermaet (2014) argue, research into the functional applicability of home languages in the classroom is quite recent but shows promising results (e.g. García & Wei, 2014; Moodley, 2007). Functional multilingualism is still very new and faces resistance by policymakers, as language policies are historically, as well as in the present ideologically, strongly related to identity politics. In sum, be it in the field of education, multilingualism or parent support, the myth of

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homogeneity has always been counterproductive for equity and fairness. Also, today the search for homogeneity blinds us from seeing the social and educational opportunities that diversity (of ages, of origins, of languages, etc.) may present us with.

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Tischler, V., Rademeyer, A. & Vostanis, P. (2007). Mothers experiencing homelessness: Mental health, support and social care needs. Health & Social Care in the Community, 15(3), 246–253. Tobin, J. (2009). Children crossing borders: Including the voices of migrant families in ECEC programs. Unpublished working paper. Tobin, J., Arzubiaga, A. E. & Adair, J. K. (2013). Children crossing borders. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Tobin, J., Hsueh, Y. & Karasawa, M. (2009). Preschool in three cultures revisited: China, Japan and the United States. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Van Avermaet, P. (2009). Fortress Europe? Language policy regimes for immigration and citizenship. In G. Hogan-Brun, C. Mar-Molinero & P. Stevenson (Eds.), Testing regimes: Cross-national perspectives on language, migration and citizenship (pp. 15–43). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Vandenbroeck, M. (2003). From crèches to childcare: Constructions of motherhood and inclusion/exclusion in the history of Belgian infant care. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 4(3), 137–148. Vandenbroeck, M. (2007). Beyond anti-bias education: Changing conceptions of diversity and equity in European early childhood education. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 15(1), 21–35. Vandenbroeck, M. (2009). Let us disagree. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 17(2), 165–170. Vandenbroeck, M. & Lazzari, A. (2014). Accessibility of early childhood education and care: A state of affairs. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 22(3), 327–335. Vandenbroeck, M., Coussée, F. & Bradt, L. (2010). The social and political construction of early childhood education. British Journal of Educational Studies, 58(2), 139–153. Vandenbroeck, M., De Stercke, N. & Gobeyn, H. (2013). What if the rich child has poor parents? The relationship from a Flemish perspective. In P. Moss (Ed.), Early childhood and compulsory education: Reconceptualising the relationship (pp. 174–191). London: Routledge. Vandenbroeck, M., Roets, G. & Snoeck, A. (2009). Immigrant mothers crossing borders: Nomadic identities and multiple belongings in early childhood education: European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 17(2), 203–216.

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Vandenbroucke, F. (2004). Vandaag kampioen in wiskunde, morgen ook in gelijke kansen. Beleidsnota van de Vlaamse minister van Onderwijs en Vorming, 2004–2009 [Policy brief from the Flemish Minister of Education and Training, 2004–2009]. Brussels: Ministerie van Onderwijs en Vorming. Vandenbroucke, F. & Rinaldi, D. (2015). Inégalités sociales en Europe. Le défi de la convergence et de la cohesion [Social inequality in Europe. The challenge of convergence and cohesion]. Policy Paper 147. Brussels: Institut Jacques Delors. Van Laere, K. & Vandenbroeck, M. (2016). The (in)convenience of care in preschool education: Examining views of staff on educare. Early Years. Online first. DOI: 10.1080/ 09575146.2016.1252727. Van Lancker, W. (2014). To whose benefit? An empirical and comparative investigation into the (un)intended consequences of family policy in the social investment state. Antwerp: University Press Antwerp. Vedder, P., Bouwer, E. & Pels, T. (1996). Multicultural child care. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Vertovec, S. (2007). Super-diversity and its ­implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30(6), 1024–1054. Vlaamse overheid (2016). Toelatingsvoorwaarden leerlingen in het gewoon basisonderwijs. Omzendbrief BaO/2001/10 [Conditions of enrollment for children in primary school]. Brussels: Vlaamse overheid. Weiss, M. J. (2002). Hardiness and social support as predictors of stress in mothers of typical children, children with autism, and children with mental retardation. Autism, 6(1), 115–130. Winkworth, G., McArthur, M., Layton, M. & Thompson, L. (2010) Someone to check in on me: Social  capital, social support and vulnerable parents with very young children in the Australian Capital Territory. Child & Family Social Work, 15(2), 206–215. Young, A. & Hélot, C. (2007). Parent power: Parents as linguistic and cultural resource at school. In A. Camilleri Grima (Ed.), Promoting linguistic diversity and whole-school development (pp. 17–32). Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing.

25 Challenges of Practicing Democracy in Polish Preschools Katarzyna Gawlicz

I can’t imagine we can keep living the way we are living. And I think it would simply be unfair if – knowing that the system I grew up in, in which we live, does not work – I kept working in accordance with it only because it’s easy and convenient. (A democratic preschool teacher)

‘Democracy in preschools? Does there even exist a referent of the object of your study?’ Such reactions are not isolated, as in Poland early childhood education and democracy are rarely immediately associated with each other. Democracy is not a prominent term in policy regulations, textbooks and other training materials, preschool charters, or academic publications in the field. In light of Poland’s recent history, this may come as a surprise. 1989 has been heralded as the return to democracy and the recovery of political and economic freedom curtailed during the post-World War II (WWII) period of Soviet dominance. Democracy was inscribed in the new Constitution, as well as in the Law on the System of Education. A singular, centrally mandated curriculum was

replaced with a less prescriptive core curriculum, schools’ autonomy in designing their educational programs increased, and the possibility to open non-public educational institutions, as well as to fulfill compulsory education outside of school, was introduced. Teachers were supposed to become autonomous subjects in control of their professional activity, rather than being transmitters of state ideology. The transition to democracy, however, also proved to be a transition to neoliberal capitalism, with its effects on education. In relation to early childhood education and care (ECEC), one of the most immediate consequences was a radical decrease in the accessibility of services. While preschool provision in the post-war socialist period was far from universal, improving access to childcare services was part of the official state ideology of ensuring women’s emancipation and equal opportunities for all children, which was explicitly framed as democratization efforts (Kupisiewicz,

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2006). In 1990, the responsibility for education was shifted from the central government to municipalities, and a sizable proportion of preschools and nurseries closed down when local governments lacked the financial resources and/or good will to keep them up. Companies that maintained 11 percent of preschools before 1990 also shed responsibility for them (Pawlak, 2006, p. 50). As a result, between 1990 and 1999 the number of preschools decreased by 29 percent, and the number of children attending them dropped by 16 percent, to the level of 50.8 percent of children aged 3–6. The figures were particularly dramatic for children aged 3–5 and living in rural areas: in 1999 only 15.7 percent of this group attended preschool (Swianiewicz et al., 2013, pp. 16–17). Later developments brought about an increasing commodification of ECEC. With the insufficient provision of public services, other entities stepped in to offer privatized, often expensive, care. Mechanisms of neoliberal management, such as a focus on efficiency, accountability, and standardization, limited the autonomy of educational institutions and individual teachers. Finally, the transformation period entailed a heightened influence of the Catholic Church, with the adherence to the Christian value system inscribed in the Law on the System of Education in 1991 and religion instruction introduced to public schools and preschools. These factors all contribute to setting a general framework that is not supportive of practicing democracy. In this chapter I analyze some dimensions of the process of bringing democratic practice to Polish early childhood education. A comprehensive analysis of it would be well beyond the scope of this chapter; instead, I intend to explore some challenges and tensions that mark this process. I examine some examples from the historical legacy of early childhood education that are either supportive of, or detrimental to, current attempts to introduce more democratic practice to preschools, and identify social, cultural, and legal factors that contribute to the framework

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in which preschools operate. Finally, I turn to the voices of some teachers that demonstrate that practicing democracy in early childhood education is premised on adults’ willingness to engage in a challenging transformation process that requires them to radically rethink the foundations of ECEC. This chapter draws on an analysis of policy documents, historical sources, and existing research on recent developments in early childhood education in Poland, as well as transcripts of in-depth individual or group interviews I carried out between 2013 and 2016 in 19 institutions in different parts of Poland, primarily in large cities.1 I talked to 32 preschool teachers and principals, and a member of a parent association that manages one of the centers. In six cases, the interviews were supplemented with short-term observations. The participants were selected based on their membership in one of three categories: 11 of them were teachers and principals from public preschools that, having originated and worked for many years as typical institutions, made a decision to radically transform their educational practice toward more democratic approaches; 11 were teachers and principals from non-public institutions that were strongly inspired by the movement of free schools based on democratic principles; and, finally, 10 were teachers who valued and attempted to implement democratic practices, but worked in more traditional institutions that did not explicitly identify with democratic values. The main objective of the interviews was to probe into the practitioners’ understanding of democratic practice with young children, their perception of its merits, and the challenges experienced in the process of its implementation. The interviewees from the first category were also invited to reflect on the preschool transformation process. While not representative of Polish early childhood education practitioners overall, these voices well illustrate the complexities of introducing into educational institutions democratic practices that – for historical, social, and cultural reasons – may

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appear foreign to them, in Poland and, potentially, elsewhere.

Preschool Education and Care in Poland: Background Information The ECEC system in Poland is divided into two separate segments: nurseries for children under the age of 3, overseen by the Ministry of Family, Labor and Social Policy, and preschools for children aged 3–6, under the Ministry of National Education. Preschool education is fairly diversified. First, there are different types of services: all-day preschools (most common), introductory units at elementary schools, and other preschool settings (units and centers that operate under more relaxed regulations than regular preschools). Second, they can be operated as public institutions (by municipalities or contracted bodies), or as non-public ones. The management of preschools is shared between municipalities and the Ministry of Education, and the financing comes, in various proportions depending on the legal status of an institution, from local and central budgets, and parents’ contributions. Public preschools provide five hours of preschool education per day, free of charge, while fees for the remaining time are capped at an affordable rate. Non-public preschools charge fees set at their discretion. Recent years have witnessed concerted efforts to increase preschool enrollment, which reached 84.2 percent of preschool-age children in 2015–16. The enrollment rates vary, however, between urban and rural areas: in the former, 98.1 percent of children aged 3–5 attended, as compared to 65.1 percent in the latter. Furthermore, there was a difference in the type of services offered. Full-day preschools dominated in the cities, whereas in the countryside, introductory units at schools and other preschool settings, typically working shorter hours, were more popular (GUS, 2016, pp. 63–4).

While the organization of non-public preschools may differ, in the public ones children are typically divided by age into groups of 25 supervised by two teachers working shifts and, optionally, auxiliary staff. The vast majority of preschool teachers are women, and they constitute a relatively welleducated (a minimum BA degree is commonly expected), but greatly underpaid, group.

Conceptualizing Democracy in Early Childhood Education Democracy, a complex and contested concept, is perhaps most immediately identified with its formal dimension as ‘a political regime form based on the rule of the many, in contrast to the rule of the few’, characterized by individual freedom, personal responsibility, and the rule of law (Gobel & Leininger, 2011, p. 387–88). ‘The rule of the many’ spreads across different levels, from local to transnational, and in modern democracies is exercised predominately by representatives. Importantly, ‘the many’ has historically been an exclusionary category, with children still remaining outside of its scope (Coady, 2008). However, democracy also has its more informal dimension, which could be interpreted as a way to translate a narrowly political notion into everyday practice. Informal democracy rests on the Deweyan (1988) understanding of democracy as a way of personal life rather than something institutional and external, with free discussion and expression of differences at its heart. Bentley phrases it as everyday democracy that is ‘extending democratic power and responsibility simultaneously to the settings of everyday life’ and safeguarding people’s possibility to ‘actively create the world in which they live’ (2005, pp. 20–1), or, in Levin’s words, ‘to participate in some meaningful way in the making of public decisions’ (1998, p. 58). ‘[I]neradicable difference and disagreement’ and ‘negotiating on the basis of shared adherence to certain

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principles’ (Moss, 2009, p. 40) are further characteristics of informal, everyday democracy. In the educational context, both dimensions of democracy are crucial (Moss, 2014, p. 115). On one hand, governments at different levels define a framework that is (or is not) supportive of democratic practices in school or preschool; on the other hand, educational institutions can – or, some argue, should – be one of the settings for enactment of everyday democracy. Integral to everyday democracy is the development of a specific ethos based on the commitment to creating conditions for everyone involved to genuinely participate (Trafford, 2008, p. 411), while remembering that ‘an individual cannot have democracy all by himself or herself’ (Levin, 1998, p. 61) and that democratic practice is inherently collective. While discussing it in detail is beyond the scope of this chapter, it needs to be remembered that nurturing the true spirit of participation is a challenging enterprise that requires mutual trust, willingness to listen to different perspectives, and the perception of children, teachers, and parents as competent citizens (Cagliari, Barozzi & Giudici, 2004; Dahlberg, Moss & Pence, 2007; Dewey, 1988). Democratic ethos takes shape in pedagogical practices that build on the agency of all involved. Moss lists some of them: practices of decision-making, evaluation based on participatory means (such as pedagogical documentation), democratic learning, creating conditions for contesting dominant discourses, and opening up for change (2014, pp. 124–30). More specifically, democratic pedagogical practices may include designing instruments for involving children in deciding various aspects of their lives in preschool. Some of these instruments could be quite formal, such as parliaments or general meetings that give everyone a chance to express their views, or negotiate and develop plans, but there could also be informal procedures of making decisions in everyday life situations, such as playing, eating, or resting.

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Other examples could be learning/teaching practices that favor children’s and teachers’ involvement in co-constructing knowledge based on their interests and desires; for instance, through the project approach, or designing mechanisms for solving conflicts in a participatory manner. The conceptualization of democracy that informs this chapter includes both formal and informal dimensions, seen as intertwined. While acknowledging the importance of decisions made at local and central government levels for the functioning of an educational institution (concerning, among others, curricula, funding, and working conditions), I focus on some aspects of informal, everyday democracy, in particular those that relate to children and teachers as active participants in a preschool constructed as a democratic space.

Learning from the Past Whilst democracy in Polish early childhood education discourse tends to be presented as a rather new feature, there is actually a long history of efforts to work with children in a way that would currently be identified as democratic. Some inspiration can be found as early as around the turn of the twentieth century, when progressivist ideas shaped early preschools, with the pedagogical theories of Montessori, Decroly, or Parkhurst being popularized in professional magazines and handbooks for teachers (Wróbel, 1967, pp. 100–3). For instance, a manual on establishing preschools, published in 1930, stipulated that children ought to be given complete freedom of movement and choice of work and play, and their self-reliance, responsibility, internal discipline, and ability to collaborate with others should be developed (Bogdanowiczowa et al., 1930, p. 25). While such ideas were not automatically and universally implemented, there are examples of attempts to put progressive approaches

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to childhood education into practice. For instance, as early as in 1911, the Home of Children was opened in Warsaw, whose aims included enhancing children’s independence and their ability to coexist with others. Rewards and punishments were forsaken, and children planned their own activities and defined their own obligations toward themselves and each other (Bobrowska-Nowak, 1978, pp. 219–23). Similar principles guided preschools established in the interwar period by the Workers’ Friends of Children Society, where children’s involvement in the life of the neighborhood was emphasized (Wróbel, 1967, pp. 110–12). One of the major, but insufficiently remembered, sources of inspiration for democratic practice from that period is the pedagogical approach developed by Janusz Korczak. As a director of an orphanage for Jewish children, the Home of Orphans, which he managed along with his colleague Stefania Wilczyńska, he instituted a system that was based on the principle of children’s citizenship (Smolińska-Theiss, 2013) and which tends to be termed a children’s republic or a small democracy (Hammarberg, 2009; Lifton, 2005). At the foundation of his approach lay his deep belief in a fundamental equality of children and adults, expressed in his often-recalled phrase: ‘There are no children as such – there are human beings’ (Korczak, 2013, p. 20). In line with the Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1924), he perceived children as holders of rights and experts on their own lives. In The Child’s Right to Respect and Loving Every Child he developed a catalogue of the rights of the child, which included the rights to death, to the present day, to be oneself, and to be respected (Korczak, 2007, 2009; see also Veerman, 1992). Korczak’s vision of the child was one of a competent citizen, as opposed to a popular perception of a child as a ‘citizen-to-be’, ‘a future person, but not yet, not today’ (2009, pp. 26–7). He urged to treat childhood seriously, emphasizing that there is not a life ‘that exists as some joke’ (2009, p. 33). Perceiving children as

‘rational beings’, aware of their ‘needs, difficulties, and obstacles in life’, he believed that ‘needed is not a despotic order, imposed discipline, or distrustful control, but tactful understanding; faith in experience; co-operation and co-existence are the real basis of child care’ (2009, pp. 34–5). These principles were practiced daily in the Home of Orphans. Korczak asked: ‘How will he know tomorrow unless we allow him a conscious, responsible life today?’ (2009, p. 36) and developed a whole range of instruments that helped children become responsible for themselves and their community. One of them was the Court of Peers, which Korczak considered instrumental in ensuring that children’s rights are observed, adults’ despotism halted, and the idea of justice imparted to children (Korczak, 2013). The Parliament was another tool for enhancing self-government, while through house duties, such as cleaning, helping in the kitchen or the laundry, or cutting hair, the children shared responsibility for the maintenance of the house and could, therefore, become ‘the patron, the worker, and the head of the home’ (2013, p. 154). As a way to promote mutual support and care, older children were assigned to look after newcomers and introduce them to life in the Home (Merżan, 1987, pp. 39–40). The Little Review, a weekly magazine that published letters and articles written by thousands of young reporters and correspondents from the whole country, was one of the means to make sure that children’s voices could be widely heard (Lifton, 2005). Korczak’s work was halted by WWII, and later the memory of his heroic death in the Treblinka concentration camp, along with the children he refused to leave behind, overshadowed his progressive educational p­ ractice – perhaps, in part, because it was too radical for many to accept. Post-WWII developments in the field of ECEC tend to be construed as antithetical to democracy. Pedagogical practice, under the influence of Soviet pedagogy, reaffirmed the ideology of the child as tabula rasa, and with it came the principle of directing a child’s

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development as the primary objective of education (Waloszek, 2006). Still, the subsequent versions of the national curriculum, otherwise focused on didactics, contained a sizable section on moral and social education, which highlighted the importance of collaboration and peaceful coexistence with others, learning to solve conflicts, carry out one’s duties responsibly, look after children who needed assistance, and so on. Already in 1957, the ‘misconception’ that there were different toys for girls and boys was opposed (MO, 1957). The mid-1980s witnessed a particularly inspiring development. In the course of an action research project, An alternative in preschool education, carried out as part of a larger initiative called Wrocław School of the Future, a group of academic researchers and practitioners worked with children from a public preschool with the aim of developing their intrinsic motivation, ability to selfcontrol, and pro-social attitudes. The driving force behind the project was a ‘desire to work differently than the majority of preschools’, which led to a refusal to follow the curriculum and, instead, developing a list of more general objectives and concentrating on issues of interest to children and their teachers (Zwiernik, 2013, p. 349). The team also devised a specific teaching method which involved inviting children to undertake (or not) open-ended tasks that entailed making decisions, planning one’s work, taking responsibility for it, and collaborating with others (Zwiernik, 1996). Although by no means standard, this approach is still practiced in some preschools.

Democracy in Polish Preschools: The Present-Day Context If democracy involves having the possibility to actively create the world in which one lives, this is still typically not what children, teachers, and parents currently experience in preschools. A recent study on teachers’

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perception of democratic practice in preschool revealed that they consider this virtually impossible, attributing it to children’s young age and a consequent lack of competences needed to make conscious decisions and take responsibility, as well as the risk that it could compromise children’s safety, result in chaos, and make it difficult to implement the Core Curriculum (Falkiewicz-Szult, 2014, pp. 116–21). Children experience preschool as a place where ‘teachers rule’ while children are expected to follow their requests and orders, pertaining to nearly all aspects of everyday life in the institution (Gawlicz, 2009). Teachers, however, also frequently perceive themselves as having little autonomy and decision-making power. Several preschool teachers who attempt to work democratically, whom I interviewed, frequently admitted that their influence was limited to the group of children they were directly in charge of. They experienced pressure from their colleagues who did not approve of their teaching approach and principals who closely monitored their work. The parents’ position is also ambiguous. While the Law on the System of Education grants them the right to form advisory councils, in practice their influence appears rather limited. Indeed, some public preschool teachers I talked to admitted that their institutions failed to create conditions for parents’ substantial participation, limiting their role to occasional help in organizational matters. In non-public preschools, on the other hand, parents may wield more influence, but as clients who buy educational and care services and need to be satisfied, rather than as engaged citizens.

Legal Regulations as a Framework for (the Lack of) Democratic Practices Legal regulations and their application are a clear example of the tensions pervading democratization efforts. The Law on the System of Education and other legislation

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grant preschools a relatively high degree of autonomy. Preschools are obligated to plan and carry out their work according to the Core Curriculum published by the Ministry of Education. First introduced in 1992 to replace a very detailed, centrally designed national curriculum, this concise document defines the general objectives of preschool education, but without prescribing ways in which these are supposed to be achieved. For this purpose, individual curricula are developed on the basis of the Core Curriculum, and preschools have the right to choose from ready-made ones, modify them for their needs, or design their own. Furthermore, other regulations require teachers to plan and document their work, yet leave it up to individual preschools to determine what form this will take. There is also legislation in place that enables educational institutions to implement innovations based solely on the decision of the teaching staff. However, the autonomy provided by the legal framework may shrink in practice as the regulations clash with the well-established mindset of educational professionals. For instance, having gotten used to the security of prescribed curricula, some teachers find it too challenging to take responsibility for developing their own programs. Instead, they rely on the abundance of ready-made, detailed educational resources, which they strive to fully implement (Kuszak, 2013). Such resources include teachers’ guidebooks that, as a teacher I interviewed observed, ‘govern every minute of your time’ (T22P).2 Although not required, some preschools continue to prepare elaborate monthly and weekly teaching plans that determine in advance the course of a day, and departing from them is discouraged. As a result, teachers who try to follow children’s needs and interests report on being forced to live a ‘double life’ when they have to document what they have planned to do rather than what they have actually done with children. Such tendencies could be partly explained by the inability of some, especially older, practitioners to overcome habits developed throughout the years and by the failure of

teacher training programs to support future educators in fostering commitment to democracy as a value. However, they are exacerbated by a strong pressure on the schoolification of preschool education combined with a continual presence of the behaviorist approach (KlusStańska, 2006). Since 1932, Polish ECEC has sat firmly within the pre-primary tradition (Bennett, 2008), and preparing children for school has been considered one of a preschool’s primary responsibilities. The Core Curriculum clearly specifies what a child needs to achieve before going to school. Relying on prescribed curricula, standardized teaching resources, and the role of the teacher as one who properly directs children’s learning may, therefore, appear as a safe strategy to fulfill the task of getting children ready for school (FalkiewiczSzult, 2007). Finally, despite changes to the external evaluation system, there is a widespread (and sometimes well-founded) fear of controlling bodies resulting in the unwillingness to experiment, as well as a tendency to present one’s work in a manner that will presumably please the inspectors (Mazurkiewicz & Walczak, 2012). This issue clearly emerged in my interviews, with several practitioners bitterly observing that inspectors ‘control and assess’ rather than offering support. The Core Curriculum itself is remarkably silent on the issue of democracy, and while giving teachers a degree of autonomy in organizing their work with students, it constructs a child who conforms to the existing order rather than actively co-creating the world around him or her. Although it stipulates that children should know their rights and obligations, the emphasis is put on ‘agreeable functioning in play and task situations’, politely addressing others and following (but not contributing to developing) rules. The only reference to communicating one’s needs is included in the section on speech development. Admittedly, one of the objectives concerns supporting the sense of identity of children from national and ethnic minorities. However, references to diversity are rather general: a child ‘knows that all people have equal rights’ and that ‘one should not brag about

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wealth and should not harass children who live under more difficult conditions, as well as that one should not scorn or persecute others’, and ‘understands the need to respect others’ distinctness and autonomy’ (MEN, 2016).3 The detrimental effects of the lack of specificity in addressing diversity can be seen in persistent practices of reinforcing gender stereotypes, marginal participation of minority (especially Romani) children in preschool education, or different forms of exclusion or discrimination of non-Catholic children (Falkiewicz-Szult, 2007; Gawlicz & Starnawski, 2013).

The Social Perception of Children as a Barrier to Children’s Democratic Participation As has been observed, a major obstacle to children’s participation is a deeply ingrained educational ideology based on authoritarianism in which children’s position is characterized by ‘nearly indisputable subordination and obedience’ (Jarosz, 2013, p. 56). This kind of ideology finds its illustration in popular sayings, such as ‘Children and fish have no voice’, in the category of parental authority used in legislation to refer to parents’ relationships with their children, and in attitudes toward violence against children: physical punishment of children was criminalized only in 2010 and recent opinion polls demonstrate wide acceptance of spanking as a method of upbringing (Jarosz & Kurkowski, 2015). The extent of violence against children in educational institutions, including nurseries and preschools, is only slowly being unearthed. Furthermore, while ratifying the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1991, Poland declared that parental authority and Polish customs and traditions concerning a child’s place in and outside of family have to be respected in the execution of children’s rights. Finally, the dominant pedagogical discourse is not supportive of children’s participation. It has been exposed (Klus-Stańska, 2007) that it favors

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constructions such as a ‘System with Deficits’ and a ‘Sweet Elf’ that position children as either incompetent and in need of correction, or vulnerable and therefore requiring protection. In neither case can children be trusted to make decisions, be involved in negotiations, or take responsibility for their own work.

Signs of Change Against this backdrop, there has been a visible rise in attempts to introduce educational practices that privilege children’s participation, decision-making, and agency. The most noticeable example is the growing movement of so-called free schools, initiated by parents who, dissatisfied with the mainstream education system, withdraw their children from school and, instead of homeschooling them, set up independent centers where small groups of children learn collectively (Uryga & Wiatr, 2015). They explicitly subscribe to the principles outlined by the European Democratic Education Community: selfdetermined learning and egalitarian relationships between children and adults. While the free schools operate at the margin of the educational system, there are also clear signs of change within. One of the most impressive examples is a long-term action research project carried out with the chain of public nurseries in the city of Łódź in the early 2000s. Aimed directly at strengthening the autonomy and participation of children below 3 and with a strong focus on children’s perspective, it supported caregivers in shifting from directiveness to ‘accompanying children in their development’. Through a process of systematic observation of their own pedagogical practice, reflection on it, and transformation of it, practitioners developed a new perception of the child as competent, creative, and capable of collaborating and making choices (Telka, 2009). There has been an observable increase in the popularity of educational approaches dating back to progressivism, such as those inspired by Maria Montessori,

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Célestin Freinet, or the Dalton Plan, as well as of the project approach to working with young children. Finally, the traditional perception of the child–adult relationship is being radically challenged with Marshall Rosenberg’s non-violent communication that is starting to be practiced in preschools.

Practicing Democracy in Preschool What happens when preschools decide to start putting democratic values into practice? The remainder of this chapter focuses on the experiences of practitioners working in institutions that made such a decision, drawing on the voices of teachers from public preschools that transformed themselves into more democratic centers and non-public ones for which democracy has been an important reference point from the beginning. Their reflections reveal that practicing democracy, while easy to declare, is a highly challenging process that demands constantly resolving tensions and overcoming one’s own limitations. The most significant tensions arise when, first, principles of freedom and equality – identified by the practitioners as foundational of democracy – are employed in everyday life, and, second, individual and collective dimensions of democratic practice meet each other. Finally, practicing democracy emerges from the teachers’ accounts as a process preconditioned by embarking on everlasting change: of one’s pedagogical practice, but, most importantly, of one’s perception of a child and oneself as a teacher.

Democratic Preschool: Freedom and Equality Two categories emerged from the teachers’ narratives as defining features of democracy in preschool: freedom and equality. In the words of one practitioner, ‘there is no democratic place without the freedom to decide for oneself’ (T5NP). Although the teachers talked

about their own freedom to plan and carry out their work, they applied this notion primarily to children, who, in their view, needed to be guaranteed the right to make choices and decisions pertaining to different aspects of their preschool life. They believed that the experience of having a real influence on one’s own life is instrumental in fostering children’s individual development: they are ‘put in a situation when they have to confront themselves, when there are no adults who tell them: now you have to sit and do this, and now you have to do that’ (T27NP). At the same time, however, some of them were adamant about setting limits of children’s decision-making power. One’s observation that children ‘still have to learn democracy’ (T20P) resonated with the opinions voiced by some other teachers that children were too young to know what they really wanted and what their interests were, or too impulsive to decide. Several practitioners pointed to organizational factors or systemic requirements that circumscribed children’s decision-making power. Nevertheless, they all strived to involve children in decisions concerning a whole range of issues, including free play, rest time, meals, and educational activities. Although it was mainly the adults who planned educational activities, they ensured that children had the right to decide, whenever possible, how to carry them out, or to refuse to participate in them. Some teachers took steps to broaden children’s influence by collectively discussing and deciding on ideas for projects or topics, picking up themes from children’s free play or inviting them to choose an issue of interest to them, investigate it at home, and then present it. Significantly, for teachers who had experienced more directive approaches, the possibility of following children’s interests rather than ready-made plans was truly liberating. Giving children the freedom to decide may sound simple, but practicing it poses major challenges. For instance, how does one ensure that everyone’s voice is heard and matters? This is particularly difficult with children with special needs who may not be able to fully grasp group regulations, but who still have the

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right to express their views and participate in decision-making, even when it leads to disruption. Similarly, very young children may not be capable of saying what they want, but nonetheless they should be given a choice and made aware that their voice matters. This is also a question of decision-making mechanisms themselves. Majority voting was voiced by some teachers as the essentially democratic method and a good, albeit painful, way to learn that sometimes you have to follow others’ decisions rather than your own. However, several teachers, realizing that it ultimately excludes some voices, favored other methods, for instance consensus decision-making, or used voting only to determine the order of activities. And what about establishing and following rules? Teachers agreed that rules had to be worked out collectively through discussion and negotiation, with the exception of those pertaining to physical integrity. Yet some practitioners admitted that the process of rule-making could be misused by adults who manipulate children into accepting regulations that have, in fact, been imposed on them. There is research that indeed attests to such practices (Olczak, 2010). And what should be done when a child exercises their freedom and breaks a rule? A sensible answer would be that they should bear the consequences of it, but some teachers experienced it as potentially unjustly restrictive, while others pointed out that there are different needs behind resistance that should not be overlooked. Equality is also a tricky concept. For some, it meant that children need to have a sense that they are equal to adults and that no hierarchy exists between these two groups, which may constitute too much of an abstraction from the social and cultural context. Others, perhaps more realistically, emphasized that teachers are not merely order-givers or the only people who direct and should delegate more responsibility to children rather than making all of the decisions themselves. Furthermore, the principle of equality was less readily applied to parents than to children. The practitioners emphasized the need to keep parents well informed, consulted, and involved, and

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created a wide range of opportunities for them to engage in the preschool life (which they often declined). However, hardly ever did parents have an equal say in defining the profile of a preschool, the only exception being a center managed by a parents’ association. As a result, despite making a conscious decision to enroll their child in a specific preschool, some parents might not have been fully convinced about its democratic principles and tried to put pressure on teachers to act in a manner the practitioners considered unacceptable. In such cases the staff members were not willing to compromise on the fundamental values on which a preschool rested and the expressions of parents’ voice were restricted.

Individual and Collective Dimensions of Preschool Democracy With democracy being ‘characteristic of communities or societies, not of individuals’ (Levin, 1998, p. 61), the construction of preschool democracy that emerges from the accounts of the practitioners I talked to is not limited to individual freedom. Democracy, as Levin observes, locates individuals in the context of community life. This dynamic was visible in the teachers’ perception of democratic preschool as a place where children ‘learn to be just, to collaborate and live with others, to tolerate others and find one’s own place among other people without imposing oneself on them’ (T17P). The attentiveness to the collective dimension of democratic preschool life manifests itself in highlighting the importance of being mindful of the others’ needs, helping and caring for each other, or thinking in terms of the common good: cleaning up so that toys do not get lost or damaged and there is space for everyone to play; helping younger children put on their clothes or making sure they get a drink of water; keeping others in mind when serving oneself food; performing one’s group duty well, but also learning to talk to each other in a respectful manner and reaching just solutions of conflicts. Some practitioners, however, saw the

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value of democratic preschool education in preparing children not only to accept, but also contest, social rules. They believed that democratic preschools may contribute to future social change through teaching children to disobey and resist, and helping them develop a disposition to ‘try to do something if there is something they don’t like, … talk about it loudly, [not to] just subordinate to others’ (T3NP). The individual and collective dimensions constantly intertwine with one another; for instance, when the ability to respect others is seen as dependent on having the experience of being respected oneself. This was particularly strongly emphasized in preschools that practice non-violent communication and focus on supporting children to learn to communicate their needs and be empathetic. This is believed to have consequences for the whole of society: ‘If people could communicate this way, if they were mindful of each other, could talk about their needs and ask for help, everything would change. It has an impact on relationship, work culture, the culture of governing a country, of discussion’ (P1NP). This assumption that individual development will bring about broader social change was shared by several teachers, in particular from the non-public institutions catering to families with higher economic, social, and cultural capital, and may attest to the strengthening of the culture of individualism in Poland.

Practicing Democracy as a Process of Change ‘We are forerunners and we have nobody to learn from’ (T1NP), said one of the teachers. Indeed, lacking appropriate professional training or experience of living in a culture that fosters democratic models of relationships, the teachers were presented with a set of challenges when they decided to start practicing democracy in their institutions. Most significant was the need to embark on a complex process of change. It included searching for new teaching methods so as to find ways to encourage children to participate in activities when the

coercion factor is eliminated, or to accommodate their ideas and requests when they do not coincide with what a teacher has planned. However, more difficult, but crucial to the transformation toward, and maintaining of, democratic practice, was the change of one’s mindset that ultimately happened ‘in one’s head, in one’s heart’ (T15P) and resulted from a conscious decision to leave old, authoritarian practices behind. Its key dimension was a reconstruction of the images of the child and the teacher. As one practitioner bitterly observed, adults talk a lot about children’s rights, but in fact they do not want to be bothered with them. They expect children to behave well rather than ‘pointlessly claiming their rights’ (T1NP). The teachers drew directly on Korczak’s (2007, 2009) legacy when they claimed that truly democratic educational practices are inconceivable without seeing ‘a human being in a child’ (T7NP) and taking children and their rights seriously. This means rejecting the construction of a child as tabula rasa or an inert substance in a teacher’s hands: ‘If you don’t see that essentially there is no difference between a child and an adult, you will treat a child like a doll, like a plush toy, or like an animal that needs to be trained’ (T7NP). Yet, it needs to be emphasized that such a perception of a child is an ideal that the teachers strove for, sometimes failing to reach it. Changing the image of the child necessitates the change of an image of the teacher, and this was identified as a major difficulty. One of the teachers put it succinctly: it is about ‘relinquishing power’ (T1NP). For individuals raised in a hierarchical system with clearly defined positions of a child and an adult, this requires constant ‘hard work on your ego’ to accept that, as many emphasized, ‘you’re not the most important one’ simply because you are older. Democratic practice demands resigning from a position of an expert who knows what is better for children and, therefore, decides for them. In the teachers’ view, this is extremely difficult for a number of reasons, including the lingering perception of a child as incompetent and a teacher as knowledgeable, and the sense of responsibility for preparing children for

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school. It is also related to a deeply ingrained imperative to act in the best interest of the child, which demands a constant juggling of different rationales and perspectives. For instance, teachers may think that something would be good for the children, but they also believe in the value of letting them decide, feel they have no right to make decisions for them, or, quite the opposite, that they have to do it, because the costs of leaving it up to the kids would be too high. The process of changing the perception of a child and a teacher is highly demanding and the practitioners emphasized the need for mutual support in it. They also saw the importance of arriving as a team at a shared understanding of a child and a teacher as the basis for their work, as well as of communicating it to others, in particular the parents. The emphasis put on arriving at a shared vision reveals a crucial dimension of the process of change: developing the ability to work as a learning collective. The practitioners shared a strong conviction that in a democratic preschool the staff members work as a team of people who trust each other, share certain values and perspectives, support each other, but who also have their own views that can be different from those of the others. The crucial role of a principal emerged as a visionary who can instigate a change, motivate others, and keep up their enthusiasm, but also safeguard teachers’ autonomy and create a space for collaboration, discussion, collective search for solutions, and co-construction of the preschool. While such an approach may seem commonplace, for instance being a foundation of the educational work in Reggio Emilia (Rinaldi, 2006), it starkly contrasted with the experience of teachers working in more traditional preschools, who repeatedly talked about having the sense of competing with, yet being isolated from, other teachers. The ability to work as a team is important because democratic practice entails a high degree of unpredictability (Moss, 2009). As one teacher noticed, ‘if you give a child space to decide, you have to take into account the possibility that something will not go the way you wanted it to’ (T2NP). The practitioners

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were constantly confronted with the need to search for new ideas, perspectives, and solutions, and they readily responded to it, inspiring each other to learn and acknowledging that they ‘don’t have ready-made recipes’ and ‘are still on the path’. Having recognized the destructive power of fear that often prevents teachers from taking up alternative ways of working, they were adamant not to give in to it and remained resolute in their ideals if challenged by authorities, and it was precisely the experience of collective development that gave them the strength to do it. And it is this desire to experiment, search, and go beyond oneself that keeps democratic practice alive.

Final Remarks The experiences of teachers practicing democracy call into question a number of widespread beliefs in Polish ECEC. Most significantly, they demonstrate that a different kind of education is possible within the existing legal framework, including in public institutions, which is an option that teachers commonly dismiss. Contrary to popular claims, the need to follow Core Curriculum or to meet inspectors’ expectations proves not to be a significant impediment. As one principal said, ‘blocks are only in our heads, while there are no formal obstacles’ (T15P). Furthermore, they manifest that it is possible to practice democracy with young children and, in doing so, they call for a radical transformation of the dominant social perception of children. Yet, the teachers’ attempts to work democratically provoke some questions. First, there is the issue of the child’s freedom to create oneself. Some practitioners, in the name of non-directiveness, were determined not to specify who the graduate of their institution would be, claiming that it would entail projecting a model and pushing it on children, rather than leaving it up to themselves to determine who they want to be. Yet, as Freire states, there cannot be educational practice that is nondirective, and by refusing to admit so, teachers

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run the risk of contributing to the reproduction of the values of the existing power structure (Freire & Macedo, 1995, p. 378). In this context, it would be worth reflecting on the significance of the conception of individual development as a path toward social change. Another issue that requires further exploration is a potential risk of turning democracy into a set of instruments that could facilitate everyday work in a preschool or school, a technical, rather than ethical and political practice (Dahlberg & Moss, 2005). Some teachers I interviewed observed that, once involved in decision-making, children become better organized, support each other more, and engage in fewer conflicts with others. Since children also understand why they need to take up an activity and accept teachers’ decisions, working with them becomes easier. This perspective brings democracy disturbingly close to an efficient classroom management technology. There might be a risk, therefore, that if followed without sufficient reflexivity, democratic practice will turn into a caricature of itself, becoming merely an instrument of control and an attractive marketing factor. And finally, there is the highly contentious issue of ‘democracy with a price tag’. Dahlberg et  al. (2007, pp. 74–5) premise their idea of an early childhood institution as a forum in civil society on the principle of unconstrained access. Non-public democratic preschools, of which some are quite expensive, are – as one teacher put it – an option for the chosen ones, although, admittedly, some undertake steps to mitigate this problem. This poses difficult questions as to the meaning and boundaries of democracy. Can institutions that practice democracy within their walls be truly democratic when they are fundamentally exclusionary? Can democracy be applied selectively? These problems remain, even when it is not the market and profit-making logic, but the desire to educate in a more ethical, just, and responsible way, that drives the preschools. The case of Polish preschool teachers striving to practice democracy with young children clearly attests to John Dewey’s (1988) claim

that democracy cannot simply perpetuate itself; rather, it has to be constantly recreated in everyday practice. It cannot be mandated either; individual teachers need to adopt it as a fundamental value and weave it into the tiniest dimensions of their activity. One practitioner claimed that a democratic preschool is ‘coconstructed by everyone who is involved in its existence. Not only the principal, not only the teachers, but simply everyone who is there builds something, brings something in, from the kids to the kitchen staff, the cleaners, the parents’ (T10NP). However, this is possibly an ideal that is not yet fully attainable. Perhaps, given the social and cultural constraints, democracy in preschool can only be ‘a bit figurative’ and ‘never fully functioning’, as some teachers observed. Yet, even if it is so, there is no doubt that it fundamentally transforms the lives of those who experience it, giving them a deep sense of satisfaction, fulfillment, and joy.

Notes   1  The research was supported with funding from the National Science Centre, Poland (project no. 2014/13/D/HS6/01896) and from the Faculty of Education, University of Lower Silesia, Wrocław, Poland. 2  The interviews are coded as T/P[digit]P/NP, where the first letter stands for a practitioner (a teacher or a principal) or a parent, and the second one for a public or non-public preschool respectively.  3  After the completion of this chapter, the Core Curriculum was thoroughly revised, with the new version scheduled to go into effect on September 1, 2017. In line with the previous ones, it fails to mention democracy as a value in education, and while alluding to the need to create opportunities for children’s independent action in everyday routines, and in play and learning situations, it does little to construct the child as an active member of a democratic community. The only tasks of the preschool listed in the curriculum that can be interpreted as relevant from the perspective of democracy include developing children’s desire for group membership, preparing them to understand their own and others’ emotions, creating situations that would enable children to learn about social values and norms, and stir their interest in other cultures. There are also vague formulations concerning the need for children to learn to respect other people, one’s own and others’ rights and duties, as well as to assess

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one’s own behavior in light of group norms (MEN, 2017). Symptomatically, there is no mention of supporting children in developing and expressing their views, making decisions and taking responsibility for them, or solving conflicts with others.

References Bennett, J., 2008. A Comparative Analysis of Provision Made in National Curricula to Strengthen Children’s Democratic Participation in Early Childhood Centres. In G. Mac Naughton, P. Hughes & K. Smith, eds. Young Children as Active Citizens, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 120–147. Bentley, T., 2005. Everyday Democracy: Why We Get the Politicians We Deserve, London: Demos. Bobrowska-Nowak, W., 1978. Historia wychowania przedszkolnego, Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Szkolne i Pedagogiczne. Bogdanowiczowa, Z., Czerwińska, Jaroszewiczowa, H., Skwarczyńska, A. & Żukiewiczowa, Z., 1930. Instrukcja w sprawie zakładania przedszkoli, Warsaw: Związek Pracy Obywatelskiej Kobiet. Cagliari, P., Barozzi, A. & Giudici, C., 2004. Thoughts, Theories and Experiences for an Educational Project with Participation. Children in Europe, 6, pp. 28–30. Coady, M., 2008. Beings and Becomings: Historical and Philosophical Considerations of the Child as Citizen. In G. Mac Naughton, P. Hughes & K. Smith, eds. Young Children as Active Citizens, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 2–14. Dahlberg, G. & Moss, P., 2005. Ethics and Politics in Early Childhood Education, London and New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Dahlberg, G., Moss, P. & Pence, A.R., 2007. Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care: Languages of Evaluation, 2nd ed., London and New York: Routledge. Dewey, J., 1988. Creative Democracy – The Task Before Us. In J. A. Boydston, ed. John Dewey. The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 14: 1939– 1941, Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, pp. 224–230. Falkiewicz-Szult, M., 2007. Przemoc symboliczna w przedszkolu, Kraków: Oficyna Wydawnicza ‘Impuls’.

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Falkiewicz-Szult, M., 2014. Demokratyzacja relacji pedagogicznych w opinii nauczycielek przedszkola. In K. Gawlicz et  al., eds. Demokracja i edukacja. Dylematy, diagnozy, doświadczenia, Wrocław: WN DSW, pp. 111–128. Freire, P. & Macedo, D. P., 1995. A Dialogue: Culture, Language and Race. Harvard Educational Review, 65(3), pp. 377–402. Gawlicz, K., 2009. Preschools Play with Power: Constructing the Child, the Teacher and the Preschool in Two Polish Childcare Institutions (Diss.), Roskilde: Graduate School in Lifelong Learning, Roskilde University. Gawlicz, K. & Starnawski, M., 2013. Areas of Discrimination and Marginalisation in School and Preschool Education in Poland. In P. Rudnicki et  al., eds. Educational Change and Challenges in Poland and the Czech Republic After 1989, Wrocław: WN DSW, pp. 39–52. Gobel, C. & Leininger, J., 2011. Democracy. In G. T. Kurian, ed. The Encyclopedia of Political Science, Washington: CQ Press, pp. 387–390. GUS, 2016. Oświata i wychowanie w roku szkolnym 2015/2015. Education in 2015/2016 School Year, Warsaw: GUS. Hammarberg, T., 2009. Children Have the Right to be Heard and Adults Should Listen to their Views. In Commissioner for Human Rights, ed. Janusz Korczak. The Child’s Right to Respect, Strasbourg: Council of Europe, pp. 81–90. Jarosz, E., 2013. O potrzebie demokratyzowania polskiej szkoły. Czas na krok następny – podmiotowość i współudział dzieci w edukacji. Studia Edukacyjne, 29, pp. 49–60. Jarosz, E. & Kurkowski, C., 2015. Przemoc w wychowaniu w świetle opinii społecznej oraz relacji rodziców – zarys problemu na tle raportu Rzecznika Praw Dziecka. Problemy Wczesnej Edukacji, 4(31), pp. 151–159. Klus-Stańska, D., 2006. Behawiorystyczne źródła myślenia o nauczaniu czyli siedem grzechów głównych wczesnej edukacji. In D. Klus-Stańska, S. Ewa & D. Bronk, eds. Wczesna edukacja. Między schematem a poszukiwaniem nowych ujęć ­teoretyczno-badawczych, Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, pp. 15–28. Klus-Stańska, D., 2007. Między wiedzą a władzą. Dziecięce uczenie się w dyskursach pedagogicznych. Problemy Wczesnej Edukacji, 1/2(5/6), pp. 92–106.

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Korczak, J., 2007. Loving Every Child: Wisdom for Parents, trans. T. Prout & A.M. Gorzelak, Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. Korczak, J., 2009. The Child’s Right to Respect, trans. E.R Kulawiec. In Commissioner for Human Rights, ed. Janusz Korczak. The Child’s Right to Respect, Strasbourg: Council of Europe, pp. 23–42. Korczak, J., 2013. Jak kochać dziecko. Internat – Kolonie letnie – Dom Sierot, Warsaw: Rzecznik Praw Dziecka. Kupisiewicz, C., 2006. Projekty reform edukacyjnych w Polsce, Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN. Kuszak, K., 2013. Zmiany w edukacji przedszkolnej jako warunek podniesienia jakości życia dzieci w okresie średniego dzieciństwa. In H. Sowińska, ed. Dziecko w szkolnej rzeczywistości, Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, pp. 79–98. Levin, B., 1998. The Educational Requirement for Democracy. Curriculum Inquiry, 28(1), pp. 57–79. Lifton, B.J., 2005. The King of the Children, Elk Grove Village, IL: American Academy of Pediatrics. Mazurkiewicz, G. & Walczak, B., 2012. Obedience, Sabotage, Autonomy: Power games within the educational system. Power and Education, 4(1), pp. 73–10. MEN, 2016. Podstawa programowa wychowania przedszkolnego dla przedszkoli oraz innych form wychowania przedszkolnego, Dz. U. z 2016 r., poz. 895, Warsaw. MEN, 2017. Podstawa programowa wychowania przedszkolnego dla przedszkoli, oddziałów przedszkolnych w szkołach podstawowych oraz innych form wychowania przedszkolnego, Dz. U. z 2017 r., poz. 356, Warsaw. Merżan, I., 1987. Aby nie uległo zapomnieniu, Warsaw: Nasza Księgarnia. MO, 1957. Program tymczasowy. Zajęcia w przedszkolu, Warsaw: PZWS. Moss, P., 2009. There are alternatives! Markets and democratic experimentalism in early childhood education and care. Working Paper No. 53, The Hague: Bernard van Leer Foundation and Bertelsmann Stiftung. Moss, P., 2014. Transformative Change and Real Utopias in Early Childhood Education: A story of democracy, experimentation and potentiality, London and New York: Routledge.

Olczak, A., 2010. Umowa społeczna z dzieckiem jako droga ku demokracji w wychowaniu, Zielona Góra: Oficyna Wydawnicza Uniwersytetu Zielonogórskiego. Pawlak, R., 2006. Stan i perspektywy wychowania przedszkolnego w Polsce. Kwartalnik Pedagogiczny, 1(199), pp. 43–66. Rinaldi, C., 2006. In Dialogue with Reggio Emilia. Listening, Researching and Learning, London and New York: Routledge. Smolińska-Theiss, B., 2013. Korczakowskie narracje pedagogiczne, Kraków: Oficyna Wydawnicza ‘Impuls’. Swianiewicz, P., Krukowska, J., LackowskaMadurowicz, M. & Łukomska, J., 2013. Sieć przedszkoli. In P. Swianiewicz, ed. Edukacja przedszkolna: polityka samorządów gminnych w zakresie edukacji przedszkolnej, Warsaw: Wydawnictwo ICM, pp. 15–40. Telka, L., 2009. Przekształcanie przestrzeni społecznej placówki. Studium społecznopedagogiczne na przykładzie żłobków, Łódź: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego. Trafford, B., 2008. Democratic Schools: Towards a Definition. In J. Arthur, I. Davies & C. Hahn, eds. The SAGE Handbook of Education for Citizenship and Democracy, London: Sage, pp. 410–424. Uryga, D. & Wiatr, M., 2015. Quasi-szkoły – nowe przedsięwzięcia rodzicielskie na obrzeżu systemu oświaty. Pedagogika społeczna, 3(57), pp. 217–231. Veerman, P.E., 1992. The Rights of the Child and the Changing Image of Childhood, Dordrecht, Boston, London: Martinus Nijhoff. Waloszek, D., 2006. Pedagogika przedszkolna. Metamorfoza statusu i przedmiotu badań, ­ Kraków: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Akademii Pedagogicznej. Wróbel, M., 1967. Wychowanie przedszkolne w Polsce w latach 1918–1939, Wrocław, Warsaw, Kraków: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich. Zwiernik, J., 1996. Alternatywa w edukacji przedszkolnej. Studium teoretyczno-empiryczne, Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego. Zwiernik, J., 2013. Polityka rzeczy małych i projekt “Alternatywa w edukacji przedszkolnej” w latach osiemdziesiątych XX w.: studium przypadku. In H. Cervinkova & B.D. Gołębniak, eds. Edukacyjne badania w działaniu, Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scholar, pp. 337–356.

26 Te Kohanga ¯ Reo: Early Childhood Education and the Politics of Language and Cultural Maintenance in Aotearoa, New Zealand – A Personal–political Story Mere Skerrett Introduction Language occupies physical and psychological space. For te reo M¯aori (the M¯aori ­language – the language of the indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand) fostering M¯aori/English bilingualism (MEB) results in a continual contestation for space. It is a contest because of linguafaction – the systematic language and cultural destruction associated with the colonisation of Aotearoa, facilitating the fragmentation of land/s, dismantling M¯aori social structures of wh¯anau, hap u¯ and iwi,1 and disrupting sociolinguistic practices through assimilation (see Skerrett, 2014, 2016). Colonisation over the last 200 years caused a language shift for most of the indigenous population of Aotearoa to a dominant English language. Over time this language shift was institutionalised, particularly throughout educational institutions – in playcentres, kindergartens, schools and universities – often resulting in total loss of te reo M a¯ ori. Language loss is extremely

harmful to indigenous children. It creates divisions and disconnections as the indigenous child’s sensibility to the language of his/her experiences of life as their mother tongue is stripped away. Critical de-­ colonialist perspectives unmask the power hierarchies (Cannella, 2011) of colonisation and thus serve to dismantle them. It is argued here that reversing that shift in early childhood education institutions is decolonising, re-connective and transformative. As an enthusiastic supporter of the regeneration of indigenous languages, I have dedicated much of my adult life to disrupting and dismantling colonial power hierarchies through establishing and working in K¯ohanga Reo (early childhood M¯aori language nests) and Kura Kaupapa M¯aori (its primary school extension). I am the mother of five M¯aori/English bilinguals, some of whom are plurilingual and hail from the Ng¯ai Tahu, Ng¯ati M¯ahuta, Ng¯ati Pikiao and Ng¯ati P u¯ keko tribes. My children and grandchild have added Ng¯ati Tama, Ng¯ati Koata, Ng¯ati

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Toa Rangatira tribal connections. I have a vested interest in counter-colonial activism and theorising. Paulo Freire calls this praxis. I call it mindful liberation in the struggle for justice for M¯aori as T¯angata Whenua (the people of the land), women’s issues and children’s rights. This chapter is positioned in a wider sociopolitical context of advocating for linguistic human rights, given the worldwide phenomenon of rapid language loss. According to Romaine (2007) many language commentators predict an alarming decline in the number of languages. From 50% to 90% of the world’s approximately 6900 languages are at risk of extinction within the next 100 years. The majority are indigenous languages. Miyaoka (2001) argued that 96% of languages are spoken by an extremely limited number of people and are thus in danger of extinction, mainly because children have stopped acquiring them as native languages. These languages are said to be moribund. There is another category of endangered languages, applied to languages that are still being acquired by children as native languages but are fast shifting into the moribund category. Many will be in that state by the end of this century. McCarty (2003) states: At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the world’s linguistic and cultural diversity is under assault by the forces of globalisation – cultural, economic and political forces that work to standardise and homogenise, even as they stratify and marginalise. In the transnational flow of wealth, technology and information, the currency of ‘world’ languages is enormously inflated, while that of local languages is flattened and devalued. (p. 1)

Minett and Wang (2008) discuss a mathematical model for studying languages in competition, developed by Abrams and Strogatz in 2003. Minett and Wang state: ‘The model predicts that whenever two languages compete for speakers, one language will eventually become extinct, the language that dies depending on the initial proportions of speakers of each language and their relative status’ (p. 20). Te reo M¯aori is vying for physical

and psychological space in its native homeland in all language domains. On 13 September 2007, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was adopted by the General Assembly. Interestingly, by a vote of 143 in favour to four against (with the negative votes contentiously including New Zealand alongside Australia, Canada and the United States), the Assembly was overwhelmingly in support of the individual and collective rights of the world’s 370 million indigenous peoples, calling for the maintenance and strengthening of their cultural identities and emphasising their right to pursue development in keeping with their own aspirations (United Nations, 2008). After much political activism by M¯aori, in April 2010 the New Zealand government announced its support. Article 13 states: 1. Indigenous peoples have the right to revitalize, use, develop and transmit to future generations their histories, languages, oral traditions, philosophies, writing systems and literatures, and to designate and retain their own names for communities, places and persons. 2. States shall take effective measures to ensure that this right is protected and also to ensure that indigenous peoples can understand and be understood in political, legal and administrative proceedings, where necessary through the provision of interpretation or by other appropriate means. (p. 7)

It is also interesting to note that the indigenous languages of the four countries mentioned are all endangered, if not already moribund. Redressing the situation of a moribund M¯aori language was the reason we started K¯ohanga Reo in New Zealand. This chapter looks back over 200 years of colonial development through which the country known as New Zealand became a British settler state through the expropriation of its geographic, psychological, sociopolitical and linguistic space/s. This includes an overview of the demise of the short-lived Missionary Schools resulting in a dominant whitestream education system. Despite the

Politics of Language and cultural maintenance in New Zealand

success over the last 30 years of the K¯ohanga Reo movement in reviving the flow of a waiM¯aori2 stream, as a resistance to homogenisation policies and practices in education, the colonising policies and practices of the past continue to impact negatively on the life of K¯ohanga Reo. I argue that the development of Te Arap u¯ M¯aori (the M¯aori alphabet) – a literary tool developed for young children in K¯ohanga Reo that updates the first one published by Kendall in 1815 for Missionary Schools – is harmonious with M¯aori phonology and can transform praxis. It is an additive tool for bilingual/multicultural education. The advancement of this tool has a political arm, defending the right of indigenous children to have their experiences of life reflected in the languages and literacies of education. As new configurations and tools of M¯aori language practices in early childhood education are generated, established colonial structures and understandings can be displaced. Following García and Wei (2014), I argue that bilingualism is a challenge to the centre, through transforming cognitive and social structures, and shifting discourses. Indigenous voices are thus foregrounded in Indigenous literatures and literacies. The challenge, and resistance, is herein referred to as a tino rangatiratanga (self-determination) operant within a Kaupapa M¯aori (a distinctly M¯aori, philosophically and linguistically enriched) sociolinguistic frame. The focus is on critical pedagogy, critical literacy, for equity and social justice.

¯ Kaupapa M aori Frame This chapter is positioned within a M¯aori cultural framework which centralises te reo M¯aori as the language of Aotearoa and its people, with its ‘whakapapa’ that goes deep into the landscape, connected both in space and time. Whakapapa acknowledges the multiple layers of who we are: te ira (life principle), te kore (the void), the substance of

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kaupapa M¯aori knowledge, and denounces history as an illusionary thing or process or archaic narrative – the product of its time. At the heart of Kaupapa M¯aori education is intervention in assimilatory colonialist pedagogies with the aim of transformation. Whilst exercising a linguistic human right to one’s heritage language, Kaupapa M¯aori education intervenes to redress the general exclusion and failure of M¯aori children in whitestream education. It seeks to overcome some of the general education and language policy and planning failures and insecurities about the value of indigenous languages and cultures. There are ideological, pedagogical and sociological grounds for supporting Kauapapa Maori education. Ideologically, Kaupapa M¯aori education is an aspect of linguistic human rights, which are a component of human rights and a way of protection from discrimination by language. Pedagogically, it aims to make seamless the progression of children and young people through the education sector without disadvantage. Culturally and linguistically it aims to uphold diversity in the world. Furthermore, Kaupapa Maori education aims to improve academic performance and to develop positive attitudes in speakers about their linguistic and cultural identities and heritage/s. It also aims to sustain the intergenerational transmission of language/s, motivated by pride in indigenous languages, by increasing public civic (institutions) domains, and private (homes and communities) domains, critical for the survival and maintenance of threatened language/s.

Historical Background After Abel Tasman’s rather curtailed contact with M¯aori in 1642 when he named the land ‘Zeelandia Nova’, it was to be another 127 years before European contact was re-established.

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The first mission in Aotearoa was established and supported by the Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS) in December 1814. The first missionary school opened in August 1816. The school teacher Reverend Thomas Kendall was part of this mission and, operating under the propaganda of the Evangelicals, had instructions to gain all the information possible on the nature of the ‘natives’ (Binney, 1968). He intended to begin his mission by rendering the M¯aori language into written form through the compilation of a vocabulary. Binney (1968) noted that this practice of gathering vocabulary had begun nearly 50 years earlier with the arrival to New Zealand of Captain Cook and his crew, Banks and Parkinson, on the Endeavour in the years 1769–70. Kendall’s task was one of establishing an orthography and grammar for schooling which, whilst related, had a different agenda – inculcating the expansion of the British Empire into the minds and cultures of M¯aori children, referred to as ‘colonizing peoples’ consciousness’ (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2015). He was aware, as he struggled to understand the pronunciation of words, that it could not be expected that he would be ‘equal to the task of fixing with any degree of accuracy the Language of the New Zealanders’ (Binney, 1968, p. 24). In those days, the New Zealanders were M¯aori, and the language of the New Zealanders was the M¯aori language, not P¯akeh¯a (people of European origin) English as it is today. His mission, although unsuccessful, had one positive outcome: the creation of a M¯aori orthography.

Kendall and the creation of a M aori  ¯ orthography Kendall studied the M¯aori language and wrote New Zealand’s first book, ‘A Korao no New Zealand or The New Zealander’s First Book; being An Attempt to compose some Lessons for the Instruction of the Natives’, printed in 1815. The book was intended for M a¯ ori

readers in the first missionary school established at Rangihoua, situated on the north-west shore of the Bay of Islands in Northland, New Zealand. Recorded on the first page of that book is an alphabet, followed on subsequent pages by alphabetically ordered word lists. Having no training in the study of languages, Kendall’s approach to recording the M¯aori language of Maori consisted of writing down words dictated to him by his friend and ally, Hongi, as he heard them, and very tentatively, he began to develop an orthography. Although challenged by his superior, the Reverend Samuel Marsden to use ‘English’ sounds, Kendall persisted in his work of recording M¯aori as he heard it. He eventually returned to England to explain verbally to the funders where he was in terms of his knowledge of the language, particularly its pronunciation and the idiom of M¯aori. A central idea, which he reiterated on many occasions, was that of the identity or the complex interrelationship of the M¯aori language with the theology, mythology, spiritual and physiological knowledge of the people. This needed to be captured. In other words, the context of M¯aori lived experiences, of M¯aori spiritual beliefs, of m¯atauranga M¯aori and tikanga M¯aori, of the relationship to land, were inextricably entangled in the language. Kendall’s study of the language led him necessarily to the study of the metaphor and imagery embedded in the language and he argued that M¯aori is a language of allusion; meanings can be drawn out only with the fullest knowledge of the oral traditions and stories that are an integral part of the M¯aori culture. Kendall described himself as one of the first settlers in New Zealand, as the first to sleep ashore amongst the M¯aori, and the first to study the language. He learnt the language from pre-P¯akeh¯a M¯aori, as Sir Apirana Ngata put it, and at one point had a M¯aori wife in the manner of a Chief. But he came from a way of life which had a divinely ordered universe, and while he found himself emotionally and spiritually drawn to M¯aori, he was unable to reconcile these leanings with

Politics of Language and cultural maintenance in New Zealand

his ecclesiastical beliefs. He became deeply conflicted, both succumbing to and simultaneously rejecting and even despising M¯aori spirituality. He became emotionally entangled in the M¯aori world, but could not shake off his evangelical ideas and his ‘class’ background. The intense and constant study of words, and of ideas expressed in those words, to which Kendall had devoted himself, had created a sympathetic attitude towards the complexities and intricacies of M¯aoridom. He argued that an understanding of the language is gained only through knowledge of the traditions and that full knowledge of the language deepens one’s understanding of the people who framed it, their ideas of human nature and destiny. Kendall ended up being expelled from the CMS and left New Zealand for Chile in 1825. However, while in Chile he continued to work on revisions of the materials he had collected in New Zealand, writing two more elementary instruction books in M¯aori. Kendall’s contributions to M¯aori print literacy and biliteracy ought not to be forgotten. For one thing, he went against the grain and used a M¯aori phonology on which those of us working in K¯ohanga Reo, nearly 200 years later, based the production of our new alphabet – Te Arap u¯ M¯aori – even though his alphabet is significantly different. It is often argued by many language activists in Aotearoa that Kendall’s was the first attempt to standardise te reo M¯aori and that this impacted negatively on tribal dialects. My argument in this chapter is contrary to that position: in fact, we owe a great deal to the meanderings of Thomas Kendall for his insistence on an orthography that was consistent with M¯aori language phonology, and which informed the work of William Williams and successive iterations leading to the current Dictionary of the M¯aori Language. While the first missionary school was a failure, the missionary school system later became successful and popular, teaching through the medium of te reo M¯aori up until 1847 when the Education Ordinance came

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into effect and with it a change of policy. The practice then became the teaching of standard subjects in an English-only school curriculum, thereby assimilating and anglicising M¯aori children. Governor Grey diverted missionary education from what is now considered sound additive bilingual pedagogical practice (Walker, 2004) to deficit subtractive pedagogical practice.3 Clause 3 supported the giving of public funds to schools provided that instruction was given in the English language (New Zealand Legislative Council Ordinances, 1841–1853). The pedagogical practice thus became speedily assimilatory and culturally alienating in the establishment and maintenance of a new social order, hierarchical in nature. Clearly, the price of ‘citizenship’ for M¯aori heralded in the Treaty of Waitangi soon became alienation through the loss of language, land, culture and identity in the turbulence of the imperialistic ‘civilising mission’. A plethora of education policies were enacted and instituted in the New Zealand system in the interest of creating ‘one nation’, ‘one people’, ‘one rule’. This meant, in real terms, one ‘British’ nation, one ‘British’ rule, one ‘British’ people (M¯aori being subservient in the hierarchy because we were not British) and one ‘British’ language (English). With the M¯aori language forbidden in education, children were often violently forced into using an English vernacular (Awatere, 1984; Waitangi Tribunal, 1986). The transfer of the missionary schools to the native school system through the Native Schools Act of 1867 furthered policies of language shift as M¯aori children were being fitted to become ‘good English speaking servants’ (Simon, 1998). School became compulsory for M¯aori in 1894 (Te Ara, 2015), practically paralleling the changes in England where the government also established free, compulsory education at the same time. One-hundred years on from the Ordinance te reo M¯aori was in dire straits. In 1847 100% of M¯aori children spoke te reo M¯aori. Just 50 years later, in 1900, that figure had

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been reduced to 90%. Public policy, wars and urbanisation facilitated further rapid decline. By 1960 only 26% of children were M¯aori speakers (Walker, 2004). That pattern of decline continued until the birth of the K¯ohanga Reo movement.

¯ M aori in early childhood education Before the 1960s there were very few M¯aori children enrolled in early childhood education (McDonald, 1973). Geraldine McDonald (1973), who conducted a large-scale research project in the late 1960s, argued that in the early 1960s the emergence of interest in preschool education became bound up with the urge to ‘do something’ about the difficulties M¯aori school children faced, giving impetus to the pre-school movement as an agency of social reconstruction. The M¯aori Women’s Welfare League (League) was actively involved in making plans for pre-school groups at the time, called the Family Preschool Movement – a M¯aori pre-school movement. However, government assistance was given to free kindergartens and play centres but not to family pre-school groups, so while some were remarkably durable, others were short-lived. Only a small number were trying to preserve the M¯aori language by means of the pre-school group. My grandmother, Raiha Serjeant, a foundation member of the League, talked about forming a preschool group in the Waikato with a M¯aori language focus. In the book Te t¯ımatanga: T¯atau t¯atau. Early stories from founding members of the M¯aori Women’s Welfare League (Szaszy, 1993) Raiha Serjeant said: N¯a, ko taku tino hiahia kia hoki ng¯a tamariki ki te ako i te reo M¯aori, kia hoki mai ai te mana o o¯ r¯atou tupuna ki a r¯atau; kia kotahi ai te iwi M¯aori … K¯atahi r¯atau ka mohio ¯ no¯ r¯atau t¯enei motu. I t¯enei w¯a k¯are te iwi tamariki e mohio ¯ ana ko wai r¯atau, he aha ranei ¯ ratau ¯ … he Maori? ¯ Koira¯ aku tumanako, ¯ kia tu¯ tika te Tiriti i runga i te

­ hakahaere a te Kuini o Ingarangi. N¯a te mea i w hunaia ¯ mai t¯er¯a Tiriti … Ko ng¯a painga i haere mai i te Rop ¯ u, ¯ he whakahoa i ng¯a wahine M¯aori, kia awhina ¯ r¯atau ki te kimi ora mo¯ ng¯a tamariki, mo¯ nga m¯atua. Kia kimi m¯atauranga ng¯a tamariki, kia tika ai t¯atau i roto i te ao P¯a keh¯a. (cited in Szaszy, 1993, pp. 195–8)

(Translated: My greatest desire is that our children learn to speak M¯aori so that the ‘mana’ of their ancestors returns and so that M¯aori people have a sense of solidarity … Then they will know that this is their land and their identity is intact … as M¯aori. These are my hopes, that the Treaty takes pride of place, because currently it is obscured … The benefits of the League were the friendships formed among women, assisting one another with the well-being of the children, and parents, and enabling the children to seek knowledge so that we (M¯aori) are able to be equally competent in the P¯akeh¯a world.) McDonald (1973) argued that the loss of the M¯aori language was apparent in the late 1960s and that there was a widespread desire to preserve te reo M¯aori. Yet, there was ‘no general desire to do this through the medium of pre-school education’ (p. 140). It took the advent of K¯ohanga Reo in 1982 for the M¯aori language to become the language of learning and teaching (not just learning another language) in early childhood education (ECE) and for its relationship to M¯aori knowledge to be made explicit: M¯aori have unique knowledge systems, with distinct pedagogies. This marked the beginning of a serious challenge to racism in education and to the unequal power hierarchies.

¯ M aori Pedagogies Documentation regarding pre-contact M¯aori pedagogy among very young children is scarce, though opinion is readily found and anecdotes relied on. M¯aori pedagogy was directly related to whakapapa and to the land. Walker (2004) argues, ‘Land is the very basis of identity as

Politics of Language and cultural maintenance in New Zealand

tangata whenua’4 (p. 135). Children were taught and learned everything about their environment, their world (and the people in it) in order to understand the land, her resources and their place in te ao M¯aori. The foreword of the seminal work of Rose Pere (1994) on the notion of ‘ako’ – which in the M¯aori tradition translates as ‘learning and teaching’ – written by David Bettison asserts that: prior to the arrival of the P¯akeh¯a in New Zealand M¯aori children were raised, and thereby taught, within the tribal institutions and mode of acquiring a livelihood of that culture … The P¯akeh¯a recognised the importance of writing and literacy, of numeracy and of the word of the ‘true’ God. Many M¯aori people of the time came to excel in these no less than in the qualities of their own tribal modes of instruction. But the passing of years and the inexorable (relentless) cultural domination of the P¯akeh¯a in the development of the modern New Zealand – coupled to the systematic character of education as a useful preparation for earning, rather than acquiring, a livelihood – have forced M¯aori tribal modes of raising children increasingly into the background.

The types of pursuits Rose Pere suggested were to enable children to develop their skills and ability in such things as dexterity, physical muscular co-ordination, rhythmic movement, balance, poise, mathematical concepts, hand and eye co-ordination, quick reflexes, endurance, stamina, vocal competence and the power of observing and listening. These were valued learner competencies, reflected in the types of games M¯aori children played. They were pertinent to tribal modes of living as part of a collective. The pedagogical model was an apprenticeship model, with one-to-one tuition or working in small groups. Questioning as a pedagogical tool was actively discouraged, and, as argued by Pere (1994), the looking, listening and doing, in shared meaningful activities, were encouraged. Hemara (2000) argues that learners’ perspectives, through discussion, were valued at the appropriate times. These times were during w¯ananga.5 W¯ananga would lead to limitless potential and unpredictable, sometimes exciting, understandings rather than

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‘questions’ with ‘correct’ answers. Moreover, the values of recognition and respect were given to the knowledge base that learners came into the learning context with. That is, the child was viewed as knowledgeable, the embodiment of their ancestors, the mokopuna (grandchild), the ‘moko o te puna’ – the physical genealogical representation of all who have contributed to their gene pool. From a M¯aori perspective, the total health and well-being of the tamariki6 (children, descended from the Gods) and mokopuna and the recognition of their wairua (spirituality) and their whakapapa (geneology) is valued. Hemara (2000) further argues that while current practices in ECE place children at the centre of learning with teachers in control, M¯aori pedagogies place children and teachers in the same place alongside the land and her resources in reciprocal relationship with each other. Pere (1994) uses the term ‘ako’ to encapsulate the reciprocal relationships of teachers and children learning from each other. New knowledge for the child is not seen or regarded as more important than the everyday tasks a child can already perform with confidence. In similar Vygotskian fashion, new knowledge is seen as building on what the child already knows. It is scaffolded knowledge, related to life experiences: relevant and meaningful. In the M¯aori mode of ‘ako’ there are no distinct boundaries which may delimit a child’s search for knowledge. Likewise, I have asserted elsewhere that within the relations of M¯aori pedagogy, M¯aori cultural understandings and practices, power and control in the learning situation are determined by the learners in an unfolding of, and movement into, new knowledge territory supported by the already known physical and metaphysical signposts. Nothing is forced. There are no abstractions for examination. Meanings are dynamic and forever shifting, whilst remaining contextually grounded in tikanga M¯aori. Learning spaces have highly developed internal structure/s that may be invisible to the uninitiated. They are

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underpinned by and consistent with the philosophy and practices that help participants determine their own expectations and learning pathways within a cultural frame that is identifiably and ideologically M¯aori. That is why our marae and the lands they inhabit are ideal places and spaces in the operationalisation of M¯aori pedagogies. They are the embodiment of M¯aori genealogies, ancestral knowledge, language and futuristic understandings. Makereti, also known as Maggie Papakura, (Papakura, 1938) asserts that M¯aori had great love for their children. She doubted if any other race could surpass M¯aori in their love for their children. They were encouraged to explore and learn through life. Children were encouraged to be adventurous and to make use of their social and physical environments to play and learn. Liberty was tempered with cautionary tales of taniwha and tapu, and some commentators suggest that physical punishment of children was unknown before the arrival of the European. According to Hemara (2000), it seems that within the formal setting of the Whare W¯ananga (The Houses of Learning) in traditional M¯aori society, small groups were the preferred option as there was often more than one adult to a learner. Children’s perspectives were considered imaginative and valued (Hemara, 2000).

¯ Kohanga Reo Ko Te Reo kia Tika, Ko Te Reo Kia Rere, Ko Te Reo Kia M¯aori It is the Exemplary M¯aori Language, Eloquent M¯aori Language and the Uniquely Expressive M¯aori Language which gives Voice to the M¯aori Mind As I have noted already, the origins of the K¯ohanga Reo (TKR) movement were to stay the decline of te reo M¯aori and to address

issues of socio-cultural disruption and concerns of identity loss (Awatere, 1984; Skerrett-White, 2003; Waitangi Tribunal, 2012). By bridging the sociolinguistic gap between the native older speaking generation and the younger generation/s, some of the socio-cultural disruption associated with language loss would be alleviated whilst also contributing to a socio-culturally rejuvenated iwi M¯aori. In this respect K¯ohanga Reo has been the leading light in terms of establishing bilingual education in Aotearoa/New Zealand. The first K¯ohanga Reo opened in 1982 and within three years the number had risen to 416, taking in more than 6000 preschool children. This rapid growth was driven by the energy of M¯aori communities across the nation and their sense of urgency in acting to preserve te reo me ng¯a tikanga M¯aori. Between 1982 and 1993, the number of K¯ohanga Reo rose by an average of 80 per year and their enrolments by more than 1400 a year, to reach 809 and 14,514 respectively in 1993 when K¯ohanga Reo provided for just under a half of all mokopuna in ECE (Waitangi Tribunal, 2012). However, that year was the zenith for K¯ohanga Reo from which it has since declined, largely due to what has been referred to as ‘glacial’ (Walker, 2004) policy responses to M¯aori language needs in education. In the article The rise and decline of te koohanga7 reo: The impact of government policy (Skerrett-White, 2001), I overviewed the development of K¯ohanga Reo in a context of rapid reform from 1990 to 2002, centralised (State) regulatory controls and neoliberal restructuring under the guise of ‘devolution’. Further, in a presentation to the TKR National Trust Board in 2002, I argued that there was a lack of policy which supported wh¯anau involvement and the dual language, care and education roles being rapidly defined by the education officials. More recently, the Waitangi Tribunal (2010) Report (Wai262) found that te reo M¯aori is approaching a crisis point, and in both Wai262 (p. 439) and the subsequent

Politics of Language and cultural maintenance in New Zealand

Waitangi Tribunal (2012) Report (Wai2336, p. 323) it was noted that from around 1994 to 1999 te reo M¯aori was in a state of ‘renewed decline’. Wai2336 argued that the problem was not just one of declining numbers of M¯aori speakers but also, strikingly, declining proportions, for it has also coincided with a significant rise in the number of younger M¯aori. Critically, the decline was occurring at both the young and old ends of the spectrum. Further, since 1993, the proportion of M¯aori children in ECE attending K¯ohanga Reo has dropped from just under half to under a quarter of the total enrolments of M¯aori children in ECE. The proportion of M¯aori children enrolled in ECE and attending K¯ohanga Reo in 2014 was approximately 20%. The decline is steady. At school, the proportion of M¯aori children participating in M¯aori-medium education has also dropped. The Tribunal argues that if the peak proportions of the 1990s had been maintained there would today be 9600 more M¯aori children attending K¯ohanga Reo and an extra 5700 M¯aori school children learning via the medium of te reo in schools. It was predicted in Wai2336 that if trends continued over the next 15 to 20 years the te reo speaking proportion of the M¯aori population would decline further. That certainly is the trend for the early childhood sector, as shown in Table 26.1. This trend is occurring in the context of a growing M¯aori population. The total number of M¯aori enrolments represents approximately 5% of ECE enrolments. Policy failures, one of the most notable being the lack of teacher supply to meet the demands, have meant that the revitalisation efforts since the 1970s have been carried by M¯aori community energies. The Waitangi Tribunal

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argued that the reo ‘movement’ has been ‘weakened more by the governmental failure to give it adequate oxygen and support than by any M¯aori rejection of their language’ (2012, p. xi). Teacher supply has now been an issue for over three decades. The Wai262 Report argues that the bureaucracy’s efforts to put in place measures to deal with, and encourage, the M¯aori language renaissance have been ‘[d]ecidedly leaden-footed’ (p. 58) and that the explosion in the numbers attending K¯ohanga Reo in the early 1980s should have instantly signalled supply and demand issues. Failure to meet the demands for quality immersion/bilingual education has accounted for the eventual decline in student numbers and not the failure of the language movement. The slow pace of Crown response and responsibility has stymied advancements, making many of the difficulties associated with K¯ohanga Reo and the stream of M¯aori language education politically constructed ones rather than linguistic. However, by its very nature K¯ohanga Reo is swimming against the tide and constantly having to resist the assimilatory and hegemonic politics of neoliberal capture and control as educational policies and the law remain out of kilter with the needs of the M¯aori language movement. Bearing in mind that there are large variations in the way data have been gathered on the subject, in 2014 only 10.6% of M¯aori over 15 years could speak te reo M¯aori ‘very well’ or well’, with a downward trend across the years. It is noted that these results are based on measuring language proficiency in different ways (Statistics New Zealand, 2014). In the 2006 census it was ascertained that English was spoken by 95.9% of people, and M¯aori was

Table 26.1  M¯aori enrolments Year

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014∼

Number of M¯aori enrolment centres using te reo M¯aori 81–100% of the time Total number of M¯aori enrolments in ECE

 9,152

 9,375

 9,154

 9,001

 8,799

35,885

37,808

38,644

40,909

41,798

Source: Adapted from Education Counts (2016) statistics

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spoken by 4.1% of people (Statistics New Zealand, 2014). A downward trend since that time illustrates the vulnerability of te reo M¯aori generally and highlights the difficulties experienced in the early childhood sector specifically.

Early Childhood Education and ¯ te reo M aori The story of colonisation through education is the story of taking M¯aori children out of their wh¯anau, hap u¯ and iwi and institutionalising them. K¯ohanga Reo is a reversal. It is meant to be about reinstituting the place of wh¯anau (and hap u¯ ) as a central pillar in the lives of children in K¯ohanga Reo. However, for that to happen it needs to be adequately resourced and supported. The rights of M¯aori children in Aotearoa/New Zealand to early childhood care and education in te reo M¯aori are unquestionably mandated through the New Zealand Ministry of Education’s (MOE) policy documents. The publicly funded cross-sector education agencies have obligations ‘to actively protect M¯aori language as a taonga guaranteed under the Treaty of Waitangi’ (MOE, 2013a). That is the mantra of the current MOE and reflected in all of its policy documents for the past decade with statements like ‘Language, identity and culture count – knowing, respecting and valuing who students are, where they come from and building on what they bring with them’ (MOE, 2008, p. 20); ‘Every M¯aori learner has a right to access high quality education that attends to their identity, language and culture’ (MOE, 2011, p. 33); ‘students do much better when education reflects their identity, language and culture’ (MOE, 2013b, p. 6); and ‘Tangata Whenuatanga: affirming M¯aori learners as M¯aori. Providing contexts for learning where the language, identity, and culture of M¯aori learners and their wh¯anau is affirmed’ (Education Council New Zealand, 2011, p. 2).

The document Tau Mai Te Reo: The M¯aori Language in Education Strategy 2013–2017 Summary (Ministry of Education, 2013b) states that the Ministry of Education and its agencies have obligations, as Crown agencies, to ‘actively protect M¯aori language as a taonga guaranteed under the Treaty of Waitangi’ (p. 1); and that ‘M¯aori language in education is a defining feature of Aotearoa/ New Zealand’s education. The education system needs to create M¯aori language opportunities for all learners. For M¯aori language to flourish, the language needs to be supported both within the education system and in communities’ (p. 3). Yet, as I have argued elsewhere (Skerrett, 2014), both strategies (Ka Hikitia and Tau Mai Te Reo) do not address the crux of the matter – the need to position the M¯aori language at the centre of the curriculum alongside the English language, across the whole education sector, and in communities. Any revitalisation strategy needs to get beyond the rhetoric to enacting this in practice. Herein, however, is the difficulty: most M¯aori and P¯akeh¯a children are unable to access te reo M¯aori in quality bilingual education settings, let alone communities. The Briefing to the Incoming Minister after the 2011 general elections stated: ‘The Ministry’s arrangements for M¯aori language in education, while well meaning, have been reactive and ad hoc’ (MOE, 2011, p. 6). Ka Hikitia asserts that it is the education system that needs to step up in terms of how the education system performs ‘to ensure M¯aori students are enjoying and achieving education success as M¯aori’ (MOE, 2013a, p. 5), but it routinely fails to step up or even acknowledge systemic failure, a problem which Tove SkutnabbKangas (2015) has referred to as linguicism and defined in 1986 as ‘ideologies, structures and practices which are used to legitimate, effectuate, regulate and reproduce an unequal division of power and resources (both material and immaterial) between groups which are defined on the basis of language’ (p. 1). Linguicism involves clear discrimination on the basis of which language(s) people

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speak or sign, natively or otherwise, and how they speak it, similar to the discrimination involving the social constructs of race, gender and class. The agents of linguicism are the ideologies, structures and practices which she unpacked further. In a subtractive learning situation (as in the case of Aotearoa where the education system arguably set about to subtract the M¯aori language), this assimilationist either/or ideology reflects linguicism. If an educational system is organised so that all teaching happens through the medium of the dominant language and the teachers are monolingual in it (a whitestream New Zealand system where the majority of M¯aori learners are situated), we have a submersion learning situation, and the school’s structure reflects linguicism. Most practices where people get unequal access to power and resources, based on their language/s, reflect linguicism. Linguicism then is a denial of linguistic human rights and proceeds to ‘hierarchizing the languages and their speakers on the basis of language’ (p. 2). The work of K¯ohanga Reo therefore is not easy; suffice to say that when the full discriminatory apparatus of the state shakes down, what I have termed ‘linguafaction’ bubbles up. This phenomenon became evident when we developed the literacy tool Te Arap u¯ M¯aori – the M¯aori Alphabet because some M¯aori thought it was a P¯akeh¯a thing to do and government officials felt that young M¯aori children in K¯ohanga Reo should not have access to books – ‘leave that for schools’ (see SkerrettWhite, 2003). But we persisted. The following sections of this chapter tell the story of this development.

¯ Advancing M  aori print literacy in the early years through Te ¯ ¯ Arapuˉ M  aori: a K ohanga Reo Case Study The development of a M¯aori alphabet to teach early M¯aori literacy in K¯ohanga Reo,

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using a kaupapa M¯aori research methodology, sought to operationalise the rangatiratanga of the sense-making processes of the children involved in a case study. The wider research project was a study of what happens at the interactional level, as shared meanings are generated. In other words, it sought to understand the purposes and functions of language use rather than the type of language that was generated, i.e. how many nouns or verbs and so on (see Skerrett-White, 2003). It is about the functional specificity that Fishman (2010) speaks of, and about recognising the importance of the domain of written language, especially in a wider context of language attrition and restricted language domains. With a minority language like M¯aori, speaking it in either the K¯ohanga Reo, or at home, is not enough to ensure its maintenance. It is important that children learn to read and write in te reo and are able to appreciate and value te reo as a full medium of communication, with status. At the time of developing this tool, we were questioning ‘normative assumptions’, and the current terms and frames within which we operated. We constantly interrogated what we were doing by asking: ‘what is the tikanga M¯aori in this?’, ‘is this a P¯akeh¯a thing to do?’ There were debates of oral versus written language transmission; colonising versus decolonising methodology; books versus no books pedagogy. After years of such debate, and of theorising the issue of whether to use the English alphabet (with English phonology) or a M¯aori alphabet that was consistent with M¯aori phonology to promote literacy in M¯aori medium, the decision to act was precipitated by a child who came to K¯ohanga Reo singing the Sesame Street alphabet song. There was no M¯aori equivalent of an alphabet song. Whilst we wanted our children to be M¯aori English bilinguals – M¯aori language first – we also wanted them to experience the richness of their M¯aori worlds through literature and literacy, and be able to transition comfortably and competently between their M¯aori and

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P¯akeh¯a worlds, as in Mason Durie’s (2001) M¯aori Education Framework. In 1999, after nearly a 200-year gap since the development of Kendall’s 1815 orthography, Kate Cherrington – a fellow teacher and parent in K¯ohanga Reo – and I took the plunge and developed the first ever contemporary M¯aori alphabet tool for the M¯aori medium sector in ECE. As a teacher and parent in K¯ohanga Reo, I had tried making an alphabet frieze using an existing phonological tool ‘a ha ka ma na pa ra ta wa nga wha’ and so on, giving me 55 morphemes to illustrate in order to turn the tool into an alphabet frieze. That turned out to be too unwieldy, besides which there is nothing alphabetical about ‘a ha ka ma na pa ra ta wa nga wha’. The late Professor Hirini Melbourne’s composition ‘¯anei ng¯a p u¯ kupu M¯aori’ (here are the basic sounds of M¯aori) – a song emphasising the M¯aori phonology for vowels – was popular with our young children. However, there was a gap.

There was no resource promoting vowels and consonants, in alphabetical ‘M¯aori dictionary’ order. In developing Te Arap u¯ M¯aori, I drafted the first verse (which incorporates a resistance element with a verse about the loss of our language and stressing the relationship of print literacy to language revitalisation) (Table 26.2), and Kate Cherrington put it to music. The second verse was subsequently added in 2000 by Maraea Hunia, another K¯ohanga Reo parent, educator and te reo activist. When composing the song we had a concern around the use of the transliteration ‘arareta’ (alphabet). Having been indirectly associated with the anti-transliteration movement and a Te Ataarangi8 supporter for years, using the term ‘arareta’ seemed a capitulation to corrupt forces. This led my colleague Kate Cherrington to call her father – one of the few highly proficient fluent native M¯aori language speakers accessible to us, the late Riki Cherrington of Ng¯ati Hine – and he

Table 26.2  Te Arapu¯ M¯aori Te Arapuˉ M¯aori

English translation

A-a a-a e h i k m n ng o p r t u w wh (x2) Ko t¯enei te arap¯u M¯aori e Kia kore ai t¯o t¯atou reo e ngaro ne! Ar¯a, a-a e h i k m n ng o p r t u w wh Ko t¯enei te arap¯u tuhituhi Hei awhina mai i te p¯anui Ar¯a, a-a e h i k m n ng o p r t u w wh, hei ha!

A-a a-a e h i k m n ng o p r t u w wh (x2) This is the M¯aori alphabet So that our M¯aori language never disappears That is, A-a e h i k m n ng o p r t u w wh (x2) This is the written M¯aori alphabet Which assists with reading That is, A-a e h i k m n ng o p r t u w wh (x2)

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coined the alternative term arap u¯ (a pathway into sound and symbols) which we then used. Promptly singing the arap u¯ with the children, the exhilaration spread: by the next day our alphabet song had replaced the Sesame Street alphabet song in the sandpit, on the trampoline, in all the activities of the K¯ohanga Reo. The children were well versed in our song compositions. They were composed weekly, according to our kaupapa. Our first public appearance singing Te Arap u¯ M¯aori was when our K¯ohanga Reo attended the book launch of one of Maoridom’s best-known artists and writers, Robyn Kahukiwa, at a Rotorua primary school early in 2000. The additional second verse, written by Maraea Hunia, makes very explicit the relationship of the written word to reading. Just as the development of the Sesame Street alphabet song and its use in the Sesame Street programme was controversial in the 1960s, so too has the ‘Arap u¯ ’ M¯aori and K¯ohanga Reo children’s exposure to text been controversial (among teachers, with policy developers and Ministry of Education officials), well documented in my doctoral thesis (see Skerrett-White, 2003). As mentioned, no such alphabetic tool had been developed for young children in K¯ohanga Reo learning through the medium of te reo M¯aori. Te Arap u¯ M¯aori was put to music which made it appealing. When a kaum¯atua (tribal elder) was asked ‘How did you learn the alphabet when you went to school?’ he replied by singing the Sesame Street song, which had not even been invented when he went to school, and thus showing the extent to which that alphabetic tool has been ‘normalised’. We hoped that our tool would displace/replace that tool in the reversal of the language shift process. A subsequent recording made by our children was runner-up in the National M a¯ ori Music Awards in 2008. It has been reproduced in New Zealand Ministry of Education publications, Te Kete Kupu and also online. It has a YouTube following, as schools place video clips online, illustrating their use of the tool in the compulsory

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school sector. There is even a clip of secondary school teenagers singing it, complete with actions. It has been made into a phone app with games and in 2015 it featured on nationwide television in the children’s television show, P u¯ koro by Kura Productions. The newly coined word ‘Arapū’ also appears in Tirohia Kimihia: He Kete Wherawhera (Huia, 2006), a M a¯ ori dictionary for schoolaged children. Thomas Kendall persisted in the knowledge that in order to ‘instruct’ in M¯aori it was necessary to work in the vernacular (Binney, 1968) and develop an orthography consistent with M¯aori phonology. Te Arap u¯ M¯aori has the same theoretical underpinnings. Binney (1968) argued, ‘Through the missionaries, M¯aori became a written language. Paradoxically, they preached doctrines which were destructive of the old culture but ensured the preservation of the indigenous language’ (p. 185). The development of this tool, and its promotion, makes explicit the relationship between M¯aori print literacy and M¯aori language revitalisation in K¯ohanga Reo and assists with its wider aims of intergenerational transmission. It builds on Kendall’s work contributing to the preservation of the indigenous language of Aotearoa. This is a model that could be replicated across those indigenous cultures that may not have begun this type of work with young children in early childhood.

Discussion That the colonisation of Aotearoa has had a most destructive and alienating effect on M¯aori culture, M¯aori children and M¯aori language is without doubt. According to Smith (2012) the very nature of colonisation is about encounter (between the West and the Other), rendering the Other as subhuman, savage, cannibal. This naming and displacement paves the way for reclaiming and replacement, a new order of society.

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The first missionaries paved the way for the creation of a ‘civil’ society in Aotearoa. The Reverend Thomas Kendall was at the forefront. Whilst unable to distinguish between the absolute essentials of Christianity and the conventions and values of English middle-class life, he nevertheless led the attack on M¯aori social structures and practices on his civilising mission of saving souls. Ironically, saving souls can be destructive work. It must have dawned on Kendall that he was trying to save the souls of M¯aori who were already imbued with a deep sense of spirituality. Expecting to meet the ‘slaves of Satan’, he found M¯aori ‘friendly and intelligent’, ‘spiritual and artistic’, which may have caused what Fanon (2008) refers to as ‘cognitive dissonance’: Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalise, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief. (2008, p. 194)

That Kendall’s time in Aotearoa caused him much internal strife, leading him to contravene his own mission, is undeniable. Importantly, he identified that the land – Papat u¯ a¯ nuku – and natural phenomena dominated M¯aori ancestral thought, life, behaviour and spirituality and the interconnectedness of the spiritual and physiological knowledge of M¯aori to their language. Many indigenous peoples are connected in this way to the land, or whenua. M¯aori collectivism is represented in the groupings of wh¯anau, hap u¯ and iwi. Whenua is the M¯aori word for land and also the M¯aori word for placenta, signifying the relationship of sustaining life to sustaining land. Wh¯anau is the M¯aori word for family.9 It also means to be born. Hap u¯ is the M¯aori word for sub-tribe. It also means pregnant. Iwi is the M¯aori word for larger tribal group. It also means bones. Those indigenous concepts speak of the centrality of relationships embedded in the language. M¯aori are t¯angata whenua. M¯aori language is the language of

the t¯angata whenua. It is the language of this land – Aotearoa. It is deeply connected to this space, place and people. May (2005) has argued that language is too often examined in isolation from its social and political conditions. Likewise, it seemed Kendall’s sensibilities were the same, objecting to the M¯aori language being examined in isolation from the socio-historical and political context of the time. His intense studies captured the complexities and intricacies of the M¯aori language and people. He understood that full knowledge of a language must lead towards an understanding of the people who framed it, and their ideas of human nature and destiny. I would argue that the fact that he was not a linguist is perhaps fortunate for M¯aori and the development of the M¯aori orthography using a M¯aori phonology. Linguistics as an academic discipline, particularly in its more trenchant structuralist forms, has been preoccupied at times with idealist, abstracted approaches to the study of language. Kendall resisted that. He did not succumb to the immense pressure to take a scientific, decontextualised, technicist approach to developing an orthography based on English phonology. Instead he simply listened, lived, learned and wrote the language as he heard it. Undoubtedly his orthography allowed us in K¯ohanga Reo to undertake the task of naming the letters and composing an alphabet song which was consistent with M¯aori phonology. His idea of the inseparability of language and culture is an integral part of the philosophy of Te K¯ohanga Reo and inherent in the whakatauk¯ı used at the beginning of the section on K¯ohanga Reo, ‘Ko Te Reo kia Tika, Ko Te Reo Kia Rere, Ko Te Reo Kia M¯aori’, the operative words being ‘Kia M¯aori’ signifying the centrality of M¯aori world-views embedded in the language. Without the M¯aori language there is no way to access the M¯aori mind. The work in K¯ohanga Reo generally has not been easy as it has had to shoulder the lion’s share of the responsibility of language regeneration in young children in the context of wh¯anau M¯aori. Despite a bicultural

Politics of Language and cultural maintenance in New Zealand

curriculum document, Te Whāriki: He whāriki mātauranga mō ngā mokopuna o Aotearoa: Early childhood curriculum (Ministry of Education, 1996 & 2017) the curriculum in practice in Whitestream Aotearoa remains predominantly monocultural and monolingual. The Education Review Office (2012)10 (ERO) has reported that only 10% of mainstream early childhood centres (ECC) have high levels of partnership with wh¯anau M¯aori. The problem is that te reo M¯aori is still not mandated in the compulsory curriculum, and the vast majority of teachers are monolingual speakers of English. Both phenomena provide the structures of linguicism, by Skutnabb-Kangas’s (2015) standards. The Waitangi Tribunal (2012) found New Zealand’s Ministry of Education to be in breach of the Treaty of Waitangi and its obligations towards M¯aori. Arguably, there can be no doubt that government policy does not consider the wider, longer-term issues of language, identity, and culture with any degree of integrity, notwithstanding the rhetoric. Instead, it continues to provide placatory discourses making little difference in the education arena for M¯aori learners. The inequalities are built in at the structural level. Systemic failure is historical. Critical literacy developments in K¯ohanga Reo are therefore essential.

Conclusion In this chapter I have asserted that in the colonial encounter space hierarchical structures became the foundations of an unequal, unjust society rendering indigenous peoples as Other, as subhuman objects, and paving the way for the displacement of people and of their knowledges, including language, as irrelevant and thus to be eradicated. In colonised spaces all indigenous languages are threatened. I have argued that whenever two languages compete for speakers, one language will eventually become extinct. In the case of Aotearoa New Zealand it is the indigenous M a¯ ori language that continues to

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compete for speakers. The urbanisation that followed colonisation has added further to language decline. M¯aori families were pepper-potted amongst British settler settings and M¯aori children were socialised into English, through playcentres and schools. Reversing that shift and the development of critical literacy in K¯ohanga Reo are decolonising, reconnective and transformative actions. Further, the nature of the work of K¯ohanga Reo is about challenging societal structures, resisting educational (and linguistic) hierarchies and injustice. The K¯ohanga Reo story is thus one of reinstatement and advancement of M¯aori language functions and a central M¯aori language domain in any revitalisation strategy. It is a story of the re-emergence of M¯aori language identities of children with, and alongside, wh¯anau. It is a movement of returning the care and education of the very young to the mana11 of the wh¯anau and through the mana of te reo M¯aori. It is really a story of struggle, a story of resistance, and a story of M¯aori sovereignty. I have argued that although M¯aori language is an official language in Aotearoa, policy development to ensure its revitalisation has been leaden footed. As an official indigenous language, te reo M¯aori is not mandated as part of the curriculum alongside English. Instead, it competes for space and resources in the curriculum in both the early childhood and school sectors. That amounts to a continued injustice and a breach of linguistic rights, when children have stopped acquiring te reo M¯aori as a birth right, as a native language. This situation forces the language to become, if not moribund, certainly endangered. While some M¯aori children may still be learning te reo M¯aori as their native language, most children’s grasp of te reo M¯aori has shifted into the moribund category. Language policy mandating te reo M¯aori in the curriculum is needed to provide the added supports and strategies needed for its regeneration and survival in communities. This chapter has overviewed the origins and development of a strategy for

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Table 26.3 Glossary Aotearoa Hap¯u Iwi Kaiako Kaum¯atua Kaupapa M¯aori education K¯ohanga Reo K¯orero Kura Kura Kaupapa M¯aori Mana Manaaki Marae M¯atauranga M¯aori Mokopuna Ng¯ai Tahu P¯akıˉh¯a P¯anui Papat¯ua¯ nuku Pepeha Rangi Ranginui Tamaiti Tamariki

Land of the Long White Cloud Sub-tribe/pregnant Tribe, people, bones Teacher Elder A distinctly M¯aori, philosophically and linguistically enriched, education system M¯aori language nest Talk School Kaupapa M¯aori immersion schools Prestige, authority, control, power, influence, status, spiritual power To support, take care of, give hospitality to, protect Formal M¯aori gathering place M¯aori knowledge Grandchild Tribal group, South Island Non-M¯aori New Zealanders Read Mother earth Tribal sayings Sky Sky father Small child Children

T¯angata Tangata whenua Taniwha Taonga Tapu Te ao M¯aori Te ao P¯akeh¯a Te Arap¯u M¯aori Te reo Te Waipounamu Tikanga Tıˉmatanga Tinana Tino Rangatiratanga Titiro, whakarongo, k¯orero T¯uhawaiki T¯urangawaewae Wairua Waka W¯ananga Whakapapa

People People of the land Powerful creature, chief, powerful leader, something or someone awesome Treasure, anything prized Sacred, prohibited, under protection, restricted M¯aori worldviews P¯akeh¯a worldviews The M¯aori alphabet The language South Island Custom Beginning Body Right to exercise authority, chiefly autonomy, self-determination Look and listen before you speak Name of South Island ancestor A place to stand Spirit Canoe Institution of higher learning, discuss in depth Genealogy

(Continued)

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Table 26.3 Glossary (Continued) Whakarongo Whakatau¯akıˉ Whakatauki Wh¯anau Whanaungatanga Whare Wh¯ariki Whatumanawa Whenua

Listen Proverbial saying according to someone Proverbial saying Family (including extended) Relationships, connectedness House Flax mat Inner heart, core Land

reconceptualising language teaching and learning into the pathway of indigenous print literacies in the early years. I have argued that the development of an indigenous print literacy tool is about adapting the important literacy work of K¯ohanga Reo to new functions, simultaneously adding to the value and status of the indigenous language of Aotearoa. I have taken the position that in the same way that educational settings helped to eradicate te reo M¯aori, so too can they help with its revitalisation aims. Te reo M¯aori stands as a challenge to the hegemonic norm of colonisation, countering dominant discourses and contesting universalisation. In this context, the development of an alphabet and an alphabet song can be seen as a resistance strategy, reflected in the last line of the first verse: ‘kia kore ai t¯o t¯atou reo e ngaro ne’ (so that our language never disappears). I have argued that we owe a great deal to the meanderings of Thomas Kendall for his insistence on an orthography that was consistent with M¯aori language phonology and which informed successive M¯aori language dictionaries. It enhanced the work of K¯ohanga Reo in a critical literacy pedagogy. The power of the M¯aori language to liberate the M¯aori mind from the language and thinking of the coloniser is what is inherent in te rangatiratanga o te reo, kia M¯aori. Whilst concentrating on our children at the centre, within the tribal unit of the wh¯anau – te K¯ohanga Reo is creating the new wave which is bringing our canoe in! The following

Figure 26.1 Graphic by Robyn Kahukiwa – Oriori Series

Figure 26.1 represents the centrality of children as being the life blood in the language revitalisation M a¯ ori language aims. Te Waka Reo! Ko te reo, n¯o te Atua mai. Kia u¯ !

Notes   1  M¯aori tribal structures of family, smaller family units and larger kinship groupings    2  WaiM¯aori is freshwater used here metaphorically to represent the M¯aori language stream of education as opposed to the Whitestream of monolingual English language education.   3  where one language is subtracted creating one dominant language system   4  Tangata—people; whenua (whenua being for both land and placenta as the nourisher of life); tangata whenua—people of the land, people of place.    5  W¯a meaning space and/or time, ‘nanga’ being a noun forming suffix – w¯ananga being the specific forum for discussion and debate.    6  Tamariki, commonly translated to ‘children’    7  In the Tainui tribal region the use of the double vowel is preferred over the macron.

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   8  Te Ataarangi – M¯aori language revitalisation initiative focusing on M¯aori language being spoken naturally in order to grow the number of c­ompetent speakers   9  Although the family is not equivalent to the nuclear P¯akeha style family but within a tribal grouping, inclusive of relationships outside mother, father and children.  10  The Education Review Office is an independent government department that reviews the performance schools and early childhood services, and reports publicly on what it finds.  11  Prestige, authority, control, power, influence, status, spiritual power

References Awatere, D. (1984). Maori sovereignty. Auckland, New Zealand: Broadsheet. Binney, J. (1968). The legacy of guilt: A life of Thomas Kendall. University of Auckland, New Zealand: Oxford University Press. Cannella, G. (2011). Political possibility, hyper­ capitalism, and the ‘Conservative Reeducation Machine’. Cultural Studies: Critical Methodologies, 11, 364. Published online. DOI: 10.1177/1532708611414667. Durie, M. (2001). A framework for considering Maori educational advancement. Wellington, New Zealand: Ministry of Education. Education Council New Zealand. (2011). Cultural competencies for teachers of M¯aori learners.Tataiako. ¯ Retrieved from https:// educationcouncil.org.nz/sites/default/files/ Tataiako.pdf. Education Counts. (2016). Early childhood services. Retrieved from https://www. educationcounts.govt.nz/data-services/ directories/early-childhood-services. Education Review Office. (2012). Partnership with wh¯anau M¯aori in early childhood services. Wellington: Education Review Office. Fanon, F. (2008). Black skin, white masks. New York, USA: Grove Press. Fishman, J. A. (2010). Sociolinguistics: Language and ethnic identity in context. In J. Fishman & O. Garcia (Eds.), Handbook of language and ethnic identity: Disciplinary and regional perspectives, 1. (2nd ed.). (pp xxiii–xxxv). New York, USA: Oxford University Press.

García, O., & Wei, L. (2014). Translanguaging and education. In Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education (pp. 63– 77). London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Hemara, W. (2000). M¯aori pedagogies: A view from the literature. Wellington, New Zealand: New ­Zealand Council for Educational Research. Huia (2006). Tirohia Kimihia: he kete wherawhera. Wellington, New Zealand: Huia Te Manu Tuku Korero ¯ for the Ministry of Education. May, S. (2005). Language rights: Moving the debate forward. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 9(3), 319–347. McCarty, T. L. (2003). Revitalising Indigenous languages in homogenising times. Comparative Education, 39(2), 147–163. McDonald, G. (1973). Maori mothers and preschool education (No. 50). Wellington, New Zealand: New Zealand Council for Educational Research. Minett, J. W., & Wang, W. S. (2008). Modelling endangered languages: The effects of bilingualism and social structure. Lingua, 118(1), 19–45. Ministry of Education. (1996). Te whāriki: He whāriki mātauranga mō ngā mokopuna o Aotearoa: Early childhood curriculum. Wellington, New Zealand: Learning Media. Ministry of Education. (2008). Ka Hikitia: Managing for success 2008–2012. The M¯aori education strategy. Wellington, New Zealand: Ministry of Education. Ministry of Education. (2011). Briefing to the incoming minister. Retrieved from http:// www.minedu.govt.nz/∼/media/MinEdu/Files/ TheMinistry/PolicyAndStrategy/EducationBIM2011.pdf Ministry of Education. (2013a). Tau mai te reo: The M¯aori language in education strategy 2013–2017. Wellington, New Zealand: Ministry of Education. Ministry of Education. (2013b). Ka hikitia: Accelerating success. 2013–2017. The M¯aori education strategy. Wellington, New Zealand: Ministry of Education. Ministry of Education. (2017). Te whāriki: He whāriki mātauranga mō ngā mokopuna o Aotearoa: Early childhood curriculum. Wellington, New Zealand: Ministry of Education, Te Tāhuhu o te Mātauranga.

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Miyaoka, O. (2001). Endangered languages: the crumbling of the linguistic ecosystem. Retrieved from http://www.accu.or.jp/ appreb/09/pdf34-2/34-2P003-005.pdf New Zealand Legislative Council Ordinances. (1841–1853). Public ordinance no. X (pp. 73–74). Wellington, New Zealand: Government Printer. Papakura, M. (1938). The old time M¯aori. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd. Pere, R. R. (1994) Ako: Concepts and learning in the M¯aori tradition. Monograph. Wellington: Te Kohanga ¯ National Trust Board. Romaine, S. (2007). Preserving endangered languages. Language and Linguistics Compass, 1(1–2), 115–132. Serjeant, R. (1993). In M. Szaszy (Ed.), Te t¯ımatanga: Tatau ¯ tatau. ¯ Early stories from founding members of the Maori ¯ Women’s Welfare League (pp. 192–9). Wellington, New Zealand: Bridget Williams Books. Simon, J. (Ed.). (1998). Nga kura M¯aori: The native schools system 1867–1969. Auckland, New Zealand: Auckland University Press. Skerrett, M. (2014). Dismantling colonial myths: Centralising M¯aori language in education. In M. Bloch, G. Cannella & B. Swadener (Eds.), Early childhood education in Aotearoa New Zealand: History, pedagogy, and liberation. (pp. 10–34). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Skerrett, M. (2016). The determinants of ‘quality’ in Aotearoa/New Zealand: M¯aori perspectives. In G. Cannella, G., M. Pérez & I. Lee (Eds.), Critical examinations of quality in early education and care: Regulation, disqualification and erasure (pp. 59–82). New York: Peter Lang. Skerrett, M. N. (2001). The rise and decline of te k ˉohanga reo: The impact of government policy. In J. Ritchie, A. Parsonson, T. Karetu,

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N. Te Uira, & G. Lanning (Eds.), Te Taarere aa Tawhaki (pp. 11–22). Hamilton, New Zealand: Waikato University College. Skerrett, M.E. (2003). Kia Mate R¯a Ano¯ A Tama-nui-te-r¯a: Reversing language shift in Kohanga ¯ Reo. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Waikato, New Zealand. Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (2015). Linguicism. In C. A. Chapelle (Ed.) The encyclopedia of applied linguistics (pp. 1–6). Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Smith, L. T. (2012[1999]). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. (2nd ed.) London, UK: Zed Books. Statistics New Zealand (2014). Measuring te reo M¯aori speakers: A guide to different data sources. Retrieved from www.stats.govt.nz Szaszy, M. (1993). Te T¯ımatanga, T¯atau T¯atau. Early Stories from Founding Members of the M¯aori Women’s Welfare League. Wellington, New Zealand: Bridget Williams Books. Te Ara (2015) M¯aori education: m¯atauranga: The native schools system, 1867 to 1969. Retrieved from http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/ M¯aori-education-matauranga/page-3 United Nations. (2008). United Nations declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples. Retrieved from http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/ unpfii/documents/DRIPS_en.pdf Waitangi Tribunal. (1986). Te Reo M¯aori report. Wellington, New Zealand: GP Publications/ Waitangi Tribunal. Waitangi Tribunal. (2010). Pre-publication Waitangi Tribunal report 262: Te Reo Maori. Wellington, New Zealand: Waitangi Tribunal. Waitangi Tribunal. (2012). Pre-publication Waitangi Tribunal Report 2336: Matua Rautia: The report on the Kohanga ¯ Reo claim. Wellington, New Zealand: Waitangi Tribunal. Walker, R. (2004). Ka whawhai tonu m¯atou: Struggle without end (Rev. ed.). Auckland, New Zealand: Penguin Books.

27 Children’s Rights and Early Childhood Education Anne B. Smith† 1

Introduction Children’s rights play an important role in policy developments in early childhood education (ECE) because they promote social justice and empowerment for children, highlight the impact of early childhood experiences and question traditional assumptions about the competence and agency of young children. To adopt a children’s-rights focus on ECE means that young children are recognised as active citizens who participate and contribute to society, rather than as the passive objects of adult actions and concern. ‘Rights’, according to James and James (2008, p. 109), ‘are claims that are justifiable on legal or moral grounds to have or to obtain something or to act in a certain way’. Children’s rights have a transformative role in reconceptualising the power relationships between children, adults and the state, and are a major driver for policy change based on reasoned arguments and a moral case (Tobin, 2011). John Tobin highlights the value of a rights-based approach in arguing that ‘rights

provide the lens by which all impact on children should be reviewed and resolved’ (p. 88). In this chapter I outline the origins and history of the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and explore its theoretical links to the study of children and childhood. I discuss the impact of UNCRC on contemporary thinking about children as rights holders and examine four key principles of UNCRC that are crucial to policy development in ECEC.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) The adoption by the United Nations of the UNCRC in November 1989, following ten years of discussion and debate, marked a new vision of children and childhood, and changed discourses and ­cultures across the world to give more prominence to children’s issues (Cantwell, 2011).

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A concern for children’s rights emerged from two world wars in which children (and women) suffered from violence, homelessness, deprivation and displacement (Fass, 2011). The first codification of children’s rights came in 1924 with the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child, a brief one-page statement, expressing that ‘mankind owes to the child the best that it has to give’, and the duty of nations to provide relief to children in distress, protect them from exploitation and give them an opportunity to earn a living. The Geneva Declaration was strongly influenced by British philanthropist Eglantyne Jebb, who was responsible for establishing the Save the Children fund (Veerman, 1992, p. 444). The Geneva Declaration was followed in 1959 by a three-page Declaration of the Rights of the Child, which expanded on the Geneva Declaration, to declare a universal entitlement of children to rights, including special protection, to be among the first to receive help, to a name and nationality, to social security, to free education, to protection from neglect and deprivation and to the care and love of parents. Both the declarations preceding the 1989 UNCRC were focused on charitable support for children and on welfare rather than citizenship rights (Cantwell, 2011). The idea of a convention to enshrine the rights of the child was suggested to the UN Commission on Human Rights by Poland in 1978. This initiative marked a turn towards the ‘harder’ law of conventions from the ‘softer’ law of declarations (Veerman, 1992). Conventions are more binding than declarations because they have to be ratified formally and require reporting to the UN followed by feedback. They are also incorporated into the domestic law of some countries. The UN International Year of the Child (1979) was an important influence on broadening and clarifying the focus on children’s rights to include a much larger range of issues. It also marked the setting up of a working group to carry out the lengthy process of drafting the UNCRC. The working group that drafted the convention included human-rights organisations

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(such as Amnesty International) and NGOs working with children (such as Defence for Children International). The UNCRC represents a hard-won consensus among that group, and the combination of a humanrights and welfare focus influenced the final UNCRC to extend beyond welfare rights to include citizenship rights (Cantwell, 2011). The following quotations demonstrate the wide-ranging importance of the UNCRC and how it has changed perceptions of childhood. Not only is the Convention a nearly universally adopted expression of respect for children as persons, but it is also unparalleled in its conceptual breadth. No other human-rights treaty directly touches on so many domains of life. (Melton, 2005, p. 648) Children are citizens and social participants in their own right. This is a fundamental shift from the old adage ‘children should be seen but not heard’. No longer are children to be thought of as the property of their parents, unwarranted of consideration until the attainment of adulthood. Children are human beings and entitled to the same degree of respect as adult human beings. … This position of being people unto themselves, while also being dependent on others, is clearly recognised in the pre-eminent human rights instrument specific to children. That is the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). (Boshier, 2005, p. 7)

The UNCRC applies to children from birth to 18. Its 54 articles range across three main categories: provision, protection and participation. Provision articles refer to the right of children to receive appropriate health care, social security, physical care, education, family life, recreation and play and culture (Lansdown, 1994). Protection articles say that children must be safe from discrimination, abuse, exploitation, substance abuse, violence, injustice and conflict. Participation articles refer to children’s civil and political rights, to a name and identity, to be consulted on matters that affect them, to have access to information, to be able to express opinions and to take part in decisions. The inclusion of participation rights in the UNCRC was a significant shift towards treating children as citizens and recognising that they deserved human rights in the same way as adults did.

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The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) monitors the progress being made by countries which have ratified the UNCRC. Two years after ratification each country must compile a report, followed by reports at fiveyearly intervals. In addition to government reports, other information can be submitted by NGOs, often presenting an alternative perspective on the progress achieved. It is essentially a process of self-review (Doek, 2011), even though the CRC responds to each country’s reports and submissions with a set of Concluding Observations. These are intended to provide input into the development of state agendas for the subsequent five years. The CRC’s Concluding Observations are part of a cycle of monitoring, reporting, recommending, applying and monitoring again with the ultimate aim of ensuring ‘evidence-based public action for children’s rights’ (Maurás, 2011, p. 61). The right to an education is one of the most fundamental of all rights because it promotes the achievement of children’s full potential. Attending an ECE centre is a large part of growing up, at least for many children in the developing world, and it is usually the first non-familial out-of-home experience for young children, so it is highly influential. Article 29(a) of the convention says that the education of the child should be directed towards ‘the development of the child’s personality, talents and physical abilities to their fullest potential’, while Article 29(b) says that education should foster respect for human rights and help children learn about their rights and the rights of others. Although the original UNCRC did not include a specific mention of ECE, this omission was remedied in 2005 when the Committee on the Rights of the Child published its General Comment No. 7. This document suggested that ECE should be defined as the period under the age of 8 (including, of course, many children at school). The General Comment expressed concern at the lack of attention to young children as rights holders and pointed out that young children hold all the rights in the UNCRC. According to the committee:

young children are best understood as social actors whose survival, well-being and development are dependent on and built around close relationships … normally with a small number of key people, most often parents, members of the extended family and peers, as well as caregivers and other early childhood professionals. … proper prevention and intervention strategies during early childhood have the potential to impact positively on young children’s current well-being and future projects. (United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, 2005, General Comment No. 7, para. 8)

Links to Theory It is important to articulate the theoretical framework that lies behind a children’s-rights approach. Everyone has a theory, whether they know what it is or not, but we all should be able to explain the conceptual foundation of our research and advocacy, especially when working within a children’s-rights framework. The dominant theories for understanding children in education, law, health and social-work practice have traditionally come from Developmental Psychology. As Berry Mayall says, ‘the child development industry has cornered the market in knowledge about children’ (2011, p. 431). Recently there has been much more criticism of the hegemonic power of Developmental Psychology to shape our thinking about children. Other theoretical approaches have challenged some of the assumptions, such as that childhood is a universal experience for all children, and that children are on a stepwise path towards an end-point of rationality and completeness as adults. Our institutional organisation, such as age-graded classrooms, segregation of disabled children into special facilities and psychometric testing, streaming and tracking according to ability are based on such assumptions. The conceptual framework of Childhood Studies is more compatible with human rights approaches because it sees children through a different and holistic lens, as active within their own lives and not just objects

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of concern, in need of protection, moulding and normalising. Childhood Studies takes an integrated, joined-up view of the child in context and rejects the essentialism of traditional theorising, instead recognising ‘the multiple ways childhood is socially constructed and reconstructed in relation to time and place, age, gender, ethnicity etc.’ (Woodhead, 2004, xii). Children can understand and participate in society now, rather than just in the future, and they can make a difference to relationships, decisions and problem-solving, and this means that they should have opportunities to have their voices heard and responded to, as well as exercise their agency. Children are much more capable and competent than we have acknowledged in the past. Their competence derives from the richness of their cultural experiences, their opportunities for co-construction of meaning in the context of their everyday lives and the extent that they are listened to, supported, guided and responded to by people who have close intersubjective relationships with them. In this respect, Childhood Studies and Sociocultural Theory mesh well together (Smith, 2002) and link to Bourdieu’s theoretical notion of ‘habitus’. I expand on some of these ideas below.

Sociocultural theories and children’s rights Context has a major influence on children’s lives, so a sociocultural approach (originating with Vygotsky) is relevant because it shows how children in different cultures come to be able to formulate, understand and implement their rights. Vygotsky (1978) believed that children grow into the intellectual life of those around them through participating in their families and cultures, acquiring knowledge and receiving guidance and support from others (adults or peers). The richer and more complex the activities and interactions in which children engage, the greater their

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understanding will be. The process is not oneway but rather reciprocal, in which adults engage jointly with children to co-construct their understanding. Expectations of what children are capable of influence how adults interact with children, and if they know children well they can engage them at the outside edge of their skill. Sociocultural theory suggests children’s social environments are the source of their agency, providing a bridge between the known and the unknown. Joseph (2005) showed how this works in his study of children in Lebanese villages who were nested in webs of family relationships; he showed that what they knew about their rights and responsibilities was influenced by who they were related to, who they knew and the everyday interactions they engaged in (such as social visits by their parents to neighbours). In M¯aori sociocultural contexts in New Zealand, children’s reciprocal relationships and responsibilities towards older siblings (tuakana) and younger siblings or cousins (teina) are similarly an important influence on their social interactions (Edwards, McCreanor & Moewaka-Barnes, 2007). Childhood is socially constructed rather than being a natural state or a universal feature of all human groups. The beliefs that are held about young children have a powerful effect, and these seemingly self-evident ‘truths’ have practical consequences (Stainton Rogers, 2009). For example, if children are thought to be their parents’ possessions they may be shaped into compliance by practices like corporal punishment; or if children are seen as lacking in rationality and competence, they may not be given information important to their understanding and decision-making. If parents divorce, for example, children may have no information about alternative residence and contact arrangements and may be given no input into decisions. If children are viewed as the passive objects of teaching in an early childhood centre, they are likely to be subjected to formal, teacher-led programmes that draw little on children’s existing cultural knowledge or family life.

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Bourdieu’s notion of ‘habitus’ and children’s right to social participation Percy-Smith and Thomas (2010) believe that children’s social participation is a key rights issue, and that it is important that children are seen as active citizens working as members of communities who can make ongoing contributions in everyday life settings. Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’ suggests that there are durable transposable ways of being, ‘things to do or not to do, things to say or not to say in relation to a “probable” upcoming future’ (Bourdieu, cited by Carr et al., 2010, p. 20). Habitus is influenced by early experiences and social fields, position in society and interactions with others, and it invites us to choose familiar pathways. Nigel Thomas suggests (based on Bourdieu’s ideas of social and cultural capital) that a barrier to children’s participation is that children have too little social and cultural capital to be taken seriously or take themselves seriously, which limits their ability to take part in decisionmaking in their communities and schools (Thomas, 2007). Children’s subordinate status and lack of interest or involvement in public affairs are also part of embodied habitus and prevailing discourses. Social participation in everyday settings, however, can provide for more opportunity for ownership and self-determination than is possible in public decision-making forums (Percy-Smith & Thomas, 2010).

Honneth’s theoretical idea of a ‘struggle for recognition’ Advocacy for children’s right to social participation implies the importance of encouraging, sustaining and interpreting dialogue with children, so that children are invited into a position where they can contribute. Thomas (2012) draws on Honneth’s theory of a ‘struggle for recognition’ to analyse the social position of

children and those who are in direct engagement with them during participatory activities. According to Honneth, identity is constructed in dialogues through a process of mutual recognition, and recognition is a key element in human interaction and group identity. Honneth (1995, cited by Thomas, 2012, p. 455) identified three distinct modes of recognition: (1) the affective relationships of recognition found in the family or friendships; (2) recognition as abstract persons, embedded in the law; and (3) enlightened recognition by the state ‘as subjects who are socialised into their particularity’ (Honneth, 1995, p. 25, cited by Thomas, 2012, p. 455). In other words, Honneth argues that recognition emerges from the experience of love, rights and solidarity. Love is about strong emotional attachments among small numbers of people, which are the source of affection, trust and attachment and provide a balance between self-assertion and mutuality. These bonds build self-confidence that supports participation in public life. However, love and care is the only mode of recognition in which Honneth includes children. Thomas sees this as unsurprising given that most social and political theory ignores children or regards them as adults in waiting. The second mode of recognition, embedded in rights, comes from the legal recognition of people as morally responsible. Historically, there has been indeterminacy about who has the status in law of being morally responsible persons, and there has been a gradual extension of inclusion of people to whom basic human rights have been attributed (for example, women lagged behind men in property rights and being allowed to vote). Self-respect, according to Honneth, is dependent on the ability to claim one’s rights through a legal process. Where legal recognition of rights is not possible, the opposite occurs and there are feelings of shame and exclusion, as in the case when civil-rights movements have fought for their rights. Solidarity is the outcome of belonging to a community of shared values and understanding. It is achieved within a group with

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common goals, where members’ accomplishments are recognised. Relations of selfesteem, according to Honneth, are subject to a permanent struggle in which various groups try to increase the value of their way of life. Nigel Thomas disputes Honneth’s restriction of children to an entitlement to love and care, and argues: (1) That children do belong to the class of morally responsible persons, are therefore rights-bearers and are entitled to respect; (2) that children are people with talents and capabilities, who contribute in a variety of ways to society and culture, and so are deserving of esteem. (Thomas, 2012, p. 458)

This modification of Honneth’s model allows us to view children not only as the recipients of care and affection but as people who provide care to others, as well as rights-bearers and rights-respecters, who are members of communities of solidarity based on shared values and reciprocal esteem. Thomas (2012) carried out ethnographic research on a Welsh initiative to encourage local organisations to be more responsive to children and to have children’s voices heard and involved in decision-making (the Funky Dragon project). Honneth’s categories were used to thematise the data. The relationships provided by the workers, and the friendships they formed with the other young people, were the foundation for participation. Having friends was one of the main reasons the children wanted to be in the group and stick together, so this was the first level of Honneth’s model: love. At a political level, the idea of children’s rights led to the whole project, but young people were rather ambiguous about the place of rights, although they did discuss the importance of getting their voices heard. Thomas got the impression that the issue of rights (the second category in the model) was the missing part of their project. The category of solidarity was, however, very relevant to the young people, as they were proud of the esteem that the whole project brought to them. This is illustrated by their reported comments about the adults involved,

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like ‘they don’t patronise us. They don’t talk to us like we’re little kids … They accept us as equals’ (Thomas, 2012, p. 462). Reciprocal recognition, according to Thomas, is more than just dialogue, however important that is: it is about shared action and participation in democratic processes. He believes that all three modes of recognition are necessary for full participation. Children engage fully in an atmosphere of warmth and affection, where they are respected as rights holders and where there is solidarity and a sense of mutual respect. This theory seems to be particularly relevant to children’s educational settings, such as schools and early childhood centres. Children’s wellbeing at school has been analysed with Honneth’s model in another study by Thomas and his colleagues (Thomas, Graham, Powell & Fitzgerald, 2016), using data gathered from focus groups and interviews across three Australian schools. Relationships were crucial to recognition in this study, according to teachers: ‘I think there’s a relationship that the teacher builds with a child and your hope as a teacher, your greatest wish, is that you connect with every child’ (teacher in Thomas et al., 2016, p. 511). Students found that being ‘cared for’ was essential for their wellbeing: ‘The biggest one we think was being loved by others … you feel very safe and you feel confident with yourself and like you belong’ (student in Thomas et al., 2016, p. 513). Being respected by teachers was also important and was associated with having fair expectations and consistency. Opportunities for student voices to be heard also made children feel respected, but school cultures varied in the extent to which they either recognised or misrecognised (respected or disrespected) students’ voices. One student said, ‘It’s pretty hard to come across a teacher that really respects and values your opinion; a lot of them listen to you and ask your opinion but they don’t do anything about it – they just leave it’ (Thomas et  al., 2016, p. 514). Finally, being valued as a member of the group was important to students, and wellbeing was adversely affected when teachers

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made incorrect assumptions about students, delivered negative feedback or treated them unequally. Promoting these aspects of recognition at school (and early childhood centres) is important for children’s wellbeing, with relationships playing a key role: Students needed to be known personally, to be cared for as unique individuals, to be respected as persons on a basis of equality, and to be valued for their achievements and contributions. They needed this from their teachers, from their fellow students, and from their families. (Thomas et al., 2016, p. 516)

When children are recognised as having rights, they can be constructed as competent, capable beings, who participate in dialogues and shared actions, develop close reciprocal relationships with others and are respected and valued for their contributions in their families, communities and institutions. Childhood studies, sociocultural concepts, views such as the ‘struggle for recognition’ and other theories come together to affirm that childhood is socially constructed and that our perspectives on childhood have a profound effect on the way we treat children. When we see children as social actors rather than passive recipients of the socialisation process, we can recognise that they also have a meaningful input into the wellbeing and rights of themselves and others. These ideas resonate deeply with the philosophies of ECE that underlie the policy and practice of many countries. In the next section I will look further at research that is relevant to policy and practice issues and to the realisation of children’s rights in ECE.

Rights, Research and Policy in ECE This section explores the four cardinal general principles of the UNCRC (Earls, 2011; Franklin, 1995), which apply to all aspects of the UNCRC and can be applied and implemented in ECE policies and practices. I first

introduce the four principles and subsequently draw on examples from policy and practice that illustrate how the principles can be relevant to both. One principle is universalism and nondiscrimination: that all children are entitled to rights regardless of their (or their parents’) race, sex, language, religion, disability or income (Article 2) (characteristics such as immigration status or sexuality are also important). This principle upholds the link between rights and social justice: that ‘everybody has a fair chance’ and that the dignity of every human being, including children, is upheld. A second cardinal principle is inherent in Article 6 (the right to survival and development), which says that children not only have the right to live but to be protected from threats to their development. This principle implies an obligation to provide services that will enhance rather than reduce children’s development and wellbeing. The third cardinal principle stems from Article 12 (also 13 and 14), which says that the views of the child should be listened to, respected, taken seriously and given due weight (Article 12).2 Participatory rights are the ‘linchpin’ of the Convention, according to Michael Freeman (1995), because they recognise children’s personality and autonomy and that children are people and not just objects of concern. Participatory rights are among the most progressive, forward-looking (and controversial) of the articles in the UNCRC, because they promote children’s citizenship, status and capacities and challenge the power balance between children and adults. Instead of being the passive objects of adult power, children are viewed as social actors and given space and support to take actions on their own behalf. The fourth cardinal principle is that the ‘best interests of the child’ should be a primary consideration in actions or decisions concerned with children (Article 3). Children have often been the last to be considered in the development of policy and practice, so this principle insists that children are a priority. While what is in the ‘best interests of

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the child’ is frequently disputed and controversial, other principles in the UNCRC (such as participation) help to point to what is in children’s best interests.

Principle 1: Universality and Non-Discrimination Before children’s rights to participate in a quality ECE programme can be realised, it is necessary that they can fully access such programmes. The importance of access to a place is highlighted by this recommendation from the Australian Human Rights Commission (2014): ‘Develop accessible, affordable, flexible, quality early childhood education and care services, including out-of-school-hours care services, and ensure each child has an entitlement to attend’ (p. 3, italics added). There is strong evidence that inequities in access to ECE before school lead to widening gaps in educational success (Bainbridge, Meyers, Tanaka & Waldfogel, 2005; Magnuson, Meyers, Ruhm & Waldfogel, 2004). During the late 1990s and early 2000s the percentage of children attending an ECE centre at 4 or 5 years (and younger) increased markedly in the Western world, so that the experience has become increasingly normative for 3- and 4-year-olds in developed countries. Some countries (such as Norway and Denmark) mandate that a preschool place is available for all 3- and 4-year-olds. But in many developed countries with a neoliberal philosophy, access to ECE is regarded as a private good that parents have to organise, in contrast to education at the primary-school level, where the state is expected to provide it. ‘Leaving the early education and care of young children largely dependent on the resources of parents appears to produce substantial inequalities in children’s experience’ (Bainbridge et al., 2005, p. 743). Moreover, there is a lot of recent research suggesting that ECE is a public not a private good. Nobel Laureate James Heckman (2011a) points out that there are economic

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and social benefits of participation in ECE which reduce future costs to the state as well as being beneficial for children’s long-term education. Parental education and parent income are strong predictors of whether children are enrolled in ECE, so inequalities tend to be intergenerational unless the state intervenes with funding, resources and regulatory mechanisms to ensure access to high-quality ECE for children. Targeted provision of ECE is common, but universal provision is much more desirable, as targeting tends to omit particular groups and is often inaccurate or fails to identify the appropriate children and families (Barnett & Yarosz, 2007). Universal provision also complies with the UNCRC.

Principle 2: Survival and Development The survival and development principle (from Article 6) in the Convention says that states have a responsibility to support children’s survival and development. ECE clearly has an important role in this endeavour, as is evidenced all over the world. This moves us from considering access to ECE to considering access to what? What do ECE centres need to do to ensure that the interactions, processes and curriculum in centres (or home-based care) positively influence children’s survival and development? While the influence of the family on children’s development clearly outweighs the effects of ECE, there is good evidence that ECE has a lasting effect, depending on the quality of the programmes (Barnett & Ackerman, 2006; Berrueta-Clement et al., 1984; NICHD, 2000, 2005; Reynolds, Temple, White, Ou & Robertson, 2011; Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000; Sylva et  al., 2010). Since the early childhood years are the most formative in a child’s life, participation in ECE programmes can give children a good start in life, support their families in their parenting and help children reach their full potential (which fits in with Article 29 of the UNCRC).

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James Heckman (2011b) argues that we have paid too much attention to advancing cognitive skills, and that lasting effects are more strongly associated with motivational and social competencies. He believes that the reason that early experiences have a lasting effect is that: Skills beget skills. All capabilities are built on a foundation of capacities that are developed earlier. This principle stems from two characteristics that are intrinsic to the nature of learning … First, early learning confers value on acquired skills, which leads to self-reinforcing motivation to learn more. Early mastery of a range of cognitive, social, and emotional competencies makes learning at later ages more efficient and therefore easier and more likely to continue. (p. 6)

Because the family is such a powerful predictor of outcomes for children, it is especially important that ECE programmes focus not just on children but on partnership and support for their families. Participation in ECE programmes outside the home, however, also offers risks, as children during these years are vulnerable to the influence of coercive, mediocre and under-stimulating environments: A fundamental paradox exists and is unavoidable: development in the early years is both highly robust and highly vulnerable. Although there have been long-standing debates about how much the early years of life matter in the larger scheme of lifelong development, our conclusion is unequivocal: What happens during the first months and years of life matters a lot, not because this period of development provides an indelible blueprint for adult well-being, but because it sets either a sturdy or fragile stage for what follows. (Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000, p. 5)

As the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2012) has pointed out, ECEC brings a range of benefits, but the OECD also notes that ‘these benefits are conditional on “quality”… if quality is low, it can have long-lasting detrimental effects … instead of bringing positive effects’ (p. 9). Most families enrol their children in ECE programmes because they believe that they provide opportunities for learning. We

know, too, that some families have no choice but to use ECE centres or home-based ECEC because they themselves are very young, are single parents and/or have to work to provide for their families. In some cases, the arrangements they make for their children may be mediocre and actually harmful to children. State welfare-to-work programmes when children are placed in poor quality programmes may actually exacerbate problems rather than ameliorate them. The state, therefore, has an especial responsibility to ensure that children (especially vulnerable children) are placed in high-quality programmes, and that suitable mechanisms, including funding subsidies, monitoring and regulation, are in place. Fiscal constraints have hampered the efforts of many countries to enhance the quality of their ECE services. It is easier to cut than to intervene or maintain the status quo in difficult economic times. This is not the place to elaborate on what constitutes quality ECE (Smith, 1999; Smith, 2016, Chapter 3; Sylva et al., 2007), but suffice it to say that it consists of subjective values in particular localities, cultures and societies; measurable aspects of quality such as teacher qualifications, child–adult ratios and group sizes (structural quality); and reciprocal, responsive and warm adult–child relationships and interactions (process quality). In higher-quality programmes children spend more time in sustained shared thinking (which includes scaffolding, extending, discussing, modelling and playing), while in poorer-quality programmes children are more likely to be unoccupied, in solitary play, or participating in teacher-directed large group activities. Children are often observed playing in small groups or pairs in good-quality provision (Sylva et al., 2007). One aspect of quality is the ECE curriculum. This provides guidelines for the pedagogical approaches taken in ECE, including the roles that adults and children play, the goals of the curriculum approach and the philosophical principles underlying pedagogy. Working with an effective curriculum model

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helps teachers to be intentional, plan, assess and reflect on their programmes, and this is a valuable component of quality ECE practice: A consistent feature of these models is that learning through play is not left to chance, but is channelled through complex reciprocal and responsive relationships, and is situated in activities which are socially constructed and mediated. (Wood, 2004)

There are many examples of such curriculum models, including Australia’s Being Belonging and Becoming, New Zealand’s Te Wh a¯ riki, the Italian Reggio Emilia framework and the US’s High/Scope curriculum. Instead of focusing exclusively on promoting skills and competencies, these curricula focus on process quality, where children are given the opportunity to initiate, take responsibility and assume agency, and adults are available who know the children well, are responsive to their current level of knowledge and encourage their exploration and curiosity. New Zealand’s Te Wh a¯ riki states that there is no one path to learning and that culturally rich settings provide different pathways for learning. Rather than focusing on the traditional domains of children’s development (physical, cognitive, social, emotional), it takes a more holistic approach of providing a safe and trustworthy environment, opportunities for collaborative problem-solving, meaningful and interesting problems, avoidance of the risk of failure and competition and the availability of assistance from teachers. The five strands and goals of Te Wh a¯ riki are wellbeing, belonging, contribution, communication and exploration. It focuses on the motivational aspects of learning, rather than fragmented skills and knowledge, and encourages ongoing dispositions to learn and persevere with difficulties. The vision of the child in Te Wh a¯ riki is one of an active learner, who brings to the ECE centre funds of knowledge from their families and communities, and expectations are high that each child can learn (Smith, 2011).

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Principle 3: Participation The participatory principles in the UNCRC to be found in Article 12 (and others) are focused on listening to children’s voices and perspectives on matters which affect them and taking them seriously, which has been described as a ‘bottom-up perspective on children’s rights’ (Harcourt & Hägglund, 2013, p. 286), and a legal imperative that is the right of every child. The second part of paragraph 1, Article 12 says that the child’s views should be given due weight in accordance with their age and maturity. There has been some doubt about what is meant by maturity, as this phrase tends to imply that it does not apply to younger children. The UN General Comment Number 7 (2005), however, strengthened the participatory intent suggesting that young children too should be able to express their views and have them taken into account. Several authors have given excellent examples of an emphasis on participatory principles in their practice. Caroline Bath (2013) cautions against a ‘quick-fix’ technicist approach to practice, because the context of listening for children often includes power differentials, and tokenistic listening reinforces differences of power and status. Bath sees participatory practice as broader and involving openness to the difference of the other. She cites Carla Rinaldi’s description of listening primarily as: Sensitivity to the patterns that connect, to that which connects us to others; abandoning ourselves to the conviction that our own understanding and our own being are but small parts of a broader integrated knowledge that holds the universe together. (Rinaldi, 2006, p. 65, cited by Bath, 2013, p. 363)

Pugh and Selleck (1996) concluded that listening to young children means observing the nuances of how they are feeling: whether they are under stress, anxious or feeling curious, and not necessarily taking all their words at face value. Because of differences in verbal language competency according to age, disability or other differences, it is useful to take a diverse approach:

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an inclusive approach to listening embraces diverse expressions of collective ideas and opens the field to multi-modal approaches to communication. This places the language of debate alongside, for example interpretations of body language and visual representation. (Bath, 2013, pp. 362–3)

Many authors have written about good participatory practice in ECE contexts and shown how it can work. I have given a more detailed account of these in Smith (2016). I described practices such as children being encouraged to climb into their own low-lying cots in Reggio Emilia centres to have their nappies changed (Pugh & Selleck, 1996); how teachers learned to tune into the voices of children and facilitate the children’s building of a rocket ship in Boulder Journey School (Hall & Rudkin, 2011); how a teacher positioned a reluctant writer to ‘click on’ to writing and to see himself as a writer (Carr et  al., 2010); how young, low-income children from a housing estate wrote a report about the estate to their local council (Clark, 2010); and how 4–5-year-old children’s perceptions of themselves as the subjects of rights, and their strong links of togetherness and belonging, were explored in Sweden and Australia (Harcourt & Hägglund, 2013). Best practice incorporating the participatory principle, recognises children as citizens and competent beings now, rather than citizens of the future, and this will demand a different approach from many ECE services. As James writes, ‘It becomes clear that not until children can be regarded as willfully responsible, rather than incompetent and irresponsible, will their status as citizens be ameliorated’ (James, 2011, p. 177). Adults working with young children need to have a greater understanding of children’s everyday experiences and their thinking, so that they become aware of their abilities and capacity for agency. While this participatory approach is strongly imbued in some ECE curricula, it is by no means universal. Staff need to be well qualified and have access to rightsbased professional development. They should be working in favourable situations (small groups, good adult–child ratios, sufficient

funding to retain staff) that allow them to develop close relationships with children so that they can be responsive, reciprocal and challenging to children at the outside edge of the children’s competency. It all comes back to the necessity of providing a high-quality ECE environment so that children have opportunities to explore, express themselves, articulate their own points of view, make choices and solve problems. Without such conditions, the power of ECE to have a lasting beneficial effect on children’s development is minimal.

Principle 4: Best Interests The ‘best interests’ principle is widely quoted and used in relation to policy and decisionmaking about children, frequently in medical decisions, child-custody/access or child-­ protection decisions. The principle elevates the interests of the child to being ‘a primary consideration’ in decisions within public or private institutions. The best-interests principle is used as an ideal to promote the best outcomes for children’s wellbeing and rights and to ensure that the rights of adults do not take precedence: It guides us to select what most informed, rational people of good will would regard as maximizing net benefits and minimizing net harms for children, given the legitimate interests and rights of others and the available options. (Kopelman, 1997, p. 287)

The trouble with this principle is that it is often interpreted largely from an adult perspective, and that it is rarely absolutely clear what the best interests of the child are in particular situations. It is often impossible to agree and be absolutely sure of what is best for a child. For example, there are different perspectives on the nature of ‘good parenting’, and parenting practices are markedly different in different cultures. It is also difficult to work from general principles in determining best interests in individual cases. It is usually assumed, for example, that it is best for children to have contact with both divorced parents, but this assumption is not always justified if there is conflict or abuse in the family.

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Best interests have often been interpreted from a protectionist perspective with emphasis on the child’s vulnerability and incompetence. Adults should be aware of their power relationship with children and that their own perspectives may be in conflict with those of the child (Jones & Welch, 2010). This does not necessarily mean that a child’s view about what s/ he wants should be determinative, but rather that the child’s view should be respected and that s/he can take part in discussions and dialogue with adults about his/her situation. The UNCRC makes two commitments – to hear the child and to promote his/her best interests: The two commitments seem to pull in different directions: promotion of a child’s welfare is essentially paternalist since it asks us to do what we, but not necessarily the child, thinks is best for the child; whereas listening to the child’s own views asks us to consider doing what the child, but not necessarily we, think is best for the child. (Archard & Skivenes, 2009, p. 2)

While agreeing that the child’s views should not be authoritative, Archard and Skivenes (2009) affirm the fundamental right of the child to express a view and participate in decisions, and they argue that this goes farther than mere consultation. They also point out that there is a difference between what is clearly normative about what is best or better for the child and empirical issues of fact about which there might be differing opinions but which might be ‘open to more definitive resolution’ (p. 7). From an early-childhood-policy perspective, I regard the authoritative research evidence on the beneficial effects of participation in ECE as demonstrating that the best interests of young children are realised when they have access to affordable, accessible and high-quality programmes. Without prioritising investment in high-quality ECE, the interests of children will not be supported. Moreover, welfare-to-work schemes that force parents to enrol their children in lowquality ECE are clearly inimical to the rights and best interests of children. From the perspective of the everyday interactions between staff and children in an ECE

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programme, the best-interests principle seems to me to be imbued in reciprocal, responsive relationships; respect for culture, language and family; and listening to children’s voices and supporting their agency. Governments are accountable for policies that support children’s best interests, and these policies need to be monitored and documented as suggested below: It is significant that the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child maintains that the obligation to consider children’s best interests requires a child-impact assessment and evaluation with respect to all legislation and other forms of policy development to determine the impact of any proposed law or policy or budgetary allocation on children’s rights. (Freeman, 2009, p. 386)

Conclusion The UNCRC marked a sea change in thinking about children in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries towards recognition of children’s agency, personhood and voice, and attributing them dignity, respect and the right to be listened to. This recognition is consistent with constructs from a number of theoretical traditions, most notably those that inform the field of Childhood Studies. Research in this field emphasises that children are people in the here and now, not just future citizens, and that their agency and dependency is grounded in rich cultural contexts, where they should be invited to participate in society. Clearly these changing views of childhood have profound implications for the way that younger children are treated in society. For too long, children in ECE services have been invisible and voiceless, and education policies have been based on the assumption of the primacy of later (primary and secondary) experiences. Funding and prestige have been much more readily available for later than earlier education. Yet there is now irrefutable evidence that optimising the experiences of the child’s earliest years is one of the ways to ensure that their right to achieve their

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full potential is realised. If young children’s rights are really taken seriously by governments and policy makers, then investment in ECE should be a natural consequence. Four cardinal principles within the UNCRC suggest directions for policy in ECE. Firstly, all children, regardless of their characteristics, are entitled to access affordable, high-quality ECE services; and universal well-subsidised or free provision is the most desirable means of achieving this. Secondly, participation in quality ECE supports children’s right to survival and development, since the early years are a time when children’s motivational and social competencies are being established, in turn establishing a lifelong pathway to learning. Thirdly, the participatory principles in the Convention highlight the importance of connecting our own understanding with children’s, being open to children’s perspectives and interacting reciprocally with them in dialogue and action. Finally, the best-interests principle should elevate children’s interests to be a key consideration in any decisions about children and policy. While this principle must be tempered by uncertainty about what is in children’s best interests, our role as researchers and practitioners should be to look for evidence to support the best actions for children as well as be sensitive to children’s own views about decisions affecting their everyday lives.

Notes 1   This chapter is being published posthumously, having been the final piece of writing completed by Anne E. Smith during her short and final illness. The editors note their deep appreciation of Anne’s commitment to completing this chapter, and their admiration for her advocacy for children throughout her distinguished forty-year career. They also wish to acknowledge Anne’s family for their ongoing support of Anne’s work. 2  State Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views freely in matters affecting the child, the views of the child to be given due weight, in accordance with the age and maturity of the child. (United Nations, 1989, Article 12, 1)

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Doek, J. (2011). The CRC: Dynamics and directions of monitoring its implementation. In A. Invernizzi & J. Williams (Eds.), The human rights of children: From vision to implementation (pp. 99–116). Farnham: Ashgate. Earls, F. (2011). Children: From rights to citizenship. Annals of the American Association of Political and Social Science, 633 (1), 6–16. Edwards, S., McCreanor, R., & MoewakaBarnes, H. (2007). Maori family culture: A context of youth development in Counties/ Manakau. Kotuitui: ¯ New Zealand Journal of Social Sciences Online, 2(1), 1–15. Fass, P.S. (2011). A historical context for the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Annals of the American Association of Political and Social Science, 633, 17–29. Franklin, B. (Ed.). (1995). The Handbook of children’s rights: Comparative policy and practice. London: Routledge. Freeman, M. (1995). Children’s rights in a land of rites. In B. Franklin (Ed.), The handbook of children’s rights (pp. 70–88). London: Routledge. Freeman, M. (2009). Children’s rights as human rights: reading the UNCRC. In J. Qvortrup, W. A. Corsaro & M. S. Honig (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of childhood studies (pp. 377–93). Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Hall, E. L., & Rudkin, J. K. (2011). Seen and heard: Children’s rights in early childhood education. New York: Teachers College Press. Harcourt, D., & Hägglund, S. (2013). Turning the UNCRC upside down: A bottom-up perspective on children’s rights. International Journal of Early Years Education, 21(4), 286–99. Heckman, J. J. (2011a). The economics of inequality: The value of early childhood education. American Educator, 35(1), 31–47. Heckman, J. J. (2011b). Effective child development strategies. In E. Zigler, W. S. Gillam, & W. S. Barnett (Eds.), The pre-K debates: Current controversies and issues (pp. 2–8). Baltimore, MD: Paul Brookes Publishing Co. James, A. (2011). To be (come) or not to be (come): Understanding children’s citizenship. Annals of the American Association of Political and Social Science, 633, 167–179. James, A., & James, A. (2008). Key concepts in childhood studies. London: Sage.

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In B. Percy-Smith & N. Thomas (Eds.), A handbook of c­ hildren and young people’s participation (pp. 356–66). London: Routledge. Pugh, G., & Selleck, D. (1996). Listening to and communicating with young children. In R. Davie, G. Upton & V. Varma (Eds.), The voice of the child: A handbook for professionals (pp. 120–36). London: Falmer Press. Reynolds, A. J., Temple, J. A., White, B. A., Ou, S-R., & Robertson, D. L. (2011). Age-26 cost– benefit analysis of the child–parent center early education program. Child Development, 82(1), 379-404. Shonkoff, J., & Phillips, D. (2000). From neurons to neighborhoods: The science of early childhood development. Washington, DC: Academies National Press. Smith, A. B. (1999). Quality childcare and joint attention. International Journal of Early Years Education, 7(1), 85–98. Smith, A. B. (2002). Interpreting and supporting participation rights: Contributions from sociocultural theory. International Journal of Children’s Rights, 10(1), 73–88. Smith, A. B. (2011). Relationships with people, places and things: Te Wh¯ariki. In L. Miller & L. Pound (Eds.), Theories and approaches to learning in the early years (pp. 149–62). Critical Issues in the Early Years Series. London: Sage. Smith, A. B. (2016). Children’s rights: Towards social justice. New York: Momentum Press. Stainton Rogers, W. (2009). Promoting better childhoods: Constructions of child concern. In M. J. Kehily (Ed.), An introduction to childhood studies (2nd ed.) (pp. 141–60). Maidenhead and New York: Open University Press. Sylva, K., Melhuish, E., Sammons, P., SirajBlatchford, I., & Taggart, B. (2010). Early childhood matters: Evidence from the effective pre-school and primary education project. London: Routledge. Sylva, K., Taggart, B., Siraj-Blatchford, I., Totsika, V., Ereky-Stevens, K., Gildren, R., & Bell, D. (2007). Curricular quality and day-to-day learn-

ing activities in pre-school. International Journal of Early Years Education, 15(1), 49–65. Thomas, N. (2007). Towards a theory of children’s participation. International Journal of Children’s Rights, 15(2), 199–218. Thomas, N. (2012). Love, rights and solidarity: Studying children’s participation using Honneth’s theory of recognition. Childhood, 19(4), 453–66. Thomas, N., Graham, A., Powell, M.A., & Fitzgerald, R. (2016). Conceptualisations of children’s wellbeing at school: The contribution of recognition theory. Childhood, 23 (4), 506–20. Tobin, J. (2011). Understanding a human rights based approach to matters involving children: Conceptual foundations and strategic considerations. In A. Invernizzi & J. Williams (Eds.), The human rights of children: From vision to implementation (pp. 61–98). Farnham: Ashgate. United Nations (1989). Convention on the Rights of the Child. Geneva: United Nations. Retrieved on 17 May, 2017 from www. un.org/documents/ga/res/44/a44r025.htm United Nations (2005). Implementing child rights in early childhood (General Comment No. 7). Geneva: Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Retrieved on 20 February, 2014 from http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/crc/docs/ AdvanceVersions/GeneralComment7Rev1.pdf Veerman, P. E. (1992). The rights of the child and the changing image of childhood. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher mental processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wood, E. (2004). Developing a pedagogy of play. In A. Anning, J. Cullen & M. Fleer (Eds.), Early childhood education: Society and culture (pp. 19–30). London: Sage. Woodhead, M. (2004). Foreword. In M. J. Kehily (Ed.), An introduction to childhood studies (1st ed.) (pp. x–xi). Maidenhead: Open University Press.

28 The Lives of Refugee Children: A Korean Example Emily Seulgi Lee and Shin Ji Kang

Introduction The famous Underground Railroad of the nineteenth century was a network of secret routes extending throughout the United States that led slaves to the land of freedom. It was neither underground nor a railroad, but its name is an illustration of how the network functioned. In the twenty-first century, a modern-day Underground Railroad is in operation throughout eastern Asian countries. While the rest of the world is focused intently on the political tensions involved with North Korean nuclear weapons and the unpredictable endeavors of its dictator, Kim Jong-un, passengers from North Korea secretly board the modern-day Underground Railroad (Butterworth, 2004, cited in Emery, Lee, & Kang, 2015). The passengers travel through China and other Southeast Asian countries with the hope of one day safely arriving at their final destination, South Korea. Because North Koreans do not have the freedom to relocate and even stricter

restrictions are placed upon cross-border movements, people seeking refuge risk their lives in search of freedom. The secret network is illegally operated predominantly by human rights activists, faith-based organizations, and professional brokers (Kirkpatrick, 2012), with a majority of the travelers being women and children. As political tensions in North Korea escalate with threats of nuclear weapons, children and women who are traveling to South Korea become all the more vulnerable to adverse environments such as homelessness, exploitation, and even human trafficking (McPhee, 2014; Song, 2015). To better defend and promote the basic human rights of North Korean refugee children, it is important to call international attention to pre-, trans-, and post-migration ecologies encompassing the migration routes of children of North Korean refugees in North Korea, China, Southeast Asia, and South Korea. To disentangle the complexity of North Korean refugee children’s life events, the current chapter explores the life trajectory of a North Korean

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refugee grounded on an ecological theory of human development (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Tudge, Mokrova, Hatfield, & Karnik, 2009). Bronfenbrenner’s systems approach emphasizes the importance of social environments and contexts in the development of an individual. Bronfenbrenner defined these environments and contexts into five-layered systems: microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, and chronosystem. The immediate layer, called the microsystem, is the setting with which an individual interacts immediately and directly. Family, neighbors, friends, or schools are part of the microsystem. The mesosystem describes interactions between the microsystems. An individual’s development is impacted by the nature of relationships among his or her proximal settings. The exosystem includes a social setting where individuals are indirectly involved. For example, a parent’s work condition or resources available in the neighborhood are not the immediate settings where an individual actively participates; however, their influence over one’s development could be significant. The macrosystem involves a broader social system, such as laws, ideologies, culture, or belief systems. The macrosystem frames and contextualizes the society where an individual develops, and it informs how the other systems should function. Finally, the chronosystem considers the historical context where one develops over time. Interactions and relationships between an individual and the various layers of environment could change over time. Anderson et al. (2004) and Hart (2009) both understood that ecological perspectives allow a full picture of the influences on refugee children’s development by considering direct and indirect environments and that these perspectives enable holistic support in their approach. Drawing upon processes of human development over time (i.e. the chronosystem), Anderson et al. (2004) revised Bronfenbrenner’s original model to explain refugee children’s development by addressing pre-migration, trans-­ migration, and post-migration ecologies. This model will help better explain the characteristics of North

Korean refugee children’s experiences prior to leaving their home (i.e. pre-migration), during the transition from home to host country (i.e. trans-migration), and after arriving at their host country (i.e. post-migration). A deeper understanding of such migratory patterns and potential risk factors will allow insight into how to better serve this under-represented and marginalized population. As such, the distinction between pre-migration, trans-migration, and post-migration will serve as the organizational structure of the chapter in describing the various environments and contexts with which the North Korean refugee children interact at each stage. The current chapter explores the migration ecologies of the North Korean refugees and the unique risk factors that are present in each ecology based on a comprehensive review of the literature across multiple disciplines, including education, psychology, public health, international relations, and sociology. The chapter further explores the long-term negative consequences of irregular migration patterns and proposes recommendations with the goal of initiating international dialogue on identifying the best methods to serve the North Korean refugee children.

Pre-migration Ecology: the Political, Socio-cultural, and Economic Context of North Korea Understanding the political, social, and economic factors of the hermit nation is critical in comprehending the foundational motivation for North Korean refugees deciding to leave their home country and the consequences that follow such decisions. Throughout its history, the political and ideological systems of North Korea have heavily influenced the economic and social structures of North Korea. The economic crisis of the 1990s, however, threw the country into a severe famine, which led to the vitalization of the jangmadang, or private

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market systems of the hermit kingdom. This ignited much change for the people of the nation. Such changes in the pre-migration ecology of North Korean refugees have led to an increase and a diversification of the North Korean refugee population around the globe.

Political and Ideological Systems of North Korea The political regime of North Korea is defined by a totalitarian dictatorship of the suryǒng, the nation’s leader, under the Workers’ Party of Korea (Institute for Unification Education Ministry of Unification, 2012). The suryǒng functions as the supreme brain of the sociopolitical body, which grants him the absolute leadership in defining the destiny of the people. Although Kim Il-sung, the first president, remains to be the ‘eternal suryǒng’ of North Korea, the same power was transferred to Kim Jong-il when he succeeded his father. Today, the political, social, and economic leadership lies in the hands of the relatively newly appointed leader, Kim Jong-un. The governing principles in which the suryǒng maintains his leadership are based on the Juche (i.e. self-reliance) ideology. The Juche ideology states that man has the ultimate authority to revolutionize and construct his own country, thereby emphasizing independence and self-reliance in solving one’s own problems and being responsible under all circumstances. Such political structure and governing principles have evoked a nationalistic drive for North Korean independence and often justify policies of self-reliance and self-denial in the face of economic hardships and political instability in North Korea (Lee, 2003).

The Economic Crisis and the Bottom-up Marketization Traditionally, North Korea is driven by a highly centralized command economy (Institute for Unification Education Ministry

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of Unification, 2012). All products of individual labor are owned by the state and a central line of command is responsible for distributing its resources (i.e. living expenses, rations, daily necessities, etc.). Meanwhile, the country also recognizes private ownership within socialism. This allows i­ ndividuals to have ownership of their wages, rations, and purchased consumer goods to distribute amongst each other but with strict limitations. In the 1990s, harsh weather conditions and political instability kindled an economic crisis that crippled the nation’s industry. North Korea suffered from a severe famine between 1994 and 1998, and the state could no longer function as the central line of command to allocate portions to its people. As a result, chronic economic instability swept the nation, forcing the North Korean government to encourage its citizens to use the jangmadang to purchase daily living materials. Vitalization of private markets catapulted a series of unintended social consequences. North Korean citizens began traveling to China illegally in search of food, clothing, medicine, and other daily living materials. Some individuals eventually became experts in traveling back and forth between North Korea and China without being caught and began bringing back smuggled goods from China to sell in illegal black markets. Such a phenomenon called ‘marketization’, a result of social, economic, and political consequences, gave rise to the concept of profit and consumer in the socialist nation (Smith, 2015, cited in Choe, 2015, p. 63).

The Changing Socio-Cultural Trends and Behaviors of the North Korean People North Korea is a collectivist society organized by a strict North Korean caste system. After the Korean War, the North Korean regime created an artificial caste system with the intention of maintaining social control. Social classes are defined by family

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background and individuals’ loyalty to the North Korean government. Individuals whose families belong to the higher classes or display exceptional loyalty to the Workers’ Party have more access to special educational opportunities, better occupations, and higher incomes. Upward mobility, especially for those who belong in the lower classes, is practically non-existent. Furthermore, North Korea is a patriarchal society. Although the regime claims to endorse gender equality and encourages women to participate in the labor market, women must be fully responsible for housework as well (Institute for Unification Education Ministry of Unification, 2012). Most importantly, North Korea is a collectivist nation that expects all people to live according to the ‘principle of communal life’ – people’s responsibilities and rights are determined by communal values, which emphasizes the importance of aligning personal gains with the goals of the nation (Institute for Unification Education Ministry of Unification, 2012, p. 16). North Korea has maintained control over its people by manipulating free compulsory education to instill and preserve the aforementioned political, social, and cultural values within its society (Institute for Unification Education Ministry of Unification, 2012). The economic crisis, however, initiated a cascade effect of changes within the socio-cultural beliefs and behaviors of the North Korean people (Choe, 2015). During the famine, between 200,000 and four million people died in North Korea (McPhee, 2014). Such devastating consequences began to challenge the people’s faith in the Juche ideology, responsibilities to the state, and the North Korean government. As individuals began crossing the border to China in search of food, medicine, clothing, and employment opportunities, they also brought back with them knowledge and information about the outside world (McPhee, 2014; Yoon, 2015).

All forms of media and entertainment are strictly controlled by the government, and viewing foreign films is officially prohibited. As the number of illegal travelers to China increased, there was also a significant increase in the exchange of foreign films through the black market. According to an ethnographic study of North Korean adolescent refugees residing in South Korea, people in North Korea had abundant access to South Korean and Western media and entertainment (Yoon, 2015). One interviewee in Yoon’s study reported that people purchased or rented CDs and DVDs smuggled from China and that more than half of her neighbors were regularly watching South Korean television programs. Another interviewee reported that people rented foreign films in secret at a reasonable price and watched them together in large groups. In fact, watching South Korean entertainment and imitating the trends (e.g. fashion, K-POP songs, dance moves) in the films have become a fad amongst the North Korean people, despite the fact that they are considered to be delinquent behaviors that come with the risk of being sent to jail (Yoon, 2015). The pre-migration ecology explains the macrosystem where the North Korean refugee children were situated before they defected. North Korea’s political, ideological, and economic systems and their changes over the past few decades suggest unique dynamics within the macrosystem and across the other layers of ecology. For example, North Korea’s economy failed partially due to the natural disaster and the political instability. People believing in self-reliance (i.e. Juche ideology) had to become economic agents while being involved in private markets. This caused people to move around more actively in and out of the country. Adults, including parents and teachers, had to leave their homes and classrooms to find jobs. As a result, many children and youths were left with their grandparents, helping with household chores or becoming homeless.

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Trans-migration Ecology: North Korean Children in China and Other Southeast Asian Countries The economic crisis, chronic famine, and the increasing knowledge about the outside world amongst North Korean citizens have all contributed to an increase in the migration trends of North Korean refugees. What is less clear, however, is the living conditions of those who spend an indefinite amount of time in trans-migration countries.

Demographic Composition of the North Korean Refugee Population: A Focus on Feminization of Migration and Stateless Children According to the Ministry of Unification (2014), there have been significant changes in the demographic composition of the North Korean refugees in South Korea within the last 20 years, and several trends are worth noting. Starting in the late 1990s, the number of North Koreans residing in South Korea began to increase exponentially. In 1998, the official number of North Korean refugees in South Korea was just shy of 1,000, but as of 2013 this number exceeded 25,000. Moreover, the composition of the North Korean refugee population has changed from being predominantly male to female in just a span of 15 years. In 1998, only 12% of the 947 refugees entering South Korea were female; in comparison, more than 75% of the

1,514 refugees entering South Korea in 2013 were female (Ministry of Unification, 2014). Another major change worth noting is the number of people entering the country as a family unit and establishing families in South Korea (Hong & Kim, 2015). In 1994, a majority of the North Koreans seeking refuge in South Korea were unaccompanied young adults in their 20s and 30s. However, as North Korean refugees began entering the country as a family unit, there has been a great increase in the number of children under the age of 10, teenagers, and seniors (Table 28.1). The data reported by the Ministry of Unification (2014), however, captures only a portion of the picture of the current diversity of the North Korean refugees in South Korea and around the world. There are several caveats to consider when interpreting the data. According to the operational definition of North Korean refugees, as defined by the Manual for the Resettlement Support for North Korean refugees (Ministry of Unification, 2014), those who have acquired foreign citizenship after defecting from North Korea and children born of North Korean refugees in a third country (i.e. those who have never resided in North Korea and, accordingly, did not escape North Korea) do not qualify as North Korean refugees. Considering such caveats, it is reasonable to assume that the number of de facto refugees in South Korea may be greater than 26,000. Official reports of the number of North Koreans currently residing in China are not available, and rough estimates of undocumented North Koreans in China range from

Table 28.1 North Korean refugees in Korea by age Age

0–9

10–19

20–29

30–39

40–49

50–59

60+

Total

Male Female Total

586 590 1176

1525 1826 3351

2081 5032 7113

1825 5748 7573

1050 2759 3809

387 841 1228

280 785 1065

7734 17581 25315

Note: as of June 2013 Source: Ministry of Unification (2014)

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10,000 to 300,000 (McPhee, 2014; Smith, 2002; Song, 2015). Qualitative changes in migration trends, including the feminization of migration and the increase in the number of family units entering South Korea (Hong & Kim, 2015; Kim, 2014; McPhee, 2014), can be explained in part by the combination of the economic crisis and the unique social and cultural structure of North Korean society (Kang, 2009; Kim, 2014). In North Korean society, men are more likely to work in large industries that are subject to higher levels of surveillance, and women are generally responsible for managing home life. It is thus socially and culturally easier for a woman to cross the border without being caught (Kim, 2014). The feminization of migration is also caused by the trafficking of North Korean women into China. Chinese men who are left without wives purchase North Korean women or seek out North Korean refugees who are willing to marry them (Kim, 2014). Many of them eventually establish new families in China, but North Korean brides still face the risk of deportation and, thus, seek ways to defect again to South Korea, where they are welcomed as legal citizens. Upon successfully entering South Korea, individuals hire professional brokers to bring family members out of North Korea and China, resulting in an increase in the number of children and seniors entering South Korea (Kang, 2009).

North Korean Refugee Children: Family, Education, and Health Conditions North Koreans are classified as illegal economic migrants by the Chinese government. When caught, they face the risk of being deported back to North Korea and being interrogated about the reason for their departure and punished. Although international law regards North Korean refugees as political refugees, the Chinese government denies this population legal protection for political

reasons (Kim, 2014). Such unstable social status in China means that exposure to adverse environments and traumatic experiences is a high risk for North Korean refugees. According to Lee et  al. (2001), North Korean refugees experience an average of 12 traumatic events throughout their stay in China, with 93% reporting experiences of food and water deprivation, 89% of illness without access to proper medical assistance, and 85% experiencing the death of a family member or friend. The reports also included experiences of being close to death (85%) and being tortured (40%) via severe beating, starvation, electric shock, etc. More than 50% of the participants were suspected of having post-traumatic stress disorder, with 90% reporting elevated levels of anxietyrelated symptoms and 81% depressive symptoms (Lee et al., 2001). Within the North Korean refugee population in China, two groups of children are often identified as at-risk: kotjebi and biboho children. Kotjebi, which is a Korean word that means ‘fluttering swallows’, are North Korean street children residing in China and other parts of Asia who travel from one location to another in search of food. These children are individuals who have become orphans as a result of the famine or the fatal and toilsome journey into China. Biboho children, which literally means ‘un-protected’ in Korean, are individuals who are born in China to North Korean mothers and Chinese fathers (McPhee, 2014). Because these children are born between illegal North Korean migrant mothers and Chinese fathers whose marriage is not legally recognized in China, the state does not grant them citizenship. Consequently, biboho children do not have access to legal rights, protection, and benefits in China. These children cannot attend school, purchase textbooks, or receive any medical benefits from the country. Although the research on the two populations is meager, research on children from North Korea and those born in China suggest that the two populations are faced with different risk

The Lives of Refugee Children: A Korean Example

factors throughout their lifetime in China (McPhee, 2014).

Family Structure and Environment Kotjebi and biboho children grow up in different trans-migration ecologies, including different family environments. Because young children are especially susceptible to adverse environments, strong parental attachment is critical to their healthy development. In general, biboho children appear to come from a more stable family environment in comparison to their peers who are born in North Korea. In Emery et  al. (2015), a sample of 82 adolescents between the ages of 15 and 25 revealed that 42% of biboho children who live in South Korea reside with both of their biological parents, in comparison to only 23% of children who were born in North Korea. Moreover, 38% of children born in North Korea reported living alone in South Korea, while only 16% of biboho children live alone in South Korea. Such data suggests that children who escape from North Korea are more likely to be exposed to adverse trans-migrant ecology, specifically family structures, than their peers classified as biboho children. For both groups, the most common family structure was living with a biological mother and a stepfather. In terms of parent attachment, biboho children reported significantly higher attachment to parents than their peers from North Korea (Emery et  al., 2015). Because many biboho children have at least one parent who is legally Chinese, they have more opportunities to receive parental support in China. For example, although it is illegal for a biboho child to receive education in China, the parent who is legally Chinese is more knowledgeable about potential loopholes within the system to provide educational opportunities for their children (McPhee, 2014). Children from North Korea also appear to be more at risk of severe parental abuse: 53% of the children born in North Korea reported

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severe abuse by parents in comparison to 30% of the biboho children. Although there is no way to confirm the validity of the comment, literature suggests that North Korean children are readily exposed to violence both inside and outside their homes. Parents have authority to use corporal punishment to discipline their children. There are also children who participate in gang activities while traveling within and across North Korea and China. There are people who die in gang fights and things can get ‘barbaric’ as some may even ‘start throwing stones if [they] feel like it’ (Emery et al., 2015, p. 96).

Interruption in Education One of the greatest negative consequences that North Korean children face during the migration process is the extended period of interruption in education. Born from undocumented North Korean immigrant mothers, biboho children are stuck in a legal limbo. Though they are born in China, they are excluded from all rights to education. According to McPhee (2014), some North Korean women willingly marry Chinese men and establish families in China; however, the illegal economic migrant status of the mother prohibits the couple from registering the birth of their child, because doing so would automatically lead to the mother’s deportation. Consequently, children of such couples are left without legal documentation and thus are deprived of educational rights. Some Chinese fathers pay a large bribe to state officials to ‘look the other way’ when enrolling their child in school, while some other families save money to purchase legal documents for their children; these bribes can be as large as a year’s worth of salary, and failure to provide the officials with the money would mean termination of educational opportunities as well. Similarly, children born in North Korea who later cross the border into China are also deprived of educational opportunities.

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Unlike the biboho children, who speak Chinese and have the option of purchasing their way illegally into Chinese schools, North Korean refugee children have absolutely no educational rights or opportunities. Because a majority of the children from North Korea enter China en route to South Korea, they cannot speak Chinese and face a greater risk of being caught by the Chinese officials. Consequently, they must remain hidden from all authorities at all times. A North Korean refugee interviewed by Emery et  al. (2015) reported, ‘[i]n China, I couldn’t go out or go to school at all. I just had to stay in the broker’s house. I watched South Korean dramas 24 hours a day’ (p. 97).

Disparities in Access to Health-care Services In addition to interruptions in education, children face multiple health-related risk factors, including malnutrition, developmental delay, and development of chronic medical disorders (Lee, Shin, & Lim, 2012; Lee & Park, 2013; Pak, 2010). One of the greatest health-related risk factors of North Korean children residing in trans-migration countries is the lack of access to health-care services. In an era where childhood immunization rates are at their peak worldwide, North Korean refugee children and biboho children are often excluded from receiving the same basic health-care benefits. Chung et  al. (2016) collected immunization data from

local Chinese children’s caregivers, North Korean refugee children, and biboho children. According to the information gathered from vaccination cards and caregiver’s selfreports, biboho children received significantly lower rates of vaccination for diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis, hepatitis B, measles-mumps-rubella, and polio in comparison to their Chinese and North Korean refugee children counterparts (Table 28.2). Because biboho children are undocumented, they cannot seek out medical care for the fear of being caught by the Chinese officials. Although the data collected by Chung et al. (2016) suggests refugee children from North Korea are better served than the biboho children in terms of being vaccinated, the authors emphasize that this does not overrule previous research that has consistently reported lower rates of health-care access amongst North Korean refugee children residing in China. There is limited data on the current health conditions of North Korean refugees residing in trans-migration countries, but it is important to note that the development of chronic medical conditions later in life (i.e. post-migration) is suggestive of adverse living conditions in China and other transmigration ecologies. In sum, North Korean refugee children continue to experience a lack of stability and safety during their trans-migration. The experience of displacement involves dramatic changes in the entire ecology including microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, and macrosystem. Common routines of families

Table 28.2  Immunization rates of local Chinese children, North Korean refugee children, Biboho children residing in China Category

Local Chinese children

North Korean refugee children

Biboho children

diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis hepatitis B measles-mumps-rubella polio tuberculosis

99.0% 99.0% 96.0% 99.0% 99.0%

96.3% 92.1% 92.1% 95.2% 92.8%

24.2% 63.7% 86.8% 12.1% 97.8%

Source: Chung et al. (2016)

The Lives of Refugee Children: A Korean Example

and schools are interrupted and the children are deprived of their basic rights to education and health. The loss of family members, friends, homes, homeland, a way of life, and familiar culture serve as major stressors and increase the risk of physical and mental health. The effects of the trans-migration experience are commensurate with the quality of the post-migration resettlement.

Post-migration Ecology: Life in Freedom and Independence? North Korean refugees travel to South Korea with the hope of gaining economic independence and liberty. Upon arrival, North Korean refugees are granted full citizenship and receive much support from the South Korean government throughout the resettlement process. Nevertheless, academic difficulties, economic challenges, social discrimination, and the residue of traumatic experiences during the pre- and trans-migration process continue to affect their new lives in South Korea.

Resettlement Support for North Korean Refugee Families Under the legal premises of the Act on Protection and Resettlement Support of North Korean Refugees (henceforth called ‘the Resettlement Support Act’), North Korean refugees receive support throughout the registration and resettlement processes so that they may obtain full legal rights, duties, and protection as South Korean citizens (Ministry of Unification, 2014). Support provided by the government includes social-adaptation education, resettlement and housing subsidies, social security (i.e. medical benefits, social pension plan, etc.), employment opportunities and vocational training, certificate acquisition, and counseling services. Although the Resettlement Support Act is rather thorough

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in providing support and protection to the North Korean refugee population, there are limited services targeted towards integrating refugees into mainstream society and providing equal academic opportunities for North Korean refugee children. Furthermore, biboho children are ineligible to receive any of the aforementioned benefits offered to North Korean refugees. Although these children can obtain full citizenship in South Korea, they were never residents of North Korea and thus do not qualify to receive the benefits set aside for North Korean refugees.

Health Condition of North Korean Refugee Children There have been numerous studies reporting the health disparities between North Korean refugee children and South Korean natives, and the difference seems to be prevalent throughout all ages. In general, North Korean refugee children spend significant periods of time undernourished during critical periods of development. Upon entering South Korea, however, these children suddenly find themselves surrounded by an abundance of food, including the unhealthy, high-calorie kind. Sudden changes in dietary behavior create numerous health problems within North Korean refugee children. According to Lee, Nam, & Hoffman (2015), approximately 30% of North Korean refugee children between the ages of 8 and 18 display growth delay; the same children who exhibit growth delay are at risk of developing chronic metabolic diseases later in life, such as obesity and diabetes. Pak (2010) also reported the long-term health consequences of pre- and trans-migration ecologies for the development of North Korean refugee children between the ages of 6 and 19 living in South Korea. According to Pak, North Korean refugee children who spent an average of two years in transit countries weighed less and were shorter than their South Korean peers at all ages.

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These phenomena occur as a result of exposure to extended periods of nutritional deprivation early in life. When the body experiences severe malnourishment, the body adapts by increasing fat deposition so that it will be available during periods of nutritional deprivation. Significant differences in height and weight between the two groups suggest that North Korean children were deprived of appropriate nutrition in their pre- and transmigration stages.

professors delivered some lectures to us, but, frankly speaking, I understood nothing’ (Lankov, 2006, p. 120). Under these conditions, a majority of North Korean refugees struggle to maintain financial stability and independence, especially those who enter as a family unit. According to a survey of 303 female North Korean refugees, more than 50% reported having no personal income. Of those who do have steady income, 92.7% earn less than 1.5 million KRW ($1,500 USD) per month. Similar trends were evident in males: 14.3% reported having no income, and 90% of those who are Economic Challenges for North employed earn less than 2 million KRW per Korean Refugee Families month ($2,000 USD; Hong & Kim, 2015). Refugees bring to South Korea little to no Financial instability creates a cascade personal possessions, and they must build effect that bleeds into other domains of life, their lives from scratch. For a one-person including the ability to provide academic household, the Resettlement Support Act disand social support for children. According burses an initial settlement subsidy of 4 milto Hong and Kim (2015), one of the greatlion South Korean Won (KRW; equivalent to est challenges faced by North Korean refugee $4,000 USD, assuming 1,000 KRW = 1 USD) parents is balancing work life and childcare. and quarterly installments of 3 million KRW Because North Korean refugees work at low-paying jobs, they must work long hours ($3,000 USD) for one year after moving into to sustain a living. The parents in Hong their designated residence. An additional and Kim’s (2015) study reported that they 13 million KRW ($13,000 USD) for housing subsidies is disbursed, and some become eliwere satisfied with their parenting abilities. gible for priority provision of public housing However, they expressed that they lacked (Ministry of Unification, 2014). Also, to the knowledge and the financial resources encourage financial independence, resettleto provide educational guidance and social ment support programs provide vocational support. Ninety-one percent of the female training and employment opportunities. participants with elementary-school-aged According to Song (2015), however, the children reported that they struggled to help resettlement support programs are only suftheir children with schoolwork. Parents with ficient to start a new life in South Korea. older children reported concerns about proThe Korean government offers high-quality viding guidance for school life and future social-adaptation programs (e.g. social-­ career development. adaptation education classes, vocational training, certificate acquisition programs, etc.), but there is no data supporting their Academic and Social Challenges effectiveness. Many North Korean refugees for North Korean Refugee remain underqualified for employment and Children struggle to find even low-paying jobs, despite successfully completing government-funded The academic capabilities and schooling expeprograms (Hong & Kim, 2015; Lankov, riences of North Korean refugees living in 2006; Song, 2015). One graduate of a vocaSouth Korea are highly heterogeneous. tional training program reported, ‘[f]amous Approximately 70% of North Korean refugees

The Lives of Refugee Children: A Korean Example

Kindergarten, 1%

Preschool, 3%

People’s School, 7%

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Other, 3% University and above, 7% Junior College, 9%

Middle School, 70%

Figure 28.1 Educational attainment in North Korea Source: Ministry of Unification (2014)

in South Korea obtain middle-school education in North Korea (Figure 28.1). What these data do not show, however, is the length of time these individuals were deprived of schooling during the migration process. There is great variability in the length of time spent in the trans-migration period, and such variability in interrupted education, along with language and cultural differences, create academic and social difficulties in North Korean refugee youths and children residing in South Korea. Survey research conducted by the Korea Hana Foundation (cited in Ministry of Unification, 2014) found that North Korean children were having difficulties adjusting to South Korean schools because of the challenges in keeping up with the curriculum, becoming acclimatized to the South Korean culture and language, and making friends. Although the two nations speak a common language, the South Korean language uses many Chinese characters and Englishdriven words that are not used in the North. In Lankov’s (2006) study, approximately 44.8% of North Korean refugees reported that they had difficulty understanding the South Korean language. The problem of the

language barrier in an academic setting has especially been prevalent amongst the North Korean student population, and several private and nonprofit organizations have collaborated to create a smartphone app that translates South Korean words into North Korean (Ahn, 2015). In addition to the linguistic challenges, children who have had extended periods of interruption in education during their residence in China and other countries struggle to keep up with the South Korean academic standards. Volunteers who worked with North Korean defectors reported that children typically struggle to understand the structure of tests and the curricula. They comprehend no more than 50% of a lesson, which often leads students to a sense of failure (Lankov, 2006). Also, it is not uncommon for college-age North Korean adults to enroll in high school due to their education having been interrupted by irregular migration (Kim et al., 2015). Although the Resettlement Support Act provides educational support for North Korean refugees, the support is often in the form of monetary subsidies. And few policies are set in place to address the achievement

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gap between North Korean and South Korean students. North Korean refugee students are expected to compete with their South Korean peers, despite disparities in educational experience, lack of parental support, and language difficulties.

Discrimination in South Korean Society One of the greatest stresses that North Korean refugees face in South Korea is the barriers to social inclusion (Collet & Bang, 2014; Kim et al., 2015; Lankov, 2006). The political tensions between the two Koreas and the lack of understanding of diversity have created feelings of skepticism and fear of accepting North Korean refugees amongst South Korean citizens. Some even openly oppose the Resettlement Support Act with the arguments that it is overly expensive, excessive, and ineffective and that North Koreans are incapable of adjusting to South Korean society (Lankov, 2006; Song, 2015). Others disagree with the Resettlement Support Act because they believe it may encourage more refugees to defect from North Korea, thereby threatening the peaceful engagement between the two nations (Lankov, 2006). There is much evidence of refugees reporting experiences of social exclusion, discrimination, and prejudice, both in work and school settings. North Korean children often feel excluded, isolated, and stigmatized in schools and experience peer rejection in multiple forms; some students report having been teased and rejected because of their North Korean heritage, and others report that classmates expressed pity and purposely approached them because they were North Korean refugees (Kim et al., 2015). To avoid being confronted with such discrimination, many choose to hide their identity. Many North Korean students practice the South Korean dialect so that their identity can remain hidden. Some students even openly express frustration towards their parents’

North Korean accents because they draw unnecessary attention to themselves (Collet & Bang, 2014). Similar trends of social exclusion are apparent in the adult population as well. Parents of North Korean refugee children express that one of the greatest challenges in adapting to life in South Korea is education for their children. About 40% of female North Korean refugees obtain information about parenting from other North Korean refugees, indicating that the social networks of North Korean refugees are limited to the North Korean refugee community (Hong & Kim, 2015). Along with social discrimination and stigmatization, North Korean refugees are particularly vulnerable to psychological problems, including PTSD, anxiety disorders, depression, and suicidal ideation (Emery et al., 2015; Kim et al., 2015). According to Emery et al. (2015), North Korean high-school students scored significantly higher depression levels than their South Korean peers. Psychological problems also become risk factors for further negative life events. For example, Kim et al. (2012, cited in Emery et al., 2015) reported that higher rates of depression were a risk factor for exposure to relational abuse (i.e. neglect and physical and emotional abuse).

Conclusion The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) states that all children should have equal opportunities to ‘survive and thrive, to learn and grow, to make their voices heard and to reach their full potential’ (UNICEF, 2014, para. 1). However, the unique migration experiences of North Korean refugees have deprived these individuals of equal opportunities throughout their lives. In the pre-migration period, North Korean children had access to free compulsory education but only to be nurtured into loyal contributors to the state. During transmigration, their educational rights and

The Lives of Refugee Children: A Korean Example

opportunities were non-existent due to their undocumented status and political tensions in China. And in the post-migration stage, they have access to educational opportunities but are not accommodated in a way that promotes learning and growth to their full potential. Based on the current review of North Korean refugee children’s experiences and ecological contexts throughout their migration, we propose both long- and short-term recommendations. First of all, we believe that holistic, integrated, and interdisciplinary understandings and approaches are warranted in order to effectively serve refugee children and families. Because North Korean refugee children’s lives have multiple layers of complexity, all interventions and services should carefully consult various expertise across political, economic, cultural, psychological, and educational domains. The current literature review is significant in that it attempts to provide a comprehensive overview of North Korean refugee children’s lives by citing literature in multiple disciplines, including education, psychology, public health, international relations, communications, social work, and sociology. We recommend that such interdisciplinary collaboration should happen more among research, practices, and policies. Researchers, practitioners, and policymakers alike should be more diligent in informing one another so that the support systems can meet the needs of North Korean refugee children in a prompt and effective manner. Since refugee children’s individual and ecological factors are interacting complexly, a ‘systems thinking’ (Senge, 1990) is essential to make meaningful changes that work. Drawing upon the ecological and systemsthinking framework, we also suggest a tangible idea for improving the current policies for refugee resettlement support: family-based support may be a better approach to accelerate social integration of the North Korean refugees in South Korean society. Many of the current resettlement programs for North

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Korean refugees are focused on providing support to the individual; however, with an increasing number of refugees entering in family units, settlement support programs strengthening family systems are imminent. A majority of the parents of North Korean refugees report difficulties in providing appropriate parental support to their children because of the lack of knowledge and resources in the South Korean system. Moreover, studies have recommended that family-oriented support may alleviate the effects of past abuse on depression within the North Korean refugee population (Emery et al., 2015). While reviewing the relevant research, we found that most studies were focused only on the challenges and adversities for refugees. For example, there was no publication exploring the positive contributions that refugee populations might have brought to their host communities. Furthermore, the host community’s knowledge and skills in interacting and coexisting with the refugee resettlers is definitely understudied. Perceiving North Korean refugees as passive recipients of services is an unreasonable approach to a successful integration of this population into the host country; we feel concerned that a research trend overly highlighting the adversities of the North Korean refugee population may perpetuate a deficit perspective toward North Korean refugee communities by directly and indirectly influencing people to believe that North Korean refugees lack the ability to thrive in a host country. Balanced research and programs focused on transforming and supporting both the refugee and the host population are necessary. We insist that researchers and policymakers should direct their attention to education models that encourage global citizenship education in ALL students: North and South Korean children and beyond. Observations of racial discrimination, achievement gaps, and disparities in employment (Pager & Shepherd, 2010) in other countries significantly overlap with the marginalization of the North Korean refugee population in South

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Korea. For example, with an increasing amount of diversity within school, US public schools have placed much emphasis on educational approaches to nurture rich universal ‘cultural tapestry’ (Sarraj et al., 2015, p. 44). Policymakers, practitioners, and researchers alike should explore the effectiveness of a multicultural education model to respond to the globalizing world by preparing ALL children to ‘survive and thrive, to learn and grow, to make their voices heard and to reach their full potential’ (UNICEF, 2014, para 1).

References Ahn, J. (2015, May 23). Bridging the app: South–North Korean translator launched. Retrieved 21 May, 2016 from https://www. nknews.org/2015/03/bridging-the-app-southnorth-korean-translator-launched/ Anderson, A., Hamilton, R., Moore, D., Loewen, S., & Frater-Mathieson, K. (2004). Education of refugee children: Theoretical perspectives and best practice. In R. Hamilton & D. Moore (Eds.), Educational interventions for refugee children (pp. 1–11). New York: Routledge Falmer. Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Choe, S. T. (2015). The new markets of North Korea: Jangmadang. American Journal of Management 15(4), 62–8. Chung, H. J., Han, S. H., Kim, H., & Finkelstein, J. L. (2016). Childhood immunizations in China: Disparities in health care access in children born to North Korean refugees. BMC International Health and Human Rights 16(13), 1–12. Collet, B. A., & Bang, H. (2014). The securitization of refugee flows and the schooling of refugees: Examining the cases of North Koreans in South Korea and Iraqis in Jordan. A Journal of Comparative and International Education (46)2, 272–92. Emery, C. R., Lee, J. Y., & Kang, C. (2015). Life after the pan and the fire: Depression, order, attachment, and the legacy of abuse among North Korean refugee youth and adolescent

children of North Korean refugees. Child Abuse & Neglect 45, 90–100. Hart, R. (2009). Child refugees, trauma and education: Interactionist considerations on social and emotional needs and development. Education Psychology in Practice 25(4), 351–68. Hong, S., & Kim, S. (2015). Empowering the parental capacity of female North Korean defectors. General Studies and Policy Review 8, 108–24. Institute for Unification Education Ministry of Unification (2012). Understanding North Korea 2012. Retrieved May 7, 2016 from http://eng. unikorea.go.kr/content.do?cmsid=1817 Kang, H. (2009). A study on North Korean mothers’ parenting of their elementary school children in South Korea. The Journal of Korean Education 36(2), 93–112. Kim, M. A., Hong, J. S., Ra, M., & Kim, K. (2015). Understanding social exclusion and psychosocial adjustment of North Korean adolescents and young adult refugees in South Korea through Photovoice. Qualitative Social Work 14(6), 820–41. Kim, S. K. (2014). I am well-cooked food: Survival strategies of North Korean female border-crossers and possibilities for empowerment. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 15(4), 553–71. Kim, Y. Y. (2013). The early childhood caring experience of North Korean refugee mothers. Child Health Nursing Research 19(2), 102–10. Kirkpatrick, M. (2012). Escape from North Korea. New York, NY: Encounter Books. Lankov, A. (2006). Bitter taste of paradise: North Korean refugees in South Korea. Journal of East Asian Studies 6, 105–37. Lee, G. (2003). The political philosophy of Juche. Stanford Journal of East Asian Affairs 3(1), 105–12. Lee, I. S., & Park, H.R. (2013). Development and effects of a health education program for North Korean preschool defectors. Journal of Korean Academy of Nursing 43(3), 478–85. Lee, S. K., Nam. S. Y., & Hoffman, D. J. (2015). Growth retardation at early life and metabolic adaptation among North Korean children. Journal of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease 6(4), 219–98. Lee, Y., Lee, M. K., Chun, K. H., Lee, Y. K., & Yoon, S. J. (2001). Trauma experience of North Korean refugees in China. American Journal of Preventive Medicine 20(3), 225–9.

The Lives of Refugee Children: A Korean Example

Lee, Y. M., Shin, O.J., & Lim, M. H. (2012). The psychological problems of North Korean adolescent refugees living in South Korea. Psychiatry Investigation 9(3), 217–22. McPhee, S. (2014). KOTJEBI: North Korean children in China. Asian Affairs 45(3), 484–9. Ministry of Unification (2014). Manual for the resettlement support for North Korean refugees. Retrieved May 10, 2016 from http:// eng.unikorea.go.kr/­content.do?cmsid=3029 &mode=view&page=&cid=41723 Pager, D., & Shepherd, H. (2010). The sociology of discrimination: Racial discrimination in employment, housing, credit, and consumer markets. Annual Review of Sociology 34, 181–209. Pak, S. (2010). The growth status of North Korean refugee children and adolescents from 6 to 19 years of age. Economics and Human Biology 8(3), 385–95. Sarraj, H., Konabe, B., Jiaqi, L., & Hansel, B. (2015). Raising cultural awareness of fifthgrade students through multicultural education: An action research study. Multicultural Education 22(2), 39–45.

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Senge, P. (1990). The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization. New York: Doubleday. Smith, H. (2002). North Koreans in China: Defining the problems and offering some solutions. Retrieved May 14, 2015 from http://seoultrain.com/content/resources/nks_in_china200207smith.pdf Song, J. (2015). Twenty years’ evolution of North Korean migration, 1994–2014: A human security perspective. Asian & the Pacific Policy Studies 2(2), 399–415. Tudge, J., Mokrova, I., Hatfield, B., & Karnik, R. (2009). Uses and misuses of Bronfenbrenner’s biological model of human development. Journal of Family Theory and Review 1(4), 198–210. UNICEF (2014, November 4). Convention on the rights of the child. Retrieved May 19, 2016 from http://www.unicef.org/crc/ index_30160.html Yoon, S. (2015). Forbidden audience: Media reception and social change in North Korea. Global Media and Communication 11(2), 167–84.

Part V

Future Directions for Early Childhood Policy

29 Costs and Benefits of Early Childhood Education and Care W. S t e v e n B a r n e t t a n d M i l a g r o s N o r e s

Introduction Recent years have seen a tremendous increase in research on early childhood education and care (ECEC) reflecting increased public attention to the issue and government investments in this sector. Substantial private and public funding in many countries across a wide span of national incomes now supports increased investment in non-parental care and education for children prior to their entry to primary school. Public sector expenditure on pre-primary education alone now surpasses 1 percent of GDP in some countries and exceeds 0.4 percent in nearly all OECD countries (OECD, 2015). Some countries in Latin America also exceed this level of investment in ECEC (Berlinski & Schady, 2015). In high-income countries, enrollment of children in formal programs most commonly begins at age 3, except in the Nordic countries where children often start in the first year of life (OECD, 2015). ECEC enrollment and the private and public

investment to support it have also increased in low- and middle-income countries (Berlinsky & Schady, 2015; UNICEF, 2014). Despite progress ECEC provision remains highly uneven globally, with some countries having attained high levels of enrollment and spending while others remain at very low levels. Among high-income Western countries, the United States remains something of an outlier for its lack of support from the federal government and the extent to which access to publicly supported ECEC depends on location (Barnett et  al., 2016). UNICEF (2014) finds a huge variation in the provision of ECEC across Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia, but notes that in most countries the majority of young children lack appropriate educational opportunities at home and do not attend ECEC programs. More rapid change that reaches many more may be on the horizon. For example, China has committed to universal ECEC with at least one year for all children and two years for most by 2020 (Hong, Luo, & Cui, 2013), and ECEC is on

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the policy agenda in many countries in Latin America (Araujo, López Boo, & Puyana, 2013). What determines the cost per child and outcomes of ECEC more than anything are the policies relating to the ECEC program’s quality and hours (e.g. Berlinski & Schady, 2015). As this chapter will make clear, quality and hours also critically affect benefits. Multiple goals have been articulated for public investments in ECEC. It is common to see ECEC advocated as a means to: decrease inequality and improve the life course for young children from disadvantaged backgrounds, mitigate the negative effects of early childhood adversities, meet obligations to address children’s rights, support women’s labor force participation and success, raise fertility rates, and generate high rates of economic return that support sustainable economic growth and development (e.g. UNICEF, 2014). It is an amazing array of benefits to expect from a single public investment. If the promise of ECEC in each of these respects is to be realized even partially, ECEC programs will have to be designed and implemented with particular attention to what is needed to attain each of these goals. This chapter reviews the available evidence with a focus on the implications of what we have learned for the costs and benefits of ECEC and how benefit–cost analysis might better inform policy in the future.

Understanding ECEC as a Joint Product From an economic perspective, early childhood education and care is, as the name itself makes clear, a joint product with two differentiated services – education and care. Education aims to enhance children’s learning and development. It is not necessarily focused on academics alone, and, if it is to address all the goals listed above, it must be concerned with the development of the whole child – cognitive, social, emotional, and physical. Care is a more ambiguous term. On the one hand, it is

commonly used to refer to providing a safe place for a child to reside while the parents engage in other activities, primarily work outside the home. Care in this sense implies meeting a child’s basic needs for health and safety. However, ‘caring’ also connotes an emotional connection and a positive relationship. In neither sense is care primarily intended to enhance a child’s cognitive development, or even development more broadly, in ways that would lead to greater academic success. Regardless of the names applied to ECEC arrangements – for example, child-minding, childcare, daycare, babysitting, nursery school, Head Start, Sure Start, early education, preschool, pre-K, and kindergarten – all of them provide both care and education to some extent. To be sure, the mix of the two services varies greatly among arrangements with different names and also within each type of arrangement. At the extremes, some may even be unintentionally detrimental toward one service’s goal or the other. The care provided to a child can be so harsh and devoid of cognitive stimulation that it may harm learning and development. An educational institution’s schedule can be so inconsistent with parental work hours that it might discourage employment. In this chapter, we focus on the more formal part of the ECEC spectrum, excluding family, friend, and neighbor care except in so far as it is part of a government-subsidized childcare system. We review what is known about costs from a macroeconomic perspective and for specific types of programs, with a view toward informing public policy. With respect to specific types of programs we consider the implications of key decisions regarding program goals and design for cost. We also review what is known about outcomes and their benefits, again with the intent of informing public policy regarding the optimal design of ECEC programs. The economics of early education is most often thought of as being concerned with quantifying the overall economic returns to public investments. As important as that topic is, economics also has more important insights to

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offer into how to best design ECEC policies to meet specific goals. However, it does not do so on its own. It must be informed by all of the research disciplines relating to learning, teaching, and child development, including those that study the larger contexts in which these take place for individuals and their families and communities. Bronfenbrenner (1974, 2005) and others (e.g. Sameroff, 2010) have provided frameworks to assist with organizing such an effort, and we view them as parallel efforts in developmental science to conceptualize the political economy of child development. Identifying and interpreting all of the relevant information to be processed within those frameworks can, nevertheless, seem overwhelming. We are acutely aware of the limitations of our own review in this respect.

ECEC Expenditure and Cost It is difficult to provide any precise comparative accounting of expenditure on ECEC internationally, much less of either total cost or unit cost of ECEC services. The difference

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between expenditure and cost is that the former is the amount paid toward such services as determined from government accounts, surveys of parents, or market surveys of providers. Cost refers to the value of the resources actually devoted to the production of ECEC services, which differ from expenditure for a variety of reasons including unpaid labor and other in-kind supports and misdirection or waste of public funds. With respect to expenditures on ECEC, differences among countries in the definition of ECEC services and the many government agencies and programs that may provide such services, the age at which children are considered to enter primary education, and accounting practices across countries make accurate aggregation and comparison of even public expenditure unreliable. Nevertheless, we report on Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) national-level data on ECEC expenditure for children birth to 5 in Table 29.1 and on educational enrollment at ages 3 to 5 in Table  29.2. Private expenditure data are not widely available. Few studies of ECEC

Table 29.1 ECEC expenditure as percent of GDP by country OECD % GDP 2 1.8 1.6 1.4 1.2 1 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0

l g d n rk e y ia d d a e a s o a a y y ly a n d a ic a d ic e s a l n s y an e a nc a r n n re um ae ur om ni d ic li ni ar n a ni ai n tri bl lt n bl il ru ni ga a te e ag el ed m a rw ga la la o gi sr o d a an x tra a g a It ove Sp rela us pu Ma ola pu Ch yp sto rtu Jap Sta urk er P e Ic Sw en Fr No Bul Fin Zea K Bel I mb ing ithu erl Me us om un erm T I A e o v C l E a d P R S R A R H G D xe d K L eth 1 te ak ew ch ni -3 N Lu ite N U D ov ze n C C Sl U E O Childcare Pre-primary Total (no distinction)

Source: Data obtained from OECD Education GPS at http://gpseducation.oecd.org/

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Table 29.2  Percent in education, ages 3–5 France Malta Belgium Israel Germany Spain Norway Iceland Denmark Italy Sweden United… New Zealand Korea Netherlands Japan Latvia Hungary Estonia Luxembourg Portugal Slovenia Romania Austria Lithuania Bulgaria Mexico Czech Republic Ireland Chile Poland Finland Slovak… Cyprus Australia United States Croatia Switzerland Greece Turkey 0

20

40

60

80

100

Source: Data obtained from OECD Education GPS at http://gpseducation.oecd.org/

programs estimate cost despite the many studies of outcomes in the United States and other countries (Berlinski & Schady, 2015; Nores & Barnett, 2010; Rao et al., 2014). To provide some information and illustrate the difficulties in drawing conclusions

from the existing sources, we review in some detail expenditure data for the United States. Barnett and Haskins (2010) estimated that US federal government expenditure on ECEC for children under age 5 approached $20 ­billion in 2010, with the largest sources of funding

Costs and Benefits of ECEC

Head Start ($6.7 billion) for children ages 3 to 5, childcare subsidy dollars sent to the states ($5.7 billion) and tax credits directly to families ($2.2 billion) for children birth to age 5. State expenditure on pre-K programs primarily for 4-year-olds amounted to $5.5 billion in 2010 (Barnett et al., 2016). Additional local government expenditure on state-funded pre-K could be determined only for some states, but even this partial accounting amounted to about $1 billion for 2010 (Barnett et al., 2016). Beyond this, it is estimated that expenditure by state and local governments on special education services for children aged 3 to 5 also exceeded $5 billion in 2010, though this is estimated with considerable uncertainty and the true figure could be much higher (Hustedt & Barnett, 2011). Local government expenditure for ECEC that is not tied to federal or state programs is not reported anywhere and so are unknown. By combining the expenditure data above with enrollment data, one can calculate the federal and state expenditure per child enrolled, but this falls far short of providing an estimate of cost per child because of how much is unknown regarding the expenditure and how it is used. In addition to the missing local government share used to fund public school services, Head Start is required to obtain a 20 percent match that may be in-kind and can include state and local funds. How to properly value the Head Start match and the extent of any additional funds or resources raised by Head Start and other publicly-funded ECEC providers is unclear. In addition, there is a blending and braiding of funds from different government programs (which are really funding streams) to pay for ECEC. Most ECEC centers in the United States receive funding from multiple sources – services for one child could in theory combine state pre-K dollars, federal childcare dollars, federal Head Start dollars, and private dollars. More than 40 percent of ECEC centers report relying on three or more sources of funds, and one-third of centers report that their two top sources of funds are one public and one private source (National Survey of Early Care and Education Project Team, 2014). With those caveats in

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mind, it is questionable how close we can approximate cost per child with average reported expenditure per child for state pre-K of $4,847 per child and the average reported expenditure for Head Start of $8,774 per child. The actual cost could be thousands of dollars per child higher. Another source of information that offers additional insights regarding US expenditure and cost is the 2012 National Survey of Early Care and Education (National Survey of Early Care and Education Project Team, 2015). This survey questioned providers about the maximum prices charged to parents. If we exclude those programs that charged no fees, the median/mean prices per hour by age for center-based ECEC are as follows: $4.40/$7.80 under age 1, $4.10/$7.00 at age 2, $3.70/$6.20 at age 3, and $3.60 at age 4. These imply annual median and mean fees of $1,944 and $3,294 for 15 hours per week for a school year at age 4. A 40-hour week for a full work year would have median and mean fees of $8,800 and $15,000 for an infant and of $7,200 and $12,200 for a 4-year-old. From this we can observe several things. First, costs of center-based ECEC rise noticeably as age falls below age 3. Second, the additional hours required when parents work full time leads to a large increase in the total cost, resulting in much larger total fees to parents for private services. The same survey provides information on prices charged for ECEC by home-based providers, registered and unregistered. They charge considerably lower fees than centers and their fees vary little by age of the child served. From birth through age 4, for home-based ECEC the lowest median fee was $3.00 per hour and the highest mean fee $4.70 which is $6,000 and $9,400 per child for full-time care.

Benefits of ECEC Research on the costs and outcomes of ECEC programs specifically developed to

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enhance child development was first initiated as a result of experimental studies that began in the 1960s stimulated by research on the effects of the social environment on intelligence and school success. These studies were designed to investigate both the shortand long-term impacts on children. Some of them cast a very wide net in searching for evidence that early education could have persistent developmental effects that might go well beyond intelligence and, thereby, significantly alter life courses. Most of these early studies found that effects on intelligence (as measured by IQ) did not persist beyond a few years (Barnett, 1995). This finding has been replicated in many studies since. However, it would be a serious misreading of the evidence to conclude that gains in cognitive skills and knowledge did not persist. Despite transitory IQ effects in most studies, they often found persistent gains in academic achievement (subject-matter-specific knowledge and skills) and educational attainment as well as positive impacts on social and emotional development that may not have been anticipated (Barnett, 2008). In addition, at least some of the educational interventions that began in the first year of life and continued to school entry did appear to produce more persistent IQ gains in addition to improvements in achievement and other outcomes (Barnett, 2008). Yet, it is at least of equal importance that a wide range of other benefits for children have been found, including: increased school success as indicated by less grade repetition and special education and increased educational attainment; improved social and emotional development and behavior; reduced crime and delinquency; increased employment and earnings; and better health (Barnett, 2008; Ramon et al., 2017), as well as benefits for parental employment (Connolly & Haeck, 2017). Much research has been conducted since those initial studies on child outcomes. Few of these have become the basis for benefit– cost analysis. Research that measures a wide range of benefits over decades takes more

patience and more funding than is typical for education research. Nevertheless, this literature must be summarized for a fair assessment regarding what is known about the costs and benefits of ECEC. Unless ECEC programs produce substantive positive outcomes on initial measures of children’s learning and development, there is no point in conducting long-term benefit–cost analysis. This could create a substantial ‘file drawer’ problem for the economics of ECEC. To address the issue, this chapter relies on previously published meta-analyses that provide quantitative summaries of the research as a whole. For the United States, multiple meta-­ analyses have been conducted using different methods and defining the relevant ‘population’ of studies differently (Camilli, Vargas, Ryan, & Barnett, 2010; Duncan & Magnuson, 2013; Kay & Pennucci, 2014). They all reach essentially the same conclusions. ECEC programs, on average, produce substantive impacts on learning and development across a broad range of domains, and while the size of effects declines after children enter primary school they persist, even if at a very modest level. The size of the effects and their persistence varies with the population served, the political, social and economic context, and program characteristics, interactions that we discuss later in this chapter. In addition, long-term effects on schooling and other ‘real life’ outcomes are found at the same time that impacts on learning and development appear to decline. Multiple meta-analyses and reviews also summarize findings of the international research literature on program impacts, especially for low- and middle-income countries (Burger, 2010; Nores & Barnett, 2010; Rao et al., 2014). Overall, the evidence is that there are positive effects and that these can persist through the school years and into adulthood. Effects on children are found to vary with program design and the mix of services provided by ECEC programs. In addition, the quality and mix of ECEC services provided have a strong influence on the magnitude of program impacts.

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As it is also important to consider the impacts on parental employment, we briefly consider that literature as well. Research on the impacts of publicly supported childcare on maternal employment not surprisingly also finds that these vary with the characteristics of the population served, the design of the program, and social context (Araujo et  al., 2013; Bauernschuster & Schlotter, 2015; Del Boca, 2015; Pronzato & Sorrenti, 2015). For example, if access to childcare and maternal employment are already very high, then little impact can be expected. Impacts on employment are higher where maternal employment rates are relatively low, maternal education levels are relatively high, and use of childcare is low. Impacts of a program are also likely to be higher for single mothers and when the youngest child is eligible for the program. Duration obviously matters. Free full-day childcare from birth to primary school entry can be expected to have more of an impact than a part-day program for one year at age 4 or a subsidy available only up to age 3.

Benefit–Cost methodology Before reviewing benefit–cost findings for ECEC it is useful to have some background regarding benefit–cost methodology. The most detailed formal studies construct cost estimates from detailed descriptions of program services and all of the resources required to produce those services. Similarly, the benefit estimates are built upon specific estimates of the value of cost savings from problems avoided and the value of positive impacts. All benefits are estimated regardless of whom received those benefits. Less formal analyses often use expenditure data that can fall far short of true cost, as should be clear from our discussion of expenditure and cost. Some studies focus only on cost savings to government and ignore the benefits to the direct beneficiaries. For example, a study

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may treat the shift from private fee-paid ECEC to free public ECEC as having a cost to government and ignore the benefit to the family of avoiding the fees, even though this frees up resources that can then be spent to improve family well-being including child development. It is also important to understand that every benefit–cost analysis requires a large number of assumptions in order to generate results (Karoly, 2011). Differences in the assumptions might produce larger differences in results than differences in the underlying evidence on impacts. Most benefit–cost analyses conduct sensitivity analyses and discuss how results vary with the assumptions. Such information typically is ignored in the larger literature making use of the benefit– cost analysis results. Given the uncertainty surrounding the underlying evidence as well as the assumptions, it is probably best to regard estimated benefit–cost ratios and rates of return as general indicators of the magnitude of impacts. Generally, it would be a mistake to decide that one program or type of program was better than another based upon estimated returns that were only modestly different and without considering the much larger body of evidence likely available on the underlying effects of those programs in different contexts. For example, none of the Perry Preschool benefit–cost estimates can be directly generalized to large-scale public policies and programs as it was much more intensive (1 teacher for every 6 children) than public programs today, served a highly disadvantaged population from one ethnic group in a single small neighborhood, and operated a half-century ago.

Three Seminal Benefit–Cost Analyses To assist in following the detailed review below, basic information from the three bestknown benefit–cost analyses of ECEC

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programs is summarized in Table 29.3. It reports on basic program features, findings regarding program impacts, benefits, costs, and benefit–cost ratios. One reason that these studies are so influential is that they provide comprehensive assessments of the benefits based on outcomes for children and their parents, unlike many other benefit–cost analyses of ECEC that simply project increased earnings for either parents or the children when they reach adulthood. To facilitate comparisons with findings of other studies, Table 29.3 presents separate estimates of the earnings and other benefits. All dollar values are present values at program entry, calculated using a real discount rate of 3 percent and adjusted for differences in price levels to 2014 dollars. One of the earliest experimental studies provided the basis for the first and most farreaching comprehensive benefit–cost analysis of early education. The now well-known Perry Preschool study began in 1962, prior to Head Start and other large-scale public preschool

programs in the United States. Participants were 123 economically disadvantaged 3- and 4-year-olds from a single neighborhood who were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. The treatment group attended a 2½ hour per day, intensive preschool education program with highly qualified teachers in small classes for up to two years. In addition, the teachers devoted the afternoons to visiting the children’s homes and providing them with one-on-one tutoring, ideally with parent observation so that parents might replicate the activities. Children in the study have been followed periodically since and results have been reported through age 40 (Schweinhart et  al., 2005). Positive effects on cognitive test scores were observed from ages 3 through 27, but persistent effects were found only for achievement and related tests, not for IQ tests. Also, the intervention group was reported to have better classroom and personal behavior from their first years of school. As they entered their teens and

Table 29.3 Features, outcomes and benefit–cost analysis (2014$) of the Perry Preschool, Abecedarian and Chicago Child–Parent Center (CPC) programs Program Features Ages Served Schedule Outcomes Short-term IQ Long-term IQ Achievement Special education Grade repetition Educational attainment Adult arrests Economic analysis Earnings benefits All benefits Cost Earnings only Benefit–Cost ratio Total Benefit–Cost ratio

Source: Ramon et al., 2017

Perry Preschool (n = 123)

Abecedarian (n = 111)

Chicago CPC (n = 1400)

3 to 4 Half-day, school year

Six weeks to 5 Full-day, year round

3 to 4 Half-day, school year

Increased No gain Increased Decreased No change Increased Decreased

Increased Increased Increased Decreased Decreased Increased No change

Not measured No gain Increased Decreased Decreased Increased Decreased

$91,606 $179,446 $20,854 4.4 to 1

$147,359 $208,283 $85,530 1.8 to 1

$32,933 $105,204 $9,719 3.4 to 1

8.6 to 1

2.5 to 1

10.8 to 1

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became adults, both self-report and official data indicated that those who had attended the preschool were less involved in delinquency and crime. Other positive outcomes through the teen years included fewer years of special education and a higher rate of on-time high school graduation. Positive adult outcomes include increased earnings, decreased welfare dependency, decreases in teen pregnancy, and, in association with the crime reductions, fewer arrests. Benefit–cost analysis of the Perry Preschool program and its outcomes was first conducted with data through age 10. Due to the limited follow-up, this analysis was primarily based on projections, but it projected that benefits were likely to exceed costs. This was followed by a series of benefit–cost analyses that Barnett and colleagues (e.g. Barnett, 1996) built off this early work to estimate the economic benefits based on data through age 19, then age 27, and most recently age 40. As the duration of follow-up increased, the ­benefit–cost analyses increasingly depended less on projections (which tended to be conservative) and more on estimated benefits based on observed outcomes. This led to a higher estimated benefit–cost ratio or rate of return at each subsequent analysis. By ages 27 and 40, the estimated benefits from observed outcomes included educational cost reductions; delinquency, crime victim and criminal justice system cost reductions; welfare cost reductions; and increased productivity as measured by earnings. The value of childcare to parents is also included, but this is trivial given children’s small number of hours per year at the center. Estimates of the benefit– cost ratio have exceeded 14:1, but Table 29.3 presents a mid-range estimate. More recently, Heckman and colleagues have reanalyzed the Perry Preschool data and produced alternative estimates of benefits based on different assumptions about such things as the costs of crime (Heckman, Moon, Pinto, Savelyev, & Yavitz, 2010). This new work strengthens the case for the study’s internal validity and supports the finding of

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earlier broad sensitivity analyses regarding the robustness of the conclusion that benefits from the Perry Preschool exceeded cost. While a welcome addition, the study’s internal validity and whether or not the Perry Preschool program per se paid off have never been the difficult questions – most researchers found the evidence persuasive in that respect all along. The truly difficult issue is external validity, and whether the Perry Preschool results have anything to tell policymakers about the economic returns on ECEC programs today. The answer to that, we believe, is yes, but only in the context of the other studies discussed below and the broader body of research and not in the sense that any of today’s programs should be expected to produce even approximately the same benefit–cost ratio or rate of return because both costs and benefits can be expected to vary with program features, populations served, and context. Two important insights that have informed subsequent research and also policy and practice were evident from even the earliest benefit–cost analyses of the Perry Preschool program and its outcomes. First, even though previous studies of the returns on investment in education had overwhelmingly focused on the effects on earnings, a large part of the economic benefit was from impacts on outcomes other than earnings, including crime reduction. Second, most of the economic benefits accrued to the general public rather than to the participants and their families. In other words, most of the benefits that could be translated into dollars were spillovers, or externalities, that accrued to society in general rather than to the participants. Any program that greatly improved learning and development for a highly disadvantaged population that had high public education costs because of failure and remediation, that was highly involved in crime, and that relied on welfare for financial support could be expected to generate large externalities. A second well-known randomized trial of early education followed the Perry Preschool a decade later. In the Abecedarian study, 111

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children from economically disadvantaged families were recruited for random assignment at birth between 1972 and 1978 and have been followed into adulthood. The treatment group attended center-based, educational childcare for a full work day, year-round through the age of 5. Positive effects have been found for IQ and reading and math achievement in the shortand long-term. Children who attended the program had much lower rates of grade retention and special education during the school years and higher rates of participation in higher education. Positive effects were also found for health-related behaviors and for symptoms of depression (Campbell et  al., 2012). In addition, because the Abecedarian program offered full-day, year-round childcare, it could be expected to have had immediate benefits for maternal employment. The benefit–cost analysis included estimates of increased longterm earnings for mothers. However, the study did not initially collect data on maternal labor force participation at the time children attended the program so the immediate impacts and benefits could not be assessed. The long-term data indicated that maternal earnings did increase as a result of the program, probably because the mothers took less time out of the labor force during the early years and benefited from increased continuity and years of experience in their jobs (Barnett & Masse, 2007). As in the Perry Preschool study, benefits in the Abecedarian study exceeded costs with a benefit–cost ratio of 2.5 to 1, and externalities were considerable. However, the estimated net benefits were much lower than in the Perry study due to both the higher costs of a full-day, year-round program for five years and lower benefit estimates. A key reason that estimated benefits were lower is that no significant impacts were found on crime and delinquency. However, much of the evidence regarding health benefits has been reported after the benefit–cost analysis was conducted, and was not incorporated into the analysis. These additional benefits could raise the estimated return, and, as noted, maternal earning benefits were not fully accounted for either.

A more recent analysis of the Abecedarian program’s costs and benefits that includes these benefits found a benefit–cost ratio of 7.3 to 1 (García et al., 2016). The third seminal benefit–cost study of ECEC began during the 1980s with longitudinal research on the Chicago Child–Parent Centers (CPC) (Reynolds & Temple, 2008). The CPC research sample that has been followed is roughly ten times the size of the samples in the Perry and Abecedarian studies. The CPC study sacrifices some of the strengths of a randomized trial, offering less certainty that the treatment and control groups and their initial circumstances are comparable (Reynolds, Temple, White, Ou, & Robertson, 2011). Data are not available on any of the CPC children until kindergarten entry. However, it gains relative to the earlier studies in terms of its generalizability. It measures the effects of an ECEC program that is more comparable in intensity and cost to public schooling generally, and it is roughly comparable in terms of staffing, class size, and operations to some preschool programs currently offered on a large scale in the United States. For example, it had a teacher and an assistant for each class of 18 students, while the Perry Preschool had two teachers for a class of 12 to 13 students. Moreover, in the two prior experiments the researchers had tight control over the selection and management of a handful of teachers in small special programs. In Chicago, the CPC program operated as a normal part of public education over a long period of time. Given the differences in internal and external validity between the CPC and previous studies, it is reassuring that the pattern of effects and benefits is remarkably similar to that in the Perry study. In addition, the CPC takes place at a time that is more similar to today, in which comparison children could have attended other preschool programs including Head Start and private childcare (with or without public subsidies). The effect estimates tend to be somewhat smaller, suggesting a dose–response relationship. As in the Perry Preschool study, the CPC treatment

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group had increased test scores beginning for the earliest follow-up compared to those who did not attend the CPCs. In subsequent follow-ups the CPC children had lower rates of gains of grade repetition and special education as well as higher rates of high school completion. The CPC attenders also had lower arrest rates in follow-ups. Additional benefits identified by the CPC study included a reduction in need for social services interventions and fewer identified cases of abuse and neglect. These other benefits were not measured in the earlier studies, but might not have been detectable given the relative infrequency of such programs and the earlier studies’ much smaller sample sizes. Interestingly, because of the lower costs of the CPC, the benefit–cost ratio is actually quite similar to that in the Perry study. Reynolds et  al. (2011) estimate that the ratio exceeded 10 to 1. However, we again caution against drawing general conclusions about the expected returns of this model in comparison to either Perry or Abecedarian type programs, as all of the benefit–cost estimates are based on a specific population in a specific time and place as well as differing in their assumptions about valuation of the benefits. As indicated earlier, the economic case for public investment in ECEC rests not just on the three benefit–cost analyses reviewed above alone, but on a much larger body of research. Much of this has been summarized in the meta-analyses we have already reviewed. However, meta-analyses are a blunt tool for investigating the precise ways in which the details of policy and programs can impact costs and benefits. For this reason we discuss findings from selected recent studies that provide particularly relevant insights for policy and practice.

Recent ECEC Benefit–Cost Analyses Although the evidence overall on the effects of ECEC on children’s learning and development

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is overwhelmingly positive, the evidence with respect to the impacts of large-scale public programs has been much more mixed. The primary explanation is likely that large-scale public programs have, by and large, not been designed to be as intensive and deliver the same quality of services. Moreover, even those that have been designed to do so in theory are not always implemented with fidelity. This is evident in comparisons of program quality and assessments of the quality of existing ECEC services (Pianta, Barnett, Burchinal, & Thornburg, 2009). None of the ECEC research suggests that programs of poor to mediocre quality can be expected to have large positive or lasting impacts on children (Yoshikawa et al., 2013). In the United States, randomized trials of federally-sponsored ECEC programs aimed at improving the development of disadvantaged children – Early Head Start and Head Start – found modest initial impacts with little or no long-term improvements in any domain of development and no signs of improvement in such other outcomes as grade repetition and special education or classroom misconduct that might be associated with later delinquency (Armor, 2014). Quality may be implicated here in that these programs have not been as focused on learning and cognitive development as those demonstrating greater success and emphasized goals such as hiring from the community rather than hiring highly qualified teachers. However, these results are at odds with much of the quasi-­experimental research on Head Start, which does find longterm outcomes in school success even when there is scant evidence that test score gains persist (Barnett, 2008). One possible explanation is that changes in the other services available to children and families in the first five years (state pre-K programs, childcare subsidies, health care coverage for children, etc.), together with efforts by the public schools to help those who are most behind catch up, offset the gains from Head Start today in ways that did not happen decades ago. Another possible explanation is that

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experiments themselves create the conditions for fadeout over time by recruiting families with more intensive interests in ECEC and then rejecting some of them who are then more motivated to find other ways to help their children not just during the preschool years, but for years later. Results from studies of state and locally funded pre-K are extremely mixed, with one recent randomized trial failing to find positive long-term effects (Barnett, 2008; Elango et al., 2016). There are reasons that some of the randomized trials might fail to produce generalizable findings. However, some null findings should be expected given the tremendous variations in quality of services delivered across cities and states. Meta-analyses that have examined this issue suggest that it is much more likely that much of the variation in outcomes is accounted for by differences in program quality and context rather than by whether a study is a randomized trial or not (Camilli et  al., 2010). Lower quality research designs tend to produce smaller estimates of effects. With respect to the quality of programs, intentional teaching one-onone and in small groups was identified as a key element of program effectiveness, pointing to the need for low student:teacher ratios, highly qualified teachers, and pedagogically astute leadership, all of which are rarer than one would hope. Outside the United States, results are similarly mixed (Nores & Barnett, 2010; Rao et al., 2014). Some public programs are found to produce long-term gains in cognitive abilities, educational achievement, and adult earnings. Other programs are found to produce null or even negative effects. Nevertheless, meaningful impacts and high rates of return have been found in high-, medium-, and lowincome countries around the globe. Across all these contexts, benefits have been found to vary with the level of family disadvantage and program design. In fact, the two interact as the effectiveness of early education depends on the formal program providing higher quality than is available in the home;

clearly this is easier to accomplish for disadvantaged families that have fewer resources. One implication is that in low-income countries it takes less to produce the same kinds of gains and it should not be expected that they must provide the same resources or have even remotely similar costs to programs in high-income countries in order to succeed in yielding a high rate of return. Nevertheless, all countries must be concerned about the tendency to fail by investing too little to produce any real improvement in children’s daily experiences. Gradually, more research is being conducted that estimates the costs and benefits of more contemporary programs under current conditions. This is always difficult as any study that requires 10 to 20 years of follow-up will be more than a decade or two out of date before it can be published. A compromise is to collect some longitudinal data on good predictors of later outcomes and then forecast further results, as was done in early studies of the Perry program, for example. However, such an approach can introduce considerable uncertainty as the basis for making such projections is not always strong. In the United States, Oklahoma was the first state to provide essentially universal ECEC at age 4 though this was only for a part- or fullschool day and school year. Bartik, Gormley and Adelstein (2012) estimated the value of lifetime earning gain from the estimated effects of the Oklahoma ECEC program on test scores at kindergarten using data from another study that links kindergarten test scores to adult earnings. Clearly, this requires some strong assumptions, and is far different from ECEC studies that actually follow up on study participants as adults to directly measure, effects on earnings. They find that the present value of earnings increases (that is, the value of the lifetime earnings increase when discounted over time back to its lump sum value at age 4) is three to four times the cost of the ECEC program for both half- and full-day programs. The full-day program is more expensive, but has larger effects on

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achievement. Clearly, if other benefits had been included, such as the value of childcare to parents (highly likely for the full-day program) and better health or less involvement in crime (which cannot be predicted from test scores), the benefit–cost ratio could have been much higher. The Washington State Institute for Public Policy (WSIPP, 2016) has conducted benefit–cost analyses of a wide range of ­ public programs based on secondary analyses of the results of program evaluations. The Institute’s benefit–cost analyses are updated as new information becomes available. WSIPP provides a model for how benefit–cost analysis can be conducted using the existing research and evaluation literature to inform policymakers. They facilitate others adopting a similar approach by making their analysis tools available for adoption by others (WSIPP, 2016). The WSIPP analyses are more detailed and sophisticated than is typical of such secondary analyses. They include a wide range of estimated benefits associated with child outcomes, and the costs of alternative programs in which children would have participated had they not attended these programs are also taken into account. Among the many educational and social programs for which WSIPP has conducted benefit–cost analysis are both federallyfunded and state-funded ECEC programs (WSIPP, 2016). WSIPP estimated that the federal Early Head Start (a program for children under 3) has a negative return with benefits that are far less than its costs. The federal Head Start program serving children aged 3 to 5 is found to be a better investment as it is estimated to generate nearly $3 for every dollar of cost. State and school district pre-K programs in general, serving primarily children at age 4, are estimated to have a somewhat higher benefit–cost ratio of about $5 to one. Owing to a lack of information on effects other than achievement test scores, WSIPP did not conduct a complete benefit–cost analysis of Washington’s state pre-K program. However, it did estimate effects on earnings based on

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third to fifth grade estimated test score gains using an approach similar to that employed by Bartik, Gormley, and Adelstein (2012). Others offer somewhat different views on the economic returns to Head Start. On the one hand, some suggest that the lack of lasting gains in the national randomized trial of Head Start and in one study of state pre-K implies that neither Head Start nor state pre-K programs have significant economic benefits (Armor, 2014). Others suggest that projected earnings benefits, though highly uncertain, might by themselves be large enough to exceed costs with state pre-K programs yielding slightly higher returns than Head Start primarily because of lower cost (Duncan, Ludwig, & Magnuson, 2010). WSIPP also conducted a benefit–cost analysis of another ECEC program for children under age 3, the Infant Health and Development Program (IHDP), which was subject to a randomized trial with follow-up through age 19. The benefits of the IHDP program were estimated to be approximately zero. No effects were found on grade repetition, special education, or educational attainment, and the achievement effects were very small (Aos et al., 2004). Cost per child was estimated to be $50,000 (Aos et  al., 2004). However, others have estimated that the achievement effects of IHDP were more substantial for a low-income subgroup most comparable to disadvantaged children generally (Duncan & Sojourner, 2013). Based on this evidence, Bartik (2013) estimated a future lifetime earnings benefit for the children of $35,000 per child and an earnings benefit for their parents of $30,000; together these exceed the cost of the program. The differences in estimates between WSIPP and Bartik illustrate how differences in the interpretation of results and assumptions can lead to quite different conclusions regarding a program’s benefit–cost ratio. The populations to which the estimates apply are quite different, and the higher return would apply only if the program successfully targeted just the higher impact

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subgroup, which is a serious challenge in program implementation. Apart from the difficulties of identifying and enrolling only those who would benefit most, it is possible that the program’s effects on the most disadvantaged might decline if higher income peers are excluded. Benefit–cost analysis of ECEC has been conducted much less often in ECEC studies outside the United States (Dalziel, Halliday, & Segal, 2015; Glewwe & Krafft, 2014). In other high-income countries, quantifying the economic return of ECEC has not been a priority, even when studies have found strong evidence that the large-scale ECEC produced long-term gains in cognitive development and earnings (Havnes & Mogstad, 2011). Studies that estimated economic benefits have tended to be quite narrow, for example, focusing on earnings alone. An economic evaluation of the UK’s Sure Start local programs was conducted with data to age 5, but at a time when free education had been offered to most 3- and 4-year-olds in the same communities. As a result, the benefit–cost analysis could only consider ­ benefits beyond those of early education. The study found a modest positive impact on parental earnings that was on its own insufficient to cover Sure Start’s cost (Meadows & National Evaluation of Sure Start Team, 2010). Although there were indications of other modest benefits for child development, their value was not estimated. Two benefit–cost analyses of Quebec’s universal childcare policy have reached strikingly different conclusions. Both focused primarily on the additional taxes generated by increased parental employment, perhaps because the estimated average effects on child development were negative (Haeck, Lefebvre, & Merrigan, 2015). The low quality of the care during the study years, especially for children of disadvantaged families, is a noteworthy feature of this policy’s implementation. Haeck, Lefebvre and Merrigan found that the additional taxes received by federal and provincial governments were

highly unlikely to equal the cost. By contrast, Fortin, Godbout, and St-Cerny (2012) found a large increase in GDP that generated increased tax revenues to the federal and provincial government far in excess of the cost. The frequency of ECEC benefit–cost analysis is similarly low for studies in middleand low-income countries, despite extensive research on ECEC impacts (Nores & Barnett, 2010; Rao et al., 2014). In fact, studies that include even a rigorous cost estimate are rare (e.g. Nakajima et  al., 2016), and a search for detailed analyses of economic returns for specific ECEC programs turns up no truly strong examples (Rao et  al., 2014). A few studies estimated benefits using earning gains as the sole benefit. For example, a preschool and nutrition program in Bolivia was estimated to produce earnings gains (based on increases in height, cognitive skills and educational attainment) that could yield benefit–cost ratios of 1.7 to 3.7 (Behrman, Cheng, & Todd, 2004). Gertler and colleagues (2014) found in an adult follow-up of a randomized trial with 129 participants that a home visiting program to train parents of growth-stunted 2-year-olds in Jamaica to provide better cognitive stimulation increased earnings by 25 percent. However, they did not compare the present value of this earnings gain to cost. Benefit–cost analyses have also been conducted by estimating the earnings gains from estimated program effects pooled across multiple studies and sometimes over many low- to middle-income countries. Engle et al. (2011) estimated that increasing preschool education enrollments in low- to middleincome countries from 25 to 50 percent would yield a benefit-to-cost ratio of between 6 and 17 to 1 based on increased earnings. Armendáriz, Ardanaz, Behrman, Cristia, and Hincapie (2015) conducted a detailed analysis of program costs and reviewed estimated effects for home visiting, childcare, and preschool education across Latin America. They estimated benefit–cost ratios for three

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countries (Chile, Colombia, and Guatemala) though most of the studies used were conducted in other Latin American countries and there is only one preschool study (from Argentina). The ratios are 1.1 to 1.5 for childcare, 2.6 to 3.6 for home visiting, and 3.4 to 5.1 for preschool education. Readers should be cautioned against concluding that these results provide a strong guide for ECEC policy generally as they are based on relatively few studies and do not include other potential benefits, including possible impacts on parental earnings. However, they illustrate how benefit–cost analyses can inform policymaking and point to the need to improve the available evidence on which to base such economic analyses. The failure of many studies to formally incorporate estimated benefits to parents is difficult to justify, except in so far as researchers have concluded that they are difficult to accurately estimate and are likely to be quite modest in many contexts. Research on the effects on parental employment and earnings of public programs to subsidize or provide early care and education have produced very mixed results. Yet, some studies find positive effects on maternal employment, and these can be quite substantial as for Quebec. Other studies do not find positive effects on employment at all, primarily because in those studies increased public investments led to a switch from informal and privately paid arrangements to other forms (often classroom based) that are publicly subsidized. Variations in findings across studies seem likely to be due to variations in family structure, labor market conditions, other public policies that support children and families, and specific features of the specific ECEC policy such as whether it targets primarily children of low-income, single parents, the hours of care provided, and the age range covered. For example, ECEC effects on employment and earnings can be expected to be largest for single mothers with low rates of labor force participation despite good labor market opportunities and whose youngest child is eligible for the program.

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Conclusion: Implications for Policy and Future Research to Inform Policy Research on the costs and outcomes of ECEC has made it clear that the details of policies matter a great deal for the benefits to both children and parents and the economic return to society, even if it has not fully clarified how those details matter. Much remains to be learned about how to optimize the economic returns on public investments in ECEC. Three questions where both costs and benefits loom large are: (1) What services should be provided and how high must the quality be to generate the desired improvements in child development? (2) Who should be served? (3) At what ages should the ECEC program serve children? None of these questions have easy and obvious answers, though the answers are easier at the margins. Poor quality childcare risks harming children, and the potential returns to increasing quality are large, comparable in size to the average estimated returns to ECEC per se (Haeck et  al., 2015; Engle et  al., 2011). Yet, what exactly comprises high quality and how it is to be assured likely varies greatly from one context to another, especially considering the wide variations across countries in children’s unmet needs for all of the resources needed to support optimal development and in the capacities of adults and institutions to meet those needs. As it appears that differences across Denmark, Sweden and Norway are large enough to produce differences in the impacts of ECEC policy, then we must be very careful in generalizing from research across countries, including generalizing from one middle- or low-income country to another. This increases the need for research that will help the field to develop an understanding of how differences in quality and other program features interact with differences in populations and context, so as to generate rules of thumb if not general principles that can be followed rather than having

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to continuously revise policy in each country every 5 to 10 years with new country-specific research. At the same time, this does point to the value of data-driven continuous improvement systems to guide policy and practice (Barnett & Frede, 2017). Low-income populations tend to benefit more from high-quality ECEC in terms of child development gains than more advantaged children. Nevertheless, it could also be true that benefits for children from middleincome families exceed the costs of high quality ECEC (Yoshikawa et  al., 2013). In addition, reasonably accurate targeting is not trivial or costless (Barnett, 2011a). Another consideration is that the participation of more advantaged children in a program may itself contribute to the program’s effectiveness for disadvantaged children (Yoshikawa et  al., 2013). Children learn not just from teachers but from other children, and more advantaged peers can enrich the learning environment (Neidell & Waldfogel, 2010). Also, the willingness of the populace to support high quality ECEC may depend on universal access (Barnett, 2011a). Voters may be more likely to support adequate spending on quality if it is a program in which they have a direct interest in terms of impacts on their children, and quality may need to be higher if children from moderate- to high-income families are to noticeably benefit. With respect to age at start, the now ubiquitous ‘Heckman curve’ portrays returns on early education as declining exponentially with age. The empirical data are clearly at odds with this hypothesis. Meta-analyses do not find a consistent relationship between age and outcomes through age 5. The available research, including benefit–cost results, offers no assurance that returns are on average lower prior to age 3. Major reasons for this are that the cost of ECEC per year and the number of years of ECEC that must be paid for fall as age of entry rises. In addition, some very early large-scale interventions have produced few benefits. However, the value of childcare provided to parents may be

higher for younger children and there may be ways to enhance very early development by working with parents that are of lower cost. It appears that there is no simple relationship between economic return and the age at which the investment starts as so much depends on the design of the program and context, including what is already available to children during the first five or six years of life. More economic research should be conducted with a wide range of programs to serve children under age 3 despite popular opinion that the question is settled. Finally, if benefit–cost analysis is to be truly useful to policymakers, economists must expand the range of benefits that typically are included in such studies (Dalziel et al., 2015). Projecting lifetime earnings from impacts on test scores from the early primary grades is both a risky procedure and so limited that it can be misleading to policymakers, even if the projection is perfectly accurate. It is risky because early achievement test scores cannot always be assumed to be a good predictor of later earnings or of an ECEC program’s impacts on job-related human capital broadly defined (Barnett, 2008). Moreover, children’s future earnings as adults may not be the most important benefit of an ECEC program, and in some countries increasing future earnings may not even be an important goal. As Table 29.3 illustrated, earnings may be only a small part of even the economic return on ECEC. In addition to the other outcomes measured and valued in previous studies – educational cost savings, child maltreatment, delinquency and crime, welfare dependency – additional outcomes that have been observed but not assigned an economic value in ECEC studies include effects on child mortality and morbidity including obesity, quality of life, mental health, parental stress and life satisfaction, educational and social inequality and social cohesion. With respect to the full range of benefits, the economic analysis of ECEC could be said to still be in its infancy. With careful nurturing much more can be expected of it in the future.

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Campbell, F. A., Pungello, E. P., Burchinal, M., Kainz, K., Pan, Y., Wasik, B. H., Barbarin, O. A., Sparling, J. J., & Ramey, C. T. (2012). Adult outcomes as a function of an early childhood educational program: An Abecedarian Project follow-up. Developmental Psychology, 48(4), 1033–1043. Connolly, M., & Haeck, C. (2015). Are childcare subsidies good for parental well-being? Empirical evidence from three countries. CESifo DICE Report 1/2015, 9–15. Dalziel, K. M., Halliday, D., & Segal, L. (2015). Assessment of the cost–benefit literature on early childhood education for vulnerable children. SAGE Open, 5(1). 2158244015571637 Del Boca, D. (2015). Child care arrangements and labor supply. IDB Working Paper No. WP-569. Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank. Duncan, G. J., & Magnuson, K. A. (2013). Investing in preschool programs. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 27(2), 109–132. Duncan, G. J., & Sojourner, A. J. (2013). Can intensive early childhood intervention programs eliminate income-based cognitive and achievement gaps? Journal of Human Resources, 48(4), 945–968. Duncan, G. J., Ludwig, J., & Magnuson, K. A. (2010). In P. B. Levine & D. J. Zimmerman (Eds.) Targeting Investments in Children: Fighting Poverty When Resources are Limited (pp. 27– 58). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Elango, S., Hojman, A., García, J. L., & Heckman, J. J. (2016). Early childhood education. In R. Moffitt (Ed.), Means-tested transfer programs in the United States II. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Engle, P. L., Fernald, L. C. H., Alderman, H., Behrman, J., O’Gara, C., Yousafzai, A., Cabral de Mello, M., Hidrobo, M., Ulkuer, N., Ertem, I., Iltus, S., & the Global Development Steering Group. (2011). Strategies for reducing inequalities and improving developmental outcomes for young children in low-income and middle-income countries. The Lancet, 37(9799), 1339–1353. Fortin, P., Godbout, L., & St-Cerny, S. (2012). Impact of Quebec’s universal low fee childcare program on female labour force participation, domestic income, and government budgets. Sherbrooke, Quebec: University of Sherbrooke.

García, J. L., Heckman, J. J., Leaf, D. E., & Prados, M. J. (2016). The life-cycle benefits of an influential early childhood program (No. w22993). National Bureau of Economic Research. Gertler, P., Heckman, J., Pinto, R., Zanolini, A., Vermeersch, C., Walker, S., Chang, S. M., & Grantham-McGregor, S. (2014). Labor ­ market returns to an early childhood stimulation intervention in Jamaica. Science, 344(6187), 998–1001. Glewwe, P., & Krafft, C. (2014). Benefits and costs of the education targets for the Post2015 Development Agenda Post-2015 Consensus. Working paper. Copenhagen: Copenhagen Consensus Center. Haeck, C., Lefebvre, P., & Merrigan, P. (2015). Canadian evidence on ten years of universal preschool policies: The good and the bad. Labour Economics, 36, 137–157. Havnes, T., & Mogstad, M. (2011). No Child Left Behind: Subsidized child care and children’s long-run outcomes. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 3(2): 97–129. Heckman, J. J., Moon, S. H., Pinto, R., Savelyev, P. A., & Yavitz, A. (2010). The rate of return to the HighScope Perry Preschool Program. Journal of Public Economics, 94(1), 114–128. Hong, X., Luo, L., & Cui, F. (2015). Investigating regional disparities of preschool education development with cluster analysis in Mainland China. International Journal of Child Care and Education Policy, 7(1), 67–80. Hustedt, J. T., & Barnett, W. S. (2011). Financing early childhood education programs: State, federal, and local issues. Educational Policy, 25(1), 167–192. Karoly, L. A. (2011). Toward standardization of benefit–cost analyses of early childhood interventions. (Working Paper WR-83.) Santa Monica, CA: Rand. http://www.rand.org/ pubs/working_papers/WR823.html. Kay, N., & Pennucci, A. (2014). Early childhood education for low-income students: A review of the evidence and benefit–cost analysis (Doc. No. 14-01-2201). Olympia, WA: Washington State Institute for Public Policy. Meadows, P., & National Evaluaton of Sure Start Team (2010). National evaluation of Sure Start local programmes: An economic perspective (Research Report DFE-RR073). London: Department for Education.

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Nakajima, N., Hasan, A., Jung, H., Brinkman, S. A., Pradhan, M. P., & Kinnell, A. (2016). Investing in school readiness: An analysis of the cost-­ effectiveness of early childhood education pathways in rural Indonesia. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper, No. 7832. National Survey of Early Care and Education Project Team (2014). Characteristics of center-based early care and education programs: Initial findings from the National Survey of Early Care and Education (NSECE). OPRE Report #2014-73a. Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, US Department of Health and Human Services. National Survey of Early Care and Education Project Team (2015). Prices charged in early care and education: Initial findings from the National Survey of Early Care and Education (NSECE). OPRE Report #2015-45. Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, US Department of Health and Human Services. Neidell, M., & Waldfogel, J. (2010). Cognitive and noncognitive peer effects in early education. Review of Economics and Statistics, 92(3), 562–576. Nores, M., & Barnett, W. S. (2010). Benefits of early childhood interventions across the world: (Under) Investing in the very young. Economics of Education Review, 29(2), 271–282. OECD (2015). Education at a Glance 2015: OECD Indicators. Paris: OECD Publishing. Pianta, R. C., Barnett, W. S., Burchinal, M., & Thornburg, K. R. (2009). The effects of preschool education: What we know, how public policy is or is not aligned with the evidence base, and what we need to know. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 10(2), 49–88. Pronzato, C. D., & Sorrenti, G. (2015). Lessons from a decade of child care reform. CESifo DICE Report 1/2105, 3–8. Ramon, I., Chattopadhyay, S. K., Hahn, R., Barnett, W. S., and the Community Preventive Services Task Force. (2017). Early childhood education to promote health equity:

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A Community Guide economic review. Journal of Public Health Management & Practice. Rao, N., Sun, J., Wong, J. M. S., Weekes, B., Ip, P., Shaeffer, S., Young, M., Bray, M., Chen, E., & Lee, D. (2014). Early childhood development and cognitive development in developing countries: A rigorous literature review. London: Department for International Development, EPPI Centre, University College London. Reynolds, A. J., & Temple, J. A. (2008). Costeffective early childhood development programs from preschool to third grade. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 4, 109–139. Reynolds, A. J., Temple, J. A., White, B. A. B., Ou, S. R., & Robertson, D. L. (2011). Age 26 cost–benefit analysis of the Child–Parent Center Early Education Program. Child Development, 82(1), 379–404. Sameroff, A. (2010). A unified theory of development: A dialectic integration of nature and nurture. Child Development, 81(1), 6–22. Schweinhart, L. J., Montie, J., Xiang, Z., Barnett, W. S., Belfield, C. R., & Nores, M. (2005). Lifetime effects: The High/Scope Perry Preschool study through age 40. Ypsilanti, MI: HighScope. UNICEF (2014). Early childhood development: A statistical snapshot – building better brains and sustainable outcomes for children. New York: UNICEF. Washington State Institute for Public Policy (WSIPP). (2016). Benefit–cost results: Pre-K to 12 education. Retrieved on August 17, 2016 from http://www.wsipp.wa.gov/BenefitCost/Pdf/4/ WSIPP_BenefitCost_Pre-K- to-12-Education Yoshikawa, H., Weiland, C., Brooks-Gunn, J., ­Burchinal, M. R., Espinosa, L. M., Gormley, W. T. Ludwig, J., Magnuson, K. A., Phillips, D., & Zaslow, M. J. (2013). Investing in our future: The evidence base on preschool education. Ann Arbor, MI: Society for Research in Child Development. Retrieved on 17 May, 2017 from http://www.srcd. org/sites/default/files/documents/washington/mb_2013_10_16_investing_in_children.pdf

30 Quality of Early Childhood Education and Care for Children under Three: Sound Foundations Sandra Mathers and Katharina Ereky-Stevens

Introduction The first few years of a child’s life provide the foundation for healthy development and lifelong learning. While the home environment is the most powerful influence on development, there is an increasing trend in many countries for children under 3 years to attend an early education and care setting,1 often to support parental employment. In England, for example, the latest national figures suggest that 40 per cent of under-3s attend formal provision (Huskinson et al., 2016). Good quality early childhood provision can bring cognitive, language and social benefits, even for very young children. However, achieving high quality in formal settings is a challenging task, particularly given growing recognition that the needs of babies and toddlers are different to those of older children. Evidence suggests that there is wide variation, and that a significant proportion of children under 3 attending early years provision do not experience good quality (Smith et al., 2009).

This is not simply a lost opportunity for supporting development: research shows that attending low quality provision can actually be harmful, with long hours in low quality group care for very young children associated with increased risk of anti-social behaviour, among other things (Melhuish et al., 2015). Particular attention is needed to ensure that children from low-income and at-risk families are not relegated to low quality early childhood settings.2 Disadvantaged children often experience home environments that are less than optimal, not because poor families are poor parents, but because the stresses of living in poverty can lead to reduced parental warmth, inconsistent and chaotic routines, and limited language and learning environments (Bornstein, 2015). As a result, children from disadvantaged homes are at greater risk of developmental delay. Whilst good quality early years provision can contribute to narrowing this achievement gap (Heckman, 2006; Nores & Barnett, 2010), low quality provision exacerbates developmental risk factors.

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Early childhood policymakers wishing to achieve maximum gains in child development, as well as social equity, should therefore aim to ensure access to good quality provision for the most disadvantaged. Many countries are now recognising this objective, either providing direct access via funded programmes or addressing issues of accessibility and affordability for disadvantaged children within early years policy. Despite these efforts, research shows that disadvantaged children do not always receive comparable quality to their more advantaged peers (Mathers & Smees, 2014). Particularly when it comes to ameliorating the effects of disadvantage, there is often a tension between measures designed to tackle poverty by increasing maternal employment and those designed to ensure that early childhood provision is of the highest quality. Whilst we recognise the key role played by employment in lifting families out of poverty, our focus here is on the potential of early childhood provision to directly promote improved child outcomes. A good understanding of the ways in which early childhood education and care shapes development and learning in the first years of life is vital to inform policy and practice. We review the international research evidence, focusing particularly on the needs of young children from disadvantaged backgrounds. We draw largely on two recent pieces of work: a review carried out in England on early childhood quality and policy for under-3s (Mathers et al., 2014), and work carried out as part of a collaborative European Union funded project2 to address issues related to the quality, inclusiveness and benefits of early childhood education and care in Europe (Melhuish et al., 2015; Resa et  al., 2016; Sylva et  al., 2015, 2016). Our work is therefore targeted rather than systematic, and draws on reviews as well as original research papers. In a short chapter on a wide-ranging subject area, it is not possible to fully reflect the evidence base. In each case, therefore, the papers we cite represent examples drawn from a wider pool of research, including significant US and European studies.

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The effects of early years provision on outcomes for under-3s Research indicates that attendance at high quality provision before starting school can bring benefits in many developmental domains. The strongest findings relate to cognitive and educational outcomes: attending early childhood provision before age 3 can lead to gains in cognitive skills, language development and academic achievement, with some effects lasting into later childhood and adolescence (Jaffee et  al., 2011; Sylva et al., 2010; Vandell et al., 2010). Effects vary according to the characteristics of children, families, providers and patterns of attendance. Importantly, benefits are often found to be stronger for children from disadvantaged families (Geoffroy et  al., 2010; VotrubaDrzal et  al., 2013). Much of the evidence relates to attendance at centre-based provision, although some studies have also found benefits for home-based provision (Lekhal et al., 2011; Votruba-Drzal et al., 2013). In contrast to the largely positive findings for cognitive development, the effect of early education and care on socio-emotional development has long been a contentious topic; and the perspective that daily parental separation might reduce secure attachment influenced much early research on infant childcare. Evidence from more recent (and methodologically rigorous) research suggests that attachment security is only compromised when babies experience low quality care (Friedman & Boyle, 2008; Love et  al., 2003). Other studies have identified the negative effects on socio-emotional outcomes of long hours in group care at an early age (Loeb et al., 2007; Yamauchi & Leigh, 2011). However, a recent comprehensive review concluded that these effects are specific to populations not facing disadvantage (Huston, Bobbitt & Bentley, 2015). For children from disadvantaged homes, positive impacts of early attendance on behavioural

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and social outcomes can be found (Côté et  al., 2008; Zachrisson & Dearing, 2015), particularly related to a centre-based care experience (Crosby et al., 2010) and to high quality care (Votruba-Drzal et al., 2004). Another important concern is how attendance at early childhood provision can affect young children’s health. Several studies have found negative impacts of attendance for babies and toddlers, including increased numbers of infections, and respiratory and gastrointestinal illnesses (Bradley & the NICHD ECCRN, 2003; Lu et  al., 2004). Although evidence suggests that these early effects do not necessarily influence later development (NICHD ECCRN, 2005), the particular demands of infant health and care in the first few months of life suggest that parental care at home may provide the healthiest environment during this stage. Some research also suggests that attendance at early years provision can raise young children’s stress levels (as measured by their cortisol increase), particularly for younger children and where the quality of provision is low (Ahnert et al., 2004; Lisonbee et al., 2008). Finally, there are indications that the physical early childhood environment also has direct impact on children’s activity levels, thus affecting their physical health. Yet, childcare studies which pay attention to the physical well-being and motor development of young children are rare. The effects of early years provision on children’s outcomes tend to increase with length of attendance (Sylva et al., 2010; VotrubaDrzal et al., 2004), although research has not yet identified an optimum number of years. Some studies suggest more than one or two (Biedinger & Becker, 2006; Bos et al., 2003) and others more than three years (Sammons et al., 2002; Wylie et al., 2006). Studies which consider starting age rather than length of attendance reflect a similar picture; not surprising, since these two variables are closely related. Evidence generally suggests that attendance from age two is most beneficial in terms of cognitive, educational and socio-emotional outcomes (Barnes

and Eryigit-Madzwamuse, 2012; NICHD ECCRN, 2004), although other studies have identified benefits from an earlier starting age, for example, between 1 and 2 years of age (Coley et al., 2013; Lekhal et al., 2011). Very little is known about the effects of programme intensity (i.e. hours attended per day or per week). In general, full days appear to add little developmental value for the general population (Howes et al., 2008; Sylva et al., 2010) but there is some evidence that children from disadvantaged backgrounds may benefit more from higher intensity provision (Chang, 2012; Loeb et al., 2007). In general, the quality of the evidence on programme intensity is relatively weak, drawn largely from nonexperimental research and from studies which did not control for programme quality. In summary, there are clear indications that attending early childhood provision at an early age can bring benefits for cognitive and language skills, as well as later educational achievement. Benefits are also seen for disadvantaged children in relation to social and emotional development. Despite this broad research consensus, we must acknowledge that identifying the impact of early childhood provision on development is not an easy task, with mixed evidence coming from different countries and contexts. The impact of attendance must be viewed alongside other influences on development, including the home environment and later schooling. One of the most consistent findings is the need for early childhood provision to be of the highest quality to ensure maximum benefits, particularly for disadvantaged children. Almost all identified benefits are stronger where provision is of high quality: children in good-to-excellent provision do better across a wide range of outcomes than their peers in mediocre or poor provision (Loeb et al., 2004) and the effects are more likely to be sustained (Anders, 2013). Low quality provision results in few – or even negative – effects. In order for these findings to be of value in guiding policy and practice, however, we must unpack the concept of ‘quality’.

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When studies conclude that good quality provision leads to better outcomes, what is meant by this? What are the specific features associated with improved outcomes for children under the age of 3? Although there is not yet a consensus on a single definition of quality, two broad dimensions are consistently identified in the literature (Early et al., 2007). ‘Process quality’ is the term used to describe the nature of children’s actual experiences within early childhood settings, primarily (although not restricted to) the pedagogical practices employed by the staff team. Structural aspects of quality include features such as adult:child ratios, staff qualifications, group sizes and characteristics of the physical space, and are generally considered to be a key means by which good process quality is achieved (NICHD ECCRN, 2002). We consider each of these in turn.

Process quality: what do under-3s need from their early childhood settings? What does a good quality environment look like for very young children? The literature on supporting development and learning is vast and varied, and in a chapter of this length we can only dip our toes in the water to consider some of the key ideas and practices. Very broadly, we know that effective provision offers children warm and positive relationships, a safe and healthy environment, and opportunities to learn. The most significant influence on children’s development in the first three years is the nature of relationships they form with the adults who care for them. Above all, young children need close and supportive relationships with a small number of familiar people, built upon a foundation of sensitive and responsive reciprocal interactions (Dalli et  al., 2011; Landry et  al., 2006). Sensitive and responsive adults are attuned to young children’s subtle verbal and non-verbal cues,

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preferences and temperaments. Through this inter-subjectivity, they display shared attention, intention and emotion with the child (Tomasello et al., 2005), following their lead in interaction, exploration and play. Such interactions support young children to develop the secure attachments essential for supporting their development later in life (Ahnert et al., 2006). Securely attached children do better than those with attachment difficulties across a wide range of domains, including emotional, social and behavioural development, peer acceptance, academic achievement and physical development (Green & Goldwyn, 2002; Sroufe, 2005). Although much of the literature on attachment relates to parent–child relationships, research also shows that children can develop bonds with other significant adults, and that secure attachments with staff in early childhood settings can support children in exploring their environments, forming relationships with peers and engaging in play (Howes & Smith, 1995). Such interactions also form the basis for early social interaction and support the development of self-regulation and cognitive control (Trevarthen & Aitken, 2001), both of which have been found to be related to school readiness and later school achievement, social competence and behaviour (Blair & Diamond, 2008; Kochanska et al., 2000). It has been argued that stability of care is particularly crucial for the birth-to-3 age group, and that continuity in relationships with adults is necessary for sensitive, attuned, responsive interactions and secure relationships to develop (Dalli et al., 2011). Despite this, many babies and toddlers experience changes in their care arrangements and/ or multiple forms of care at the same time (Bowes et al., 2004; NICHD ECCRN, 2005). While research on the impact of such instability is still in its infancy, early studies indicate that it may negatively affect children’s social competence (NICHD ECCRN, 2003), cognitive and language development (Loeb et  al., 2004; Tran & Weinraub, 2006) and well-being (de Schipper et al., 2003).

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Young children also need support for their emerging language and communication skills. Language underpins later learning but large variations, even from an early age, mean that some children are better equipped than others to become lifelong learners. Even by age 2, children from a lower socio-economic background have smaller vocabularies than their peers, and these vocabulary skills predict academic and behavioural skills at age 5 (Morgan et al., 2015), which in turn predict later educational, economic and societal success (Chetty et  al., 2011; Duncan et  al., 2007). Much of the research relating to children’s language development is based on interactions within the home, which are the most powerful influence on children’s development (Roulstone et al., 2011). Evidence suggests that, while the volume of speech that children have directed towards them matters (Shneidman et al., 2013), the quality of talk is also important. Most effective is contingent talk (i.e. talk about what the child is paying attention to) which is rich, varied and complex (Hoff & Naigles, 2002; McGillion et  al., 2013). Language-related activities such as interactive shared reading also support development (Mol et  al., 2008). Despite the fact that much of the evidence relates to parental interactions, there is also good and growing evidence that similar techniques will support the language development of children under 3 within early childhood settings (Girolametto & Weitzman, 2002). With increasing movement of families between countries, support for children learning a second language is increasingly also required. Bilingual preschool programmes that support language minorities to maintain their first language as well as providing second language support have been shown to be effective (Durán et al., 2010). Implementation of such programmes is challenging however, particularly where children with various language backgrounds come together. We need to better understand how to support children in groups with several languages. In addition to support for language development, practitioners must have an understanding

of how children develop across all domains, and how to support learning through sensitive, responsive interactions. Play is recognised as being a particularly rich learning context, supportive of social, emotional, cognitive and physical outcomes, as well as the development of self-regulation, meta-cognition and problem-solving (Goswami, 2015; Milteer et al., 2012). However, evidence suggests that it is a more effective vehicle for learning when scaffolded by adults and – as children become older – when it takes places with other children (Goswami, 2015). Children are highly interested in other children from a very young age and, as they become older, they engage deeply with their peers (Parker et  al., 2015). Peer learning is an important but often undervalued and under-researched dimension of group care for young children; and adults have a key role to play in supporting children to engage successfully with their peers. Young children also need to be physically active to support health and development, with increased physical activity linked to reduced obesity, improved motor and cognitive development and bone and skeletal health (Tremblay et al., 2012). Although research is not yet detailed enough to identify the most effective pedagogical strategies for encouraging physical development in very young children, practice guidelines which combine the currently available evidence with professional expertise exist in several countries (Department of Health, 2011; Tremblay et al., 2012). Concerns about obesity in some countries have also led to calls for increased attention to food and nutrition, including the quality of food served in early childhood settings, relevant staff training and the development of good eating habits (Story et  al., 2006). In addition – and particularly for young babies – good standards of health and hygiene are vital to prevent the spread of communicable illness (Dalli et al., 2011). Parents are the most significant influence on children’s development, and good relationships between early childhood settings and families are recognised as a further important

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dimension of quality. Although the researchbase is thin, evidence from professionals suggests that active family involvement supports children’s engagement in learning and their adaptation to care routines, and promotes the self-esteem of both parents and caregivers (Brooker, 2010). Positive practices identified include a reflection of family preferences and cultural differences in planning and curriculum implementation, communication regarding the child’s progress, support for the home learning environment (Melhuish et al., 2008) and an awareness of and response to signs of family stress, particularly for vulnerable families (Leseman & Slot, 2014). In summary, the evidence suggests that high quality early childhood provision for children under 3 is built on a foundation of stable, sensitive and responsive interactions with adults, support for language and learning through playful interactions, opportunities for movement and physical activity, attention to health and personal care needs, and partnership working with parents. As children become older, support for peer interactions becomes increasingly important. There is also a recognition that quality for children under 3 – although it shares many features with provision for older children – must also reflect the unique needs of very young children (Dalli et al., 2011). However, given that associations between quality and outcomes are not always consistent across different measures of quality (Beckh et al., 2015; Ruzek et al., 2014; Sylva et  al., 2011), and that much of the evidence for this age group is based on the study of parent–child interactions, more work is needed to understand how specific features of early childhood provision influence the development and learning of under-3s. One of the features that makes early childhood provision different to parent–child interactions is the fact that multiple children are being cared for together. We need to know more about how techniques found to be effective within parent–child interactions can be applied in a group context. It is also important to understand how the effects

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of attendance and quality vary according to the characteristics of the children and families themselves, and particularly to establish the features which make most difference for disadvantaged young children. This should include attention to the social mix within early childhood settings, since research indicates both that disadvantaged children benefit from attending provision with a mix of social groups (de Haan et  al., 2013; Sylva et  al., 2010) and that it can be more challenging to offer high quality in settings attended by high proportions of children from disadvantaged backgrounds (Early et  al. 2010; Mathers & Smees, 2014). Finally, we need to understand what influences the quality of provision within early childhood settings, in order to develop policy and practices, which will be supportive of high quality. We discuss these structural characteristics below.

What are the drivers of quality and what does this mean for policymakers? In this section we consider the structural predictors of quality, including organisational characteristics such as adult:child ratios, the qualifications and training of the workforce, and the ways in which such structural features vary across provider types and early childhood systems. We also consider the issue of providing appropriate curriculum guidance for staff working with children under the age of 3. Variations in these characteristics – and the ways in which early childhood policies work to influence them – will greatly affect the potential of early childhood provision within individual countries to improve children’s development. There are considerable differences in the approaches taken by different countries to policymaking, and in the weight given to promoting specific structural features, particularly with regards to the younger age groups in ECEC (Resa et al., 2016).

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Workforce preparation Identifying a clear story to tell in relation to early childhood qualifications is not an easy task. Types and levels of education, qualifications, training and in-service professional development vary widely between and within countries (Dalli et  al., 2011; Huntsman, 2008; Resa et al., 2016). Since the effects of qualifications and training are necessarily dependent on their nature and content, and on the workplace contexts within which they are enacted, this limits the extent to which generalisations can be drawn (Tout et  al., 2006; Whitebook et  al., 2009). In addition, the findings on qualification effects are not always consistent across age groups, with some studies identifying positive effects for under-3s and others identifying no effects (Fukkink & Lont, 2007). Despite these challenges, comprehensive reviews conclude that workforce preparation has a direct impact on the ability of staff to provide sensitive, responsive and stimulating care and education, which in turn enhance children’s learning and development. Positive effects have been found for general educational qualifications, specialised pre-service training, inservice professional development following initial training and in-work supervision (Dalli et al., 2011; Fukkink & Lont, 2007; Howes & Brown, 2000; Munton et al., 2002). While for pre-school children there is good evidence that graduate-led provision is important for quality and child outcomes, the evidence is less consistent for younger children. The overall qualification level of the team is important (although there is little evidence on specific thresholds) and some argue strongly for specialised training with appropriate content on the development of babies and toddlers (Mathers et al., 2014). In general, studies show that staff working with under-3s tend to be less well qualified than those working with older children, particularly in relation to graduate status (Mathers et al., 2011). There are also differences in the extent to which young children have access to staff trained in education or are primarily

looked after by staff with ‘care’ qualifications (Resa et  al., 2016). Similarly, while some studies highlight the need for setting leaders to be well qualified and trained for their role (Ballaschk & Anders, 2015; Melhuish et  al., 2015), there is much variation in requirements for staff in leadership positions across different countries and provider types. Recent reviews have emphasised the need to bring expectations for the under-3 workforce in line with those for older children (Resa et al., 2016) and to better specify the appropriate content, design and delivery of qualifications (Expert Advisory Panel on Quality Early Childhood Education and Care, 2009). Evidence is also growing that in-service professional development can improve the quality of practice and – as a result – ­children’s outcomes (Jensen & Rasmussen, 2016; Markussen-Brown et al., 2015). Specific studies relating to professional development for practitioners working with children under 3 are almost non-existent. This gap needs to be addressed. However, the impact of professional development rests largely on the extent to which adult learning is successfully fostered; there is therefore also much to learn from studies relating to staff working with preschool or school-age children. As with qualifications, the content and structure of professional development vary enormously. Not all forms are equally effective, and there is evidence that oneoff external workshops and conferences of the type traditionally attended by most early years professionals do little to promote change in practice (Cordingley et  al., 2015). There is evidence that formal training courses can be effective when they are of sufficient duration, and well-designed using evidence-based principles (Hamre et al., 2012). Research also supports the use of coaching and mentoring (Mashburn et al., 2010), combinations of training and classroom-based mentoring (Neuman & Cunningham, 2009) and collaborative teacher-led approaches (Borko et  al., 2010; Vescio, Ross & Adams, 2008). The current evidence base would benefit from specific studies addressing the effects of professional development for staff working with children under 3,

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and identifying promising design features and content. Finally, given findings on the potential challenges of providing high quality when meeting the (potentially wide-ranging) needs of children from disadvantaged backgrounds, we need to know more about how to prepare staff for this role. Evidence suggests that this is best achieved when staff are well supported, qualified and experienced (Slot et al., 2015a), when there is a focus on education, and when programmes are combined with family support services and coaching (Blok et al., 2005).

Adult–Child Ratios and Group Sizes Moving now to consider staff deployment, it is often argued that higher adult:child ratios (fewer children per practitioner) and smaller group sizes promote higher quality and more individual adult–child interactions, and that these features are more important for younger children (Expert Advisory Panel on Quality Early Childhood Education and Care, 2009; Huntsman, 2008). Most countries operate minimum standards and regulations in this regard. However, a closer look at recent studies shows no clear effects for under-3s, particularly across European countries (Albers et al., 2010; Slot et al., 2015b). As with staff qualifications, these inconsistencies may arise from differing structural quality characteristics across countries and contexts (Slot et al., 2015a). Group size or ratios can often depend on other structural variables such as staff education and training, or the organisational characteristics of the setting. For example in England, settings with higher qualified staff allow for high child:adult ratios. A factor not usually considered is that the organisation of activities within a group relates strongly to pedagogical practice in a classroom. Ratios and group sizes by themselves provide a limited picture of children’s experience. Where more than one adult is present, groups with smaller numbers of children are often created. Case studies show that the structure of the grouping within a classroom (small-group activities) is an important

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variable to consider when providing good quality early childhood education and care (Slot et al., 2016).

Curriculum Curriculum is one of the key factors influencing pedagogical practice. Curriculum frameworks aim to facilitate coherent pedagogical approaches to assure more even quality of provision for all children, and maximise gains from early childhood attendance (European Commission et al., 2014). As part of its work, the recent CARE Project considered curricular frameworks across Europe (Sylva et al., 2015, 2016); in this section we draw on this work to consider issues relating to guidance for providers working with children under the age of 3. The picture of curriculum frameworks in Europe is complex. While there is a trend towards a more integrated system, with a common standard curriculum for all types of provision, this is not yet realised in many countries and splits exist between frameworks for different age groups and different types of providers. Where there are gaps in curriculum frameworks, these usually concern the younger group. One of the challenges of curriculum development is finding a balance between a curriculum for younger children that harmonises with the framework with older children while remaining sensitive to the characteristics of babies and toddlers. The lack of a shared conceptual framework for the younger age-group goes hand in hand with a lack of clarity (and more divergent views) on the way learning is conceptualised, especially in relation to intellectual goals (Broekhuizen et al., 2015; Sylva et al., 2016), despite the broad agreement on the value of a balanced approach where learning and socioemotional objectives are combined within a play-based framework (Slot et  al., 2016). Relatedly, there are differences in the focus that is given to the learning of skills in preacademic/academic subject areas. This tension becomes particularly apparent when we think

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about a good curriculum for children with more disadvantaged backgrounds. If early childhood provision is to help to close the education gap between more disadvantaged and affluent families, a curriculum needs to ensure learning for all children in all domains, while at the same time strengthening support mechanisms which assure pre-academic skill development for those at risk of falling behind, and language development for migrant and ethnic minority children (Leseman & Slot, 2014). Finally, curriculum implementation needs to be in tune with children’s interests and needs, the specific situation and the context. Curriculum frameworks should be open and flexible enough to enable educators to apply the general guidelines whilst using their knowledge and analysis of the local context and the specific situation. Partnerships with parents and the wider community, observations and documentation of children’s experiences and learning, and continuous evaluation of practice are commonly stressed as important elements that support such responsive practice. Thus, curriculum implementation is a complex task, requiring a knowledgeable, skilled and well-supported workforce.

Provider Characteristics and Early Childhood Systems International reviews (e.g. European Commission et al., 2014) indicate a complex picture of early childhood services in many countries, with wide variation in provider types and in the ways in which services are combined to meet the needs of children and families. Differences are seen in many of the structural characteristics known to influence quality, including staff qualifications, professional development opportunities, ratios, group sizes and the existence and application of curriculum frameworks. As a result, quality can vary significantly by type of provider (Sylva et al., 2010; Slot et al., 2015a). In some countries, for example, use of informal care arrangements and home-based care arrangements are common for the younger age

group. The majority of the research indicating the benefits of early childhood provision relates to centre-based group provision. Evidence on impacts of informal or home-based provision is less conclusive. Some argue that homebased provision is ideal for very young children, because groups are commonly smaller and more intimate, with fewer peers and greater adult–child ratios than in centre-based programmes (Dowsett et  al., 2008). Studies that directly compare provision types draw mixed conclusions, with some studies identifying centre-based and others home-based provision as offering a more optimal environment for young children, including disadvantaged children (Groeneveld et al., 2010; Luijk et al., 2015), while others find no differences (Barnes et al., 2010). It is likely that differences arise from variation in the characteristics of provider types in different countries, and the levels of support each receives. Undeniably, we do not know enough about how home-care settings relate to children’s development, and how to support practitioners offering home-based care. Even less is known about informal care arrangements, which cannot be regulated, and within which children’s experiences may vary widely. Financial and governance structures also vary from country to country. Many systems include a mix of private and public provision, with sufficiency of provision for the youngest children often relying heavily on private provision paid for directly by parents. In some countries private provision has been found to be of lower quality (Sylva et al., 2010), and some have suggested that a reliance on parental fees and the pressure to remain competitive can influence the extent to which private providers focus on improving quality (Akgündüz et al., 2015). Other factors influencing the differences between provision types include differences in legal requirements governing qualifications and adult:child ratios. In England, for example, the qualification requirements for the private sector are lower than for government-maintained providers, which are all graduate-led.

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Finally, variations in opening times and costs can influence the accessibility of certain provision types. For example, half-day provision is less likely to meet the needs of working parents, while unsubsidised provision is less accessible to low-income families. This can lead to segregation, with high proportions of children from more disadvantaged backgrounds in certain types of providers. This works against principles of inclusion, and challenges providers in ensuring good quality for all (Slot et al., 2015a; Tonyan & Howes, 2003).

Conclusions and implications for policy In this chapter we have outlined the evidence base on early childhood provision for children under the age of 3. Research confirms that attendance at a high quality provider can be beneficial, particularly for disadvantaged children. The first implication is therefore that disadvantaged children should have access to early childhood provision from the age of 2, and possibly before. This conclusion is drawn based on potential benefits for children’s development: many countries also promote access to enable parents to work, thus potentially improving outcomes by lifting children out of poverty. Increased recognition of the value of early childhood provision has led to higher investments and service expansion in many countries. Increasingly, policies introduce targeted free entitlements and put measures in place to under-3s reduce costs for those families in need. Yet, participation rates for underthrees vary greatly in European countries, and are generally lower for more disadvantaged families (OECD, 2014; OECD/PISA, 2012). Demand is also commonly higher than supply for this age group (European Commission et al., 2014). For policymakers, there are challenging decisions to be made regarding targeted versus universal provision. Should resources be spent on ensuring access for the most disadvantaged by reducing costs for this

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group, or on providing for everyone? With a fixed amount to be spent, increasing subsidy for all potentially reduces the funds available for ensuring that provision is of good quality. In England, free half-day places are offered to the 40 per cent most disadvantaged 2-year-olds. The evaluation of the pilot initiative showed positive effects, but only for children attending higher quality provision (Smith et al., 2009), and there has been some debate about whether the policy was extended too widely (i.e. from the most disadvantaged 20 per cent to the most disadvantaged 40 per cent) before ensuring that places were of sufficient quality to help children catch up with their peers (Mathers et al., 2014). The second implication stems from evidence on the need for stability and continuity to support young children’s socio-emotional development and secure attachments. In England, such research formed the basis for introducing the statutory ‘key worker’ system for early years providers. A child’s key adult is responsible for helping them settle in, offering a secure relationship, tailoring provision to meet their individual needs and building a relationship with parents. However, given the agreed importance of stability, surprisingly little is known about other factors which may exert an influence. Although adult:child ratios are oft-studied, there is little evidence to provide guidance on optimal attendance patterns, use of multiple providers or the effects of different lengths of day. While full days are generally thought to add little developmental value over part-time provision, and long hours in low quality provision have been associated with some negative outcomes, there is some evidence that longer hours may be beneficial for disadvantaged children. More research is needed to guide practice and policy in this regard, particularly since children of full-time working parents will often be attending long days or (in countries with little full-time provision) accessing multiple forms of provision to make up a full-time place. The third key consideration is how to ensure high quality provision, particularly for disadvantaged children. Although – as noted above – there are potentially tensions between

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policies designed to widen access and those which aim to ensure quality, the evidence shows that many developmental benefits will be lost unless attention is paid to quality. A primary consideration is the quality of the early childhood workforce, and policies should ensure that staff working with young children are well qualified and have access to high-quality in-service professional development. While the evidence is unclear on the importance of graduate-led provision for this age group, it is clear that higher qualifications in general are associated with higher quality and that staff working with under-3s require specialised input relevant to the age group. Evidence suggests that this is not always the case. In England, for example, where the government’s flagship programme offering free early education to disadvantaged 2-year-olds has been introduced within recent years, less than half of respondents to a national workforce survey felt that their initial qualifications had prepared them well for working specifically with this age group (Georgeson et  al., 2014). Professional development often falls well below initial qualifications on the policy agenda, and workforce development in many countries would benefit from greater attention being paid to its potential. Current approaches vary widely between different European countries, in terms of the extent to which efforts are co-ordinated and/or compulsory for early educators (Jensen et al., 2015). Policymakers should work to ensure greater parity in qualifications and professional development opportunities between provider types, for example private and public providers and centre- and home-based providers. Pay and conditions for early childhood professionals are also significant factors, not considered in this review, but closely linked to issues of quality, including qualifications and staff turnover. The evidence on other structural features such as adult:child ratios and group sizes is less clear-cut, although it does seem wise to ensure lower ratios for younger children than for older pre-schoolers (in the majority of countries this is the case). In truth, the many

different structural features of early childhood provision interact with each other, influencing child development in combination rather than individually. In the majority of European countries, different provider types and early childhood systems operate widely differing combinations of qualifications, ratios and operational structures, and policymakers should consider the system as a whole when developing policy solutions. In England, for example, government-­ maintained providers have higher qualification requirements than privately-funded provision but can operate at lower ratios (i.e. more children per adult); and they have been shown through research to offer higher overall quality than the private sector (Sylva et  al., 2010). The government has made recent attempts to level the playing field by introducing a single funding formula to calculating the amounts received by all providers offering the free early education entitlement, and debates continue as to whether the net effect will be to improve quality within the private and voluntary sector, or to lower quality in the government-maintained sector. There is limited room here to explore different mechanisms for policymakers to promote quality, and the widely different approaches taken to monitoring and regulation, funding mechanisms and the use of curricular frameworks to provide guidance for practice in different countries. Whatever the methods employed, it is clear that policy should incentivise providers to improve quality in addition to supporting access for disadvantaged children under the age of 3. In general, the evidence suggests that parental choice is not sufficient to incentivise providers to improve quality and that other means are necessary (Gambaro et  al., 2014). Where funding is used as a lever, this may mean that benefits in supply-side incentives for quality (i.e. additional funding for providers with well-qualified staff) may be more effective than demand-side approaches (i.e. providing funding directly to parents). Policymakers should also ensure recognition of the particular needs of very young children, for example by ensuring that regulators monitor the provision

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offered for different age groups and that qualifications include specialist content relating to this age group. In conclusion, although knowledge is increasing about the features of early childhood practice that support children’s development, provision for babies and toddlers remains under-studied in comparison to that for older children. Further work is needed to guide policy and practice to ensure that all children attending early childhood provision before the age of 3 have their needs met effectively, and that we make the most of its powerful potential to act as an early intervention for disadvantaged young children.

Notes  1  In this chapter, the terms early education and care setting, early childhood provision and early years provision are used interchangeably. They include centre-based early years education, childcare and home-based provision such as childminding or family daycare.   2  Curriculum and Quality Analysis and Impact Review of European Early Childhood Education and Care at http://ecec-care.org/

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Luijk, M., Linting, M., Henrichs, J., Herba, C., ­Verhage, M., Schenk, J., Arends, L., Raat, H., Jaddoe, V., Hofman, A., Verhulst, F., Tiemeier, H., & van IJzendoorm, M. (2015). Hours in non-parental child care are related to language development in a longitudinal cohort study. Child: Care, Health and Development, 41(6), 1188–1198. Markussen-Brown, J., Juhl, C. B., Piasta, S. B., Bleses, D., Højen, A., & Justice, L. M. (2015). The effects of language and emergent literacy professional development for teachers and children: A meta-analysis. Manuscript, University of Southern Denmark. Mashburn, A., Downer, J. D., Hamre, B. K., Justice, L. M., & Pianta, R. C. (2010). Teaching consultation and children’s language and literacy development during pre-kindergarten. Applied Developmental Science, 14(4), 179–198. Mathers, S., & Smees, R. (2014). Quality and inequality: Do three- and four-year-olds in deprived areas experience lower quality early years provision? London: Nuffield Foundation. Retrieved on 17 May, 2017 from http:// www.nuffieldfoundation.org/sites/default/ files/files/Quality_inequality_childcare_ mathers_29_05_14.pdf Mathers, S., Eisenstadt, N., Sylva, K., Soukakou, E., & Ereky-Stevens, K. (2014). Sound Foundations: A review of the research evidence on quality of early childhood education and care for children under three – Implications for policy and practice. The Sutton Trust and the Education Endowment Foundation. [online]. Retrieved on 17 May, 2017 from http://www.ox.ac.uk/document.rm Mathers, S., Ranns, H., Karemaker, A., Moody, A., Sylva, K., Graham, J., & Siraj-Blatchford, I. (2011). Evaluation of the graduate leader fund: Final report. London: Department for Education. Retrieved on 17 May, 2017 from https://www.education.gov.uk/publications/ standard/­publicationDetail/Page1/DFE-RR144 McGillion, M. L., Herbert, J. S., Pine, J. M., Keren-Portnoy, T., Vihman, M. M. & Matthews, D. E. (2013). Supporting early vocabulary development: What sort of responsiveness matters? IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development, 5(3), 240–248. Melhuish, E. C., Phan, M. B., Sylva, K., Sammons, P., Siraj-Blatchford, I., & Taggart, B. (2008). Effects of the home learning

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Institute of Education, University of London/ Department for Education and Skills. Shneidman, L. A., Arroyo, M. E., Levine., S., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2013). What counts as effective input for word learning? Journal of Child Language, 40(3), 672–686. Slot, P., Cadima, J., Salminen, J., Pastori, G., & Lerkkanen, M.-K. (2016). Multiple case study in seven European countries regarding culture-sensitive classroom quality assessment. CARE Curriculum Quality Analysis and Impact Review of European ECEC, WP2, D2.3. Retrieved on 17 May, 2017 from http://ecec care.org/fileadmin/careproject/Publications/ reports/CARE_WP2_D2_3_Multiple_Case_ study_FINAL_REPORT.pdf Slot, P. L., Lerkkanen, M.-K., & Leseman, P. P. M. (2015a). The relations between structural quality and process quality in European early childhood education and care provisions: Secondary analyses of large scale studies in five countries. CARE Curriculum Quality Analysis and Impact Review of European ECEC, WP2, D2.2. Retrieved on 17 May, 2017 from http:// ecec-care.org/fileadmin/careproject/Publications/reports/CARE_WP2_D2__2_­Secondary_ data_analyses.pdf Slot, P., Leseman, P., Verhagen, J., & Mulder, H. (2015b). Associations between structural quality aspects and process quality in Dutch early childhood education and care settings. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 33, 64–76. Smith, R., Purdon, S., Mathers, S., Sylva, K., Schneider, V., La Valle, I., Wollny, I., Owen, R., Bryson, C., & Lloyd, E. (2009). Early education pilot for two year old children: Evaluation. DCSF Research Report RR134. Retrieved on 17 May, 2017 from http://dera.ioe. ac.uk/10651/1/DCSF-RR134.pdf Sroufe, L. A. (2005). Attachment and development: A prospective, longitudinal study from birth to adulthood. Attachment and Human Development, 7(4), 349–367. Story, M., Kaphingst, K. M., & French, S. (2006). The role of child care settings in obesity prevention. The Future of Children. Special Issue: Childhood Obesity, 16(1), 143–168. Sylva, K., Ereky-Stevens, K., & Aricescu, A. (2015). Overview of European ECEC curricula and curriculum template. CARE Curriculum Quality Analysis and Impact Review of European ECEC, WP2, D2.1. Retrieved on 17

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31 The Competent System at the Intersection of Research, Policymaking and Practice Jan Peeters and Brecht Peleman

Introduction In the field of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) for children aged 0 to 6 or 7, policymakers, practitioners and researchers often seem to speak a different language, and neither ECEC researchers nor practitioners or policymakers alone have the full array of knowledge and skills to move effectively from established principles to specific plans for a specific context (Super, Britto & Engle, 2012). However, to realise sustainable change, policy, research and practice need to be rewarded as inextricably linked. In this chapter, we describe the importance of this interrelationship by presenting recent international efforts to improve the quality of the ECEC sector through the Continuous Professional Development1 (CPD) of the early years workforce. The work of the Centre for Innovation in the Early Years (‘VBJK’; Ghent University) will serve as a concrete case for this chapter, considering their more than 30 years’ experience

in bridging research projects, policy advocacy and the development of innovative ECEC practices regarding CPD at the local, regional and European level. Since its start in 1986, VBJK has conducted action research projects and developed training tools for pedagogical coaching and publications to support professional ECEC staff. In this sense, their work is comparable to that of other research centres in Europe that also operate at the nexus of research, policy and practice regarding ECEC, such as the Pedagoški Inštitut in Ljubljana (Slovenia), the Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione – Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche in Rome (Italy), the Public Policy and Management Institute in Vilnius (Lithuania), the Thomas Coram Research Unit at the UCL Institute of Education in London (UK), the Deutsches Jugendinstitut in Munich (Germany), and others. In 1980, during the same period in which Northern Italy, pedagogical coordinators were beginning to introduce pedagogical

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documentation, a project on pedagogical coaching in the city of Ghent was set up, and a rigorous evaluation of the effects of this new form of CPD was published (Peeters, 1993). Later, this concept of pedagogical coaching was used to implement innovation in many projects in the childcare sector of the Flemish Community of Belgium. In the Flemish community, and in this chapter, ‘childcare’ refers to centres and family day care for children aged under 3. In this chapter, we first focus on the relationship between research and practice, which has been an important mission of VBJK ever since the University of Ghent set up its first research project on childcare in 1979. The researchers of VBJK at the University of Ghent were initially inspired by the emancipation movement of the 1960s and by such charismatic figures as Paolo Freire and Martin Luther King. Martin Luther King instigated the movement for more change-oriented research in the United States with his 1966 lecture at a conference for social science researchers (Noffke, 1997): We do not ask you to march on our side, although, as citizens, you are free and welcome to do so. Rather, we ask you to focus on the fresh social issues of our day; to move from observing operant learning, the psychology of risk … to the test tubes of Watts, Harlem, Selma, and Bogalusa. We ask you to make society’s problems your laboratory. We ask you to translate your data into direction – direction for action. [Martin Luther King, as cited in (Noffke, 1997; p. 305)]

Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed also had a significant impact on setting up research projects that strive for change (Peeters, 2012). He wrote: ‘the starting point must be the present existential, concrete situations, reflecting the aspirations of the people. We must pose this to the people as a problem which challenges them and requires a response – not just at an intellectual level, but also at a level of action’ (Freire, 1970, p. 75). In 2010/2011, VBJK conducted the European CoRe study (Competence Requirements in Early Childhood Education and Care) together with the University of

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East London, an EU-funded project that analysed examples of interesting practice on the necessary competences to work with young children. The case studies not only show the diversity of possible pathways to develop professionalism through continuous professional development in a wide range of early childhood contexts, they also open up deeper understandings of how to develop competent systems – a concept that is central in the conclusions of the CoRe study (Urban et al., 2011). Second, we focus on the relationship between research and policymaking. Both international research and policy documents increasingly highlight that enhancing the professional development of the ECEC workforce is critical in promoting the quality of ECEC provision (Council of the European Union, 2011; OECD, 2012a, 2012b). Initial workforce preparation and the ongoing professionalisation of staff are key elements in guaranteeing positive outcomes for children (Fukkink & Lont, 2007) and in realising accessible and quality services for children and their families (Eurofound, 2015). This, in turn, is crucial for establishing children’s successful learning and for fostering social inclusion in contexts of increasing diversity (Bennett, 2012). The quality of ECEC provision for children and their families deserves the greatest attention, considering the fact that early childhood is a period of uncontested importance for lifelong development and the knowledge that the cycle of poverty and disadvantage can be countered by focusing on the most vulnerable young children (Sylva et al., 2011; Vandenbroeck & Lazzari, 2014; Yoshikawa & Hsueh, 2001). However important these claims, still not all the evidence makes it to the policy tables. Researchers and policymakers sometimes seem to speak a different language (Peeters & Vandekerckhove, 2015). Nóra Milotay, former Policy Officer for the European Commission, Directorate-General Education and Culture, puts it this way: ‘While research seeks to show the complexity of issues

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in a nuanced way, policy looks for quick and efficient solutions supported by scientific evidence. Policymakers often feel that researchers cannot provide them with the exact evidence they need and researchers think that policymakers oversimplify the issues’ (Milotay, 2016, p. 119). In this regard, an increasing tendency to carry out systematic reviews in order to inform policy in an evidence-based way is noticed. As a research centre, VBJK is also subject to this trend and recently conducted a systematic review of working conditions, the training of ECEC workers and the quality of services (Eurofound, 2015). The study was commissioned by Eurofound and conducted together with two international research centres: UCL IOE2 and The Public Policy and Management Institute (PPMI) in Lithuania3. It shows clearly that pedagogical coaching starting from a scientific-based holistic pedagogical framework with an active participation of practitioners is an essential tool to increase the quality of the services and to yield positive effects on children’s outcomes. The third relationship, between practitioners and policymakers, is equally essential to achieve sustainable change. Therefore, we need collaborative processes with policymakers and practitioners in so-called ‘communicative spaces’ or ‘islands of democracy’, enabling democratic consultation of parents and ECEC workers (Dahlberg & Moss, 2005; Tobin, 2007). To be able to function in such consultation groups with policymakers, practitioners need to develop their competences of analysis and critical evaluation, to question the link between evidence and the dominant discourse and to consider and reflect on the values and assumptions on which each policy is based (Miller & Hevey, 2012). Starting from this democratic approach, VBJK set up innovative projects in collaboration with governmental organisations or city councils in national and international contexts in which the ECEC practitioners operated as ‘actors of change’ in their process of development. Together with practitioners,

policymakers and researchers, new pedagogical practices were co-constructed and implemented in practice and new policy regulations. On the other hand, VBJK informed the policymakers of the results of the innovations in which the practitioners put policy measures into innovative practice, through the distribution of video films and by organising conferences and international policy forums (Peeters & Vandekerckhove, 2015; Peeters & Vandenbroeck, 2011). We will illustrate this approach through two research projects and one policy advocacy project on the topic of continuous professional development.

Research and practice: not everything that counts can be counted … Until recently, little was known about the relationship between high quality ECEC services and the competences of the staff providing it. Therefore, the European Commission, Directorate-General Education and Culture (DG E&C) commissioned a study on ‘Competence Requirements in Early Childhood Education and Care’. In consequence, DG E&C identified in the terms of reference of the study the need ‘to work towards a common understanding of the issue at European level’. This study, called ‘CoRe’, explored conceptualisations of competence and professionalism in early childhood and identified systemic conditions for developing, supporting and maintaining competence at all levels of the early childhood system. The study consisted of a literature study, a survey on professional and training competence profiles for the different early years professions in 15 countries and a series of seven in-depth case studies on how these challenges are met in diverse contexts (Vandenbroeck, Urban & Peeters, 2016). The review of non-English-language literature carried out within the CoRe study led to the conclusion that a narrow conceptualisation of continuous professional

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development as individuals following cour­ ses to increase their knowledge and skills is not appropriate in the ECEC field. Rather, professional development in the ECEC field needs to be conceptualised with­ in a ­ multidimensional framework – which ­encompasses both individual and collective components – and is understood as a process that constantly evolves in socio-cultural contexts. In sum, rather than focusing on increasing individual competences, we need to discuss competent systems, consisting of five levels of competences (Vandenbroeck et al., 2016) (Figure 31.1). The first level is the level of individual practitioners and at this level the study advocates for sustained continuous professional development, with a strong focus on the link between theory and concrete pedagogical practice. Daily practice as a

Figure 31.1 The competent ECEC system

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basis for learning and for theorising through shared reflection is key to the positive experiences of the professionalisation policies that were studied in the CoRe case studies. The study also emphasises that individuals with a low qualification should have the opportunity to follow adapted training paths with a strong link to practice that lead to a qualification. From the case studies we learned that the second level (institution and team) must enable close collaboration between professionals with different statuses, and a continuous and reciprocal exchange between professionals and parents from diverse backgrounds. These exchanges should result in a common culture and a shared understanding of what is desirable for children, as well as in shared ethical values. The case studies also show that working in a context of diversity can

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increase professional reflexivity, provided the teams can benefit from coaching and inspired leadership. The case studies showed that an important condition to make CPD sustainable on the institutional level is that the members of the team benefit from paid hours away from the children. The third level is the level of inter-institutional competences, favouring the collaboration between local early years provision and other social educational and cultural institutions. On this broader scale of interagency collaboration and local government, the case studies show the importance of developing, through CPD, a common culture and a shared image of the child, an image of an active and competent child that is shared by colleges, practitioners and the local authorities (Peeters et al., 2016a). On this level, a coherent policy of CPD must be developed in meetings where researchers and stakeholders are advising the policy level. The case studies give a lot of inspiration. For example, yearly meetings for the whole workforce where interesting practices that were developed by the practitioners are shared; the organisation of peer learning groups and intervision groups (learning communities); and implementing new pedagogical approaches and the development of new pedagogical tools. The fourth level is the crucial level of governance competences regarding vision, finance and monitoring and is closely linked to the third level. Legislation differs substantially across Europe. Despite these differences, it is clear that structural conditions (and thus competent governance) are necessary, including decent working conditions, child-free hours for continuous professional development, adequate funding for CPD, and so on. In all these aspects, the case studies reiterate and deepen different aspects of the competent system that is emphasised by the CoRe study. All these competence levels are interrelated and problems at one level impact on other levels. But competences can also be increased by participation in international networks or in

European projects, where practitioners, pedagogical coaches and directors can learn from colleagues from other countries. An excellent example is the EU programmes on job shadowing, in which practitioners get the opportunity to work in an ECEC centre in another country for a limited period of time. The fifth and last level is the level of international organisations. In Europe we see, for instance, how the European Quality Framework (European Commission, 2014) is used in continuous professional development in many different countries (Vandekerckhove & Van Keulen, forthcoming). In countries outside the EU, UNICEF and UNESCO play an important role to introduce innovative practices. For instance, at the moment, VBJK is involved in the implementation of a system of continuous professional development in Albania. The CoRe data and the case studies provide a solid evidence base that increasing professional competence through CPD cannot be sufficiently understood as the sole responsibility of the individual practitioner (teacher, educator, childcare worker). Instead, competence unfolds in reciprocal relationships between all elements of the early childhood system: individuals, institutions, and the governance of the system on national and on international levels. It is therefore futile (and unsustainable) to concentrate efforts and scarce resources on only one aspect of that system. To change practices in order to achieve better, more equitable outcomes for all children and families is to address all elements simultaneously, focusing (and resourcing) the relationships between them (Peeters et al., 2016b).

Research and policymaking: not everything that can be counted counts In current ECEC policy, there is a tendency to draw exclusively upon research evidence that

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is quantifiable and measurable (Milotay, 2016). Vandenbroeck, Roets and Roose (2012) frame this within the evidence-based paradigm, which is ‘an approach to research in which effectiveness studies in general and Randomised Controlled Trials (RCT) in particular, are undertaken to advance further research and to inform policy and practice’ (Vandenbroeck et  al., 2012, p. 538). Increasingly, systematic reviews are becoming preferred methods to collect all relevant research findings from these effectiveness studies. Systematic reviews are reviews of the available research literature using systematic and explicit accountable methods to ensure full validity and reliability (Gough, Oliver & Thomas, 2012). By searching exhaustively to find all relevant research, assessing the quality of the research and using rigorous techniques to synthesise findings, they aim to inform decision-makers in an evidence-based way (Gough, Oliver & Thomas, 2013). Vandenbroeck, Roets and Roose (2012) argue that the evidence-based paradigm is ‘anything but evident’ because of its inherent risk of neglecting the way in which social problems are constructed by appointing only ‘what works’ as valid knowledge. Of course, in ECEC, technical issues matter. But since ECEC is above all a political and ethical practice, these technical issues always have to be seen in relation to the social, political and pedagogical context where multiple stakeholders, policymakers and researchers engage in democratic processes. Therefore, when only ‘what works’ is the lead question, there is a risk of reducing everything to a simple matter of problem-solving and performance, which might depoliticise social issues and will not provide the most valid form of evidence in the ECEC field (Moss, 2016). In 1999, the first systematic reviews that moved away from a strictly ‘what works’ approach originated in the EPPI-Centre in the Social Science Research Unit at the UCL Institute of Education (UCL IOE) in the UK. Since then, methods have been developed to also incorporate ‘qualitative studies’ about

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people’s perspectives and experiences in systematic reviews (Thomas & Harden, 2008). This is a vital development, considering the importance of providing policymakers with contextualised information and explanatory analysis that give insight into what might work for whom, in what circumstances/contexts, in what respect and how (Pawson et  al., 2005) and thus into the political and ethical questions. However, the number of completed systematic reviews that adopt qualitative research is still rather limited, especially in the field of ECEC. In 2014 and 2015 VBJK led a study on the impact of working conditions and continuous professional development of the ECEC workforce on the quality of the services provided and on the outcomes for children. The study was commissioned by Eurofound and aimed at supporting European decisionmakers in designing effective ECEC policies in their countries. In order to meet this goal, the study adopted the systematic literature review methodology. In the study we tried to contribute to the emergent development of incorporating qualitative research into systematic reviews. We adopted a broad concept of ‘effectiveness’ by not solely relying on ‘hard quantitative research evidence’ about the impact of interventions, but also including qualitative studies about the views of practitioners concerning the effects of an intervention. By so doing, the study examined ‘impact studies’ which are designed to establish whether or not an intervention works and ‘views studies’ which use qualitative and other types of methods to study the perspectives and experiences of the actors involved. By combining empirical evidence from both ‘impact’ and ‘views’ studies, the review aimed to enable decisionmakers to reach a deeper understanding of interventions linked to the continuous professional development of staff (CPD) and working conditions (WC) and how they can be organised to work more effectively. Moreover, the review is explicitly European in orientation, by also including non-English language studies carried out

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in all EU-28 languages. Searches for the studies published in languages other than English were conducted by national experts in all 28 European Member States, in collaboration with the nominated members of the core team. By relying on this network of known local experts with expertise in carrying out relevant research and with local policy experience, we tried to draw on the widest range of data sources available. Also, by actively looking for empirical evidence in all European Member States, we aimed at unveiling good quality research projects that for the time being stayed ‘under the radar’ because they are not published in English. The overarching aim of the review was to explore the links between continuous professional development, working conditions, staff–child interactions (process quality) and children’s outcomes and experiences. Specific objectives were to document what constitutes more effective ECEC services and how investing in the ECEC workforce contributes towards improving quality and providing evidence on which features of staff working conditions and continuous professional development have a positive impact on pedagogical quality, with a specific focus on children’s outcomes and learning/socialising experiences. Considering the impact of working conditions, only five reliable studies found that adult:child ratio and group size have positive effects on the quality of the services and on the interactions between the practitioner and the child. However, these results cannot be generalised into other contexts, nor compared to each other. This is due to the differences between the involved studies: different types of settings, different research methodologies, different types of observations and used tests. On the other hand, we found better evidence of the effects of continuous professional development. After the application of the quality assessment protocol, 41 studies remained, of which 11 were quantitative and 30 qualitative in their design. The review of those studies shows that CPD interventions are more likely to be successful and/

or effective if they are integrated into the ECEC centre’s practice and if they adopt a clear focus on reflection with a feedback component. By enhancing practitioners’ reflectivity both at individual and at team level, CPD activities allow professionals to strengthen their capacities and address areas for improvement in everyday practices. Intensive CPD programmes with video feedback showed an impact on achieving short-term outcomes in fostering practitioners’ competences in care-giving and language stimulation, and, regarding outcomes for children, there were significant gains in terms of language acquisition and cognitive development. Long-term CPD initiatives accompanied by pedagogical guidance and coaching in reflection groups were found to be successful in enhancing and sustaining the quality of ECEC services over long periods of time. These programmes proved to be effective in a wide range of ECEC systems, including countries with low qualification standards for ECEC staff or low funding for ECEC. The studies on CPD show that there are several essential conditions that need to be met for the CPD intervention to yield positive effects: 1 The use of specific tools:

The included studies show that the use of tools can benefit and support crucial reflective processes. Both Sheridan et al. (2013) and Picchio et al. (2012) found that pedagogical documentation enables practitioners to be more aware of their own competencies and the quality of their work. The competent use of documentation of children’s experiences within the setting, allows practitioners to understand better the ongoing development of learning interactions occurring in the centre: it enables them to re-direct educational practices more responsively. Other tools that were found to be effective are reflective journals (Ang, 2012), systematic cycles of planning, acting, observing and reflecting (Bleach, 2013; Sheridan et al., 2013),

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portfolios (Vonta et al., 2007) and the ‘repertory grid’ (Menmuir & Christie, 1999). 2 The active involvement of practitioners in processes of change:

An important condition to realise an increased pedagogical awareness and a deeper reflection process is the active involvement of professionals in transformative processes. Their involvement in processes of change that they can influence themselves (being an ‘actor of change’) has an impact on their practical knowledge and professional attitudes and understanding. One of the most salient effects of professional development, especially when accompanied by guidance, is the empowerment of practitioners to question taken-forgranted assumptions that underlie their enacted practices. These conditions were found in the studies of Peeters & Vandenbroeck (2011), Rönnerman (2003, 2008), Blenkin & Hutchin (1998), Wood & Bennett (2000), Johansson et  al. (2007), Lino (2005), and OliveiraFormosinho & Araújo (2011). 3 Combination with pedagogical guidance, supervision and feedback:

The most effective CPD strategies are integrated into practice and should be combined with a well-elaborated feedback component and pedagogical coaching during child-free hours (McMillan et  al., 2012; Rönnerman, 2003; Vonta et al., 2007). 4 Providing opportunities to reflect in groups:

When CPD programmes focus on reflection on practice and offer opportunities for critical reflection, practitioners start to question and redefine their own role as a professional (Menmuir & Christie, 1999; Picchio, Giovanni, Mayer & Musatti, 2012; Potter & Hodgson, 2007; Rönnerman, 2003; Wood & Bennett, 2000). 5 Involving all organisational levels:

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It is necessary that effective continuous professional development starts from a coherent pedagogical framework which is based on scientific research and which addresses local needs (Cardoso, 2012; Sheridan, Williams & Sandberg, 2013). The results of the Eurofound study were presented at a conference in May 2015 in Brussels and were published in Dutch in a special issue of Children in Europe. The results were also published in the book Pathways to Professionalism in ECEC and were presented at seven conferences and workshops in Flanders and at 19 international conferences. Together with the CoRe (2011) study, the Eurofound (2015) study served as an important source of inspiration for the development and the implementation of new legislation for Early Childhood Education and Care in the 0 to 3 sector of the Flemish Community of Belgium. The Eurofound study also had an impact on the new project in Flanders on pedagogical coaching that was launched in 2015.

Practice and policymaking: collaboration in a communicative space Innovation Project About the Coaching of Pedagogical Support Centres in Flanders In 2014, in the Flemish Community of Belgium, a new law on childcare came into effect. One of the new regulations states that each organising body should provide professional pedagogical support for the staff. Services can choose for themselves to employ a pedagogical coach in their own organisation or to make use of an external pedagogical support centre (PSC) that has different coaches. The pedagogical support consists of in-service coaching of the staff as well as peer learning activities for different childcare workers in reflection groups.

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Contrary to many European countries that experienced a decline in ECEC as a result of the economic crisis, the number of childcare places in Germany and Belgium has increased (European Parliament, 2013). However, in the Flemish Community of Belgium, this took place in childcare sectors characterised by poor working conditions, no or low qualification requirements and thus little funding (Peeters, 2008). These services mostly operate independently, without any umbrella organisation to provide them with support or coaching. For these ECEC providers in particular, the new legislative regulations caused great challenges. Therefore, from 2014 to 2016, the Flemish Government provided extra funding to offer pedagogical coaching to these services. Eleven PSCs throughout Flanders were established, with an overall full-time employment of 31 pedagogical coaches. Over the two years, the plan was that these PSCs would give free pedagogical coaching to independent ECEC services. For some of the childcare centres, it would be their first encounter with any form of support. VBJK was commissioned to support the 11 PSCs in a two-year professional learning community. The goal was to co-construct together with the pedagogical coaches a conceptual framework for pedagogical coaching and language support, by reflecting on their work as coaches, exchanging experiences, documenting good practices and creating partnerships. In their work as a pedagogical coach, the PSCs adopted a strengths-based approach, by explicitly valuing the expertise of the childcare workers and giving them an active role as actors of change in their professional development. The questions and the needs of the childcare centres were the starting point of each coaching trajectory. The results of this two-year coaching project show that in a relatively short time, it is possible to engage ECEC practitioners with a low qualification in a process of

professional development. Already after one year of coaching, the childcare workers showed their active involvement in critical reflection about their own professionalism and the organisation of the service. They discovered the importance of reflective practice and they became more conscious about their own pedagogical role towards children and parents, leading to a more positive approach towards diversity and multilingualism. The ECEC services also got acquainted with specific tools to support reflection, communication and pedagogical documentation. Although this might not lead directly to a visible increase in the overall quality of the centres, we may state that these are important improvements for a childcare sector with a long history of low professionalism. Over a period of two years, the PSCs supported 1437 childcare centres in Flanders, of which 1103 were group-based settings and 334 family daycare workers. Critical to the success of this project is the interplay and the collaboration between different actors and stakeholders on different levels within a competent system. On the first and second level, of course, the active involvement and the willingness of the childcare workers and their teams to engage in this process of professional development are crucial. The support and the coaching that they received from the PSCs stimulated them to start reflecting and this opened a pathway to more professional growth. The PSCs provided coaching of individual childcare centres as well as peer learning activities where childcare workers from different centres could meet and learn from each other’s experiences. At the start of each individual trajectory, the pedagogical coaches and the childcare centre staff underwent a thorough introductory phase with time to get acquainted and to get a grasp of the context of the centre. Then, individual action plans where made up together with the professional teams or at least together with the coordinators of

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the childcare centres. These action plans offered a shared preview of the coaching trajectory and consisted of a combination of individual coaching and learning activities in peer groups. Furthermore, during the coaching trajectory, ongoing feedback and evaluation were provided and the process was documented. For the 11 PSCs, it was vital to participate in the professional learning community that was set up by VBJK. On this third level of the competent system, the pedagogical coaches were able to join forces in dealing with complex situations regarding the coaching of low qualified and often isolated childcare centres. VBJK facilitated this learning community and supported the PSCs in using different tools for coaching. Notable in this process is the collaboration with Kind en Gezin (‘Child and Family’), the governmental organisation responsible for services for young children and their parents in the Flemish Community of Belgium, which explicitly enabled the connection of the different levels of the competent system. Above all, the work of Kind en Gezin made it possible to provide substantial funds for this two-year project, allowing the childcare centres to receive free pedagogical support for two years. Kind en Gezin has a long tradition in policy work aiming to improve the quality and professionalism of the ECEC sector in Flanders. In this ambition, they already have a long-standing partnership with VBJK. Furthermore, two staff members of Kind en Gezin also took part in the professional learning community of the PSCs. Together with VBJK, they prepared the learning communities, did the follow-up of the qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the PSCs and organised a stakeholder meeting consisting of key persons in the private childcare sector and coordinators of the umbrella organisations of the PSCs. By so doing, the collaboration and connection between the third and fourth levels of the competent system was established.

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Transatlantic Forum on Inclusive Early Years: A Meeting Place for Policymakers, Researchers and Stakeholders To facilitate and support cooperation between researchers, practitioners and policymakers, we need open dialogue spaces where politicians, administrators, stakeholders and researchers can discuss together and learn to understand each other’s language (Moss, 2007; Peeters, 2012). This raises the question of who could accomplish this translation from evidence to practical policy and how such dialogue between the involved groups can be supported. In the past, foundations such as the Bernard van Leer Foundation, Aga Khan and the Open Society Foundation have played an important role in bringing together policymakers, practitioners and researchers. These efforts of combining input have been shown to foster positive effects in the policy of ECEC at the local and regional levels (Gielen, 2004; Grover, 2012; Peeters, 2008; Tanckersley, Mikailova & Sula, 2012). The King Baudouin Foundation (KBF) has a long tradition in innovative projects on child poverty and immigration issues in education. The KBF has also built up excellent contacts with Belgian policymakers. Convinced by the scientific evidence of the importance of ECEC for vulnerable and migrant children (KBF, 2011), the Foundation therefore took the initiative in 2012 to set up a common project to translate the scientific evidence towards policymakers with several North American and European foundations.4 This consortium of foundations then appointed VBJK and the US-based Migration Policy Institute (MPI) to organise seven highlevel panels over a period of three years, from January 2013 until January 2016, under the title ‘Transatlantic Forum on Inclusive Early Years’ (TFIEY). In each meeting of the TFIEY about 30 policymakers, 20 stakeholders and 20 researchers debated the most relevant issues in ECEC. Both VBJK and MPI worked on the input (background

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papers, relevant research, contributions and speakers) while the foundations were in charge of inviting the policymakers. The second meeting of the TFIEY took place in New York and was organised in the summer of 2013. There, policymakers were informed about the latest findings on research on continuous professional development. In small groups intensive discussions took place and the group of researchers, policymakers and stakeholders came to the following conclusions: CPD and professional support are as important as a high-level initial training and must be provided to all staff, with sufficient length and intensity to be effective and lead to change. Both pre-service (50% of the staff should hold a bachelor’s degree) and in-service training, with a focus on changing practices is necessary (Park & Vandekerckhove, 2013). The TFIEY was attended by several members of the Flemish Parliament and the head of the governmental organisation ‘Kind en Gezin’. These policymakers have inspired the Flemish Government to not only prolong the PSC project but also to look for ways to create sustainable centres that will provide pedagogical coaching. We expect that these centres will be set up in the beginning of 2017. The evaluation of the seven meetings of the TFIEY unravels some important conclusions to bear in mind when organising communicative spaces where researchers, policymakers and practice meet: 1 Most of the foundations have good relationships with policymakers and therefore they are interesting partners to link politicians with stakeholders and researchers on the role of ECEC. 2 Members of parliament or decision-makers prefer meetings with a limited number of persons (50 to max. 70) and with short presentations and lots of time for discussion. It gives them the opportunity to meet and discuss with other policymakers. They do not like traditional conferences, because these are too often focused on research alone and are therefore ‘too academic’, or on practice alone and are therefore not applicable to policy matters. 3 The organisers of the forums also learned that those meetings need to provide enough informal time. It is indeed during breaks and during meal-

time that policymakers start talking among each other or with the researchers. These moments are, for most of the policymakers, even more important than the presentations and the provided formal discussion time. 4 It is also important that the organisers bring policymakers from different countries together so that they can learn from each other. 5 Researchers are sometimes in a difficult position. In the academic world, researchers that are in close contact with policymakers and speak their language are sometimes not seen as real researchers by their peers, because they translate the results of the research into concrete policy recommendations, that do not always take into consideration the nuanced approach that is so typical for scientific research. On the other hand, researchers who speak a far too academic language are often seen by policymakers as too distant from practice, unrealistic and therefore not useful for their policy work. Yet some researchers are able to bridge this gap between a comprehensible and a scientific language. 6 In supporting the successful functioning of the TFIEY, VBJK and MPI delivered important work in preparing the different researchers to present their scientific results in a way that would address the interest of the policymakers. Together, they searched for a common language and possibilities to concretely bridge the different perspectives.

Conclusion: Overcoming the gap – the competent system One could imagine research, policy and practice as the vertices of a triangle. The relationship between the three is then illustrated by each of the three sides: the interplay between research and practice, research and policy, and policy and practice. In this chapter, we had this geometrical figure in mind when illustrating recent projects and their impact in Flanders on each of these connections. On the line between research and practice, the CoRe research (Urban et al., 2011) showed the importance of studying concrete practices by adopting in-depth case study analysis. This has proven to be an added value compared to a mere academic or evidence-based approach to research. By so doing, the study revealed that

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increasing professional competence through CPD cannot be understood as the sole responsibility of the individual practitioner, but should be regarded as a reciprocal responsibility and collaboration between all elements of the early childhood system: individuals, institutions, and the governance of the system on national and international levels. In the Flemish Community of Belgium, the results of the CoRe study were widely disseminated at conferences and study days and via the professional press. They influenced the new law on childcare (2014) that stipulates that every childcare worker has the right to pedagogical mentoring. On the line between research and policy, the Eurofound study (2015) made it clear that it is worthwhile to broaden the strict and narrow approach to policy-relevant research of quantitative impact studies. Being open to good, qualitative, studies published in other languages than English alone, offers the opportunity to inspire policymakers with research results that shift away from the dominant Anglo-Saxon approach to research and to ECEC practices. Furthermore, the results of the Eurofound study show that investing in quality CPD interventions makes sense, because it can raise the quality of ECEC services to the benefit of all children and their families. The systematic review also unravelled important conditions for CPD to be effective. In the Flemish Community of Belgium, the results of the Eurofound study (2015) provided policymakers with more evidence and justification to invest in pedagogical coaching aiming to increase the quality of the ECEC provisions. On the line between policy and practice, the establishment of the PSCs in the Flemish Community of Belgium could not have been so successful without the involvement of the governmental organisation Kind en Gezin, which actively contributed to the implementation as well as to the political support base for the project. On the international level, the Transatlantic Forum on Inclusive Early Years illustrates the pivotal role of international foundations in bringing together policy, practice and research. In such a communicative space, it is of the

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utmost importance to set the scene and to prepare all participants in such a manner that they can actually meet and discuss their shared interests. The discussions within the second meeting of the Transatlantic Forum (January 2013) focused on CPD and were attended by several policymakers from the Flemish community. The discussions and the positive results of the PSC-project stimulated the governmental organisation Kind en Gezin to strive for a prolonging of the newly set up PSCs and look for ways to make this practice sustainable. However, what really matters is what happens ‘inside’ the triangle. A triangle connects the three vertices together. If not, it would merely be a straight line between two points. Thereby, a whole space opens up, a window of opportunity for the three perspectives to meet and influence each other. In this sense, the different projects and their results presented in this chapter do not stand alone. The crux of their success lies in the connection between them and we believe there is an important task here for institutions like VBJK. Since the early 1990s, VBJK has profited from its unique position precisely at this intersection between research, policy and practice. The great impact of this approach is the result of long-term collaboration with different stakeholders and their tradition to organise meetings between the three perspectives in the run-up to new laws on childcare. Likewise, the importance of building competent systems in order to implement CPD initiatives that can really benefit ECEC centres and thus children and parents, VBJK adopts the competent system approach in its goal to bridge policy, research and practice. For centres such as VBJK, it is important to take up an active role in making the efforts of the three ‘worlds apart’ visible and comprehensible to one another. By translating research results into meaningful and supportive recommendations for ECEC practices and for policy workers, and by making inspiring practices visible via research, conferences and coaching trajectories, it is possible to move away from a strict ‘what works’ approach towards an open outlook where the social, political and

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pedagogical dimensions of ECEC are truly valued. This asks for a positive view towards change and a notion that there is a shared goal that connects research, policy and practice in the field of Early Childhood Education and Care: working towards universally available and accessible high quality inclusive ECEC services that are beneficial for all children and their families.

Notes  1  Continuous Professional Development refers to all planned programmes of learning opportunities for staff members of ECEC services undertaken for the purpose of complementing, updating and consolidating the professional knowledge and competence of individuals and teams (Hauari et al., 2014). They can be composed of preservice training at different levels and specific in-service training or lifelong learning initiatives related to ECEC (Jensen & Iannone, 2015).  2  UCL Institute of Education (UCL IOE) is the world’s leading centre for education and related social science. It is based in London.   3  The Public Policy and Management Institute (PPMI) provides research-based advice aimed at improving public policies and their management. It is based in Vilnius.  4  The Jacobs Foundation (Switzerland); the Fundaçào Calouste Gulbenkian (Portugal); the Lego Foundation (Denmark); the Bernard van Leer Foundation and the Universal Education Foundation (the Netherlands); Compagnia di San Paolo and Fondazione Caripio (Italy); the Bertelmans Stiftung (Germany); the Foundation for Child Development, the California Community Foundation, One America and Thrive by Five (the USA) and the Atlantic Philanthropies (the USA and UK).

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Professionalization and management in the early years (pp. 62–74). London: Sage. Peeters, J., De Kimpe, C., & Brandt, S. (2016a). The competent early childhood education and care system in the city of Ghent: A longterm investment in continuous professional development. In M. Vandenbroeck, M. Urban & J. Peeters. Pathways to professional early childhood education (pp. 57–71). London, New York: Routledge. Peeters, J., Urban, M., & Vandenbroeck, M. (2016b). Lessons learnt and a debate to be continued. In M. Vandenbroeck, M. Urban & J. Peeters, Pathways to Professional Early Childhood Education (pp: 132–136). London, New York: Routledge. Picchio, M., Giovannini, D., Mayer, S., & Musatti, T. (2012). Documentation and analysis of children’s experience: An ongoing collegial activity for early childhood professionals. Early Years: An International Research Journal, 32(2), 159–170. Potter, C., & Hodgson, S. (2007). Nursery nurses reflect: Sure Start training to enhance adult child interaction. Reflective Practice, 8(4): 497–509. Rönnerman, K. (2003). Action research: Educational tools and the improvement of practice. Educational Action Research, 11(1), 9–21. Rönnerman, K. (2008). Medvetet Kvalitetsarbete. En uppföljning av kursen Q i förskolan och dess inverkan på för-skollärares handlingar i praktiken. Göteorg: Göteborgs Universitet, Institutionen för pedagogic och didaktik. Sheridan, S., Williams, P., & Sandberg, A. (2013). Systematic quality work in preschool. International Journal of Early Childhood, 45(1), 123–150. Super, C., Britto, P., & Engle, P. (2012). Closing commentary: The future of early childhood development in the global development agenda. In P. Rebello Britto, P. Engle & C. Super (Eds.), Handbook of early childhood development research and its impact on global policy (pp. xi–xvi). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sylva, K., Melhuish, E., Sammons, P., SirajBlatchford, I., & Taggart. (2011). Pre-school quality and educational outcomes at age 11: Low quality has little benefit. Journal of Early Childhood Research, 9(2), 109–124.

Tanckersley, D., Mikailova, U., & Sula, G. (2012). Supporting early years practitioners’ professional development as a vehicle for democratisation. In L. Miller & D. Hevey (Eds.), Policy issues in the early years (pp. 122–136). London: Sage. Thomas, J. & Harden, A. (2008). Methods for the thematic synthesis of qualitative research in systematic reviews. BMC Medical Research Methodology, 8:45. Tobin, J. (2007). Rôle de la théorie dans le mouvement Reconceptualiser l’éducation de la petite enfance [The role of theory in the Reconceptualising Movement]. In Repenser l’éducation des jeunes enfants [Rethinking ECEC], ed. G. Brougère and M. Vandenbroeck, pp. 139–164. Brussels: Peter Lang. Urban, M., Vandenbroeck, M., Peeters, J., Lazzari, A., & Van Laere, K. (2011). CoRe: Competence requirements in early childhood education and care. University of East London, University of Ghent. Vandekerckhove, A., & Van Keulen, A. (forthcoming). 5 steps to quality: Training pack on the European quality framework for ECEC. ISSA. [Manuscript in preparation]. Vandenbroeck, M., & Lazzari. A., (2014). Accessibility of early childhood education and care: A state of affairs. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 22(3), 327–335. Vandenbroeck, M., Roets, G., & Roose, R. (2012). Why the evidence-based paradigm in early childhood education and care is anything but evident. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 20(4), 537–552. Vandenbroeck, M., Urban, M., & Peeters, J. (Eds.). (2016). Pathways to professionalism in early childhood education and care. London, New York: Routledge. Vonta, T., Rutar, S., Istenič Starčič, A. in Borota, B. (2007). Mentorstvo v profesionalnem razvoju učitelja in vzgojitelja. Koper: Univerza na Primorskem, Pedagoška fakulteta. Wood, E., & Bennett, N. (2000). Changing theories, changing practice: Exploring early childhood teachers’ professional learning. Teaching and Teacher Education, 16(5–6), 635–647. Yoshiwaka, H., & Hsueh, J. (2001). Child development and public policy: Towards a dynamic systems perspective. Child Development, 72(6), 1887–1903.

32 The Privatisation/Marketisation of ECEC Debate: Social versus Neoliberal Models Christine Woodrow and Frances Press

Introduction In the four decades since the introduction of the Child Care Act, 1972, Australian childcare has transmogrified from a public, notfor-profit and community-based sector to a predominantly commercial enterprise. In the context of such significant policy transformation surrounding the provision of Australian childcare, we consider Nancy Fraser’s (2013) assertion that ‘the movement for women’s liberation has become entangled in a dangerous liaison with neoliberal efforts to build a free-market society’ (n.p.). Neoliberal economics provided the initial impetus for the Australian Government to marketise childcare provision in the 1990s and now the neoliberal ethos appears to be generating new discourses in the way that childcare is perceived, transforming it into a commodity for (women’s) private benefit rather than as a public good. To respond to Fraser’s provocation, we open the discussion with the first term of reference

of the 2014 Productivity Commission Inquiry into Child Care and Early Learning which was ‘to examine and identify future options for a child care and early childhood learning system that … supports workforce participation, particularly for women’ (p. v.). The foregrounding of women’s workforce participation in this Inquiry was a significant symbolic reversal of the child-focused intent of the previous government’s national Early Childhood Reform Agenda (2009). The Reform Agenda had been strongly focused on improving the quality of early education and care settings for young children, a shift in focus that had been welcomed by many early childhood advocates who regarded the initiatives of the Agenda as being long overdue (Wong & Press, 2013). To more fully understand the implications of this reordering of policy priorities and what it represents for the entanglements of neoliberalism and women’s liberation, we turn to the history of Australian ECEC since the introduction of the 1972 Child Care

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Act. Across this policy history, it is possible to identify five policy or policy-related events that are significant for this unfolding policy trajectory: (1) the introduction of the Child Care Act, 1972; (2) the 1983 Accord on Economic and Social Policy struck between the trade union movement and the then national Labor Government (Landsbury 1984); (3) the marketisation of childcare provision throughout the 1990s; (4) the financial collapse of the largest corporate (commercial) provider – ABC Learning in 2007/8; and (5) the discourse of the 2014 Productivity Commission Inquiry, including its emphasis on mothers’ workforce participation and a focus on establishing a subsidised system of in-home nanny care. In tracing this policy trajectory, salient questions arise: How have the interests of women and children been represented? What’s currently at stake? What might be the implications for the future trajectory of policies for families and for children? We commence with an explanation of the current policy context for Australian ECEC.

The Context of ECEC in Australia The focus of this chapter is on childcare, however childcare provision in Australia occurs within the broader context of policy for early childhood education and care (ECEC). The ECEC sector is comprised of a diversity of services including home-based care (predominantly family daycare in which carers are coordinated and resourced by central coordination units); preschools (often offering sessional or short-day care and education to children in the year or two before formal schooling); and childcare (long-day care and education often available to children from birth through to school commencement age. (Minimum and maximum school starting ages vary across Australia, ranging from 4.5 years for the lowest commencement age and 6.5 years for the highest.

Typically children commence after they turn 5.) A mixed economy of provision is evident within sections of the ECEC sector. Family daycare and centre-based childcare providers can be ­community-based (run by local government, parent or community-based associations, charities, or early childhood specialist not-for-profits) or run as commercial enterprises either by small businesses or larger companies, some of which are publicly listed. Whilst many preschools are established and managed by state government departments of education, discrepancies between various Australian states mean that not all Australian children get access to government-administered preschool. Table 32.1 provides an overview of early childhood service types, including locations, organisational or jurisdiction responsibility and associated requirements for staff qualifications. The unaffordability of childcare for many families is a recurring policy issue, and in some areas there are insufficient childcare places to meet demand (Productivity Commission, 2013). Thus, the tension between the cost of providing good quality care and education for children and affordability for parents has been central to many policy debates. Significantly, the National Early Childhood Development Strategy (Council of Australian Governments, 2009) instigated by the then national Labor Government (2007–2012) and developed by the Council of Australian Governments (COAG), introduced reforms designed to improve the quality of ECEC in whatever form it was provided. These reforms included increasing entry-level qualifications for those working with children, and in most jurisdictions, increasing the numbers of early childhood teachers required to work in childcare. In contrast, the 2015 Productivity Commission Inquiry Report declared that: the Australian Government is committed to establishing a sustainable future for a more flexible, affordable and accessible childcare and early childhood learning market that helps underpin the national economy and supports the community, especially parents’ choices to participate in work. (p. v)

State departments of education; Community based non-profit agencies; Independent schools Non-profit agencies; Independent schools; Local government; For-profit companies.

Preschool: Typically sessional – offered in the morning or the afternoon. Sometimes available as a 6-hour day. Open during school terms. Child care: Centres are typically open between 8–10 hours a day, 5 days a week, 48 weeks of the year. Children can attend up to 50 hours a week. Children may attend from 6 weeks of age to school commencement

Available to children one or two years before they commence school

Ages of children

The minimum qualification for all staff working with children is a Certificate III – equivalent to 6 months of study. The preschool program is run by a university qualified early childhood teacher (3–4 year qualification). All staff working with children must have an entry level qualification in children’s services – a Certificate III – equivalent to 6 months study. Centres must also employ a proportion of diploma-qualified staff (equivalent to two years vocational study) and early childhood teachers. Family day care educators require a Certificate III.

Staff qualifications

Family day care: Non-profit agencies; Can be offered to children Typically open between 8-10 hours a day, 5 days a Independent schools; from 6 weeks of age to week, 48 weeks of the year. Children can attend Local government; school commencement up to 50 hours a week. For-profit companies. Family day care educators, and the placement of children, is overseen by a family day care coordination unit. All the services above must comply with the requirements of the National Quality Standard, including implementation of the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF). Nannies: Employed directly by parents or No age restriction. No qualification requirements. Employed by parents to work in the parents’ employed through agencies. home to mind children. Sometimes attached to agencies.

Management

Service type

Table 32.1 Overview of early childhood provision in Australia

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Various documents produced through the Productivity Commission review process highlighted the pervasive and powerful influence of neoliberal framings on current policy responses (Productivity Commission, 2013, 2014, 2015). The Terms of Reference (2013) and the Draft Report (2014) in particular emphasised family choice, the need for flexibility and the ‘burden of regulation’. Regulation was often positioned as ‘cumbersome’ and an obstacle to flexibility and affordability, rather than posited as a safeguard for children. In effect, many aspects of the Review made the issue of quality subservient to issues of choice and flexibility. Nancy Fraser’s justice framework (1997, 2009a,b), together with her more recent reflections on the 40-year history of secondwave feminism and its relationship with capitalism (2013), offer some resources through which to explore this trajectory of ECEC policy. The concepts of redistribution, recognition and representation were key elements to addressing injustice, according to Fraser. Redistribution is a response to socio-economic injustice embedded in the politicaleconomic structure of society that includes forms of ‘exploitation (having the fruits of one’s labour appropriated for the benefit of others), economic marginalisation (being confined to undesirable or poorly paid work or being denied access to income-generating labour altogether), and deprivation (being denied an adequate material standard of living)’ (Fraser, 1997, p. 68). Fraser defines the justice of recognition as being the equal recognition of different identities/groups within a society. Recognition ‘seeks to address the damage caused by misrecognition’, that is the ‘depreciation of such identity by the dominant culture and the consequent damage to group members’ sense of self’ (Fraser, 2001, p. 23). Whilst acknowledging the existence of a tension between redistribution and recognition, and the tendency for identity politics to erase issues of economic injustice, Fraser argues that both redistribution and recognition are necessary for justice (Fraser, 2009b).

In the wake of the breakdown of the nation state, Fraser argues that ‘the characteristic political injustice is misrepresentation’ (2005, p. 69), which occurs when ‘political boundaries and/or decision rules function to deny some people the possibility of participating on a par with others in social interaction – including, but not only, in political arena’ (p. 69). Hence she emphasises the importance of political justice, explaining that is how the interests of people are represented. Second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s illuminated the injustices of previously ‘overlooked, tolerated or rationalised social inequalities’ (Fraser, 2009, p. 103). It was at this historical point that the politicisation of the personal made an effective contribution to invoking a structural critique of society, reinterpreting social inequality as unjust, in the context of what Fraser characterises as ‘state organised capitalism’ (p. 97) in the welfare state. Women’s claim to full participation in public life, including paid work, demanded public recognition of women’s participation rights to which the lack of childcare was a significant barrier. It also required a redistribution of resources to enable a state-funded role in the provision of childcare. Thus, the care of children, which was considered in the earlier post-war years as a private responsibility and domestic concern, emerged into public discourse. Noting an historical shift in the character of capitalism to neoliberalism, Fraser observes how this seems to have coincided with the rise of second-wave feminism (2009, p. 107). Observing the successful gains made for women’s participation, reflecting a cultural shift, Fraser also suggests that the successful evolution of second-wave feminism demonstrates convergence with ‘the demands of an emerging new form of capitalism’ – described as ‘post fordist’, ‘disorganised, transnational’ (2009, p. 98). What she means by this is captured in the language of the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ in which capitalist society is arguably being transformed. In the light of this, Fraser questions whether cultural changes produced out of second-wave

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feminism ‘have served to legitimate a structural transformation of capitalist society that runs counter to feminist versions of a just society’ (2009, p. 99) and are complicit in the consolidation of a neoliberal-individualist agenda (Fraser, 2013). As she elaborates: With the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that the movement for women’s liberation pointed simultaneously to two different futures. In a first scenario, it prefigured a world in which gender emancipation went hand in hand with participatory democracy and social solidarity; in a second, it promised a new form of liberalism, able to grant women as well as men the goods of individual autonomy, increased choice, and meritocratic advancement. Second-wave feminism was in this sense ambivalent. Compatible with either of two different visions of society, it was susceptible to two different historical elaborations. (Fraser, 2013, n.p.)

Some indications of the non-hierachical and flexible character of the ‘new spirt of capitalism’ referred to by Fraser might be discerned in the discourse of the Australian Productivity Commission inquiry into future options for childcare and early learning (Productivity Commission, 2013), with its frequent references to the need for flexible childcare provision that responds to parents’ participation in the workforce and the needs of the economy in having a flexible workforce working ‘non-standard work hours’ (Productivity Commission, 2014, p. v). To explore dimensions of this claimed convergence, we now turn to the policy trajectory in relation to Australian ECEC, as it has unfolded from the introduction of the Act in 1972, to the present-day debates. In following this trajectory, we pay particular attention to its relationship to women’s workforce participation.

Women’s liberation/secondwave feminism and the Child Care Act, 1972 Second-wave feminism was critical in generating political commitment for childcare

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(Brennan, 1998) and, in 1972, a conservativeoriented Liberal and National Party Coalition Government introduced the Child Care Act under the Department of Labour and National Service. The introduction of the Act was a critical policy juncture, triggering significant and unprecedented government involvement in childcare policy and funding investment that eventually led to the development of a national (though not universal) childcare system (Logan, Sumsion & Press, 2013). Although feminists saw the provision of childcare as pivotal to enabling mothers to enter the workforce, in introducing the Bill to Parliament, the Minister, Phillip Lynch, stated that the childcare scheme introduced by the Bill ‘is not intended either to encourage or discourage mothers from entering paid employment’ (Commonwealth of Australia, 1972, p. 2). Rather, This Government initiative is a tangible expression of its very real and proper concern for the welfare of children. It is designed as a humanitarian measure with particular concern being directed to those in need. (p. 1)

Shortly after the Child Care Act was passed, a progressive Labor Government was elected. Its leader, Gough Whitlam, promised preschool education for every child, describing this policy as ‘the most important single weapon in promoting equality and in overcoming social, economic and language inequalities’ (cited in Brennan, 1982, p. 4). Here Whitlam was referring to sessional early education programmes for children in the year before their school commencement, typically for children between 4 and 5 years of age. However, in a nation that had neither universally available preschool education, nor an extensive childcare system, the allocation of the funding enabled by the Child Care Act was hotly contested. Preschool advocates and childcare advocates, by and large, stood in different camps. Many preschool advocates were not supportive of mothers being in the workforce. Preschools operated on the assumption that the children who attended had a mother at home. Initial suggestions that

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the preschool day could be lengthened or otherwise altered to meet the needs of working women was fiercely rejected by many as being contrary to children’s interests. On the other hand, the women’s liberation movement regarded childcare as part of a much needed radical reorganisation of society (Brennan, 1998). As a result, at the 1973 Labor Party Congress, the Labor Women’s Organisation challenged the Party’s policy emphasis on universal preschool provision and instead demanded ‘a comprehensive child care s­ ervice … to provide community support for women to participate more fully in society’ (cited in Brennan, 1982, p. 5). Hence, by 1974, the Labor Government had announced the establishment of a Children’s Commission to oversee the creation of community-based and integrated children’s services (that included full-day childcare), with the aim of ensuring that by the end of that decade ‘all children in Australia have access to services designed to take care of their physical, social and recreational needs’ (cited in Brennan, 1982, p. 9). This vision was never to be realised. With the dismissal of the Whitlam Government in 1975, and the return to power of a conservative government, the promise of a universal childcare system was abandoned, and responsibility for childcare policy transferred to the Department of Social Security, ensuring the provision of childcare became, once more, closely tied to welfare objectives rather than attached to women’s claims for equality. The introduction of government funding of childcare occurred against a backdrop of a visible, vocal and influential women’s movement that forced a public reconsideration of women’s role in society, the nature of the family unit, and with this, the role of social policy. Brennan (1993) recalls that prominent feminist, Ann Curthoys, wrote in the Sydneybased feminist journal Refractory Girl in 1976 that childcare was ‘the structural base of the feminist revolution’ (Brennan, 1993, p. 108) and that feminists needed to ‘strive toward new patterns of work and family life’ (p. 108), a view somewhat at odds with the

conservative social protectionist view of childcare of the conservative government that had ushered in the Act. Capturing something of the nature of the social and political turmoil of this time was the wide-ranging and controversial Royal Commission on Human Relationships (1977). The focus of the Commission was, ‘To inquire into and report upon the family, social, educational, legal and sexual aspects of male and female relationships ... and to give particular emphasis to the concept of responsible parenthood’ (p. 11). In relation to childcare, this report concluded that: Child care services should be available for all parents to support and complement the care they can provide for their own children. These services should not be seen as a welfare service, nor as a crisis service, but as a right, to serve the needs of the child and parents, just as education is available to the school-aged child. (p. 37)

Illustrative of the radical re-thinking taking place in some social and political movements regarding women’s role in society, family structural arrangements and the place of children, was a 1980 Tin Sheds poster (http://cs.nga.gov. au/Detail.cfm?IRN= 94911) headed with the slogan: ‘There are no childless people. End the oppression of women as mothers’. Under this heading were declarations such as ‘Child sharing now’; ‘Support your local kids co-op’; ‘kids are not property’. Tin Sheds Gallery is attached to Sydney University and has had a tradition of producing radical political art relevant to contemporary issues of the time. Feminist support for childcare was widespread and came from feminists across the political spectrum. What is notable at this time, however, was that despite disagreements about how widespread childcare availability should become, there was general agreement amongst both radical and more conservative women’s groups that if childcare were to be supported by the government it should be supported only on a not-for-profit basis. When the privatisation of childcare was

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mooted in the early 1980s by the conservative Liberal Government, women within the Liberal party lobbied to keep childcare not-for-profit and community-based on the grounds that this would ensure high quality services, even though they supported ‘the principle of private enterprise, generally’ (Flynn, 1981, p. 3). Many conservative feminists framed childcare as ‘a positive, constructive investment in the growth of the community’ (Mahlab, cited in Flynn, 1981, p. 3).

Childcare as an industrial issue The Women’s Trade Union Commission, formed in 1974 to challenge the male domination of the Australian trade union movement, was instrumental in organising Australia’s first women’s trade union conference in 1976 (Ryan, 2013). The conference advocated for a Working Women’s Charter in which childcare for working women was a formal demand. The Charter, after some modification, was adopted by the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) in 1977. The demand for childcare to be taken up as an industrial issue met with considerable opposition. One trade union official reputedly asked Edna Ryan, a key organiser of the 1976 women’s trade union conference, whether she knew that ‘the aim of union movement in Australia is to return married women to the home?’ (Ryan, 2013, p. 128). Indeed, in 1983, the ACTU Congress moved a resolution that ‘child care is primarily a parental issue, not an industrial issue’ (Blackman, 1984). Nevertheless, when the Hawke Labor Government came to power in 1983, its Accord on Economic and Social Policy (hereafter, the Accord, Lansbury 1984) with the ACTU included a commitment to ‘urgent action to restore the position of low income working families, through improvements in child care’ (p. 25). The Accord described itself as ‘concerned with the equitable

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redistribution of income as well as basic economic objectives’ (1984, p. 6). To this end, an integral part of the Accord was the social wage. The social wage encompassed government expenditure to improve ‘the living standards of the people by direct income transfers or provision of services’ (p. 6). The Accord was not without its critics. At the time, left feminist activist Danny Blackman described it as ‘a compact with the patriarchy; the working class with which it is concerned is represented as predominantly male’ (1984, p. 17). Regardless of this criticism, the expansion of childcare did become part of the Government’s social wage agenda. Over the ensuing decade, the total number of childcare services trebled (Brennan, 1993, p. 108). Yet, at the same time that the social wage was concerned with redistribution, a ‘constrained’ (Peetz & Bailey, 2011, p. 1) neoliberal economic agenda was being pursued as more and more publicly-funded services were opened to the market. For some time, childcare was immune from such marketisation, despite neoliberal proponents from within and outside the Labor Government pushing a privatisation agenda. However, even with continued government investment in childcare, demand for childcare places continued to outstrip supply. The lack of childcare was an issue for the electorate, including trade union members, and was a significant policy problem for the government. Eventually, the union movement, through the ACTU, supported a policy shift to extend fee subsidies to users of private childcare centres on the grounds that existing arrangements were unfair for many of its members who could not access community-based childcare in their areas (Logan, Sumsion & Press, 2015). The subsequent announcement in 1991 by Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke, that childcare fee subsidies could be utilised by families using private for-profit centres marked a significant turning point in the childcare landscape. It signified the beginning of what was to become an ever expanding childcare

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market, which resulted in the marginalisation of community-based, not-for-profit childcare, and a retreat by government from planning toward a reliance on ‘market forces’ (Brennan & Oloman, 2009). The trade-off, demanded by early childhood advocates and the trade union movement, was a mandated quality assurance framework for all long-day care. This ultimately led to the establishment of a National Childcare Accreditation System. This system was largely endorsed by early childhood advocates and the not-for-profit sector, while resisted by large sections of the private childcare lobby who regarded it as interfering with the market (Logan et al., 2015).

The discursive shift and the rise of ABC Learning The private, for-profit sector quickly came to dominate childcare provision. While the previous system of government-subsidised provision had allocated money for new childcare places on the basis of need, neoliberalism demanded a faith in the market to regulate supply. As a result, the government largely withdrew from any planning responsibility for childcare. The result was a notable unevenness in supply, with pockets of oversupply and pockets of undersupply (Loane, 1997). Initially ‘sold’ to investors as a small business opportunity, the market soon gave rise to the establishment of corporate chains, the most notorious of which was ABC Learning. Previous research has chronographed the rapid rise to dominance of ABC Learning in the Australian childcare landscape (Press & Woodrow, 2005, 2009; Sumsion, 2012; Woodrow & Press, 2007). By 2007, an estimated 70% of childcare places in Australia were provided by the company. The corporation also added international interests to its portfolio, eventually claiming to be the world’s largest childcare provider (Press & Woodrow, 2009). Not only did the company’s reach expand into international childcare

markets, but the purchase and vertical integration of other childcare-related service businesses into its operations enhanced its profitability. This was largely invisible to parents using the childcare services and most would have been unlikely to know that their purchase of commodities such as children’s photographs and educational toys were through companies owned by the childcare operator. When viewed alongside ABC Learning’s intensive marketing practices that included a highly persuasive advertising campaign centred around the theme of ‘love’, there is a clearly evident shift in the positioning of childcare as a commodity in a marketplace and as a site of consumption. In this way, parents’ relationships with the centre are mediated through market discourses more similar to that of consumer and supplier than partners in children’s learning and development. These are also aspects that are illustrative of the process of commodification and that represented a significant change in the discourse of childcare in Australia. Alarmed by the domination of one corporate provider, and the subsidisation of its profits by the Australian taxpayer, policy activists warned that Australia was engaged in a massive ‘social experiment’ (Brennan, 2007) that rendered governments vulnerable to market failure. Others warned of the risks associated with repositioning childcare as a commodity rather than a public investment (Press & Woodrow, 2005, 2009; Sumsion; 2012; Woodrow & Press, 2007). These analyses of the impact of the increasing dominance in childcare discourse of the language and practices of the market (Brennan, 2007; Press & Woodrow, 2005, 2009; Sumsion, 2012; Woodrow & Press, 2007) identified concerns about particular implications for such aspects as children’s well-being and learning, curriculum commodification, teacher identity, and wages and conditions. As neoliberal policy framings promoted the marketisation of childcare, a parallel discourse associating the provision of ECEC with growing the economy, was also

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strengthening. This two-pronged discourse associated the rationale for publicly subsidised childcare with human capital development, to be achieved both through the increased female participation in the paid workforce and improved educational outcomes for children, leading to enhanced national productivity (Campbell-Barr & Nygard, 2014; Moss, 2007a, 2013). This latter dimension of childhood learning undoubtedly reflects the growing international recognition of the role of high quality ECEC in early learning (OECD, 2001, 2006, 2012). As a consequence, debates about ECEC provision have increasingly positioned ECEC as subservient to the needs of the economy (Paananen, Kumpulainen & Lipponen, 2015). This has pervaded all shades of government politics, sometimes creating tensions across various policy discourse. For example, the Early Childhood Reform Agenda, with its policy intent of strengthening quality in provision, together with ‘universal access’ of preschool, was underpinned by a rationale that also strongly foregrounded human capital development (Rudd & Macklin, 2007). Government faith in the neoliberal cannon was rewarded in 2008 by the spectacular financial collapse of ABC Learning. Whilst once childcare was cast as an enabler of women’s equality, the spectre of a substantial part of the nation’s workforce being unable to come to work because of a lack of childcare, created a potential crisis. As a result, the federal government invested $100 million of public money to keep the centres open until new arrangements for their operations could be made (Newberry & Brennan, 2013). Although a social venture consortium now operates over 650 former ABC Learning Centres across Australia, the market still dominates childcare provision in Australia. The reasons for the collapse were both simple and complex. Subsequent enquiries revealed deceptive accounting practices that concealed evidence that many centres were not profitable (Sydney Morning

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Herald, January 2, 2009). Other commentators, including accountancy academics, suggested that there had been a ‘failure of regulatory and accounting processes’ and that such rapid expansion of market share ‘carried significant risks clearly not reflected in [their] financial statements’ (Ross, 2009, cited in SMH). Of equal or greater concern was how exposed the government became through its reliance on one company which, by growing so quickly, had eased pressure on the government in relation to supply. In addition, increasing costs were becoming somewhat problematic for the government as it was caught in a subsidy spiral occasioned by rapid increases in fees. To ease the increasing fee burden on families, the government was forced to regularly increase subsidies. In the wake of the ABC Learning collapse, a perspective of ECEC as an important social investment developed in parallel with the ascendance of a more liberal political climate, intersecting with, but not replacing the human capital discourse. This shift however failed to arrest the entrenched position in public policy of the private provision of childcare, despite the escalating cost to government stimulated in part by spiralling fees. However, no other for-profit organisation has achieved the national or international reach and market penetration of ABC Learning. A raft of early childhood policy reforms under the previous Labor government did not fundamentally challenge a reliance upon market forces, though it did seek to temper them by making the primary policy focus that of improving the regulatory framework for ECEC in ways designed to improve quality. Most recently, with the re-ascendance of a neo-conservative perspective in government policy, childcare as a private, domestic concern has gained ground. Alarmed at the rising cost to government of subsidising childcare, the conservative government tasked the Productivity Commission, a government-funded agency, to ‘examine and identify future options for a childcare and early childhood learning system’ (Productivity Commission, 2015).

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Reframing the debate – Women’s workforce participation and the Productivity Commission The Productivity Commission Inquiry flagged a major intervention in the field of ECEC. The enquiry was conducted over two years, receiving in excess of 1000 formal submissions from across the sector. The Commission produced an issues paper, a draft report and a final report. The Commission was asked to, first and foremost, suggest reforms to the system that privileged the role childcare plays in supporting women’s workforce participation; including flexibility of provision and ‘fiscally sustainable funding arrangements that better support flexible, affordable and accessible quality child care and early childhood learning’ (Productivity Commission, 2014). It was particularly required to look at options for nannies, that is (predominantly) women who come into a child’s home for the purpose of providing childcare. The Inquiry was long and protracted, receiving widespread submissions, and the recommendations were wide-­ranging. The Draft Report included recommendations designed to water down regulatory requirements for childcare, particularly in relation to staffing for children under 3 years of age (Productivity Commission, 2014). This attracted widespread opposition and the recommendation was not carried over to the final report. However, one of the more controversial recommendations to make it to the final report was related to making government-subsidised childcare available in private homes through the employment of nannies. Whilst the recommendation undoubtedly responds to the increasing demand for flexible childcare provision, it can be seen to mark a shift towards privatised solutions and raises new issues about the nature of the childcare workforce. These include issues related to the credentials required for working with children in private homes, and how the work and the workforce might be regulated, in the secluded domain of private homes.

Discussion Adopting an analytical lens to this policy history, drawing on Fraser’s concepts of redistribution, representation and recognition, and her perspectives regarding the unfolding of second-wave feminism (Fraser, 2009, 2013) in the context of the historical trajectory of capitalism, it is possible to consolidate the policy moves we have described and explore them in relation to the social and economic movements of the times. Beginning with the passing of the Child Care Act, 1972 and its provision for ­government-funded subsidies for childcare, we argue that this period established that young children’s care was a legitimate matter of both public interest and public investment, and that the state had a role in supporting women’s participation in public life. This shift of the care of children from the private, domestic sphere to the public domain, might be seen in feminist and justice terms as concerned with distributive and representational justice, providing recognition to women’s rights to participate in the public sphere and creating possibilities for social transformation. Making available public funding for childcare delivers distributive justice by redirecting resources to enable the support of the care of children through public investment. As this was enacted at a time of fervent ambitions for social change in the context of second-wave feminism, it also provided a context for re-envisioning children’s access to early education reflected in the Whitlam governments’ (1974) aspirations, at first for universal preschool provision, and later for universal childcare provision, as a contribution to social transformation. Following Fraser, it is instructive to locate and understand these social movements and their achievements in the context of the unfolding history of capitalism (Fraser, 2009b), particularly for better understanding the present. The achievements chronicled above took place in what Fraser refers

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to as a period of ‘state-organized capitalism’ (2009b, p. 97), where there was considerable momentum for the emancipation of women, and a structural critique of society and how this was implicated in injustice (2009b). By the time of the Accord in 1983, childcare had become positioned as an industrial issue, its place in the industrial agenda instigated by women trade unionists who wanted their interests recognised and represented. Additionally, childcare’s redistributive function was acknowledged by its positioning as part of the social wage. At the same time, these reforms reinforced an understanding of childcare’s primary function as being to enable women’s workforce participation. The Accord coincided with an emerging neoliberal agenda that was to later eventuate in the marketisation and commodification of childcare. As the Australian government increasingly adopted neoliberal approaches to managing the economy, a turning point for childcare policy was the decision by the Hawke Government in 1991 to allow families utilising private for-profit childcare access to publicly-funded subsidies. This pivotal moment involved an important trade-off, in the requirement to establish a system of quality monitoring and assurance. However, ultimately there was more at stake, as a marketisation discourse around the provision of childcare quickly escalated and took hold. The 1991 agreement that secured the legitimised but regulated participation of the private, for-profit sector in childcare provision marked a significant shift in the childcare landscape, beginning the visible commodification of childcare. The significance of the shift to a reliance on the market for the provision of goods and services that were once the responsibility of governments and community, is profound. In a recent speech marking International Women’s Day 2016, Professor Eva Cox, a childcare policy activist with a long history of involvement in advocating for community-based models of provision, observed:

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By the 1980s the arrival of neoliberalism as the dominant political paradigm slowed most social progress, as market models took over. These changed the political focus from progressive social change to market choices and individualised material success. (Cox, 2016)

Like Fraser, Cox also notes that the ‘broad intentions of second-wave feminism to create radical shifts of gender power’ have failed to be achieved in the context of market models on social policy, and social wellbeing. As Fraser observes, ‘disorganised capitalism turns a sow’s ear into a silk purse by elaborating a new romance of female advancement as gender justice’ and the ideal of the family wage has been replaced by the ‘norm of the two-earner family’ (Fraser, 2009b, p. 110). Where once women’s workforce participation was about choice and liberation, in the neoliberal context it has become an economic necessity, for the family and the state. With the market model of childcare provision entrenched, the Australian government is now concerned about the rising cost of subsidies, and the impact of regulatory requirements (designed to improve the experiences of children in childcare) on the cost of delivery. Questions of affordability and flexibility assume precedence as childcare’s primary purpose becomes again aligned first and foremost with women’s capacity to undertake paid labour and for that the availability of that labour source to be flexible and ‘responsive’ to the needs of the so-called ‘new’ economy. This discourse of flexibility resonates with how Fraser (2009b) fears secondwave feminism may be complicit or some of its ideals convergent with an advanced stage of neoliberalism, suggesting ‘the cultural changes jumpstarted by the second wave, salutary in themselves, have served to legitimate a structural transformation of capitalist society that runs directly counter to feminist visions of a just society’ (p. 99). What Fraser sees in contemporary feminism as a liberal-individualist scenario is implicated in the Productivity Commission scenario.

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In giving primacy to the objective of creating flexible childcare options that cater to the workforce demands of the modern economy, the Commission also created the conditions for a more casualised, less qualified, fragmented and flexible childcare workforce, and pushed for government-subsidised, in-home ‘nanny care’, resulting in the creation of a workforce potentially vulnerable to exploitation and difficult to regulate. In a paper exploring the impact of market model approaches to care services such as elder care and childcare, Brennan, Cass, Himmelweit and Szebehely (2012) note that market-based approaches lead to greater inequality. For example, they observe that care ‘consumers’ with better education have greater chances of finding the better quality services, and higher income families are able to purchase ‘add-on’ services. Further, they draw attention to research that demonstrates that care workers tend to be drawn from more vulnerable groups in society, traditionally women, and in the case of home care, migrants (Shutes & Chiatti, 2012). Following Fraser and Cox, we can see the dangers accruing to women, especially the exploitation of vulnerable women from the ‘reprivatisation’ of care work through a home-based system providing individualised care solutions to already advantaged women.

Conclusion: Australian Policy Legacy We have attempted to demonstrate through this historical overview of ECEC provision how Australia’s policy leadership in conceptualising childcare within a broader framework of an ECEC system which is concerned both with children and the needs of working women, has flourished and diminished over time. Through successive policy actions the ‘childcare’ element of ECEC is now primarily directed towards economic goals. The provision of childcare through a market model, with the involvement of an ever growing

private-for-profit sector, has become entrenched and is now positioned as critical to the achievement of the policy objective of supporting female work participation, which has in itself become the dominant discourse for rationalising the public funding of childcare. We also note that whilst there have been recent gains in policy attention to quality through reforms such as the ‘National Quality Framework’, and strengthening of regulatory accountabilities, there remains little policy aspiration for childcare, as a key component of ECEC, to be conceptualised as a space of/for social transformation (Moss, 2007b; Woodrow & Press, 2007) that was evident in the period of reform between 2007 and 2013. The Productivity Commission Inquiry into ECEC has brought into sharp relief the distance Australian ECEC policy has travelled from earlier conceptualisations of ECEC as a public good, to its current positioning in the policy landscape as a commodified necessity whose place in public policy is legitimised by its importance to the economy and national productivity through supporting womens’ workforce participation. As Cox notes: This shift is clearly illustrated by proposed changes to the funding of children’s services, whose role will move from complementing community/family to servicing GDP growth. In the process, ‘progress for women’ has been reduced to increasing their participation in paid work. (Cox, 2016, https:// www.qt.com.au/news/feminism-has-failedand-needs-radical-rethink/2956245/)

Neoliberalism positions the market as an efficient solution to the problem of supply. However, the Australian experience has demonstrated that the move to the market as a solution for supply is neither infallible nor neutral. There are obvious risks posed through market failure. However, the more insidious impact is in the commodification and privatisation of what was once considered a public good. Whereas feminist advocacy concerning the provision of childcare in the 1970s was bound up with ideas of social transformation, contemporary childcare policy emphasises

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the market’s capacity for individualised solutions, obscuring alternative policy futures.

REFERENCES Blackman, D. (1984). Women and the Accord. Australian Left Review, 1(89, Spring), 17–23. Brennan, D. (1982). Children’s services in Australia, the state of play: A review of Commonwealth and state policies, 1972–1982. Haymarket: Family and Children’s Services Agency. Brennan, D. (1993). Refracting voices: Feminist perspectives from refractory girl. Marrickville: Southwood Press. Brennan, D. (1998). The politics of Australian child care: Philanthropy to feminism and beyond (revised ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brennan, D. (2007). The ABC of child care politics. Australian Journal of Social Issues, 42(2), 213–235. Brennan, D., & Oloman, M. (2009). Childcare in Australia: A market failure and a spectacular public policy disaster. Our Schools/Our Selves, Spring, 117–127. http://www.policyalternatives.ca/sites/default/files/uploads/ publications/National%20Office/2009/04/ Child%20Care%20in%20Australia.pdf Brennan, D., Cass, B., Himmelweit, S., & Szebehely, M. (2012). The marketisation of care: Rationales and consequences in Nordic and liberal care regimes. Journal of European Social Policy, 22(4), 377–391. Campbell-Barr, V., & Nygard, M. (2014). Losing sight of the child? Human capital theory and its role for early childhood education and care policies in Finland and England since the mid 1990s. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 15(4), 346–359. Commonwealth of Australia. (10 October, 1972). House of Representatives Child Care Act 1972, second reading. House of Representatives, Canberra. Council of Australian Governments. (2009). Investing in the Early Years – A National Early Childhood Development Strategy. http:// w w w. c o a g . g o v. a u / s i t e s / d e f a u l t / f i l e s / national_ECD_strategy.pdf Cox, E. (2016). Feminism has failed and needs a ­radical rethink. The Conversation. March 8, 2016. Retrieved on 12 July 2016 from

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https://theconversation.com/feminism-hasfailed-and-needs-a-radical-rethink-55441 Flynn, J. (1981). Liberal women’s group warns government over child care funding. The National Times, December 13–19, p. 3. Fraser, N. (1997). Justice interruptus: Critical reflections on the ‘post-socialist’ condition. New York: Routledge. Fraser, N. (2001). Recognition without ethics? Theory, Culture and Society, 18(2), 21–42. Fraser, N. (2005). Reframing justice in a globalizing world. New Left Review, 36(November– December). Fraser, N. (2009a). Scales of justice: Reimagining political space in a globalising world. New York: Columbia University Press. Fraser, N. (2009b). Feminism, capitalism and the cunning of history. New Left Review, 56(March–April). Fraser, N. (2013). How feminsim became capitalism’s handmaiden – and how to reclaim it. The Guardian, October 14. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/14/ feminism-capitalist-handmaiden-neoliberal Lansbury, R. D. (1984). The Accord between the unions and government in Australia: A new experiment in industrial relations? Working Paper, Alfred P. Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Loane, S. (1997). Who cares? Guilt, hope and the child care debate. Sydney: Mandarin. Logan, H., Sumsion, J., & Press, F. (2013). The Child Care Act 1972: A critical juncture in Australian ECEC and the emergence of ‘quality’. Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, 38(4), 84–91. Logan, H., Sumsion, J., & Press, F. (2015). The Council of Australian Government Reforms [2007–2013]: A critical juncture in Australian early childhood education and care (ECEC) policy? International Journal of Child Care and Education Policy, 9(1), 1–16. Moss, P. (2007a). Meetings across the paradigmatic divide. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 39(3), 229–245. Moss, P. (2007b). Bringing politics into the nursery: Early childhood education as a democratic practice. European Early Childhood Research Journal, 15(1), 5–20. Moss, P. (2013). Beyond the investment narrative. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 14(4), 370–372.

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Newberry, S., & Brennan, D. (2013). The marketisation of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) in Australia: A structured response. Financial Accountability & Management, 29(3), 227–245. OECD. (2001). Starting Strong: Early Childhood Education and Care. Paris. OECD. OECD. (2006). Starting Strong II: Early Childhood Education and Care. Paris. OECD. OECD. (2012). Starting Strong III: A quality toolbox for Early Childhood Education and Care. Paris. OECD. Paananen, M., Kumpulainen, K., & Lipponen, L. (2015). Quality drift within a narrative of investment in early childhood education. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 23(5), 690–705. Peetz, D., & Bailey, J. (2011). Neo-liberal evolution and union responses in Australia. In G. Gall, A. Wilkinson & R. Hurd, The international handbook on labour unions: Responses to neo-liberalism (pp. 62–81). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Press, F., & Woodrow, C. (2005). Commodification, corporatisation and children’s spaces. Australian Journal of Education, 49(3): 278–297. Press, F., & Woodrow, C. (2009). The giant in the playground: Investigating the reach and implications of the corporatisation of child care provision. In D. King & G. Meagher (Eds), Paid care in Australia: Profits, purposes and practices. Sydney: University of Sydney Press. Productivity Commission. (2013). Child Care and Early Learning: Issues Paper. http://www. pc.gov.au/inquiries/completed/child care/ issues/ child care-issues.pdf Productivity Commission. (2014). Child Care and Early Learning: Draft Report http://www. pc.gov.au/inquiries/completed/child care/draft Productivity Commission. (2015). Child Care and Early Learning: Inquiry Report http://

www.pc.gov.au/inquiries/completed/child care/report Ross, P. (2009). Lessons to be learnt from ABC Learning’s collapse. Sydney Morning Herald, January 2. Royal Commission on Human Relationships. (1977). Royal Commission on Human Relationships: Final report volume 4. Canberra: Australian Government. Rudd, K., & Macklin, J. (2007). New directions for early childhood education: Universal access to early learning for 4 year olds. Canberra: Australian Labor Party. Ryan, L. (2013). Edna Ryan and leadership: The women’s trade union commission 1976. Labour History, 104(May), 119–30. Shutes, I., & Chiatti, C. (2012). Migrant labour and the marketization of care for older people: The employment of migrant care workers by families and service providers. Journal of European Social Policy, 22(4), 392–405. Sumsion, J. (2012). ABC Learning and Australian early education and care: A retrospective ethical audit of a radical experiment. In E. Lloyd & H. Penn (Eds), Child care markets: Can they deliver an equitable service? (pp. 209–225). Bristol: The Policy Press. Sydney Morning Herald. (January 2, 2009). Retrieved on 8 October 2016 from http://www. smh.com.au/business/lessons-to-be-learntfrom-abc-learnings-collapse-20090101-78f8. html Tin Sheds Poster (1980) http://cs.nga.gov.au/ Detail.cfm?IRN=94911 Wong, S., & Press, F. (2013). Integrated services in Australian early childhood education and care: What can we learn from our past? Australian Journal of Social Issues, 47(2), 153–173. Woodrow, C., & Press, F. (2007). (Re)Positioning the child in the policy politics of early childhood. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 39(3), 312–325.

33 ISSA’s Quality Framework: An Invitation to Policy Dialogue for Building Integration and Alignment in ECEC Systems D a w n Ta n k e r s l e y , M i h a e l a I o n e s c u a n d Z o r i c a Tr i k i c

Introduction In 2014, the Proposal for key principles of a Quality Framework for Early Childhood Education and Care1 (European Commission, 2014), hereafter referred to in this chapter as the European Quality Framework, outlined five key areas of work in policy that are meant to strengthen quality in early childhood education and care (ECEC), including: access to ECEC, the ECEC workforce, the curriculum, monitoring and evaluation, and governance and funding. Around this same time frame, ISSA began to work on the development of a Quality Framework for Early Childhood Practices in Services for Children under Three Years of Age (ISSA, 2016), hereafter referred to as the ISSA Quality Framework. As a professional association, ISSA2 is known for its concern for process quality in early years education and care, documented through the publication, Competent Educators of the 21st Century: Principles

of Quality Pedagogy (ISSA, 2010), and the resources in the accompanying Quality Resource Pack for supporting the implementation of the Principles into the practice. These documents outline the principles and indicators that define process quality in educational services for children from 3 to 10 years of age, and invite professionals, policymakers, managers and parents to engage in democratic discussion on what quality is about. The need for a separate framework for services for children under 3 years was predicated by a survey ISSA carried out in 2013 among its member organisations in Central/Eastern Europe, the Commonwealth of Independent States and Central Asia which documented that these services are often overcrowded, under-staffed and operating without quality standards/principles in those regions. Early childhood services are often fragmented among different governmental bodies and without policies to interact among each other. In addition, the

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most vulnerable children and families benefit the least or not at all from education and care services for children under 3 (ISSA, 2013). While the European Quality Framework addresses the specifics of competent systems needed around services for children from birth to 6 years of age, the ISSA Quality Framework opened a dialogue around policies and practices in early childhood care and education systems specifically for children under 3 years. The ISSA Quality Framework, as its previous framework for educators of 3- to 10-year-olds, also focuses more on process indicators of quality and recommended practices to meet those indicators and much less on structural indicators of quality, monitoring and evaluation, governance and funding than is presented in the European Quality Framework. However, the ISSA Quality Framework and European Quality Framework both promote dialogue around practices, policies and cooperation between different sectors that work with young children and their families. ISSA’s Quality Framework focuses on the rights of very young children to be treated in a holistic manner, with a voice and agency in that process and recognises the centrality of relationships in their development and the need for an integrated and aligned approach to their care, development and learning. The Quality Framework builds on examples of good practices in the ISSA region, on progressive policies such as New Zealand’s ‘pedagogy of care’ (Dalli et  al., 2011; Rockel, 2009) and on quality pedagogical practices, like the documentation of observations and reflection on them illustrated in Reggio Emilia and the Tuscan Approach.3 Finally, the document emphasises the rights of parents, caregivers and families to be respected and included in their young children’s protection, care and educational processes and advocates for integrated and competent early childhood systems.

The ISSA Quality Framework consists of principles and examples of practice structured around nine focus areas that cover the broad range of experiences impacting children and families accessing early childhood services. The focus areas are: (1) Relationships; (2) Family and Community; (3) Inclusion, Diversity, and Values of Democracy; (4) Health, Well-being, and Nutrition; (5) Development and Learning; (6) Observation, Documentation, Reflection, and Planning; (7) Enabling Environments; (8) Professional Development; and (9) Inter-sectoral Cooperation. For a more complete description of the Framework, see the Appendix at the end of this chapter. The purpose of this chapter is to describe the synergies between the two international frameworks in terms of policy guidance, the added (and complementing) value that the ISSA Framework brings to working with the birth to 3 age group, and how the ISSA Quality Framework can open up dialogue between and among policymakers and practitioners working with children under 3 and their families. These points were documented by 3 ISSA member non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that introduced the Framework to small groups of audiences in Bulgaria, Lithuania and Slovenia. The amplitude of their intervention depended to a great extent on their convening capacity on the local and/ or national level, but equally indicated the relevance of proposing to actors in the early childhood system an enabling resource that inspired reflection and dialogue on issues of quality, cooperation between and integration of different services and sectors. It was interesting to note that although the ISSA Quality Framework addresses more process indicators of quality for working with this age level, the comments from participants who engaged in the introductory activities around the Framework in their countries were also strongly connected to the more structural indicators in the European Quality Framework, such as access to services for this age level, qualifications and

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continuing professional development of the workforce, supportive working conditions, monitoring and evaluation, and governance and funding.

The Development of the ISSA Quality Framework Building on its experience in framing principles of quality pedagogy for educators of 3- to 10-year-olds, ISSA began the process of developing this Quality Framework by reviewing other countries’ and organisations’ frameworks, along with research showing the best ways to support the development of children under 3 years of age. A team of international experts from ISSA and from organisations from other parts of the world with expertise in various domains of early childhood (education, care, health, social protection, children’s rights) was then convened to develop a set of principles that both illustrates and promotes ISSA’s vision, mission, beliefs and values around democratic procedures and quality practice and strengthens the much needed integrated and inter-sectoral approach when working with this age group and their families. ISSA strongly believes that policy frameworks, principles or standards that define quality need to be developed through social constructivist processes that promote participatory, democratic practices and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Quality is not a static phenomenon, but an on-going process that requires building shared values and meanings. The term ‘quality’ is a value and culturally based concept (UNICEF, 2012) that may be difficult to measure in the same way across contexts and may not incorporate the changes that are so much a part of life in the twenty-first century. Practitioners, leaders and managers need to be able to reflect on the complexity and uncertainty that exists in their

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communities and be able to respond to what this means for the children and families they work with and the environments in which they work (Miller & Cable, 2011). They also need to listen to children and families and include their voices in these discussions. Defining quality in early childhood services requires listening to and reflecting upon others’ voices, needs and challenges, and being open to finding a common ground for communication and shared understanding. However, in each and every context, the common denominator of quality in early years services is children’s wellbeing through promoting their potential and competences. Social constructivist, democratic processes also ensure a more equal and reciprocal relationship between theory and practice (Urban et  al., 2011). Early childhood practitioners can make a contribution as co-constructors to a field that is continuously evolving as more input is received and upon greater critical reflection of that input (Peeters, 2008). As practitioners who work with children under 3 and their families are required to work in an even more inter-sectoral way, redefining what quality practice entails needs to include greater collaboration and shared meaning among different practitioners. In order for the development of the ISSA Quality Framework to be as participatory as possible, different processes were employed to gather the voices of international experts, practitioners and policymakers. The writing of the Framework was done, as mentioned above, with the input of a working group composed of experts from different countries and representing different early childhood services, including care, education, home visiting, social protection and early intervention specialists. A draft of the Framework was then sent to other renowned international experts, including those in the social protection and health sector, who also provided input which helped shape the final document.

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The entire process provoked intense conversations about differences in language used to describe early development and learning from different regions of the world, as well as from different professional viewpoints. Building a common language for all sectors working with the youngest children has to be grounded in shared beliefs about the child’s development, learning and wellbeing. The decision regarding the concepts to be promoted in the framework considered two aspects: advancing the understanding of the child, and bridging the professions in the early years. Discussions included the use of terms such as the ‘competent’ child, ‘competent’ family and ‘competent’ early childhood system as well as what the balance is between respecting families and working to strengthen the home environment (Tankersley & Ionescu, 2016). To avoid misunderstanding and create common understanding of certain concepts, in the end, decisions were made to stay in alignment with the language presented in the European Quality Framework as well as in the CoRe Report (Competence Requirements in Early Childhood Education and Care: CoRe Final Report) (Urban et al., 2011).

Introducing the ISSA Quality Framework in three countries In line with ISSA’s work to bridge theory and practice, the ISSA Quality Framework was introduced to selected groups of participants by three ISSA members: the Step by Step Program Foundation in Bulgaria, the Center for Innovative Education in Lithuania, and the Developmental Research Centre for Educational Initiatives Step by Step in Slovenia. These NGOs in the respective countries had also participated in the European project, the Tuscan Approach in Learning for Early Childhood Education and Care, focusing on five aspects of the work in services for children under 3: the curriculum, family participation,

the learning environment, professional development and the governance of services. The mutual learning between countries was around the concept of quality and was accompanied by inspiring experiences and resources developed in the project. Therefore, the member NGOs were already engaged on a pathway of searching for quality that was specific to the birth to 3 age level. The main goal of introducing the ISSA Quality Framework in the three countries was to test the usability of the document at local, regional and national levels and to obtain information on how the Framework could promote inter-sectoral dialogue and cooperation, as well as build a shared understanding of quality. The introduction of the document was also meant to incorporate the voices of practitioners, families, local governance representatives and governmental bodies in the discourse about quality of services for the youngest, and to explore the potential of how the Framework could be used to promote inter-sectoral practices. Each of the organisations introducing the ISSA Quality Framework conducted roundtables with audiences that could test its ability to be used as a policy document. In Bulgaria, the Framework instigated the development of a National Communication Framework around care and education services for birth to 3-year-olds, including redefining qualifications for staff working in crèches who have been under the governance of the Ministry of Health. In Lithuania, misunderstandings where the government had already initiated policies to promote inter-sectoral cooperation and communication, the Framework encouraged the development of inter-sectoral learning communities, documentation of examples of good practice and a request for more classes on the specifics of working with children under 3 in higher education programmes for pre-service educator development. In Slovenia, care and education of this age group is under the Ministry of Education, but they did not participate in introductory roundtables. However, education authorities, parents and elected officials

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from three municipalities acknowledged the Framework’s usefulness in promoting greater inter-sectoral cooperation and encouraged the Ministry of Education to be more proactive in this regard. In addition to the roundtables, workshops were held for practitioners to introduce the Framework and test its ability to actually be used as a way to stimulate dialogue among different sectors about quality practices for this age level. In Bulgaria, where the crèche workers are health assistants, the workshops also included student teachers from a pedagogical institute, enriching the dialogue about care and early education opportunities of children under 3 for both groups. In Lithuania, workshops were conducted in two public and 12 private kindergartens and found the ISSA Quality Framework to be a good selfassessment tool for increasing quality in their practices and as a tool for developing profiles of those who would work with the age level. In Slovenia, one of the three kindergartens where the Framework was introduced was located in a hospital and worked as a tool for opening dialogue between the educators and medical staff. In another one of the kindergartens, parents were included, showing how the document could also support their rights and responsibilities along with the inclusion of their voices in the centre’s work.

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that are fundamental to its statements: (1) A clear image and voice of the child and childhood should be valued; (2) Parents are the most important partners and their participation is essential; (3) There should be a shared understanding of quality. All three of these issues have also been central to ISSA’s work on quality in the past 15 years and represent the foundational beliefs upon which ISSA’s Quality Framework was developed and will be introduced in various countries. The European Framework outlines ten action statements under the five policy focus areas mentioned earlier. This section will look at where the principles and recommended practices in the ISSA Quality Framework and the comments from the participants in the introductory activities in their countries support the European Quality Framework’s action statements with specifics about the birth to 3 target group’s needs.

European Quality Framework – Policy Area 1 – Access to ECEC Action Statement 1: A provision that is available and affordable to all families and their children. • Advocacy for expanding the provision of services for children under 3

Where the European Quality Framework and ISSA’s Quality Framework Support Each Other The European Quality Framework represents a major step forward and a landmark in the global discussions around quality early childhood education and care (ECEC) services. Its sound research background and well-articulated values led to a strong document to be promoted and embraced by early childhood systems across Europe, and even beyond. There are three transversal issues mentioned in the European Quality Framework

Several participants in the activities introducing the ISSA Quality Framework mentioned that it was a strong advocacy tool for increasing access to services for children under 3 and their families, increasing the quality of those services, and for better funding of those services at national and local levels. A Slovenian participant commented on how the importance of the first three years of a child’s life is just beginning to be recognised by parents and by professionals in the country and how more information is needed that specifically addresses this age level (Rezek, 2016).

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As stated earlier, the NGO in Bulgaria used the introduction of the Framework as an opportunity to promote advocacy for access for children under 3 through the creation of a National Communication Framework among key stakeholder agencies on the national level, including the Ministry of Healthcare, the Ministry of Education and Science, the State Agency for Child Protection, the UNICEF Country Office, and the Step by Step Program Foundation Bulgaria, among others. While keeping ISSA’s Quality Framework as the reference document for defining quality, the municipalities that participated in the introductory activities also developed their own municipal communication frameworks, ‘launching a long awaited inter-institutional dialogue and cooperation for national education of every child in the first three years of their life’ (Buzov, 2016). • Expanding the kinds of provisions of services for children under 3

A goal in the European Quality Framework is to increase the enrolment of children from minority ethnicities, poor families and disadvantaged groups and it identifies five criteria that increase the participation of these children and their families to include: availability, affordability, accessibility, usefulness, and comprehensibility. The ISSA Quality Framework specifically addresses usefulness and comprehensibility through outlining how the document can be used with multiple kinds of practitioners, beyond just those who work in kindergartens or crèches, to include those who work with parenting support programmes such as home visiting, social assistance and healthcare. Work with children under 3 and their families means that programmes must be flexible, useful, and allow for differing needs. Daycare is one need, but informing and supporting parents to more effectively provide for the well-being, health, development and learning of their young children is equally as important for children in this age group.

Action Statement 2: Provision that encourages participation, strengthens social inclusion, and embraces diversity. The European Quality Framework states that successful inclusion in ECEC is based on a collaborative approach to promoting the benefits of ECEC which respects and values the beliefs, needs and culture of parents; an assurance that all children are welcome in an ECEC setting/centre; and a recognition that staff need to be trained to support parents and families in valuing the ECEC services. Here the European Quality Framework and ISSA’s Quality Framework are strongly aligned. The ISSA Framework clearly states the need for participation, inclusion and embracing diversity, and describes practices under Focus Area 3 on Inclusion, Diversity, and the Values of Democracy, such as incorporating the home language in the service if it is different than the official language of the country, demonstrating sensitivity to the need for different role models for children, and supporting families’ child-rearing practices. In addition, Focus Area 2 on Family and Community describes recommended practices on how to create collaborative and cooperative partnerships with families and communities, building on the strengths that exist in them. It was interesting to note that the participants in the introductory activities in all three countries, found these to be two of the most challenging focus areas for them in the ISSA Quality Framework and stated that more professional development opportunities in these areas would be helpful. Although practitioners agree with the concept of social inclusion and diversity, how to actually put these concepts into practice is more challenging, since these are less covered in pre-service training. In addition, there is strong, continuing sentiment in Central and Eastern European communities that the professionals who provide early

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childhood services are the ‘experts’ and that parental input into how programmes are run, may be inappropriate. Parents who participated in the workshops at one the kindergartens in Slovenia saw the benefits of being more included through understanding better the educators’ work and how stronger cooperation and trust are essential for the child’s well-being (Rezek, 2016).

Policy Area 2 – The ECEC Workforce Action Statement 3: Well-qualified staff whose initial and continuing training enables them to fulfill their professional role. All of the reports from the introduction of the ISSA Quality Framework noted its potential to contribute to policies that would require practitioners to have certain levels of education, qualifications specific to working with children under 3, and on-going in-service professional development requirements. The documentation also noted that ISSA’s Quality Framework could be used by policymakers to assess the curriculum in teacher training institutions and the courses that should be required of those who work with this age group (Sabaliauskiene, 2016). One of the outcomes in Lithuania was the invitation for the Center for Innovative Education, one of ISSA’s member organisations, to develop and teach a new three-semester university course for future practitioners who will be working with this age group based on the focus areas and principles presented in the Framework. The qualifications of the staff working in Bulgaria, where workers in the crèches are health assistants with a vocational degree, and Lithuania and Slovenia, where those who work with this age group have degrees from universities in early childhood education and development, differed in terms

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of the number years required to complete preparatory coursework and degrees. The responses from the staff with higher level degrees who participated in the workshops showed a higher level of reflection on and understanding of the concepts being presented in ISSA’s Quality Framework. For example, they were able to say much more accurately where their own practice fell short in terms of a continuum from not evident to quality practice (Rezek, 2016; Sabaliauskiene, 2016). They were more self-reflective and self-critical of their practice and cognisant of what was further needed in their professional development to reach the recommended practices in ISSA’s Quality Framework. The European Quality Framework goes on to add that while initial preparation of staff is important, on-going professional development may be as important and ‘lead to the acquisition of new knowledge, the continuous improvement of educational practice, and the deepening of pedagogical understanding’ (p. 31). It was clear in the introductory activities of the ISSA Quality Framework that the opportunity for practitioners from different sectors to engage in training and discussions that increased shared understanding of quality, led to the acquisition of new knowledge and greater reflection on what quality practice was for this age group. Several participants even commented on the introduction of new terminology, such as ‘the centrality of relationships’ in children’s development and a ‘pedagogy of care’ (Sabaliauskiene, 2016). The CoRe Report (Urban et  al., 2011) also points out that reflection is the most important part of professionalism. Professionalisation is a learning process in which meaning is given to the interpretation of the profession and this is continually undertaken in relation to others: colleagues, parents and children. Oberhuemer (2005, p. 13) calls this ‘democratic professionalism’ that is based on collaborative, cooperative action between professional colleagues and other

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stakeholders, including the local community. The introduction of the ISSA Quality Framework opened up this collective reflection among practitioners and therefore increased their level of professionalism (Buzov, 2016; Rezek, 2016; Sabaliauskiene, 2016).

Action Statement 4: Supportive working conditions including professional leadership which create opportunities for observation, reflection, planning, teamwork and cooperation with parents. As stated earlier, a key finding of the CoRe Report (Urban et al., 2011) is that: competence’ in the early childhood education and care context has to be understood as a characteristic of the entire early childhood system. […] A key feature of a ‘competent system’ is its support for individuals to realise their capability to develop responsible and responsive practices that respond to the needs of children and families in ever-changing societal contexts. (Urban et  al., 2011, p. 21)

The European Quality Framework points out that competent systems include staff:child ratios and group size that provide better conditions for sustaining social interactions with children. The ISSA survey report (ISSA, 2013) documented that most of the countries in which its member organisations were operating were out of compliance with internationally recommended staff:child ratios. The participants in Lithuania specifically stated that the national ratios needed to be lowered in order for practitioners to be able to more easily provide quality experiences for the children (Sabaliauskiene, 2016). Having low staff:child ratios is particularly important in ISSA’s Quality Framework because such ratios more easily facilitate the kinds of interactions required for building strong relationships, by

giving caregivers more time to interact with individual children. Competent systems also require working conditions that include adequate wages, as well as paid time for documenting observations of children, reflecting upon those observations, and documentation, planning, and meeting with families and other professionals working with the child. Group reflection on practice is another of the recommended practices in ISSA’s Quality Framework under Focus Area 8 on Professional Development. It has also been promoted in professional learning communities as an on-going practice by the Center for Innovative Education in Lithuania and the Developmental Research Centre for Educational Initiatives Step by Step in Slovenia. It can also be anticipated that these can now be extended to include practitioners from the health and social services sectors. The introductory activities in Slovenia, where one of the preschool organisations was located in a hospital unit, showed the potential for medical and educational staff to work together to reflect on what could be improved (Rezek, 2016).

Policy Area 3 – Curriculum Action Statement 5: A curriculum based on pedagogic goals, values, and approaches which enable children to reach their full potential in a holistic way. The European Quality Framework (p. 10) points out that children’s well-being, positive self-image and learning and development come from a well-balanced combination of care and education. The ISSA Quality Framework is especially attentive to this concept, stating that care and education cannot be separated, especially for this age level. It introduces the term ‘a pedagogy of care’, discussed in policy documents from Australia and New Zealand that state how care for

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children at this age is the appropriate pedagogy, as very young children learn about the world through how they are cared for in their daily interactions with caregivers (Rockel, 2009; Dalli et  al., 2011). A ‘pedagogy of care’ builds on the knowledge that children’s development and learning are dependent on the quality of interactions and the centrality of relationships in a holistic approach. The developers of the ISSA Quality Framework engaged in a critically reflective discussion about holistic development which has been traditionally described as having four (or more) domains, including physical, emotional, social and cognitive development (with language and spiritual development sometimes being added). It was intentionally decided not to reference these domains in the document as sometimes they may be looked at as separate from each other, especially when assessing children. These developmental domains are intertwined and dependent upon each other. As both the European and ISSA’s Frameworks point out, children’s development and learning can be ‘better sustained by nurturing their sense of identity and belonging as well as by empowering them in developing an understanding of their surrounding world’ (EC, 2014, p. 42). Research (Siraj-Blatchford, 2009) states that these processes are highly dependent on ‘the social environment, stable and trusting interaction with other children and adults, as well as free and unconditional space and time for play and free expression’ (EC, 2014, p. 42). While the ISSA Quality Framework is not a curriculum for children under 3, it does address important facets of a curriculum under Focus Area 1 (Relationships), 3 (Health, Wellbeing, and Nutrition) and 5 (Development and Learning) outlining recommended practices around the centrality of relationships in children’s development and learning, where and how care routines are opportunities for development and learning, how to approach learning and development holistically, and the fundamental importance of play in children’s development, well-being and learning. All of

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these principles and recommended practices may guide policy around a curriculum for children under 3.

Action Statement 6: A curriculum which requires staff to collaborate with children, colleagues and parents and to reflect on their own practice. The European Quality Framework states that the curriculum has to leave space for practitioners to work with children’s interests, experiences and questions. This requires welleducated and reflective practitioners who work collegially with professional colleagues to reflect on their observations of children and the documentation of those observations (p. 46). The CoRe Study (Urban et al., 2011) pointed out that in order to be able to do this, competent systems need to give practitioners time and space to co-construct pedagogical knowledge and to engage in on-going professional development opportunities such as coaching, peer learning (participation in professional learning communities) and networking with other services. The activities around the ISSA Quality Framework in countries showed that educators who had an introduction to working in professional learning communities in Lithuania and Slovenia valued the process of reflecting on their practice with the document. In Bulgaria, the experience of having student teachers and their university supervisors brought in to reflect with the medical assistants who were providing services for children under 3 was also very rich and showed that this kind of networking enhanced the delivery of a learning curriculum (Buzov, 2016). The European Quality Framework also states that the curriculum should foster cooperation and dialogue with parents, including encouraging parents to express their views on daily practices and take into account their perspectives in the creation and adjustment of activities (p. 47).

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The ISSA Quality Framework clearly lays out how parents’, families’ and communities’ perspectives should and could be included in their practices through the establishment of sensitive, respectful and reciprocal communication and partnerships. When working with children under 3, the dependency children have on their families is even more pronounced and the communication between a practitioner and the family is even more vital for the child’s well-being as the child is still limited in their ability to communicate their own needs and interests. Practitioners need the input of parents and other family members in order to best provide for the child’s well-being. This is the best time for building partnerships with families and promoting respect and mutual learning.

Policy Area 4 – Monitoring and Evaluation Action Statement 7: Monitoring and evaluation produce information at the relevant local, regional and/or national level to support continuing improvements in the quality of policy and practice. The European Quality Framework points out that: checking the performance of the ECEC setting is important, but it is not the same as focusing on system and provider level improvement […] Monitoring for quality includes a focus on the processes and outcomes of ECEC (i.e. are the pedagogy, the curriculum, and the staff/children relationships enabling children to make progress). (p. 54)

Participants in Lithuania noted that the ISSA Quality Framework could be used as an assessment tool by service managers to see where more support for practitioners is needed in terms of the implementation of principles under different focus areas, as well as to

identify mentors to reflect with practitioners on a current practice and plan for quality improvement. It can also provide background information for developing national, municipal and service-level external assessments of quality. The results of any assessments would be to plan targeted professional development for teachers and other professionals (Sabaliauskiene, 2016).

Action Statement 8: Monitoring and evaluation which are in the best interest of the child. The European Quality Framework states that all stakeholders, including ECEC staff, should be engaged and empowered during the implementation of any monitoring and evaluation process (p. 10). It should also foster active engagement and cooperation among them, rather than pursuing the assessment of the performance of the service. In this way, quality improvement and innovation of pedagogical practices become sustainable over time. The document goes on to recommend child-centred and actionresearch methodologies, as well as documentation and narrative practices (p. 56). The ISSA Quality Framework clearly calls for an assessment and a monitoring of children that are based on observations, documentation and individual and group reflection on that documentation by any who work with the child. While this is an important process when working with any young children, it becomes even more so when working with this age level. Caregivers’ abilities to adjust their interactions with infants and very young children in the moment are paramount to the child’s well-being and learning. Observation and reflection are the basis for being responsive to and building relationships with them and for planning actions that relate to the child (ISSA, 2016, p. 59). Observations are most useful when they are documented and reflected upon and shared. As shown earlier, engaging in professional learning communities as an on-going mechanism for jointly

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reflecting on documented observations, helps practitioners to engage in thoughtful dialogues concerning practice, its impact on children and how it can be improved to best support children’s learning and development.

Policy Area 5 – Governance and Funding Action Statement 9: Stakeholders in the ECEC system have a clear and shared understanding of their role and responsibilities, and know that they are expected to collaborate with partner organisations. The European Quality Framework states that this collaboration can take the form of inter-agency cooperation, inter-professional partnership and networking among stakeholders. It is pointed out that when this kind of cooperation does not exist, children ‘experience a lower standard of care; higher costs to parents; and less equal access to all families; and more poorly educated and paid workforce’ (p. 60). While acknowledging that care, education, health, early childhood intervention and social protection need to be better interconnected, traditionally organisations that work in the area of early childhood care and education (including ISSA’s members) have had limited experience with the health and social services sectors, except to give referrals where warranted. Programmes that focus on children under 3 must address the interconnectivity of the needs this age level requires. The ISSA Quality Framework highlights the role of early childhood practitioners and different service providers, recommending an approach that promotes the seamless integration and/or alignment of services in order to best serve the child under 3 and their family, while simultaneously respecting the privacy,

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autonomy and human dignity of the family unit. Research evidence indicates that parents value services that are coordinated, so that information is shared and does not have to be repeated several times (Wave Trust, 2013). An integrated approach is especially crucial for the most vulnerable families, some of them hard to reach, suffering multiple risk factors and in need of a range of different support services. In this way, integrated services can also contribute to social inclusion and cohesion (Geinger, Van Haute, Roets, and Vandenbroeck, 2015) if they work in nonstigmatising ways that involve and empower the family (Wave Trust, 2013). When different kinds of professionals working in various sectors’ services engage in discussions, reflect upon and define ‘quality’ of service in accordance with their own values, mission, nature and cultural aspects, they can also learn about other kinds of services’ values, missions, cultures, etc. The alignment in vision and values needs to be reflected in policy, governance and practice, and young children and their families have to be the focus. In the activities associated with the introduction of the ISSA Quality Framework, its potential to be used to promote inter-­sectoral cooperation was mentioned in all of the reports. Lithuania was the only country where policies already exist to ensure the possibility of inter-sectoral cooperation, but practical implementation is not always of high quality. The activities stimulated a rethinking of the issue at the national and local levels to evaluate existing documents and practices and provided new ideas on the ways in which to ensure quality cooperation, such as how to introduce the Framework to faculty from different universities which are preparing not only future teachers, but also future doctors, social workers, etc. (Sabaliauskiene, 2016). In Bulgaria, the dialogue has started on inter-sectoral cooperation at the national and municipal levels with the development of the national and municipal Communication Framework for Institutional Cooperation

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for Improving the Quality of Policies and the Practices on the Care and Education of Children from Birth to 3 Years. Unlike the other two countries introducing the ISSA Quality Framework, in Slovenia there was no immediate action taken at the national level as a result of the activities undertaken. Care and education services for children under 3 are under the responsibility of the Ministry of Education, representatives of which did not engage in the roundtable at the time when it was organised. Additional activities will need to be organised in order to create the ideal conditions for all the relevant stakeholders to participate.

Conclusion While the early childhood field has been growing significantly in the past decades, there is still a great need to advocate in the public discourse for the crucial importance of quality and diverse experiences for the child in their first 3 years of life. Equally important is to continuously nurture the dialogue around how the child’s well-being and ‘good start’ in life are defined and understood, and how we should re-consider and re-interpret our mindsets and practices to better support their potential, without hindering their windows of opportunity. The impetus for developing the ISSA Quality Framework for services for children from birth to 3 came from the noted tension between the growing evidence of how important this period of life is for every individual and the weak attention paid to how services are organised, governed and delivered. Both documents, the European Quality Framework and the ISSA Quality Framework, are strongly aligned in promoting values and beliefs that are grounded in the most recent research and practice and put the child at the centre of the early childhood education and care system. Both aim at bridging policy-research-governance and practice

towards a shared understanding of quality, at challenging the existing understandings and practices in ECEC systems, and at responding appropriately to the emergent needs of children and their families. While the European Quality Framework focuses on the entire early childhood period of life, the ISSA Quality Framework focuses on the earliest ages, the most vulnerable component of ECEC systems. The ISSA Framework is also more specific in terms of how practitioners can engage in quality practices for this age level and in providing more details to reflect upon when discussing practice among themselves, between themselves and practitioners from other sectors who interface with children under 3 and their families, and with the communities with which they work. ISSA’s introduction of the Framework in three countries indicated that there are various ways in which an international policy document, developed and introduced by civil society organisations, can be embraced by ECEC systems following a bottom-up and a top-down approach: from mentoring and group reflections in professional learning communities within services to animating higher education institutions to promote new understandings and learning within the practicum for future educators; from creating a dialogue among national and local governmental agencies to bridging the practices of professionals from different sectors and empowering parents to be valuable partners in decisions. To the same extent, the introductory activities revealed that although the ECEC systems in the three countries differ considerably, the values, approach and concepts of the ISSA Quality Framework made a significant contribution to starting to build a shared understanding of child and family centrality, and quality practices among practitioners, parents and other key stakeholders. The response from the stakeholders in all three countries demonstrated that the need for discussion on quality and cooperation between services and sectors exists. By addressing the workforce from all sectors in

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the ECEC systems in one document, the ISSA Quality Framework aimed to create a sound foundation across sectors for a shared image of the competent young child, of the competent family and of the competent professional, as well as providing a tool for building competent ECEC systems.

Notes  1  http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/education_culture/repository/education/policy/strategic-framework/archive/ documents/ecec-quality-framework_en.pdf  2  ISSA (International Step by Step Association) is an international association that connects professionals and non-governmental/civil society organisations working in the field of early childhood development in more than 40 countries across Europe and Central Asia. Established in the Netherlands in 1999, ISSA’s original members were from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries. Their mission was to bring childcentred and democratic principles into early childhood programmes. Today, ISSA’s community, with more than 70 members, bridges policy and practice and nurtures mutual learning between West and East, North and South. See for more information: www.issa.nl  3  For more information, visit: http://www.istitutodeglinnocenti.it/?q=content/tale-tuscan-approachlearning-early-childhood-education-and-care

References Buzov, E. (2016). Report on the implementation of the quality framework for early childhood practices in services for children under three in Bulgaria: Step by Step Foundation Bulgaria. Unpublished manuscript. Dalli, C., White, J., Rockel, J., & Duhn, I. (2011). Quality early childhood education for undertwo-year-olds: What should it look like? A literature review. Report to the Ministry of Education. Retrieved from: http://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/publications/ECE/ Quality_ECE_for_under-two-year-olds/ executive-summary European Commission (EC). (2014). Proposal for a quality framework on early childhood education and care: Report of the ET 2020

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Thematic Working Group on early childhood education and care under the auspices of the European Commission. Retrieved from: http://ec.europa.eu/education/policy/ strategic-framework/archive/documents/ ecec-quality-framework_en.pdf Geinger, F., Van Haute, D., Roets, G., & Vandenbroeck, M. (2015). Integration and alignment of services including poor and migrant families with young children. Background paper for the 5th meeting of the Transatlantic Forum on Inclusive Years. International Step by Step Association (ISSA). (2010). Competent educators of the 21st century: Principles of quality pedagogy. Amsterdam: ISSA. www.issa.nl International Step by Step Association (ISSA). (2013). Early childhood services for children from birth to three years of age and their families in the ISSA regions: Survey report. Amsterdam, Netherlands: ISSA. Retrieved from: http:// www.issa.nl/sites/default/files/3-6-Early%20 Childhood%20­S ervices%20for%20Children%20from%20Birth%20to%20 Three%20Years%20Old.pdf International Step by Step Association (ISSA). (2016). A quality framework for early childhood practices in services for children under three years of age. Amsterdam, Netherlands: ISSA. Retrieved from: http://issa.nl/sites/default/ files/ISSA_Quality_Framework_Birth%20 to%20Three_with%20cover.pdf Miller, L., & Cable, C. (Eds) (2011). Professionalization, leadership and management in the early years. London: Sage. Oberhuemer, P. (2005). Conceptualising the early pedagogue: Policy approaches and issue of professionalism. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 13(1), 5–16. Peeters, J. (2008). The construction of a new profession: A European perspective on professionalism in early childhood education and care. Amsterdam: SWP Publishers. Rezek, M. (2016). Report on the implementation of the quality framework for early childhood practices in services for children under three in Slovenia: Developmental research centre for educational initiatives – Step by Step Slovenia. Unpublished manuscript. Rockel, J. (2009). A pedagogy of care: Moving beyond the margins of managing work

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and minding babies. Australian Journal of Early Childhood, 34(3), 1–8. Retrieved from: http://www.earlychildhoodaustralia. org.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/ AJEC0903.pdf Sabaliauskiene, R. (2016). Report on the implementation of the quality framework for early childhood practices in services for children under three in Lithuania: Center for Innovative Education. Unpublished manuscript. Siraj-Blatchford, I. (2009). Conceptualising progression in the pedagogy of play and sustained shared thinking in early childhood education: A Vygotskian perspective. Educational and Child Psychology, 26(2), 77–89. Tankersley, D., & Ionescu, M. (2016). A quality framework for early childhood practices in services for children under three years of age: Starting ­regionally – moving globally. In E. J. White & C. Dalli (Eds), Policy and pedagogy in

under three year olds: Cross disciplinary insights and innovations (pp. 191–204). Singapore: Springer. UNICEF (2012). A framework and tool box for monitoring and improving quality. Draft. New York. Urban, M., Vandenbroeck, M., Peeters, J., Lazzari, A., & Van Laere, K. (2011). Competence requirements in early childhood education and care: CoRe final report. Brussels: European Commission. Vandenbroeck, M., De Stercke, N., & Gobeyn, H. (2013). What if the rich child has poor parents?: The relationship from a Flemish perspective. In P. Moss (Ed.), Early childhood and compulsory education: Reconceptualising the relationship (pp. 174–191). London: Routledge. Wave Trust. (2013). Conception to age 2: The age of opportunity. Retrieved from: http:// www.wavetrust.org/sites/default/files/reports/ conception-to-age-2-full-report_0.pdf

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APPENDIX: Description of the Principles Presented in the ISSA Quality Framework for Early Childhood Services for Children under 3 Years of Age • Relationships � Recognising and valuing each child’s uniqueness, competences, personal communication style, preferences and agency. � Engaging in responsive interactions that create a secure attachment. � Fostering through strategies that encourage dialogue. � Fostering relationships between and among children. � Supporting the child under 3’s routine and non-routine transitions. • Family and Community � Strengthening relationships with and among families and communities. � Engaging in sensitive, respectful and reciprocal communication. � Working in partnerships with families. � Cooperating and collaborating partnerships with the community. • Inclusion, Diversity and Values of Democracy � Including equal opportunities for every child and family to participate. � Understanding and appreciating the diversity that exists among children, families and communities. � Fostering each child’s sense of self, voice and agency. � Promoting inclusion through partnerships with families. • Health, Well-being and Nutrition � Promoting health. � Ensuring children’s nutritional needs are met. � Using healthcare and nutritional routines as a source of pleasure, attachment and learning.

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Safeguarding each child from abuse, neglect and harm.

• Development and Learning � Approaching children’s development ­holistically. � Using play is as a source and strategy for development, well-being and learning. � Scaffolding development and learning. • Observation, Documentation, Reflection and Planning � Using observations to provide important information about children’s development, learning, interests, strengths and needs. � Documenting, reflecting upon and sharing with parents/families and others who are involved in the child’s care and well-being. � Jointly reflecting on observations and the documentation of children’s learning and socialisation experiences. � Planning by responding to individual children’s strengths and needs. • Enabling Environments � Promoting each child’s safety and well-being. � Ensuring the environment is welcoming, accessible and comfortable and creates a sense of belonging. � Stimulating the child’s play, exploration, autonomy and initiative. • Professional Development � Increasing knowledge about child development and learning. � Continually engaging in professional development activities. • Intersectoral Cooperation � Collaborating and cooperating with other practitioners and services within and across sectors, whilst ensuring children’s and families’ privacy, confidentiality and dignity. � Referring to early childhood intervention specialists for formal screening and assessment when needed.

34 Creating a New Era of Usable Knowledge: Enhancing Early Childhood Development through Systems Research Sharon Lynn Kagan, Rebecca E. Gomez and Jessica L. Roth

Introduction The first two decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed an explosion of interest in, and services for, young children and their families. From the global ‘north’ to the global ‘south’, from advanced to advancing countries, and in democratic, socialist, and quasi-totalitarian countries, young children are commanding more policy attention and more fiscal investment than at any other time in history. Some attribute this momentum to an energized focus among the social sciences that address children and families. Others contend that robust communication, or popularization of these scientific findings, accounts for much of the advancement. Regardless of the motivation, there can be no doubt that the social sciences have influenced the promulgation of early childhood education and care (ECEC) services for young children. This chapter begins by reviewing and acknowledging the seminal contributions of two domains of this work, neuroscience and econometric science, and examining the lessons

that can be learned from each of these scientific literatures. It then explores whether the research approaches employed in these domains are appropriate for, and can be applied to, the rapidly changing context for children. In so doing, the chapter delineates an alternative paradigm that may yield scientific findings more suited to a twenty-first century ECEC context – one that not only aims to generate the rationale for more services, but advances services that are higher in quality, more equitably distributed, and more sustainable and scalable. In short, this chapter suggests that ECEC and its research to policy apparatus is at a critical juncture, and now is a perfect time for reflection and re-action. Inherent in this formulation are several key assumptions, which will be explored: (1) there is a solid foundation of research that has been successfully applied to generate the construction of policy for young children; (2) there are recurrent and fresh research-policy polemics that must frame the future of usable ECEC research; (3) there is an emerging body of systems research that must be examined for its

A new era of usable knowledge: systems research

policy utility in the context of contemporary ECEC; and (4) there is a need to envision a new, usable research to policy zeitgeist in order to invoke children’s services that are not merely numerically increased, but markedly improved.

Major Research Foundations Well beyond the scope of this chapter is a comprehensive review of extant research that has produced usable knowledge about young children and families. But ask most policymakers and practitioners about the most prominent research in ECEC, and they are likely to cite two disciplines that have been seminal in guiding the motivation for global investments in children’s policy: neuroscience and econometric science. Icons of ‘usable research’, these bodies of literature are briefly summarized below in terms of their content, method, and popularization. Although these exemplars of usable ECEC research are both legendary and globally influential, it is imperative to consider if they remain sufficient in a twentyfirst century ECEC research to policy context.

Neuroscience Research Research regarding the rapid brain development that takes place during the first five years of life has been particularly compelling to, and widely used by, policymakers globally (Marope & Kaga, 2015). Derived from decades of research, scholars in the fields of neurology and neurobiology have articulated several core concepts of early development, emphasizing that experiences and genetics interact to shape the circuitry of the developing brain; that brain development is hierarchical and occurs in sequence; and that learning, behavior, and health are interrelated (Shonkoff, 2015). These core concepts were consolidated in the landmark text Neurons to Neighborhoods (Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000), which was commissioned by the US National Academy of Sciences and widely consumed by ECEC professionals. Its

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publication not only provided ECEC practitioners with critical information, but also sparked broad policy interest in the early years. In part, this research captured the attention of policymakers due to strategic dissemination, hallmarked by easily understandable messages that were widely and thoughtfully circulated among non-research audiences. In addition to US-based work, research from other countries also addresses and uses the neurosciences for social improvement in ECEC. For example, a study of Latin American countries examined the effects of ECEC interventions on brain development and revealed significant differences in cognition between children from poorer families and those from wealthier families; these differences begin in the early years and persist into adulthood (Schady et al., 2015). Analyses of the use of neuroscience research as a policy elixir are also evident in Alberta, Canada, and Brazil (National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, 2014). Attesting to its international scope, neuroscience was the basis for an international symposium sponsored by UNICEF in 2014. It congregated 16 leading international neuroscientists to present their research regarding brain development in early childhood; in so doing, the potency of the growing knowledge base, as well as its unprecedented applications, were fortified (UNICEF, 2014).

Econometric Research A plethora of empirical and well-disseminated research pertinent to ECEC has been conducted by economists over the past five decades. Perhaps the most well-known and often cited finding is that investment in high quality ECEC services can yield economic returns of up to ten times the dollar amount it costs to provide such services (Engle et al., 2011). Like the neuroscience research, econometric science has been dramatically influential in altering the public agenda and enhancing commitments to young children. This is due in part to general agreement among scholars that such economic impacts stem from two sources; first, in the

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short-term, high quality ECEC enables parents to enter the workforce, and, second, in the longterm, the services provided to young children enable them to contribute productively to the workforce while preventing large social expenditures later in life (Nores & Barnett, 2015). Particularly compelling for policymakers, these short- and long-term benefits have fueled a near ECEC research to policy tsunami. The best known of such cost–benefit studies are three US-based randomized control trials with outcomes measures that include longitudinal follow-up of participants: (1) the Perry Preschool Project (1962–1967), (2) the Carolina Abecedarian Study (1972–1985), and (3) the Chicago Parent Project (2002–present). In reviewing cost-effectiveness research, Nores and Barnett (2015) characterize these longitudinal studies as pieces of research that ‘knit together findings’ (p. 79) in ways that studies more limited in scope and less generalizable cannot accomplish. Beyond these US-based studies, examples from other countries contribute to the research base as well. For example, a longitudinal study in Jamaica examined growth-stunted toddler-aged children who received psychosocial stimulation during a two-year period. Follow-up 20 years after the intervention revealed that these children’s earnings increased 25%, enabling them to match the earnings of their peers who were not stunted (Gertler et al., 2014). Noteworthy cost–­benefit studies from other countries that yield similar findings include the Mauritius Preschool Study (Raine, Mellingen, Liu, Venables, & Mednick, 2003) and a study of the Turkish Early Enrichment Project (Kagitcibasi et  al., 2009). However robust, this evidence does not quash debates regarding the degree to which these services should be universal or targeted, the amount of the return on investments (ROI), and the generalizability of these research findings.

Characteristics of Usable Research Writing decades ago in Usable Knowledge, pioneers Charles Lindblom and David Cohen

(1979) identified the litany of challenges inherent in applying social science research to social policy. Lindblom and Cohen offered what are now accepted as classic differences in professional orientations, timelines, and intentionalities. In so doing, they conceptualized quality scholarship as embedding social problems within the design and execution of any study and helped debunk the idea that scientists are ‘philosopher kings’ who alone bear irrefutable truth and ultimate knowledge. They, and many following them, refuted the notion that research is produced primarily for the academy or laboratory; rather, research must be conceptualized and positioned not only for its potential scholarly findings, but for its optimal application to trenchant social issues (Kagan, 1993). Axiomatic today, usable research is bolstered by careful problem formulations, effective research design, and careful attention to dissemination. Today, research is rendered most usable when it is communicated in terms that are accessible to laypersons (UNESCO, 2006). Moreover, strategic communications – including clear, succinct messaging, targeted communications, the use of metaphors, and delivery by respected spokespersons – accelerate the utility of research (Kendall-Taylor & Haydon, 2014; Lindland, Fond, Haydon, Volmert, & Kendall-Taylor, 2015). Beyond design and positioning, the utility of social knowledge is often predicated on the degree to which the findings are verified, often by subsequent studies. While it is possible to cite individual studies as a rationale for investing in ECEC, the composite findings from multiple econometric and neuroscience research studies hold the most clout with policymakers (Shonkoff, 2015). It is not one study, but the findings derived from many – typically from the same field of scholarship – that have produced the now widespread understanding that high quality ECEC is a wise and compelling social investment. Despite some application of research to ECEC policy on the global scale, particularly in the areas discussed above, there is concern that the contradiction between what Rose and Peters (1978) called ‘disciplined research and undisciplined problems’ is growing. ECEC abounds in

A new era of usable knowledge: systems research

highly disciplined research, in terms of it being both discipline-specific and very controlled and orderly, as aptly demonstrated by neuroscientific and econometric research. Not alone, these domains of inquiry are joined by other research that emanates from single fields. Educators study diverse approaches to curriculum, particularly teaching strategies or specific dimensions of commonly taught subjects (Brooker & Woodhead, 2013; Ginsburg, Hyson, & Woods, 2014). Alternatively, individuals from the medical sector are likely to focus their research on the health and physical/emotional well-being of children. Economists focus on cost–benefit analyses, and sociologists examine equity issues. Single disciplinary studies, and even some of the emerging multidisciplinary efforts, are often enmeshed in research traditions, methodologies, and contexts that delimit the transferability of results across cultures and domains. Indeed, scores of revisionist scholars have refuted the idea of automatic transferability, suggesting that much of ECEC scholarship, particularly uni-disciplinary research generated in the West, has very limited transferability to other contexts and cultures (Dahlberg, Moss, & Pence, 1999; Moss, 2007). Still evolving, some strategies to help combat the challenges associated with transferability are emerging. First, traditionally under-represented countries are being more systematically included in research through the inclusion of their data in comparative analyses. Second, research networks that support the advancement of research scholars from traditionally under-represented countries are being established, with the goal of both enhancing research capacity and transferring research and policy lessons across countries. Even with disciplined research, contemporary ECEC has undisciplined problems. To begin, ECEC sits squarely centered amidst different disciplines, is usually housed in different ministries, and is staffed by an extraordinary array of diversely trained and diversely qualified individuals. Adding to this already chaotic context, fiscal investments for ECEC are rapidly increasing, generating new types of programs

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and services. As services expand and diversify, so do the financial and regulatory policies that influence ECEC. Indeed, the already undisciplined ECEC field is becoming even further undisciplined as it expands. Without disdaining this growth and multidisciplinariness, it is safe to say that the extant research agenda and methods may not be keeping abreast of these changes. Old models are far too narrow to address the kind of social change that characterizes contemporary ECEC, and may not be uniquely productive as the field evolves into its twenty-first century self. The authors of this chapter suggest that as the field grows, it becomes more important to acknowledge the accomplishments of the past research paradigm that fostered uni-disciplinary research, as discussed above. That said, it is also time to acknowledge the urgent need for a new approach to creating usable research – one that broadens the present conceptualization of ECEC, captures more generalizable data with salience across cultures and contexts, and reflects the actual messy, complex, and integrated nature of contemporary ECEC. More specifically, too little research has been devoted to broader systems issues associated with the scaling up and replicability of quality services, equitable service distribution, and program/ service sustainability. This chapter suggests that only when more diverse and appropriate methods and a systems focus emerge will research realize its potential social utility in the rapidly shifting, and global ECEC context. In short, as times change, there is a need for a new approach to producing usable knowledge.

Major Research Polemics Global scholars may find the above review to be somewhat simplistic and lacking nuance. This is true, in that this cursory accolade to the past research enterprise masks essential polemics, allowing contemporary research to masquerade as a policy success. Nothing could be further from reality; the current usable

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research enterprise is laden with challenges, with some quite historic and some more current in nature. This section discloses these polemics as a prelude to proffering a more timely and well-suited approach to creating greater global usable knowledge in ECEC.

The Value Polemic Three value sets collide when discussing the utility of social science knowledge globally: (1) generic distinctions between the needs and roles of social scientists and politicians; (2) embedded values regarding how countries ‘hold’ and value young children and families; and (3) the appropriately contested hegemony of Western, Eurocentric values and research regarding children and childhood.

Needs and roles of social scientists and politicians As noted above, social scientists were held in high esteem for decades, fully expecting their findings to play a predominant role in directing policy action. Noting and contradicting this sentiment, Rossi and Wright (1985) suggest that, ‘in a truly democratic society, social science must be content with an advisory but not dominating role’ (p. 331). Reflecting these changing views dedicated to democratizing social science research, Pettigrew (1985) notes that social science is but one influence on policy, mediated by multiple factors, including the media, funding agencies, and the receptiveness of the policy-making body. Accepting that there are multiple influencers of policy, policymakers do continue to rely on social science as a critical policy influencer, particularly when such science focuses on young children (Fernald, Gertler, & Neufeld, 2008; Wong & Rao, 2015; Yoshikawa et al., 2014).

Embedded values regarding how countries ‘hold’ young children Countries hold different and historically embedded values about, and attitudes toward, young

children. Rooted in and reflecting socio-cultural, economic, and political traditions, these values contour the nature, amount, and durability of services for young children (Kamerman & Kahn, 2001). Contrast, for example, the services for children in market-driven versus social welfare states. In market-driven societies, services for young children are not seen solely as a governmental responsibility; the use of the private sector is more prevalent, with the result that these services are typically far from universal and inequitably accessible. Welfare states, in contrast, privilege state sponsorship of social programs, including child care, often rendering such provision normative and universal. The United States and the Nordic c­ ountries – Finland in particular – exemplify how a country’s social contract with its citizens yields discrepant services for young children. In Finland, family support and ECEC are regarded as elixirs of equity, one of the nation’s key values. In particular, these policies foster gender equity because they enable female employment. In Finland, public offerings to young children are comprehensive, beginning during a mother’s pregnancy and continuing through the provision of diverse services and options for families with young children (OECD, 2000). In contrast, the United States government has been historically ambivalent regarding its role in policies that affect children and families, producing services that have been scattered and episodic (Grubb & Lazerson, 1982; Woolsey, 1977). Emanating from a social history that privileged family primacy and privacy, US intervention in child and family has been fueled primarily by national crises (e.g. the World Wars, Depression, and War on Poverty), not the general well-being of youngsters. Although recent ECEC policy advances have been fueled by a ‘scientifically sound and practically relevant knowledge base’ (Welch-Ross, 2006), traditional family values spur ideological debates as each new ECEC policy is considered, further underscoring the value proposition that social needs and evidence, not children’s well-being or rights, foster child and family policy in the US.

A new era of usable knowledge: systems research

Contested hegemony of Western, Eurocentric values More recently, global concern has mounted regarding the over-reliance on research produced in the West, particularly North America and Europe (Moss, 2007; Rogoff, 2003; Yoshikawa & Currie, 2011). Early childhood revisionists have caused scholars and practitioners to question the applicability of such widely held constructs as child-centered play and the value of individualism. Contending that constructivist, child-centered pedagogy represents but one pedagogical approach, scholars such as Moss, Rogoff, Yoshikawa, and Currie have raised important issues concerning the applicability of research findings across cultures and continents. As contextual importance is increasingly acknowledged, the applicability of research universals also comes into question (Penn, 2016). The polemic extends far beyond the debate about, for example, the salience of Western child:adult ratios across cultures and context; it raises trenchant questions about the overall transferability of research, and about the hegemony of the Western research enterprise and its controlling influence on scholarly publications and scholarship in general.

The Definitional Polemic, or What is Meant by ‘Research’ Strictly speaking, according to Webster’s Dictionary, research is ‘the careful, systematic, patient study and investigation in some field of knowledge undertaken to discover or establish facts or principles’ (Agnes, 1999). Using this definition, countless studies, reports, and analyses could be, and are, considered research, fueling the definitional debate. Whereas some methodologists define research as hypothesis-driven investigations that use random assignment and experimental design, others support a qualitative or mixed approach (Sullivan, 2011), and still others advance a conceptual or theoretical framework to understand the epistemological and ontological conditions needed to render

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work valid and credible (Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, & Taubam, 2008). The two categories of research discussed above (neuroscience and econometric) represent studies that are among the most rigorous, often using experimental design and random assignment. There are also multitudes of rigorous qualitative studies (Creswell & Clark, 2011; Willis et  al., 2009), which are extremely useful in providing texturized explorations into areas of ECEC that are typically considered ‘contested’ spaces. Methodology alone does not determine what constitutes ‘research’, as multiple approaches to generating and analyzing data (e.g. qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods) are routinely categorized as research. Studies framed by theories of change are also frequently included as research (Fulbright-Anderson, Kubisch, & Connell, 1998). In short, confusion abounds around the definition of research studies. For the purposes of international ECEC policy work, three categories of studies deserve special mention as policy elixirs: (1) population-based studies, (2) program and service population-based studies, and (3) systems studies. Population-based studies are designed to capture the status of variables at a point in time, with the goal of communicating information on the state of the population under consideration. In some cases, these population-based studies are carried out in repeated, intervaled trials where the same data are collected at different points in time; these studies enable the comparison of results over time. Populationbased studies often collect and compare data from populations in different countries, enabling cross-­country comparisons. Examples of these studies are well known (e.g. TIMSS and PISA) and routinely used in policy analyses (Schütz, Ursprung, & Wößmann, 2008). The second type of study, a variant of population-based studies, focuses less on the status of individuals and more on the status of programs, services, and policies. Noted examples of this sub-type of research include, in the US, the annual NIEER report card of state performance (Barnett et  al., 2016) and

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the Kids Count Data Book (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2016). Internationally, the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Starting Well (2012) chronicles early childhood service provision in 45 countries. Moreover, countless pieces of important research undertaken by UNICEF, UNESCO, and the OECD represent, in the aggregate, both types of population data. The advent of the Sustainable Development Goals (UN General Assembly, 2015) is likely to increase such reporting, particularly through the expansion of monitoring efforts such as the TALIS Starting Strong Survey (Taguma, Engel, & Huerta, 2016). The third category of studies, discussed in depth later in this chapter, are systems studies, which probe into greater depth and use multiple data sources for, and approaches to, analysis. Typically, these are in-depth comparative analyses that look at complex phenomena, including systems and services. These studies do not intend to represent the population of individuals or programs, but instead examine alternative questions regarding why such policies emerged, and how they are being mounted, funded, monitored, and evaluated.

The Purposes Polemic Due to the rampant press for hard data and the extraordinary value accorded to it, data are used for multiple and sometimes undistinguished purposes. Data produced for one purpose is massaged for another. This is often the case with data used for policy and is the rationale for a bevy of scholarship that tries to clarify the purpose and definitions of data used for policy. Nagel (1990) notes that data used for policy takes multiple forms (policy research, policy-related research, policy analyses, and evaluation research), with the terms being used interchangeably and often inappropriately. Others suggest that this confounding of terms is acceptable because ‘policy research cannot be described as a distinct category … because much research used by policymakers was not intended for policy at

all’ (Maccoby, Kahn, & Everett, 1983). While this may be the case in some instances, many scholars have worked arduously to differentiate among types of research; Moroney (1981) argues that policy analysis is a distinct category of research, characterized by the ways in which questions are asked and data are purposed. Gallagher (1981) distinguished between policy evaluation (i.e. the analysis of how well an existing program is performing) and policy analysis (i.e. the analysis of how combinations of programs, funding and accountability streams can be managed). More recently, Kagan (1993) conceptualized a policy continuum that embraces basic, policy-relevant, and policy-dominant research. While raising the purpose of policy research, these efforts do not eradicate the dilemma that there is no consistent and specific understanding of the different types and purposes of this expanding field of scholarship.

The Measurement Polemic The measurement polemic includes three issues: what is being measured, what is used to measure effects, and how data are managed. With regard to what is being measured, there is little consistency; inputs, outputs, outcomes, or some combination thereof are all being routinely used, and challenges are associated with each. For example, when discussing inputs, there is grave concern over the correlates of quality and how quality varies among contexts; for example, is and should quality be the same for children in Finland and Bangladesh? If so, what should the input dimensions be? Quality inputs that are routinely examined include process and structural quality dimensions, along with teacher preparation and functioning. Outputs are equally varied, as is the press for child outcomes, with questions regarding the appropriate nature of outcomes. Laden with controversy for decades, ECEC outcomes are burdened with issues of transferability (i.e. how transferable among cultures can and should outcomes be)

A new era of usable knowledge: systems research

and applicability (i.e. how can outcome data honestly reflect young children whose linguistic or mental abilities vary from the norm). In short, legions of issues relate to what should be assessed. Notably, however, efforts to examine child outcomes are taking hold; for example, over 20 countries are now conducting such analyses using the Early Development Instrument developed in Canada (Janus & Reid-Westoby, 2016). Issues related to instruments also prevail. First, the sheer volume and variety of accountability instruments often yield differences in data collected in diverse regions of any single country, much less across countries. Beyond instrument consistency, there is some concern that available instruments do not yield reliable information on relevant matters. Often, they fail to measure the very outcomes ECEC programs strive to achieve. Moreover, in some cases, valid and reliable instruments may not be easily usable by untrained personnel. Finally, many such instruments are not available in the public domain. Such a lack of consistent, available, and usable measurement instruments is being addressed by notable efforts in the field, including Measuring Early Learning Quality and Outcomes (MELQO) (Devercelli, Raikes, & Anderson, 2015). Finally, even if the perfect instruments were to exist, countries often lack the necessary data systems to house the data sets; moreover, even if data are collected and housed, data collected in many countries may not be optimally analyzed or used (Kagan, Araujo, Jaimovich, & Aguayo, 2016). Although the lack of effective data collection globally is distressing, there are signs of improvement (Data Quality Campaign, 2013), and new systemic data efforts are taking hold.

The Infrastructure Polemic The content of research is the starting point for its social utility in addressing the multiple challenges facing ECEC. Historically, the focus has

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been on examining the quality of programs, using either inspection, regulatory, or monitoring apparatuses (Barnett, 1995). To ensure the efficiency of these efforts, the criteria of program quality were developed over time and are manifest in self-review guidelines, performance standards, quality rating and improvement systems, and program/classroom observation tools. Indeed, progress continues to be made to garner the status of programs, improving conditions for the children who attend them. Work on systems development and research suggests that looking at global program quality does not provide sufficient data for policymakers to advance improvement agendas (Halfon et al., 2009). Instead, the sub-­ systems that support the emergence of quality need to be examined. Definit­ions for these specific elements are wideranging, and hence scholars define the overall early childhood system a bit differently (Bruner, Wright, Gebhard, & Hibbard, 2004; Gallagher, Clifford, & Maxwell, 2004; Sugarman, 1991). Vargas-Barón (2013) considers the following eight building blocks for a strong and sustainable ECEC system: equity and rights, multisectorality, governance, service standards and regulations, quality improvement and resource development, accountability, investment and systemic issues for going to scale, and policy advocacy and social communications. Kagan and Cohen (1996) define accepted elements of the infrastructure to include: governance, finance, monitoring and accountability, workforce/capacity development, data systems and use, family engagement, and linkages with other institutions. Despite definitional differences, systems thinkers suggest that quality programs will not emerge unless there is an infrastructure in place that supports them. Irrespective of the definition used, the dearth of scholarship on these elements seriously limits the ability of research to impact policy. Interestingly, the focus on program quality has been well researched, but detailed examination of the inputs or infrastructural elements that produce quality (e.g. regulations, monitoring, accountability, governance, and finance) has not. This lack of research inhibits the ability to

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understand why quality is lacking, and how and where to focus on its improvement. Moreover, the lack of emphasis on elements of the infrastructure, as well as the system as a whole, inhibits the proliferation of high quality, equitably distributed, scalable, and sustainable programs. Although the limited scholarship on systems is emerging, the basic polemic remains: how and how much research can and should be devoted to examining the infrastructure and its implementation when the research to policy funding and capacity apparatus in ECEC is constrained? To date, global research on ECEC is only just beginning to incorporate systems and implementation sciences into its conceptualization of essential early childhood research.

The Capacity Polemic Two major issues characterize the capacity polemic as the production of usable knowledge is considered: the content of research, and who carries out the research. With regard to the former, when capacity in ECEC is discussed and addressed, it is usually proffered in terms of front-line workers who interact directly with children and their families. To date, due in part to the expansion of ECEC globally and to the serious shortage of qualified personnel to staff programs, workforce development is gaining currency, and programs and supports are emerging. The new global Early Childhood Workforce Initiative, sponsored by the International Step by Step Association (ISSA) and Results for Development (R4D), expands this traditional focus by addressing diverse providers and by developing competencies and standards (Ionescu, Josephson, & Neuman, 2016). With regard to the second issue of who produces research, there is only limited attention accorded to the preparation of those who produce early childhood policy research. As noted, such research conventionally emanates from distinct and a somewhat limited number of disciplines (e.g. neuroscience, developmental psychology, economics, and education). Far more work is needed from

other disciplines such as anthropology, communications sciences, humanities, and political science. Scholars who conduct such work, however, require an understanding of the ECEC context so that their work will be able to address the complex issues evoked by contemporary ECEC. In economics, for example, expertise needs to address alternative methods of financing ECEC efforts, as well as to discern the consequences of such efforts. Under what conditions, for example, does the market work most effectively? Where, and under what conditions, do market incentivizations work? Similarly, the fields of political science, complexity theory, and sociology should contribute to research related to the policy capacity of ECEC. Beyond those who conduct research in one discipline, ECEC needs cross-disciplinary research and scholars to conduct it as the field expands. Such training should address different disciplinary conventions related to problem definition, methods, and analytic techniques. In reality, very few professional programs prepare scholars to examine the research to policy connections from these diverse disciplinary perspectives.

Systems Research Given the complexity of producing usable research that transcends disciplines and tackles these polemics, another domain of inquiry warrants examination. Broadly construed as ‘ECEC systems research’, this work takes the ECEC system as its unit of analysis and domain of inquiry, tackling far more than just the performance of children or programs. It significantly expands the discourse by embracing multiple disciplines, using multiple types of research, and raising serious questions regarding the interactions of various elements that have heretofore been addressed only individually or not at all. As such, it represents a new frontier in the movement to develop an innovative approach to producing usable knowledge. To that end, this section chronicles

A new era of usable knowledge: systems research

a number of such systems studies, takes stock of the nascent field’s current state, and, using that knowledge, formulates recommendations for the future of producing usable ECEC research. It should be noted that although this section focuses particularly on systems research, it is not the only emerging type of research that evokes usable knowledge; systems research merely warrants attention because it is an under-examined and promising option to tilt the pendulum toward a more comprehensive examination of what is needed to improve ECEC policy and programs.

Systems Research: What Is It? General systems theory is not new; the movement has its roots in the early twentieth century when scholars, mostly European, were disconcerted by increasingly reductionist and specialized approaches to science. In its earliest incarnation, systems thinking was conceptualized as pertaining mostly to the hard sciences (von Bertalanffy, 1968). Later, systems thinking transcended the biological and medical sciences and began to influence behavioral science and organizational development (Lewin, 1947; Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Schein, 1993). Meyer and Rowan (1977) and DiMaggio and Powell (1983) incorporated systems theory into their work on institutional theory, which, along with complex adaptive theory (Jochim & May, 2010), continues to influence the way that complex phenomena are studied and understood. As systems theory has evolved, its applications have expanded; recent work has been incorporated into practice via management applications such as organizational strategy, options and scenario planning, and the need to look at inter- and intra-institutional interactions (Senge, 1990). In each stage, despite nuances in interpretation, systems thinking is not relegated to discourse; to the contrary, it has influenced research and practice, making it important to understand and examine. Even the most cursory historical review of systems thinking demonstrates that different

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scholars have studied and reframed systems theory, rendering multiple and diverse ideas about systems (Laszlo, 1996). Despite this, most systems theory shares some common traits. Essentially, irrespective of era or discipline, systems theory is designed to be an integrative tool that inspires interdisciplinary dialogue and research in order to understand diverse phenomena. It suggests that the basic elements of any social or physical organism are composed of properties that only enable the system to function when combined. Although these individual parts can be discerned, discussed, and studied, they achieve their optimum utility in synthesis with one another. In these conceptualizations, the nature of the whole organism is more than the sum of its parts; the interaction of the parts transcends them. Social change, then, must be directed to the whole; addressing any single element will not create success for the whole entity, and indeed may render the whole less effective. Systems theory forms the basis for systems research. This kind of research undertakes the scientific examination of a set of interrelated experiences in order to better discern the principles that may exist among and across them. Inherently, then, systems research looks across disciplines to formulate a holistic understanding of reality. It honors complexity theory and the diversity of contextual values. Today, general systems research is especially helpful in providing frameworks for understanding the complex and dynamic elements of diverse socio-cultural systems.

ECEC Systems Research: Applying Systems Theory to ECEC In ECEC, although systems theory has evolved somewhat over the past three decades, it remains at a nascent stage (Kagan & Kauerz, 2012). Recognizing that ECEC transcends disciplines (e.g. medicine, education, psychology) and service modalities (e.g. homes, health and mental health facilities, schools), systems thinking is gaining currency as a way to frame current

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understandings of the ways in which ECEC functions and could function. It provides a new lens that moves beyond direct services to examine the infrastructural elements that contribute to their functioning. Moreover, systems thinking broadly shifts the ECEC paradigm. Instead of conceptualizing quality services and child outcomes as the primary outputs of ECEC investments and interventions, it embraces a new set of outcomes: quality, equitably distributed, sustainable, and scalable services. Systems theory advances the field by broadening the inputs of ECEC services as well, reminiscent of the infrastructural elements discussed earlier: governance, finance, capacity development, accountability, data, monitoring, family engagement, and linkages with other systems. In short, systemic thinking reframes the range of analyses, outputs, and policies embraced by ECEC.

ECEC Systems Research: What Can Be Learned From It? As systems theory has found its way into ECEC, scholars have decided to actively examine the field through this lens. Most scholars suggest that the systems lens is especially appropriate for a field that is as structurally diverse, as inconsistently funded, and as organizationally fragmented as ECEC (Bruner, 2012). Indeed, in the past ten years, a number of such systems studies have emerged. The few extant international ECEC systems studies are typically comparative in nature and often focus either on the full system or elements of the infrastructure. In addition to these studies, a number of efforts to benchmark ECEC have also taken hold. However embryonic the ECEC systems literature, it is teaching important lessons about the structure, design, and implementation of ECEC services. A preliminary review of the international ECEC systems literature was conducted as an initial component of an early childhood systems analysis of six high-performing countries, funded by the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE). This initial meta-analysis

reviewed 14 individual systems studies, which fell into the following three categories: (1) full systems studies (OECD, 2001; Halfon et  al., 2009; Vargas-Barón, 2013; Akbari & McCuaig, 2014; Bertram & Pascal, 2016; Kagan et  al., 2016); (2) infrastructure-focused studies (Montie, Xiang, & Schweinhart, 2007; Kaga, Bennett, & Moss, 2010; Oberhuemer, Schreyer, & Neuman, 2010; Urban et  al., 2011; Britto et  al., 2013); and (3) benchmarking studies (Adamson, 2008; Economist Intelligence Unit, 2012; Neuman & Devercelli, 2013). Conducted from 2007 to 2016, these studies represent a range of authors, organizations, fields of scholarship, and countries – ­including as few as two and as many as 45 countries. Interestingly, each employed a similar comparative case study methodology, beginning with a literature review or desk analysis, followed by some form of within-country data collection, and concluding with an integrative comparative case analysis. Despite differences in the countries studied, preliminary results from the meta-analysis revealed important systems findings, discussed below (Neuman, Roth, & Kagan, in press).

Context matters ECEC is not immune to political realities. These realities inform the choices made in each country, as well as the elements of ECEC that are emphasized. Historic, cultural, and economic variables influence systems design and programmatic options. Given that country contexts vary so dramatically, no single systemic type or organization will best suit all ECEC systems globally; rather, countries should etch their systems from and within their unique contexts.

Governance matters Successful ECEC systems cannot be implemented without visible and functional governance structures. Such structures must have concrete connections to some ministries and engage in cooperative and collaborative arrangements with others. Ideally, they will also link with middle and local-level entities, where attention is badly needed in early childhood governance.

A new era of usable knowledge: systems research

Financing amounts and mechanisms matter In most study countries, financing allocations are evolving and there is considerable support for examining new approaches to revenue generation and utilization. There is also an increasing need for demand-side financing strategies, and for methods of combining and maximizing public and private sector funding.

There is a difference between policy implementation and intent Most countries examined have policy frameworks in place for advancing ECEC, but the frameworks are often vague and aspirat­ional in nature, lacking the proper implem­ entat­ ion schemes and guidance. These frame­works badly require accountability mechanisms and increased focus on sub-national implementation.

Confusion regarding universal provision

Study the understudied Most systems research focuses on the areas of recent policy investment, which tend to address older children; as a consequence, very little systems attention is devoted to services for the youngest children, from birth to age 3. Rural, migrant, non-mainstreamed, and other marginalized and underserved groups are also not fully addressed in systems research. Moreover, there is a tendency to bound systems research by avoiding analyses of the transitions that children and families experience as they traverse different systems and settings. Although this analysis conveys the results from just one meta-analysis of systems work, it is clear that systems analyses evoke salient findings for ECEC research and policy. Moreover, as systems research evolves, it will continue to provide promising insights for advancing new and usable research for the ECEC policy context.

There is a tendency to espouse universal provision despite the fact that such provision often only addresses one age group (i.e. those children who are nearest the age of compulsory school attendance). Further, the achievement of universal provision is so demanding that, once accomplished, there is less appetite in policymakers to foster the quality of the services and the ongoing accountability mechanisms to monitor them. The ECEC job is deemed ‘accomplished’ when services are provided, at the expense of addressing the infrastructure necessary to support them.

Invoking a New Usable Research to Policy Context

Need to look beyond children and families

Broadening the Conceptualization of ECEC

ECEC systems are more effective when the beneficiaries are conceptualized as not only the children and families, but also the wider community and society. The focus of policy attention should be expanded to incorporate individual gains as well as economic and social gains. When beneficiaries are included in program design, research and practice both improve (Britto et al., 2013; Economist Intelligence Unit, 2012).

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Systems research has a great deal to teach those who want to study and impact ECEC policy; it is, however, not the only strategy that can be employed to render research usable. This section explores the ways in which the research enterprise could be reconfigured to foster the development of the next generation of research that will have systemic, not only programmatic, social utility as its raison d’être.

As larger swaths of society become aware of ECEC services and demand for these services grows, ECEC, and research associated with it, must be conceptualized more broadly than ever before. Research must not only take into consideration the multidisciplinariness of the field (Lake, 2016), but must also account for the broader socio-political, economic, and cultural contexts in which ECEC services are

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carried out. From a content perspective, it must transcend disciplines and embrace context, as do recent studies on home visiting (Porter et al., 2010) and on social and health workers in Pakistani ECEC (Gowani, Yousafzai, Armstrong, & Bhutta, 2014). Methodologically, such studies could embrace qualitative case study research and ethnographic approaches that engender rich understandings of those contexts (Yoshikawa & Nieto, 2013). Identifying this need, scholars are calling for ‘contextually specific research literatures’, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (Yoshiwaka & Nieto, 2013, p. 495). Likewise, in order to create a more robust understanding of ECEC in diverse contexts, new research methodologies that include active partners (e.g. policymakers, practitioners, and community members) in the design and implementation of research need to be developed.

Conceptualizing Systems Building on the embryonic studies discussed above and considering expansions and the complexification of ECEC, there is a clear need for more attention to systems-based research. But inherent in this shift, as is the case in any emerging field, is the need to arrive at some common understandings regarding what constitutes an ECEC system. Such definitional clarity is necessary as programs and services evolve, and as new research is undertaken. Exemplified by the long history of systems theory, arriving at a common definition will not be easy; it appears doable, however, as there are several candidate definitions that share common elements. Just as scholars have come together to define outcomes for children, they could come together to develop a consensus definition of the ECEC system and its infrastructural elements. Once these terms are agreed upon and defined, the ways in which to assess the synergies among systemic elements can be considered. One helpful way to consider the definition of an ECEC system is to visualize its outcomes and discern what would be different if such a system

existed. An analysis of systemic outcomes provides, then, one method of developing definition markers and systemic benchmarks.

Developing Systems Measures As researchers seek to produce more usable research and more systems research specifically, new tools and methods are needed. Such tools must assess the efficacy of systems and its infrastructural elements. Consequently, such measures must embrace the proposed outputs of systems work: quality, equity, sustainability, and scalability. Presently, measures exist to assess the quality of programs, but not the quality or efficiency of the overall system. New measures that address this paucity could focus on the degree to which, for example, services are linked across sectors and levels of government, are not duplicative, and address the specified outcomes derived from the definitional work discussed above. Once the preeminent standards and indicators for systems effectiveness are accomplished, they can be operationalized in usable tools. Moving from the development of measures to methodology, some important steps have been taken; recent advances evoking theories of change and estimation strategies have tilted the research to policy agenda. Yet, thoughtful analysis must be rendered as to how systems data can be optimally captured. Work is also needed to address the timing of such data collection, the tools used to procure information, and the mechanisms to effectively process the data. Qualitative and case study methodologies remain germane to systems research, but the design of unique tools and methods that enable the systemic collection of data is badly needed, especially if such research is expected to meet the scientific standards of reliability and validity. Moreover, it may well be that systems thinking, so essential to usable research, will create an entirely different approach to the international ECEC research enterprise. Rather than ‘bowling alone’, scholars interested in systemic work could benefit from

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having a forum in which to share their present approaches, explore new methods, and apply them in a collegial context. Such tool development and methodological experimentation assure the advancement of any field, and are certainly timely for ECEC systems research.

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funds can emanate from governments, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and corporate/private philanthropy. Professional organizations should foster such efforts by highlighting inventive systems studies in their scholarly publications and meetings. In short, ECEC systems research is like a toddler; it is taking a lot of initial steps, but remains vulnerable and in need of support.

Training for and Supporting Systems Research Without scholars to carry out systems research, there will be no such research. Given that systems research involves new ways of thinking and processing information, scholars need to be trained in this method, as well as the evolving methodologies that will accompany its expansion. Presently, however, most ECEC programs focus on one discipline and scholarship tends to follow in linear fashion. Since systems research involves knowledge of multiple disciplines concurrently, it is necessary to train individuals who are not only agile with qualitative and quantitative research methods, but who can integrate diverse disciplines. Too often, professional schools train in the content and methods of their own discipline and offer far too few opportunities for interdisciplinary training. To address this paucity, individuals from different disciplines often carry out systems scholarship collaboratively. Sub-Saharan Africa’s ECD Virtual University, for example, has created interdisciplinary teams to engage in knowledge production and sharing for the purposes of informing policy and practice (Pence & Marfo, 2005; Pence & Shafer, 2006). Fostering this kind of intellectual inquiry can be incentivized if institutions offer individual grants, fellowships, and other forms of acknowledgement for such collaborative, cutting-edge work. Beyond preparing individuals for systems scholarship, there must also be support for conducting systemic research. Large multinational organizations have been generous in launching such efforts, but more funding is needed to promote systems research. Such

Conclusion Within the last three decades, the promulgation of early childhood research has expanded exponentially. Greater sophistication in the use of research has dramatically influenced the quantity of services made available to children globally. Most notably, research from the fields of neuroscience and economics has made a profound impact. Yet, as early childhood services expand and become simultaneously more nuanced and diverse, the field faces significant challenges. In addition to funding and rendering the ECEC infrastructure more effective, ECEC is being asked to help address countless global and social problems, including the depletion of the environment, challenges to world peace, and the curtailment of the rampant effects of social trafficking. Increasingly conceptualized more broadly to accommodate these panacea-like hopes, ECEC must work to assure that its services are high quality, equitably distributed, sustainable, and scalable. To meet all of these demands, new data and data systems are needed and, as this chapter contends, new approaches to usable research that incorporate systems thinking are crucial. At the cusp of a formative revolution, abetted by the 2016 Sustainable Development Goals, the field of ECEC will benefit from new thinking about the nature, content, and conduct of the research enterprise needed to support its next wave of development. In both design and intent, systems research provides one potential vehicle to address complex polemics and increasingly complex contemporary ECEC issues.

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35 The Development of a United ECEC Workforce in New Zealand and England: A Long, Slow and Fitful Journey Claire Cameron, Carmen Dalli and Antonia Simon

Introduction Professionalisation of the ECEC workforce in both New Zealand (NZ)1 and England has been a longstanding policy concern (e.g. Dalli & Urban, 2010; Miller & Cable, 2008). One developmental trajectory has been efforts to unite the ‘care’ and ‘education’ workforce conceptually, administratively and in practice. In NZ this began in the 1980s (Meade & Podmore, 2002) and in England from 1997. A united care and education workforce is associated with benefits such as conceptual coherence, integrated curricula, more access to services for younger children, and a levelling of historic inequity between care and education workers. In six case studies of ECEC integration, all reported positive results (Kaga, Bennett & Moss, 2010). This chapter traces the different policy trajectories of ECEC workforce development in NZ and England. After setting out some issues in common we use current workforce data to illustrate the impact of policy in the two countries. We then focus on three illustrative issues

to examine: (1) the complexities of uniting workforce models of the ‘new teacher’ in NZ and the (now deleted) ‘early years professional’ in England; (2) the pay and conditions of work of the ECEC workforce in the two countries; and (3) home-based ECEC, called family daycare in NZ and childminding in England. Drawing on what we call ‘sector voices’ we track the impact of political advocacy, union activism and eventual conservative backlash in creating the current profile of the ECEC workforce in each country to evaluate the extent to which a truly united workforce has been achieved. We argue that despite major steps forward through qualifications and, in New Zealand, pay, historical tensions about the relationship between care and education continue to take their toll on the ambition of a wholly professionalised workforce in the ECEC sector. Throughout the chapter we refer to the whole sector as early childhood education and care or ECEC, in keeping with OECD tradition and the dominant practice in NZ. Yet we are aware that this broad term covers a range

Uniting the ECEC workforce in New Zealand & England

of services whose names serve to indicate their historical origins and scope. ECEC includes ‘childcare’ such as day nurseries, childminders or family daycare and playgroups or playcentres, as well as ‘early education’ services such as preschools, kindergartens and schools.

A common heritage and integrationist policies In common with many other countries, both NZ and England had – until the late twentieth century – a split workforce based on a division between early education services for children aged 3 and over, supported by public funding, and services for children up to 3 years based on a model of care or ‘minding’ the children while parents worked. Typically, services for children under 3 received much less public funding, if any. The different services were associated with the priorities of different government departments (typically ‘education’ and ‘welfare’); further differences have been noted related to ‘access, regulation, funding and workforce, lead[ing] to problems of inequality and lack of continuity for children, parents and workers’ (Kaga et al., 2010, p. 7; Kamerman, 2000). Within NZ, the first formal step to integrate the childcare and preschool education workforce was taken on 1 July 1986 when, following years of lobbying by childcare activists, administrative and policy responsibility for childcare services was transferred from the Department of Social Welfare to the Department of Education (Meade & Podmore, 2002). This break from the welfare principle as the driving force behind childcare policy was justified as a way to achieve ‘equitable funding for childcare’ (State Services Commission, 1980, p. 91). It was also consistent with a growing consensus within the early childhood field that it was very difficult to separate care and education (e.g. Smith, 1988). As the integration of childcare policy and administration into the Department of Education was

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effected, a terminological shift also occurred in the official discourse with the terms ‘childcare’, ‘daycare’ and ‘preschool’ replaced by the more inclusive term ‘early childhood education and care’ (May, 2007). The historical integration of childcare and preschool services at the policy level was followed in 1988 by the integration of the previously separate training pathways for work in childcare centres and kindergartens into one three-year early childhood teacher education diploma programme in Colleges of Education. The result was that by the end of 1990, new cohorts of early childhood teachers were graduating with a shared history of integrated study and practicum experiences gained across different ECEC settings. As these graduates took up positions in diverse parts of the sector, met at cross-sector conferences and attended the same in-service professional learning courses, historical, philosophical and organisational boundaries started to dissolve and a new sense of sector unity emerged (Dalli, 2010). With the subsequent merger of Colleges of Education with university departments of education in the early 1990s, three-year diploma-level courses at Colleges of Education were phased out and replaced by a new three-year Bachelor of Education degree, making early childhood teaching in NZ a graduate profession. In the late 1980s, the ECEC sector was also included in widespread reforms of education aimed at creating a seamless education system. In the ECEC sector this led to the Before Five (Lange, 1988) policies which sought to remove long-standing funding inequities between previously called ‘childcare’ and ‘preschool’ services, and to improve quality and equity of access. These policies were widely welcomed (Meade, 1990) though short-lived. In 1990, within months of the election of a neoliberal National government, the Before Five funding policies were dismantled, leaving the integration of childcare administration under education, and the introduction of integrated training for work across the ECEC sector as the main policy achievements of the 1980s.

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One of the strengths of the NZ ECEC sector has been the mobilisation of the centre-based early childhood workforce into professional organisations and trade unions, with union mergers in the early 1990s strengthening the negotiating ability of the workforce. First, the Early Childhood Workers’ Union and the Kindergarten Teachers’ Union joined forces to become the Combined Early Childhood Union of Aotearoa New Zealand (CECUA), and, second, CECUA amalgamated with the primary school teachers union, the NZ Educational Institute (NZEI) – Te Riu Roa. This strategic alliance was instrumental in facilitating a job-sizing exercise between kindergarten and primary-school teaching, resulting in a campaign for pay parity between them. Negotiated in 2002, pay parity for kindergarten teachers was later extended to all qualified early childhood (EC) teachers working in education and care centres – ­formerly called ‘childcare’ (May, 2007). As three-year integrated training for new ECEC teachers was becoming the norm, the need for coherent policies to upskill the existing early childhood workforce remained a key preoccupation throughout the 1990s (Early Childhood Group, 1994). An important development was the implementation of a point system (NZ Government, 1990) through which ECEC staff across the sector could have their very diverse training background, qualifications and experience evaluated by the New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA). The point system provided a focus for the ECEC workforce and a means for assessing progress towards training goals; it also helped to identify the desirable elements in a ‘benchmark’ qualification for work in ECEC (Meade & Dalli, 1992; NZQA, 1996). The imperative for a benchmark qualification became more urgent with the launch of Te Wh¯ariki (Ministry of Education, 1996), the internationally acclaimed NZ early childhood curriculum. Simultaneous professional development initiatives to support implementation of the curriculum fostered the growing sense of workforce unity brought about by the integrated initial training and the union amalgamations.

Slowly, but surely, a ‘new teacher model’ for ECEC work was taking shape. The new teacher model was most fully articulated in the ten-year strategic plan (SP) called Pathways to the Future: Ng¯a Huarahi Arataki (Ministry of Education, 2002), launched by the Labour-led coalition government elected in 1999. Building on sector recommendations, the SP set a goal that by 2012 all staff in ‘teacherled’ early childhood services for 0 to 6-yearolds would be fully qualified and registered teachers with parity of pay with primary school teachers. Teacher-led services are services like kindergartens and education and care centres which are staffed by trained teachers. They are distinct from parent/wh¯anau-led services – like play centres or ng¯a k¯ohanga reo – where family members are present alongside their children during the hours of operation. The qualification goal in the SP did not apply to these parent-led services. It also did not apply to home-based educators or caregivers who work directly with children. However, since home-based networks are co-ordinated by qualified teachers, and are part of the teacher-led part of the ECEC sector, the qualification requirement did apply to the home-based network co-ordinators. The implementation of the SP was brought to a premature halt by the election in 2008 of a conservative-led neoliberal coalition government. Nonetheless, by then a major milestone had been achieved: the new ECEC teacher model was firmly in place in teacher-led ECEC settings. In England, the story of integration started later and was one of stutter and stall rather than steady progression through streamlined policy. In 1997, the new Labour administration inherited a fragmented system of ‘daycare’ and ‘early education’ that was largely ignored by policy and split between health and education departments. Over the preceding 20 years, child poverty and inequality had been rising with lone parents particularly likely to be at risk. At the same time, demand for full ‘daycare’ was on the increase, principally among working mothers earning higher incomes (Moss, 2014).

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Provision was inadequate to meet demand, and – apart from nursery schools and classes which employed teachers – staffed by low paid and low qualified ‘care’ workers with a confusing array of job titles (McGillivray, 2008). The Labour government advocated early childhood education and care services as a means to encourage parental (principally mothers’) employment and so address child poverty. In three main ways, the integration of care and education was pursued. First, in 1998, an important integrationist step was taken when governmental responsibility for ECEC was consolidated in one department, education, in the National Childcare Strategy (DfEE, 1998). In 2007, local administrative areas (called local authorities) mirrored this step, establishing Departments of Children’s Services. Second, an early years curriculum was introduced for all children attending ECEC services. First named (in 2000) as the Foundation Stage, the curriculum was for children aged 3 to the end of the first, reception, year in primary school (usually aged 5). In 2008 this was extended to all children aged 0 to 5 and called the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS). The EYFS was clearly positioned within an ‘educational’ framework; it predefined early learning goals in areas of learning and development that were seen as ‘useful for school’ (Bennett, 2006), and all care and education practitioners, regardless of their qualification or background, were expected to deliver it. In 2012, the EYFS was modified, and the number of learning goals reduced. But, as Moss (2014) points out, the focus on a narrow definition of education, mainly on literacy and numeracy, sharpened in this iteration, with an emphasis on the role of ECEC services in preparing children for school, or ‘school readiness’. The third dimension of integration in English ECEC was that of regulation. In 2002, the schools inspection agency, Ofsted, adopted responsibility for regulating all childcare services (apart from nannies and au pairs who are employed by parents in their homes) as well as early childhood services in schools. All three

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dimensions of integration demonstrate a commitment to perceiving ECEC as ‘education’ services at a time when education was increasingly seen as driven by standards of academic performance. It appeared to be less of an equal status ‘integration’ of care and education and more of an unequal subsumption of care under a schools agenda. The introduction of children’s centres by the Labour government (in 1998, when they were known as Sure Start local programmes) is a good example of working with concepts of integration in England. Building on earlier experience of combined nursery/family centres (OECD, 2000), children’s centres were envisaged as a universal neighbourhood service to cater for children of working and studying parents as well as supporting parents who needed additional help. By 2010, there were 3,500 Children’s Centres in England. Their main role was to provide advice, guidance and support for parents, and, in the most deprived areas, to provide care and education sessions. At their best, Children’s Centres brought together, under one roof, full-day nursery education and childcare, with health and employment advice and support for parents. But, by 2010, only 800 of the 3500 Children’s Centres offered care and education places. They complemented, but did not replace, existing ECEC services. However, in other respects, integration did not take place. The workforce, as we shall see in the next section, is still characterised by teachers working in school-based services and care workers (and others) in nurseries and in domestic premises. In contrast to NZ, there has been little integration of qualifications for those working with children under compulsory school age and no discernible sector strength derived from trade union organisation and membership. We discuss one integrationist occupational model, now discarded (and replaced), called the Early Years Professional, later in the chapter. There have been shifts in government funding. Tax credits were introduced to support families ‘childcare’ costs, and, most recently, extending an entitlement to free ‘childcare’

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from 15 to for 30 hours per week for children aged 3 and 4, and for the most disadvantaged 2-year-olds (DfE, 2015) in registered provision which can be schools, nurseries or other registered services. This entitlement is for children of employed parents, effectively subsidising childcare, not education, and the arrangement still leaves many parents funding places themselves. Clearly, the terminology used in this financial support reflects a split between care and education rather than a united field of ECEC. At the time of writing, ministerial responsibility for ‘childcare and early years’ sits with the portfolio of the minister responsible for women and equalities, child poverty reduction, mental health services for children, school funding, and careers advice (DfE, 2016). It is too early to tell what this will mean for the integration of the care and education agenda in EC services.

Overall, the story of integration of previously split early childhood workforce occupations in NZ and England can be illustrated through Tables 35.1 and 35.2. Rather more progress towards integration can be seen in NZ in Table 35.1, which shows services designed for children of the entire preschool age range (rather than being split between older and younger age groups), and fewer occupational titles than in England. In Table 35.2, we compare, so far as is possible, the size and characteristics of the ECEC workforce. Caution is needed in comparing England with NZ because of the way the data sources compiled vary between the countries. For example, there is no adequate means of counting just those teachers working in early education settings in England, as all teachers in preschool services are counted within a category called ‘primary and secondary teachers’. This leaves us with ‘childcare’ workers. Comparing

Table 35.1 Ministry responsible, service types, age attending and occupational titles in England and New Zealand

England

New Zealand

Ministry responsible

Services

Age range attending

Occupations

Department for Education

Day nurseries

0 to 5

Day nursery worker

Playgroups Childminders Nursery schools; primary schools with nursery classes

2.5 to 4 0 to 7 3 to 4 (plus some 2-y-o)

Primary schools with reception classes but no nursery classes Children’s centres Teacher-led services:

4 to 5

Nursery nurse Teaching assistant

0 to 5

Outreach worker, playworker

Kindergartens Education and care services Home-based (H-B) education and care Parent-led services: Playcentres Te K ¯ohangaReo/M ¯aori language nest Playgroups

1 to 5 0 to 5 0 to 5

Teacher Teacher Teacher (for H-B network co-ordinator); H-B educator

0 to 5 0 to 5

Educator Kaiako

0 to 5

Educator

Department of Education

Nursery nurse Playgroup worker Childminder Teacher

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Table 35.2 Numbers of childcare workers (England) and ECE teachers and home-based educators/co-ordinators (New Zealand) England: childcare workers NZ: ECE teachers England numbers (2012–14): Childminders and related (including nannies and au-pairs) Nursery nurses and assistants Playworkers NZ numbers 2013: Kindergarten teachers Home-based co-ordinators of services Home-based educators (part of an organised network; under the supervision of home-based co-ordinators) Education and care services (previously childcare) Casual education and care services Hospital-based services Correspondence school Characteristic (%) Age: Under 24 years 25–34 years 35–44 years 45–54 years 55–64 years 65 years and over Total Sex: Male Female Total Ethnicity (England):

100,916 149,522 23,404

– – –

– – –

2,806 628 6,486

– – – –

18,620 76 49 16

24% 27% 21% 18% 9% 1% 100%

12% 26% 26% 21% 12% 2% 100%

2% 98% 100%

3% 97% 100%

White Black and Minority Ethnic Total Ethnicity (NZ): European Maori Pacific Peoples Asian Other Total Highest level of qualification of childcare workers (England):

89% 11% 100%

– – –

– – – – – –

75% 14% 6% 12% 2% 100%

Degree level or higher Post-school qualification Other None/Don’t know Total

11% 16% 71% 2% 100%

– – – – –

(Continued)

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Table 35.2 Numbers of childcare workers (England) and ECE teachers and home-based educators/co-ordinators (New Zealand) (Continued) England: childcare workers NZ: ECE teachers Education NZ with benchmark qualification of a 3-year post-school/undergrad diploma or degree: % of staff in licensed teacher-led services Hours worked a week: 1–9 10–19 20–29 30–39 40–49 50–59 60 or more Total

–

76% (n = 16,917)

4% 17% 20% 29% 22% 6% 2% 100%

5% 9% 14% 26% 41% 3% 2% 100%

Source: Data sources for New Zealand are ‘Census 2013’ Statistics on ECE Teachers (Morrison, 2014), and from the annually updated ECE statistical reports on the Ministry of Education’s website Data source for England: The UK Office for National Statistics Labour Force Survey (LFS). This survey provides self-reported data by workers collected annually from around 60,000 households. Occupational groups in the LFS group together staff in private day nurseries, playgroups and as childminders and related occupations (including nannies and au-pairs) to form ‘childcare’. ‘Education’ includes teachers in primary schools and nursery classes as well as secondary teachers, special education teachers, educational assistants, teaching professionals and school midday assistants. Not all of the occupations in this ‘education’ group are therefore relevant to the ECEC sector in England as they cover provision for children beyond 5 years of age (e.g. including secondary school teachers).

this group with ‘teachers’ in NZ means including those working with rather different professional education backgrounds. In some cases it has been possible to make comparisons between workers in England and teachers and educators in NZ and these are given in Table 35.3. However, it is not possible to compare the two workforces on education levels: while in England it is possible to establish a ‘highest level’ of qualification, the discourse in NZ is rather different, with national statistics distinguishing between holders and non-holders of the benchmark qualification of a three-year diploma or undergraduate degree (see Table 35.2). Thus NZ statistics only show the proportion of qualified teachers within the total workforce and not the different levels of training. There is a clear difference regarding qualifications between the two countries. There is missing data, as we know that almost all nursery and primary teachers in England have a relevant degree-level qualification and a recognised teaching qualification but we do

not know how many nursery teachers are in employment. Looking at the qualifications of English childcare workers (Table 35.2), we see a high proportion in the ‘other’ category (which includes school-leaving and workplace-based qualifications), and around a quarter have a post-school qualification including bachelor degrees. Among EC practitioners in NZ, at the end of 2013, over threequarters (76%) of staff in licensed teacher-led services held the benchmark qualification of a three-year bachelor degree or diploma programme (Ministry of Education, 2014). It is notable that, as workforce integration has progressed in NZ, the points of crossover with English childcare workers have decreased. Childminders in England, for example, are largely self-employed with minimal requirements for keeping written policies or supervision (DfE, 2014), although they must adhere to the early years curriculum. Home-based educators in NZ, by contrast, are members of local networks, and their practice is supervised and

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Table 35.3  Annual income comparison, England and New Zealand Income bands England (PPP converted) England 2012–2014 (LFS)

Income bands NZ

NZ 2013 (Census)

£2,450 or less £2,451–4902 £4,903–9,804 £9,805–14,706 £14,707–24,510 £24,511+

$5,000 or less $5,001–10,000 $10,001–20,000 $20,001–$30,000 $30,001–$50,000 $50,001+

4% 5% 13% 17% 36% 25%

6% 15% 31% 28% 18% 2%

Source: https://data.oecd.org/conversion/purchasing-power-parities-ppp.htm. PPP value for UK has been divided by PPP value for NZ to create a multiplier which has been applied to the cash values in NZ dollars and rounded Note: Data on pay from LFS has been converted using Purchasing Power Parities so that the income categories are directly comparable to those for the NZ ECE workforce given in the Census.

supported by home-based coordinators who hold a teaching qualification, making homebased ECEC a ‘teacher-led’ service. Arguably, the two roles, and expectations of them, are diverging. What is also clear is that teachers in NZ, which include those working in services previously considered ‘childcare’, are older than childcare workers in England overall. While nearly all workers in both countries are female, there seems to be greater ethnic diversity among staff in NZ. Clear differences between ECEC practitioners in England and NZ are visible when we examine pay. Table 35.3 sets out the annual income of childcare workers in the English Labour Force Survey and early childhood teachers in the NZ census for 2013 (Morrison, 2014). Childcare workers are very low paid in England. Using Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) conversion, Table 35.3 shows that over half of childcare workers in England are earning less than £10,000 per annum (or $NZ20,390, converted using PPP for 2013) compared with 22% of the NZ ECE workforce. The low pay is in part explained by the high proportion of childcare workers in part-time employment (especially among playgroup workers, where the number of hours has declined sharply in the last ten years) (Simon, Owen & Hollingworth, 2016). Table 35.2 shows that 41% of childcare workers in England work fewer than 29 hours compared with 28% of NZ ECE teachers. The

overall low level of pay could also be explained by the young age profile of the English workforce (around a quarter of workers are under 24 years of age – see Table 35.2). This picture of low pay is supported by findings from the UK’s Low Pay Commission (2014): 41% of the childcare workforce are paid less than £7 per hour ($NZ14.27, converted using PPP for 2013). Figures presented here show some impact from the highly integrationist policies in NZ, compared to a rather more piecemeal approach in England. In both countries, however, there are complexities in uniting the ECEC workforce, illustrated below using three examples: the occupational models of the ‘early childhood teacher’ in NZ and the Early Years Professional in England; the role of advocacy and unionisation in shaping integrationism; and the particular issue of childminders/family daycarers and how they embody (or not) care and education.

Uniting care and education through occupational models The ‘Early Childhood Teacher’ in NZ As noted earlier, the ten-year Strategic Plan (SP), Pathways to the Future (Ministry of Education, 2002), envisaged the ‘early

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childhood teacher’ as the main occupation working with young children in centre-based provision and co-ordinating home-based networks. This was in contrast to the earlier separate roles of ‘kindergarten teacher’, ‘childcare worker’ and ‘early childhood educator’. The SP laid out target percentages of fully qualified and registered teachers to be achieved incrementally in teacher-led services over a ten-year period to 2012. The benchmark qualification was deemed to be a three-year diploma or undergraduate degree and could be acquired in a variety of ways. An array of qualifications, ranging from equivalency to a three-year Diploma of Teaching through to four-year degrees and one-year graduate programmes, was subsequently approved for registration with the NZ Teachers Council (renamed the Education Council in 2015). Teacher registration is achieved through successful completion of a post-qualification induction programme through which applicants are mentored by a registered teacher to meet registration criteria. Until this milestone is reached, newly qualified and employed teachers are called ‘provisionally registered teachers’. From 2011, primary school teaching qualifications also became acceptable for registration as an EC teacher. Throughout the implementation of the SP this inclusive approach to qualification and registration was supported through a range of financial incentives, including staff scholarships, higher funding rates for ECEC services meeting target levels of qualified staff; and loans and grants for students. However, in 2009, a new centre-right government elected just as the effects of the global financial crisis started to impact NZ, announced that it would no longer pursue the goal of 100% fully qualified teaching staff by 2012 and capped the top funding rate at the level of 80% qualified staff. Thus, from the budget of 2009/2010, the different funding streams – and those for other professional development initiatives – were withdrawn including for the flagship Centre of Innovation (COI) action research programme. The COI programme had created models of good practice which were disseminated

nationally and internationally (Meade, 2010), with research teams recording the professional benefits of becoming teacher-researchers (e.g. Simmons et al., 2007). By 2009, when implementation of the strategic plan was prematurely halted, 20 teaching teams had been part of the COI programme and an unpublished evaluation of the programme was anecdotally reported to have documented extensive impact on improving sector morale and engagement with initiatives to enhance practice. Additionally, by 2010 the proportion of staff holding the recognised ‘benchmark’ teacher qualification had risen impressively to 66.8% of all staff in teacher-led services (Ministry of Education, 2014) compared to the 50.8% figure in 2004 (Ministry of Education, 2014), with the biggest increase occurring amongst teachers working in education and care centres versus kindergartens – which had always been staffed by qualified teachers. The termination of the SP policies significantly slowed the momentum of change within the sector (Dalli, 2010). While the figures of qualified staff continued to rise over subsequent years to reach 74.6% of the workforce by 2014, this 30.5% increase over 2004 figures (Ministry of Education, 2014) fell significantly short of the expectations of 100% qualified staff in teacher-led services by 2012. Many believed that with a sustained supportive policy infrastructure, the 100% target would have been achievable. A concerning trend by 2014 was evidence that life as an early childhood teacher remained less lucrative than in other education sectors (Morrison, 2014). In a report which integrated 2013 national census data with workforce data gathered by the Ministry of Education, Morrison showed that only 25% of ECE teachers earn more than $NZ50,000 (£24,522, converted using PPP for 2013) compared to 39% of all employed adults, and 67% of school teachers. This suggests that despite progressive introduction since 2002, pay parity has not been wholly achieved for the ECEC sector. One likely consequence is that qualified EC teachers, particularly younger ones, will leave the sector. With

Uniting the ECEC workforce in New Zealand & England

the 80% qualified staff now seen as the new target, and with qualified staff making up 74.6% of the ECEC workforce in teacher-led services (Ministry of Education, 2014), EC teachers are finding themselves working with unqualified staff on a more regular basis, with concerns about rising workplace stress. One cannot expect qualified teachers to carry the responsibility for ensuring a quality experience for children and families by themselves (Meade et al., 2012). A recent survey of qualified EC staff found that despite increased professionalisation through qualifications, EC teachers were experiencing a renewed sense of low societal esteem for their work and low occupational value (Dalli & Cherrington, 2015; see also Kane & Mallon et al., 2006).

Early Years Professional Status (EYPS) Early Years Professional Status (EYPS) in England was an attempt to build a graduate-level occupational model that combined care and education with the equivalent status of qualified teachers. This is similar to its NZ counterpart, and the ‘new teacher’ was one model considered during consultation (DfES, 2003), the other being the continental European social pedagogue. Introduced in 2007, by 2014 there were approximately 13,300 EYPs in England (Taylor, 2014). The model arose ‘out of thin air’ (Moss, 2008, p. 127), being neither the new all-graduate teacher model nor the holistic model of pedagogue with applicability across children’s services. But the need for a graduate status arose from influential research by Sylva et al. (2003, 2010) linking the quality of ECEC provision with the quality of staff. The effect of high quality staff was particularly marked for the social and learning gains of children living in economically disadvantaged areas. Sylva et  al. (2003, 2010) had recommended there should be a high proportion of trained teachers, or equivalent, holding lead positions in ECEC settings in order to achieve good outcomes. Equivalence, however, was never defined. The EYP model sought

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to integrate care and education, to be applicable across the whole 0 to 5 year age range, and to be attractive to employers in private, voluntary and independent (PVI) and public sector provision. Each setting was supposed to have one graduate or EYP and two in settings in areas of high levels of social disadvantage. Four routes to attaining the Status, dependent on prior experience and qualifications, were introduced, taking 3 and 15 months to complete. The EYP was to lead practice and be a change agent in the setting. Training was a collaboration between training providers, including universities and employers. The implementation of the EYP model was part of a wider investment in ECEC, including a Transformation Fund, later superseded by a Graduate Leader Fund (GLF), as ‘ring-fenced funding to support all full-day care PVI sector providers in employing a graduate or Early Years Professional by 2015’ (Mathers et al., 2012, p. 12). The GLF was intended to support locally designed professional development. Outcomes were measured against the baseline of the number of graduates leading practice in PVI full-day care settings in each area (Mathers et al., 2012). Overall, the EYP role brought significant gains to children’s care and education, particularly those in the age range 30 months to 5 years. Mathers et al. (2012, p. 6) found improvements in ‘positive staff-child interactions; support for communication, language and literacy; reasoning/thinking skills and scientific understanding; provision of a developmentally appropriate schedule; and providing for individual needs and diversity’. The EYP was also often a catalyst for improvements to children’s learning and structural changes such as a key worker system or parental involvement. Fewer gains from EYP presence were noted in the quality of provision for younger children (birth to 30 months) (Mathers et al., 2012). There were professional development advantages from attaining EYPS. Trainees noted increased professional confidence and new knowledge and skills (Hadfield et  al., 2012; Roberts-Holmes, 2013), particularly theoretical knowledge and its relationship to

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practice. However, qualified teachers, who might have undertaken the EYP training to better equip themselves in relation to the 0 to 3 age group, felt it confirmed what they already knew and represented ‘jumping through more hoops’ (Roberts-Holmes, 2013, p. 345). One intention of the EYP was that practitioners would be equipped to lead practice in the workplace and inspire other practitioners (CWDC, 2010, cited in McDowell Clark, 2012) through modelling good practice. Early studies indicated that the ‘change agent’ role was proving difficult (Simpson, 2010), particularly for those not already in senior positions (Cameron and Miller, 2016; McDowell Clark, 2012). Most EYPs reported that holding the Status had improved their ability to carry out improvements in their settings, and that colleagues were more receptive to their ideas (Hadfield et al., 2012). McDowell Clark (2012) characterised the EYP role as exercising ‘catalytic leadership’ where the practitioner has influence but not authority. In theory, this accords with the position of teachers in terms of being free from financial, administrative and managerial demands to focus on pedagogical leadership (Aubrey, 2007; Roberts-Holmes, 2013). In practice, the roles of EYP and manager were often combined, particularly for those working in the PVI sector (Hadfield et al., 2012). While the EYPS did address pedagogical coherence, it did little in terms of workforce professionalisation. There was a lack of parity with early childhood teachers, in terms of pay and conditions, and professional status. The EYPS did not convey the Qualified Teacher Status that qualified teachers enjoyed. Despite the assertion of broad equivalence between the two Statuses they were in fact quite distinctive. Holders of the EYPS are counted as part of the childcare workforce, which, as noted in Table 35.2, is characterised by low salaries. In the PVI sector, salary is closely linked to the ability of parents to pay fees. Despite some tax credit subsidies, parents in England spend more of their net income on ECEC costs than in other OECD countries, meaning limited room for salary increases for the introduction of EYPS. Working as a graduate in

the PVI ECEC sector meant earning little more than half the national (graduate and non-graduate) mean hourly wage for the UK (Brind et al., 2014). The EYP model threatened to ‘ghettoise’ EYPs in the lower paid private and voluntary sector (Hevey, 2007). With prescience, Hevey (2007) questioned the long-term affordability of EYPs once initial government funding ended. In 2013, new occupational models were introduced and EYPs were replaced by Early Years Teachers. The latter were designed to be teaching ‘specialists in early childhood development, trained to work with babies and young children’. They had to meet ‘the same entry requirements as primary classroom trainee teachers’ (DfE, 2013, p. 27), and were supported by Early Years Educators, whose entry criteria were less stringent. These new models employed the terminology of education but were not accompanied by new measures to address unity across the care and education workforce. By May 2016, EYT training providers were closing courses due to lack of demand (Crown, 2016).

Union representation and professional advocacy in ECEC The second illustrative issue of workforce integration is collective action in the ECEC sector and, within NZ, the winning of pay parity for early childhood teachers with their primary school peers. Unionism for NZ ECEC staff has a relatively short history with the first early childhood professional organisation, the Kindergarten Teachers’ Association (KTA), established in 1952. In 1958, KTA was recognised as a service organisation able to enter into salary negotiations on behalf of its members. During the 1960s and 1970s, the rapid expansion of the kindergarten service saw the KTA become a significant political force with salaries and staffing as the key issues (Clark, Cook & Pearson, 1983). By contrast, unionisation of childcare workers did not start till 1982 with the setting up of the Early Childhood Workers’ Union (ECWU) by a group of women activists

Uniting the ECEC workforce in New Zealand & England

building on 20 years of activism and lobbying to improve the training and public perception of childcare workers. Clark, Cook and Pearson (1983) argued that without a common background of training, childcare workers typically had stron­ger relationships with the parents in their c­ entre – who paid their wages – than with other childcare workers. But this close relationship with parents also made collective action to improve pay harder to achieve than for kindergarten teachers who had trained together, belonged to regional associations, and negotiated salaries with the government. At the same time there was much in common, not least their female membership and common concern with the care and education of children. Clark et al. (1983, p. 19) called for an ‘effective forum for the debate over the values and beliefs surrounding the role of men and women, community and state, and their responsibility for child-rearing’. This was a strongly activist, feminist movement, concerned with advancing the cause of quality provision for children, and an enhanced status for early childhood work. In 1990, ECWU amalgamated with KTA to form the Combined Early Childhood Union of Aotearoa (CECUA). One KTA member, interviewed in 1994, recalled of this time: What was emerging was a group of young women who were actually starting to look at the job as a profession and that was a key thing that started the change … We had to make political stands against the government of the day because of the appalling wages and our conditions of employment. (reported in May, 1997, p. 7)

The professional aspiration captured in this teacher’s statement reflected the need to improve employment and pay conditions and was strongly connected to political action. The merger of CECUA with NZEI in 1994 laid the ground for this aspiration to take shape: by the end of the year NZEI had already published two reports to build the pay parity argument for both kindergarten teachers (NZEI, 1994a) and for early childhood ‘workers’ (NZEI, 1994b). Meanwhile, another campaign was brewing. In 1990 NZ had elected a New Right

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government that, within weeks, had dismantled many of the recently-introduced Before Five policies (Dalli, 1994; Meade & Dalli, 1992). Under the guise of establishing funding equity across all services, this government also took away the funding base for kindergartens, and effectively privatised them (Davison, 1997). By1995, the funding situation of kindergartens was so dire that NZEI mounted a 17-month campaign, marshalling parents to its cause, to reverse the government’s privatisation policy and to increase kindergarten teachers’ salaries. In this context, the pay parity issue receded from the public eye. By the mid-1990s the sector had lost trust in the New Right government’s will to move forward the sector’s integrationist agenda of ensuring quality across services. Apart from the erosion of the Before Five policies, and the attempt to privatise kindergartens, the sector was incensed that the results of a Ministry of Education-led national forum in 1994 – on the future of ECEC – were ignored. In response, the NZEI set up a working party to develop a statement of what the ECEC sector wanted for the future, resulting in a policy blueprint entitled Future Directions (New Zealand Educational Institute, 1996). The report was well received by political parties beyond government and eventually became the basis of Labour’s 1999 pre-election manifesto (Wells, 1999). A key recommendation was that ‘government establish a working group to progress work on a unified teaching pay scale and pay parity for early childhood teachers’ (New Zealand Educational Institute, 1996, p. 24). In 2002, armed with an NZEI-commissioned pay comparison of the work of kindergarten teachers against that of primary teachers (Burns, 1999), NZEI secured a government commitment to set up a ministerial working group to establish benchmarks for pay parity of kindergarten teachers with school teachers and to recommend implementation (May, 2007; Mitchell, 2002). In a memorable statement at an early childhood conference in 2005, the then minister of education, Trevor Mallard, stated: ‘Early childhood people are being regarded as professionals. They have

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gone from “childcarer” to “educator”. This was the debate of the 70s’ (Mallard, 2005). At the time of writing, NZEI remains the only industrial union acting on behalf of early childhood teachers in salary negotiations, across 17 types of employment agreements. Its current membership includes 4782 early childhood staff, or approximately 22% of the 21239 qualified early childhood teachers registered by the Education Council at August 2016 (see Table 35.4). Significantly, Table 35.4 shows that kindergarten teachers are the most highly unionised with approximately 71% of kindergarten teachers belonging to NZEI; by comparison only 12.5% of all other ECEC qualified and registered teachers contribute to the total ECEC membership. This raises the question of whether the goals of amalgamation in the late 1980s and 1990s have truly been achieved. An NZEI paper written in the late 1990s described the amalgamation as the result of workers recognising the need ‘to hold together collectively to fend off the new right agenda’ (NZEI, undated, p. 4). However, with the non-kindergarten part of the sector being the fastest growing, but having the smallest representation within the ECEC industrial union, it would appear that the new right agenda is once again on the ascendant.

Union activism in NZ is a story of commitment to goals of quality services and equality for members across several decades. Creating a single union and pay parity across the sector are arguably integrationist causes. By contrast, few childcare workers in England are members of trade unions or professional associations despite a long history of organisational presence. Early professional associations reflected the conceptual split between care and education. Different rationales for types of service underscored the evolution of different sector voices throughout the twentieth century (Penn, 2009). The National Society of Day Nurseries, founded in 1906, existed to define and improve the quality of care for young children while their mothers worked. On the other hand, the Nursery Schools Association was founded, in 1923, for the purposes of promoting fully qualified teachers with specialist training as appropriate staffing for young children of nursery school age (then 2 to 7 years). However, advocacy organisations have been influential in shaping the development of ECEC. In the 1960s, the Preschool Playgroups Association (now the Pre-School Learning Alliance) campaigned for part-time, parent-run sessional services to compensate for the lack of early educational opportunities in many areas

Table 35.4 ECEC union membership in New Zealand

ECEC teachers working in education and care settings2 Kindergarten teachers Total

NZEI members at August 20161

Qualified and registered ECEC teachers

Union membership as % of relevant workforce

2343

18620 (20143 numbers)

12.5%4

2439 4782

3433 (at 2014) 212395

71% 22%

Notes: 1 Figures provided by NZEI, 16 August 2016. 2 Includes teachers working under 16 different employment contracts, ranging from the generic Early Childhood Education Agreement, a major home-based network collective agreement, and individual employment agreements. 3 2014 figures were the most recently available at the time of writing. 4 This is a rough estimate rather than an exact proportion since, in the absence of published 2016 figures for total number of ECE teachers and kindergarten teachers, the proportion of union membership has been worked out using 2016 data for current NZEI members, and published 2014 figures (Ministry of Education, 2014) for qualified and registered teachers working in the two different settings. 5 In the absence of published 2016 figures for total ECEC teachers, this total figure is based on the number of practising certificates issued to EC teachers published on the sourced Education Council website, August 2016.

Uniting the ECEC workforce in New Zealand & England

of the country. Playgroups largely supported middle-class non-working mothers, and did little to support the childcare needs of poor and minority ethnic mothers, who were more likely to be employed (Penn, 2009). The prevailing ideology, on which playgroups thrived, was that mothers should stay at home with their young children until they started school. This was challenged, from 1980, by the feminist-inspired National Child Care Campaign (NCCC), which argued that mothers, fathers and children would benefit from ‘Childcare for All’ that combined education and care, staffed by well-trained workers in community nurseries. With some government funding in place, the NCCC spawned the Day Care Trust which ran community nurseries and campaigned on ‘day care’ issues. It remains an important voice for the sector. In 2015, the (now) Family and Day Care Trust (FDCT) and the Pre-School Learning Alliance (PLA) challenged the government’s planned extension of the hours of free childcare available from 16 to 30 on the grounds of financial viability for providers, particularly those in the PVI sector. They argued that government funding did not cover the cost of providing the care, and parents and providers were left to make up the shortfall. The FDCT pointed out that while parents in England already pay higher fees than their counterparts in other European countries, providers find it difficult to cover their costs. Furthermore, in a long-running theme of differential provision for different families, the FDCT argued, in early 2016, that while ECEC can act as a protective factor against the negative effects of poverty, it is currently failing to reach its potential as the distribution of services is: less favourable to families in less prosperous areas … childcare in the least affluent areas is dominated by (state financed) providers in schools, the majority of which do not offer daycare, supported by a limited patchwork of voluntary services and childminders. Families therefore often lack access to year-round, flexible daycare. (Butler & Rutter, 2016, p. 4)

The PLA and the FDCT are just two examples of advocacy organisations across the ECEC field.

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There is also BAECE (the British Association for Early Childhood Education), now Early Learning, and the National Childminding Association, now PACEY (the Professional Association for Childcare and Early Years). What is notable is that the terminology employed often retains the division of ‘daycare’, ‘care’ and ‘education’. This may reflect long-held claims to separate parts of the ECEC workforce for membership recruitment purposes or it may speak to a policy agenda that has still not adopted the internationally agreed nomenclature of ECEC. Government policy, for example, still refers to ‘more great childcare’ and the ‘childcare offer’. While there are numerous sector voices, Cohen et  al. (2004) pointed out that the main teaching unions restrict membership to graduate teachers, and emphasise the superior position of teachers within the care and education workforce. This is in striking contrast to the feminist-inspired NZ rallying cry of unity across the sector. Given the qualification profile of the workforce, the teacher unions’ position makes creating a single sector voice for ECEC in England more or less impossible and inhibits the development of a strong union voice. Actual membership of unions or professional associations is not extensive. PACEY has around 30,000 members, mostly childminders, while Early Education has about 3,500 individual members. One trade union approached to request this information refused to reveal it. Overall, Table  35.5 shows that nearly ten percent of ‘childcare’ workers (i.e. nursery nurses and assistants, childminders and related occupations, and playworkers, so excluding early childhood teachers) in the Labour Force Survey2, are members of a trade union or staff association.

Family daycare: tensions over ‘education’, professionalisation and integration Our third issue is that of family daycare. Daycare in domestic, familiar settings is a wellestablished but in some ways atypical form of

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ECEC in both NZ and England. Indeed, in the drive towards professionalisation and educationally oriented services, it might be considered an outlier. Internationally and in NZ known as ‘family daycare’, but as ‘childminding’ in England, this form of ECEC is both home-based and care-oriented in practice. In England, there are around 100,000 childminders (see Table 35.2); and around 344,000 children have a childminder (Huskinson et al., 2016). It is overwhelmingly (98%) a female occupation, with low earnings (£11,400 p.a. on average; DfE, 2013 – $NZ23,245, converted using PPP for 20133).The central concept defining childminding is an overarching domestic or ‘care’ setting within which ‘educational’ activities might take place. The domestic settings give rise to a longstanding association with mothering, since many childminders take up this work when their own children are young (Everiss & Dalli, 2003; Mooney, Moss & Owen, 2001), and there are no pre-entry requirements that might mitigate, depart from or adapt the value of the mothering experience in caring for nonrelated children. These features speak to an established conceptual division between care and education that is arguably not overcome by the adoption of family daycare within integrated early education in either England or NZ. Since 1998 there have been sustained attempts to draw childminders in England into a largely ‘educational’ framework. Kalitowski (2016) reports that childminders have made ‘great strides’ in terms of both quality (84% are now rated ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ by the national inspection agency, Ofsted) and

qualifications, since two-thirds of registered childminders have a Level 3 award (equivalent to a school-leaving qualification at age 18 and sufficient for working unsupervised with children). Training is not mandatory, however. Qualifications are seen as a proxy for ‘high quality pedagogic environments’ that ensure: practitioners involve children, simulate interactions with and between children and use diverse scaffolding strategies such as guiding, modelling and questioning. [Practitioners should be engaging children] in meaningful activities that promote their conceptual understanding of the world and [helping to] construct positive adult–child relationships. (Kalitwoski, 2016, p. 4)

The argument that only high quality environments help children to make significant progress foregrounds educational objectives for childminding. For children under 3, often seen as a particularly suitable age group for childminding (Vincent & Ball, 2006), Mathers et al. (2014) found that four key criteria around (1) interaction with sensitive and responsive adults, (2) play where children can take the lead, (3) support for communication and language, and (4) being physically active, were most likely to support high quality experiences for children. Graduate-level trained teachers are a critical ingredient in high quality early years settings (Sylva et al., 2004) and for childminders who support disadvantaged 2-year-olds, access to support from a graduate-level trained educator/teacher, strengthened networks and interactions with group provision would be

Table 35.5 Union membership among childcare workers in England 2012–2014, numbers and percentage

Childcare workers

Nursery nurses and assistants Childminders and related occupations Playworkers

Total

Source: LFS 2012–2014; analysis by Charlie Owen and Antonia Simon

Member of trade union of staff association (number/percentage)

Total

17,830/13.1 3811/4.0 3244/11.3 24885/9.6

135952/100 95276/100 28620/100 259848/100

Uniting the ECEC workforce in New Zealand & England

highly beneficial (Mathers et al., 2014; SirajBlatchford & Siraj-Blatchford, 2010). In sum, recent research on the quality of early childhood settings, including childminding, foreground an educational and developmental lens, rather than a ‘care’ one for both the adults and children. Since ‘educational’, in England, at least, is associated with formal settings, such as schools, and since one key lever for quality is inspection and registration, the regulatory environment is a main vehicle for insisting upon (educational) requirements. O’Connell (2011, p. 783), however, argued that childminders quietly contest or even resist the ‘technologies of quality’ associated with inspections. In her study they: disagreed with requirements or advice, that they display posters in their homes; shared recommended resources and brought them out just for inspection visits; regarded activity plans or timetables as overly formal given children’s wishes and needs at any moment in time; and believed that adopting the unfamiliar language in the new curriculum at the time (Birth to Three Matters) to be an unreliable indicator of high quality practice. These childminders identified primarily with a ‘care’ and family ethos and articulated a tension that is not new – between the formal trappings of ‘work’ in a regulated environment and the informal, familial and domestic environment of family and home (Mooney, 2003). That childminders are less likely to be associated with ‘education’ is reflected in parental views that school-based settings are more likely to be encouraging academic and social skills (Huskinson et al., 2016). In the quest for integration under ‘education’, childminding or family daycare – as currently organised on a largely individual, self-employed basis – seems to have limited potential. At a time when the English government is expanding ‘free’ childcare hours and relying on childminders to provide a proportion of these, especially to cover ‘non-standard’ working hours of parents, tensions around the concept of ‘education’ and ‘care’ endure. This may be partly due to the way ‘education’ is perceived as formal, documented and evaluated.

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Another is the way childminders are conceptualised as autonomous and self-regulating. Recent secondary analysis of large-scale data sets suggests that numbers of childminders are decreasing, which might be related to poor awareness of regulatory requirements, and the increasing cost of registration; alternatively it could be related to a rise in illegal childminding, since more people describe themselves as childminders than are registered with Ofsted (Simon et al., 2015). By contrast, family daycare – or homebased education and care (HBEC) – ­provision is growing in NZ. Between 2004 and 2014 the number of services rose by 6.6%, with enrolment numbers in the same period almost doubling from 9,922 to 19,162. This makes HBEC one of the fastest growing early childhood provisions, especially for children under 2 years, who make up 57.8% of all HBEC enrolments (Ministry of Education, 2014). In NZ, HBEC is provided in familial homes as part of a co-ordinated teacher-led service and licensed under the provision of the Education (Early Childhood Services) Regulations 2008 (E(ECS)R, 2008). These regulations specify an adult-to-child ratio of 1:4 children under the age of 6 years (in addition to any child enrolled at school who is the child of the person who provides the education or care). An informal and unregulated home-based sector also exists but remains hidden from the domain of public policy. Some of the recent growth in HBEC services reflects the emergence of a diverse range of new providers, including kindergarten associations who have expanded to include running home-based EC networks under the oversight of their qualified and registered teachers, and au pair agencies who place (typically young) women wanting to travel and experience work life in NZ with a family needing a nanny. Thus, the contemporary NZ HBEC scene is very different to that in the 1970s when the first home-based family daycare services were established (St Johanser, 1980). Despite its recent growth, home-based or family daycare remains largely neglected by researchers, not the least because of the

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difficulty of gaining access to the private space of domestic homes as a research site. This invisibility of HBEC provision to the public eye continues to reinforce the general perception that HBEC is primarily a custodial ­activity – a view shared also by parents (Education Review Office, 2009) – rather than a service that is simultaneously educational, which is the basis on which it is funded. A commonly cited concern is that while most network co-ordinators are registered teachers, only a few home-based educators – who are the ones in direct contact with children and their families (3% in 2013; see Ministry of Education, 2014) – hold qualifications eligible for teacher registration. A government-led report to investigate issues in home-based early childhood education was abandoned in 2013, leaving concerns about the quality and wise use of government resources in HBEC services unresolved (Early Childhood Council, 2013; Education Review Office, 2009; Smith, 2015). Such reports leave the HBEC sector in a very uncomfortable space. On the one hand, the sector benefits from funding allocated for education and care services, while, on the other hand, the available evidence suggests that parts of the sector may be using government funding in ways that were not originally intended. Even providers which are teacher-led, have networks and get good funding, continue to pay HB educators very little. This reinforces the historical image of family daycare as a vocational care activity and maintains an uneasy equilibrium between care and domesticity on the one hand, and the education policy framework that funds it on the other.

Conclusion The two integrationist trajectories documented in this chapter illustrate the critical role of both top-down government-led policy in defining and resourcing a vision for uniting the care and education workforces in ECEC, and the no less important and complementary role of bottom-up sector-led policy advocacy

activity in stimulating visionary policy and responding to policy measures. The chapter shows that ECEC policy in New Zealand – particularly that over the tenyear period to 2010, coupled with energetic and focused early childhood sector specialist advocacy – has driven and sustained a transformation in the workforce towards conceptual coherence, graduate-level qualifications and ongoing professional development as well as higher pay. While the goal of a fully graduate workforce has not yet been achieved, with 74.6% of its EC workforce in teacher-led services qualified at the benchmark level of a three-year diploma or degree, NZ has the most professionalised early childhood workforce in the world. Comparisons on professionalisation dimensions are clearly hampered by a lack of access to data, specifically about early childhood education teachers in England; nonetheless, the direction of travel is clear. ECEC practitioners in England do not have access to a unified occupational model across the preschool age range and the policy activity towards integration has not specifically addressed the low pay for working in what is still often described in terms of ‘childcare’ and not a unified sector of early childhood education and care. However, even within the comparatively ‘good news’ story of the NZ ECEC workforce, we also noted signs of retrenchment in policy and its impact since 2010. While the proportion of the workforce that holds a qualification is rising in both countries, pay has not kept pace and practitioners’ sense of societal esteem for their work remains low. Collective action via unions might be a way forward but our analysis shows that the scope for this may be limited: in NZ and England membership rates are low and/or organisationally fragmented. Lastly, the sense of a conceptually unified workforce is challenged by home-based early education. Numbers of home-based carers are falling in England but rising in NZ. In England, the rise of a (narrowly defined) educational framework for ECEC possibly disadvantages the (broadly defined) ‘care’ provided by childminders. In NZ, the educational framework is more broadly

Uniting the ECEC workforce in New Zealand & England

defined, but the ECEC work arrangements being operationalised within it give some cause for concern that a narrower understanding of care is being resurrected. The case for an integrated workforce is conceptually solid but the political and practical journey remains long and often tortuous with shifting policy directions making progress fitful and fragile.

Notes  1  New Zealand is also known as Aotearoa New Zealand to acknowledge its dual M¯aori and P¯akeha (European/other) heritages.   2  The LFS is the largest and most comprehensive source of data on the workforce collecting data from approximately 60,000 UK households per quarter.  3  Data on pay from LFS for the UK has been converted using Purchasing Power Parities so that the income categories are directly comparable to that for the NZ ECE workforce given in the Census. See here for the data tables: https://data.oecd.org/ conversion/purchasing-power-parities-ppp.htm. A multiplier (dividing £ to NZ for 2013) has been applied to the cash values in £ and NZ dollars to arrive at the internationalised figures in this chapter. The multiplier for converting £ to NZ dollars is 2.0390173; and for NZ dollars to £ is 0.4904323.

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some inner London childminders’ encounters with professionalization. The Sociological Review, 59(4), 779–802. OECD (2000) OECD country note: Early childhood education and care policy in the United Kingdom, available at http://www.oecd.org/ unitedkingdom/2535034.pdf (accessed 29 April 2017) Penn, H. (2009). Public and private: The history of early education and care institutions in the UK. In K. Scheiwe and H. Willekens, Childcare and preschool development in Europe. Berlin: Springer. Roberts-Holmes, G. (2013). The English early years professional Status (EYPS) and the ‘split’ early childhood education and care (ECEC) system. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal 21(3), 339–352. Simmons, H., Schimanski, L., McGarva, P., Woodhead, E., Haworth, P., & Cullen, J. (2007). A reconstruction of roles at Wycliffe Ng¯a Tamariki Kindergarten COI: Teachers as researchers and researchers as teachers. In A. Meade (Ed). Riding the waves: Innovation in early childhood education. Wellington: NZCER Press. Simon, A., Owen., C., & K. Hollingworth. (2015). Provision and use of preschool childcare in Britain: Key findings summary. London: UCL Institute of Education. https:// www.ucl.ac.uk/childcareinbritain/researchoutputs/documents/Childcare-In-BritainWEB.pdf Simon, A., Owen, C., & Hollingworth, K. (2016). Is the ‘quality’ of preschool childcare, measured by the qualifications and pay of the childcare workforce, improving in Britain: American Journal of Educational Research, 4(1), 11–17. Siraj-Blatchford, I., & Siraj-Blatchford, J. (2010). Improving children’s attainment through a better quality of family-based support for early learning. London: Centre for Excellence and Outcomes in Children and Young People’s Services. Smith, A. B. (1988). Education and care components in New Zealand childcare centres

and kindergartens. Australian Journal of Early Childhood, 13(3), 31–36. Smith, A. B. (2015). Can home-based care offer high quality early childhood education? New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, 50(1), 71–85. States Services Commission. (1980). Early childhood care and education: A report of the State Services Commission Working Group. Wellington: State Services Commission St. Johanser, C. (1980). Family day care in New Zealand 1980. Unpublished MA thesis, Wellington: Victoria University of Wellington. Sylva, K., Melhuish, E., Sammons, P., SirajBlatchford, I., Taggart, B., & Elliot, K. (2003). The Effective provision of PreSchool Education (EPPE) Project: Findings from the Pre-School Period: Summary of findings. London: Institute of Education/ Sure Start. Sylva. K., Melhuish, E., Sammons, P., SirajBlatchford,I., & Taggart, B. (2004) The Effective Provision of Pre-school Education (EPPE) Project: Final Report. (Nottingham: DfES Publications). Sylva, K., Melhuish, E., Sammons, P., SirajBlatchford, I., Taggart, B. (2010). Early childhood matters: Evidence from the Effective Preschool and Primary Education Project. London: Routledge. Taylor, C. (2014). Transforming the early years workforce: Leadership and improvement aspirations for the early years workforce of the future – The journey to get there and how to make early years a career of choice, speech given at National Day Nurseries Association Conference, 19 June. Vincent, C., & Ball, S. (2006). Childcare, choice and class practices. London: Routledge. Wells, C. (1991). Address to the New Zealand Free Kindergarten Union Annual Conference, 21 June. Wells, C. (1999). Future directions: Shaping early childhood policy for the 21st century – A personal perspective. New Zealand Annual Review of Education 1988(8), 45–60. Wellington: Victoria U ­ niversity Wellington.

36 Closing Comments: Future Directions for Early Childhood Policy C a r m e n D a l l i , N a n c y B a r b o u r, C l a i r e C a m e r o n a n d Linda Miller

Introduction We introduced this Handbook by noting that the place of ECEC in international policy and research has become one of considerable importance in recent years. The high impact reviews of ECEC across 20 countries, conducted by the OECD in the first decade of this millennium, found that integrated early childhood policies provide a significant foundation for social and economic policies (Bennett, 2006). As we draw this volume to a close, it is clear that the high profile of ECEC policy on international agendas is well-­ established and is likely to continue to grow, even acting – as documented by Milotay (Chapter 1) within the European context – as a ‘disruptive innovator’ for producing change within the broader educational sector, and within the policy-making process itself, through its innovative and cross-sectoral ways of working. All the chapters in this volume show that ECEC policy affects services and lives, which

cannot easily be partitioned into health, education and/or care, and social care/welfare components. ECEC services have different traditions and have been linked historically with different departmental responsibilities at local and national government level. ECEC policy is an applied practice; it seeks to tackle problems or issues in the present and for the future, from particular cultural ‘lenses’ and priorities, and taking account of many situational factors. There is ample evidence in this Handbook that cultural values and political ideologies underpin the trajectory of policy and determine the endpoint in terms of how children live their childhoods, and the possibilities achievable to them within their life span. Without doubt ECEC policy needs to be understood as a multi- and inter-disciplinary endeavour. Above all it is clear that policy development concerning young children and families is complex – this is an overarching theme that links all the chapters in this Handbook.

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Within this complexity, the OECD (2012) has identified five policy levers governments can utilise when developing an ECEC policy framework: (1) setting goals and regulations; (2) designing curricula and standards; (3) improving the workforce conditions and training; (4) engaging families and communities; and (5) tracking progress through data collection and monitoring. Countries represented in this volume address all of these policy levers, but from a range of perspectives according to their contexts and priorities. Responding to their local contexts, governments increasingly seek to inform and justify their ECEC policies and practices through scientific arguments about psychophysiological and brain development, with arguments that also invoke considerations of the health and well-being of children and families (see Allsopp, Dlamini, Jacobs, Mamabolo and Fulcher, Chapter 20; Young, Chapter 23; Smith, Chapter 27). Barnett and Nores (Chapter 29) make a plea for research that will better inform policymakers about the optimal design of policies and programmes for specific contexts with respect to issues relating to necessary programme features, quality, and the types of policies and programmes that are most productive at each age from birth to primary school entry. Neuman (Chapter 14), however, argues that there is no clear trajectory from evidence to policy and no simple rational process of evaluating evidence and applying that knowledge to formulate policy, or to guarantee that the evidence will be acted upon. Other chapters illustrate that policymaking is as much about values, moral, political and cultural judgements as it is about evidence. Similarly, the choices and priorities of governments are established in the context of available resources. Decision-making and resource allocation are challenging for all countries, but especially so where low resource levels combine with a lack of political will to change; where safety and political stability are fragile (Woodhead, Rossiter, Dawes & Pankhurst, Chapter 13; Ang,

Chapter 6); in contexts with high-volume populations (Woodhead et. al., Chapter 13; Chen, Chapter 10; Kaul & Sharma, Chapter 2) or where health is the main priority (Allsopp et  al., Chapter 20). Challenges to policy frameworks are evident also in economically and politically stable countries with some chapters documenting the impact of massive increases in privately owned EC services on the EC policy landscape, shifting it to a mixed economy of childcare. In the following sections we discuss a selection of noteworthy themes explored in this volume, highlighting both enduring and recent concerns. Some of the themes may indicate possible future directions in early childhood policy. Inevitably they are connected to foundational concepts about the aims of ECEC services: enhancing children’s development and subsequent chances of school success and in later life – a human capital argument; compensating for social disadvantage – an early intervention argument; and enabling mothers to return to the paid workforce – a gender equity argument. That ECEC is a service to which children have a right by virtue of their citizenship, is a more recent concept that is fast gaining visibility and space in policy discourses. These multiple aims may overlap in practice and compete for political priority, bringing access to and provision of ECEC services in tension with enhancing their quality. In the selection of themes discussed below, these tensions appear as interweaving threads.

ECEC as an Investment in the Future Underlying most chapters in this volume is the implicit assumption that ECEC is an important investment in a nation’s future and its human capital. Some argue this from an ethical, moral stance of obligation toward children and society, while others, such as Barnett and Nores (Chapter 29), point to the

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long-term economic benefits as evidence of the impact of ECEC. Both the scientific and experiential evidence support the case for financial investment in young children, but, as also pointed out by Barnett and Nores, the commitment to fully-funded ECEC services globally is not an accomplished fact and many governments fail to invest adequately in programme design and resources to ensure that the benefit of high quality ECEC is realised. The authors in this Handbook discuss a range of service provisions for economically challenged families, refugee families, all 4-year-olds, children from birth to 3, and comprehensive services for families. Some chapters offer very different solutions that recognise the reality of finite economic resources. Klinkhammer and Riedel (Chapter 3) see investment in ECEC services as linked to a shift towards a social investment ideology – including in female human capital, thus furthering a gender equity agenda – as well as to the desire to ensure that non-Germanspeaking children of new migrants are able to start school proficient in German.

question of whether young children need to be ‘ready’ for school or whether schools should be ‘ready’ to receive young children in contexts and with practices which are age appropriate (Kaga, Chapter 5). Whilst Brown (Chapter 17) acknowledges the apparent links between being ‘ready’ at school entry and later success in school, he argues against a narrow framing of school readiness in favour of a wider vision of the purpose of early education, one which takes into account different families, communities and governance. Woodhead et al. (Chapter 13) further illustrate the complexities of ‘readying’ large numbers of children for primary school when resources are scarce and personnel are inadequately trained and qualified. A key message is that attempts to scale-up ECEC through poor quality programmes and an untrained and unqualified workforce will not compensate for mediocre school systems; and that children (especially poor children) will be the losers.

The Schoolification of ECEC and Readiness for School

One consequence of scaling-up investment in ECEC in an era of globalisation, is the phenomena of global competitiveness and the search for a standardised ranking of ECEC services to quantify the return on investment. International comparison league tables, such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), have forced societies to re-evaluate their ECEC services. For example, Germany shifted to a more schoolified approach in its kindergarten provision in the light of its 2001 PISA ranking (Klinkhammer & Riedel, Chapter 3), and Sweden separated out initial teacher education for early years teachers from its primary school counterpart (Kaga, Chapter 5). At the time of writing, there is further threat of a standardising lens being applied to ECEC services as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published plans for an

A number of Handbook chapters reflect on a global trend towards the ‘schoolification’ of ECEC where ‘readiness for school’ is positioned as a means of alleviating poverty and enhancing children’s life chances, thus also urging the ‘scaling-up’ of ECEC. Schoolification raises questions about the nature of children and childhood – a topic to which we return later; about what children are expected to ‘become’ (i.e. pupils); the nature of the curriculum, and what children are expected to learn (‘basic skills’ and subject content); and which pedagogical practices are privileged (formal teaching versus holistic learning). This trend highlights historical tensions in the relationship between ECEC and primary education, and the

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international assessment of early learning outcomes, causing dissent and consternation amongst academics and stakeholders in Europe, North America and Oceania (Moss et al., 2016; Pence, 2016), not least about the lack of consultation about the process with the early childhood community. The complexities of global competitiveness, and perhaps the impossibility of a fair comparison using such means, is sharply visible in this volume. The chapters describe a wide range of distinct country contexts, including those that have experienced multiple political upheavals and attendant economic and social vicissitudes, such as Myanmar and other countries in East Asia and the Asia Pacific region, as well as the Latin American and Caribbean region. In such ‘fragile countries’ (OECD, 2016b), international organisations like the World Bank, the OECD, UNICEF and UNESCO have often been the catalyst for change in ECEC provision, helping to put ECEC policy onto national agendas by initiating country reviews, commissioning research, and tendering contracts for child development, health and curriculum programmes. As Ang (Chapter 6) points out, however, such proactive advocacy for ECEC can be counterproductive in that it drives a Western-influenced construct of ECEC which can unintentionally exacerbate pre-existing structural inequities and inequalities. This is a lesson that urges caution about one-size-fits-all approaches. At the same time, we are aware of the benefits of having a global overview and the driver to action that this constitutes where otherwise there would be inaction.

ECEC as Early Intervention The evidence supporting early intervention programmes and investment in high quality services for young children and their families is consistent and irrefutable (Engle, Rao & Petrovic, 2013). Inter-sectoral and multidisciplinary coordination in early intervention

programmes is increasingly emphasised, as it is in ECEC programmes generally, and Young’s chapter (23) provides a powerful case for intervention pre- and post-conception, through the early years of life and beyond, through ‘a life course health development model’ (p. 386). Often framed in relation to cost–benefit analysis and investment in human capital, early intervention through ECEC ranges from well-established programme models in highresource countries (Horm et  al., Chapter 18; Jones, Chapter 8) to low-cost and innovative approaches in countries where resources are low but ambitions are high (Woodhead et al., Chapter 13; Neuman, Chapter 14). However, both established programmes and innovative policy-making are threatened by cuts to resources and an increasing emphasis on approaches that prioritise measurable outcomes and competitive performance on the global stage (Jensen, Chapter 4; OECD, 2017). Adlerstein and Pardo (Chapter 11) lament the fact that investment in ECEC services by both governmental and private sector agencies is often undermined by administrative silos and a fragmentation of services leading to an inefficient use of resources, a view echoed by Jones (Chapter 8) in her account of the US history of ECEC services and the persistent a fragmentation of services, over time. Horm, Yazejian, Kennel and Jackson (Chapter 18) and Neuman (Chapter 14), however, have more optimistic views as they talk about public/private partnerships to enhance funding for ECEC and how to do more with fewer resources. Across these views, the clear message is that ECEC matters and that investment in young children will reap important benefits.

New Funding Models Chapters in this Handbook show how countries struggle to find resources to provide ECEC services and to respond to global pressure to scale-up the volume of provision.

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They offer some solutions for this dilemma: doing more with less; encouraging private providers; combining public and private funding. Most ECEC systems include both private (for-profit and not-for-profit) and publicly-funded provision, with public– private partnerships (Neuman, Chapter 14; Woodhead & Strueli, 2013) and social enterprise models (O’Sullivan, Chapter 19) fast becoming an increasingly important funding source. Yet there are consequences with each alternative, including the dangers of further marketisation of ECEC (Woodrow & Press, Chapter 32; Lloyd, Chapter 16). The view of ECEC as a ‘market’ contrasts strongly with the notion of ECEC as a public good (Barnett & Nores, Chapter 29), or the view of ECEC as a service to which children are entitled (Smith, Chapter 27). When public subsidies decline and marketisation increases, there are consequences for children and families, including in their level of access to high quality services (Lloyd, Chapter 16), or to any services, as in the case of the collapse of a large corporate chain in Australia (Woodrow & Press, Chapter 32). A clear message is that where the private sector is prominent, it is essential that governments retain a vital role in regulation (Woodhead & Strueli, 2013).

Childhood and Children’s Rights Who is the child and how is childhood positioned in early childhood policy? The subjects of early childhood policy are frequently invisible in debates about how to increase the volume of services and the quality of the provision on offer. Rather, policy documents tend to focus on structural and organisational constraints that impact early childhood services, as well as factors that drive up standards. Authors in this volume raise questions, sometimes implicitly, that challenge the

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invisibility of children in ECEC policy and illustrate different ways of conceptualising ‘the child’ and the era of their lives designated as ‘early childhood’. For instance, Kaul and Sharma (Chapter 2) refer to the view in India of children as a ‘national asset’ in whose educability societies should invest. This is both a very old-world view and a new and dominant mantra, increasingly couched in the discourse of human and child rights. Who could disagree with the view that children are an asset to families and, by extension, society, and that the way we collectively nurture the next generation is fundamental to societal prosperity? But the chasm between discourse and policy-inpractice remains a deep and very real one for many children for whom access to ECEC in the vast territory of India remains limited to the provision of basic health and nutrition services. O’Sullivan (Chapter 19) argues that ECEC services are there for children from all social backgrounds to support their learning, development and to build social capital. This view that positions the child as having rights as well as being a resource for the future. The importance of policy attending to ‘lived’ childhood is present in several chapters. The notion of ‘lived’ childhood gives expression to the reality of children’s lives and their diversity. It urges that policy positions children as democratic subjects and rights holders who participate in constructing everyday experiences in early childhood settings, and who can contribute to the development of policies and practices in the ‘here and now’. Jensen’s (Chapter 4) discussion of Danish practitioners’ ‘conceptualisation’ of children in early childhood settings provides an example of how this idea plays out in the Danish context. Using as her starting point the notion that the best way to develop and learn is through play and experiment, Jensen presents Danish practitioners’ valorisation of childhood in the image of the ‘mud child’, who is free, active and natural, and readily explores outdoor natural environments. This contrasts with the image of the passive child

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who must absorb knowledge from teachers, or be protected from the harsh world outside the ECEC setting. While the notion of children as democratic citizens in ECEC settings is increasingly embraced in principle, Gawlicz (Chapter 25) shows that democracy in preschools must be the subject of continual renewal and re-articulation in practice, particularly where notions of individual freedom come into conflict with a collectivist tradition. A focus on the lived childhood in ECEC reminds us that policy – framing what happens and should happen – must always take account of values (such as inclusion, play, individuality) and contexts (such as the social and material realities of families’ lives). Further diversity in imagery of the child comes from Vandenbroeck (Chapter 24) who addresses cultural heterogeneity as a pedagogical asset in early childhood settings, arguing that services that are ‘superdiverse’ in the linguistic and cultural backgrounds of children and adults offer a richness of content and opportunity for learning. Vandenbroeck advocates that ECEC settings be re-imagined as places that are ‘child ready’ in all their infinite variety, rather than training children to be ‘school ready’. Across numerous chapters it is clear that the codification, in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), of a strong image of the child as a rights holder and active participant in decision-making has shifted discourse about children’s issues across most of the world. A comprehensive overview of this shift, and of what is meant by children’s rights in light of the UNCRC, is provided by Smith (Chapter 27), while a number of other chapters show how these rights can work out in ECEC practice (e.g. May, Chapter 9; Gawlicz, Chapter 25; Skerritt, Chapter 26). Several authors note serious violations of children’s rights, including in Lee and Kang’s (Chapter 28) account of North Korean children whose rights are compromised or denied by the policies and practices in the countries

where they seek refuge from an oppressive regime, thus raising questions about how seriously children’s rights to be safe and cared for are taken in specific environments. This is an issue with worldwide relevance given the massive displacements of people occurring through war and terrorism. Various chapters have touched on this critical topic which will surely continue to require policy attention for the foreseeable future. Insufficiently explored within the discussion of children’s rights in this volume – framed around the UNCRC and its underlying premises about children as citizens who are entitled to participate in democratic processes – are some untested assumptions. Primarily, there is an assumption that all people around the world believe that children should have the right to be heard and express their opinions. Though most countries are signatories of the UNCRC, it is unclear how these rights fit with different cultural beliefs about children’s roles in families and society. This issue deserves more attention than it has yet received, as suggested also by Ang (Chapter 6). Many policy recommendations are based upon this assumption but the nuances of this belief across cultures are often ignored.

The enduring education and care split and implications for quality An enduring theme in the ECEC field is that of the split between care and education services and the drive towards integrating them. Moss (Chapter 15) calls the split a ‘dysfunctional legacy’ that acts as a barrier to recognising that children’s lives are lived as a whole and that care and education are inseparable. The split is not only in the main purpose of services, but also in the age groups served and, by implication, the foundational concepts that guide policy. Some

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countries, notably New Zealand, Denmark, Sweden and Slovenia, have re-worked their services around integrated systems, with marked success (Kaga, Bennett, & Moss, 2010). But most countries still have some split, whether it is an age division, typically at age 3, or a division around overarching ministerial responsibility for early childhood services with different purposes (such as ‘education’ and ‘welfare’ or ‘health’). There tend to be other splits, too, such as whether provision is funded publicly or through private monies (e.g. in China, as discussed by Chen, Chapter 6). Some major steps have been taken to unify the field. The use of Early Childhood Education and Care as an overarching descriptive term is one example, but it is not used everywhere. The English government, for example, refers to ‘childcare and early education’. The situation in England, which has integrated within education at the ministerial level, may be particularly confused and internationally confusing (Moss, Chapter 15; Cameron, Dalli & Simon, Chapter 35). The legacy of split systems, concepts and multiple providers is that the terminology of the field is not united and does not have international visibility in the way that, for example, ‘schools’ and ‘teachers’ do. Chapters in this volume interchange terms and even the same term, such as ‘childcare’, may reference different kinds of services in different countries. For example, in Flemish Belgium, childcare refers to provision for children under 3 that combines education, care and upbringing in a ‘holistic pedagogical approach’. In England, childcare refers to provision for children aged 0 to 4 years, where the primary purpose is to support parents’ labour-market participation, despite a common curriculum across childcare and early years provision. By contrast, in New Zealand, the use of the term ‘childcare’ has fallen out of use in policy discourse. One of the consequences of the ‘split’ is that ‘care’ services are often seen as not

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requiring, or requiring less, public funding than education services. Care services are often those for under-3-year-olds, where participation rates in ECEC services are growing most rapidly across OECD (2016a) countries, but where the quality of those services is frequently compromised by a lack of public funding. The critical importance of high quality ECEC provision for children’s lived experience in ECEC settings, and for their cognitive, language and social development, and longer term overall well-being is no longer quibbled about, notwithstanding ongoing philosophical debates about the meaning of ‘quality’. There is agreement that in centre-based ECEC provision, high quality rests on the well-known ‘iron triangle’ of quality: adult:child ratios, group size, and staff qualifications and training, along with other process variables such as adult–child interactions. That quality is essential to programme effectiveness is also integral to the arguments about the costs and benefits of ECEC (Barnes and Nores, Chapter 29). Yet, what the Handbook chapters show is that ensuring high quality across the broad range of ECEC services, with their multiple goals, is a complex business and remains a challenge for many jurisdictions, often competing with the goal of widening access and participation in ECEC. For example, Kaul and Sharma’s (Chapter 2) description of the dominant model of ECEC service in India, the Integrated Child Development Services, shows that while the service has expanded into a nationwide network providing a holistic integrated provision, the quality of the programme is at risk due to the lack of a suitably qualified workforce. Woodhead et al. (Chapter 13) similarly warn of the risk to quality when ‘scaling up’ ECEC in lowresource countries, while in the very different ‘global north’ context, Jones’ review of early intervention programmes in the US (Chapter 8) highlights that staff qualifications can be a challenge to quality provision anywhere.

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Need for Systemic and crosssectoral Approaches to ECEC A recurring plea in a number of chapters is for cohesive, intentional approaches to ECEC services and their guiding policies. Jones’ historical account of ECEC services in the US (Chapter 8) is framed by a strong belief in the sovereignty of individual states to make their own regulations. The consequences of this individualism have been a fragmented array of agencies serving young children and families and few successful attempts to establish nationwide guidelines and policies that can ensure high quality ECEC. Adlerstein and Pardo (Chapter 11) point to similar emerging concerns within countries in the Latin America and Caribbean region, where they identify siloed and fragmented policies across agencies as roadblocks to progress. In China, Chen ­ (Chapter 6) describes infrastructural problems of delivery in a context of rapid changes in policies, while in Hong Kong (Li & Wang, Chapter 7) a history of exclusive private ECEC provision means that the government has no legal infrastructure in place to require, and monitor, standards of care and education. Similarly, the chapters point to stark inequalities in children’s health and development, despite an overall improving picture (Engle et  al., 2013). A cross-sectoral approach is required. Young (Chapter 23) argues that a large body of evidence supports the use of early childhood interventions as a promising new avenue for health policy, programmes and practices. Such programmes need to be multi-sectoral under an ‘enabling and protective policy umbrella’ (VargosBarón, 2013, p. 443) – to include education, health, nutrition and child protection. Achieving this is a considerable challenge and there is a need for cross-world learning to share ideas and innovative strategies. Neuman (Chapter  14) suggests three ‘next steps’: strengthening mechanisms to identify and share early childhood innovations;

evaluating impact and analysing key elements of success; and attracting financing for piloting and scaling-up effective ideas. In all cases, there is a strong argument for a more systemic approach to policy development. This is endorsed by Kagan, Gomez and Roth in their thorough review of ECEC research (Chapter 34); they argue for a systems approach to ECEC research that brings together disparate sectors so that problems can be explored more holistically. They, and others in this Handbook, also urge researchers and policymakers to improve communication to ensure policy and practice are aligned.

Professionalising the ECEC workforce Delivering on quality is inescapably linked to the ECEC workforce, and professionalising the workforce remains a clear policy concern. Chapters in this Handbook reveal wide variations in the profiles of the ECEC workforce across different countries, indicating that despite the urgings of national and supranational organisations like the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council (2015) and the OECD, the professionalisation of the EC workforce remains patchy and in many contexts is an elusive goal. A consequence of split-system thinking is that those working in ‘care’-oriented occupations have fewer professionalisation options than those working in ‘education’ services and with older children (e.g. Moss, Chapter  15; Brown, Chapter 17). This is despite growing evidence that very young children have particular characteristics that are different to those of older children and that adults who work with them require specialised knowledge and skills (Mathers & Ereky-Stevens, Chapter 30). The comparative analysis of attempts made in New Zealand and England (Cameron et  al., Chapter 35) to create an integrated qualified workforce shows that, in New Zealand, the issue – particularly for

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work with under-3-year-olds – was only recently won and remains fragile, while in England it remains contested, as elsewhere. Peeters and Peleman (Chapter 31) discuss a highly contextualised approach to continuous professional development in Ghent, Flanders, and other micro-contexts, through working at the intersection of policy, research and practice. Within global south contexts, meanwhile, awareness of the need to upskill the ECEC workforce is acute. In some middle-to-low resource countries – where ‘westernised’ professionalisation solutions may be an aspiration but are not an option – this awareness has resulted in some innovative solutions (see Woodhead et  al., Chapter 13; Neuman, Chapter 14). If quality matters, as many authors suggest, a qualified workforce is essential, leading to some critical questions: How can policy enable a better qualified workforce in specific local contexts? Which qualifications should there be, and at what level? What pathways can be established to enable existing unqualified practitioners to achieve a credential? How can training capacity be improved in regions without a history of qualified ECEC staff? Who should pay to improve the qualifications of ECEC staff? Jones (Chapter 8) describes attempts in the US to develop non-degree credentialing systems as well as incentives through Head Start to gear up the formal preparation of the ECEC workforce. In countries with an established or growing level of privatisation of ECEC, this is a big issue for the future and one that requires creative policy solutions.

Conclusion In the Introduction to this Handbook we said we wanted to explore the ECEC policy landscape and share cross-national learning. In this final chapter we have looked for indicators for future directions. Throughout the chapters, rich themes have been identified

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and innovative solutions reported. The chapters have covered a wide expanse of ECEC policy contexts and initiatives in the second decade of the twenty-first century and have given rise to lessons to be learned, some possible solutions, but also further questions. A clear overall message is that policy is complex and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. We know that ECEC policy affects services and lives and that policy can provide a ‘framework’ through which ideas are communicated and legitimised and can be both enabling and restricting. In signalling possible future directions, it is clear that there is a growing global momentum to implement and expand ECEC policy but the ‘policy space’ in which to do this (Milotay, 2016, p. 127) differs across countries, context, culture and beliefs about what ECEC is for and can do. For countries where ECEC programmes are scarce or embryonic, scaling-up provision is a clear priority, but mediocre and poor quality ECEC programmes are not the answer and will disadvantage the poorest and most vulnerable children. The challenge of scaling-up ECEC services and programmes has given rise to creative and innovative solutions, but resourcing, maintaining quality, replication and rigorous evaluation remain a challenge. That quality matters is undoubted but pathways to achieving this are less clear; indicators are: a professional and trained workforce; innovative funding streams; and multi- and inter-sectoral co-ordination of services. Possible funding solutions discussed in this Handbook include: the high risk approach of privatisation/marketisation of services; and a public/private partnership approach, but this involves increased expectations of ‘returns on investment’ and greater accountability, monitoring and regulation, and also increasing standardisation of curricula and pedagogy. Notably, public funding for ECEC as an acknowledged public good is not given wide discussion: we suggest that it should be.

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The issue of human capital development is changing the big picture of ECEC policy, leading to a more instrumental view of the purpose of ECEC services. Global competitiveness and international comparative league tables such as PISA are becoming a driver for ECEC services but ‘westernised’ ‘solutions’ such as these may be neither an option nor an answer and bring with them the threat of the ‘schoolification’ of early childhood. In such a global policy context, there is a danger that local ECEC services may come to be measured and valued in terms of ‘outcomes’ against externally prescribed standards and benchmarks to ensure that they are worth the investment (OECD, 2017). Such standardised measures run counter to strongly argued views that policies and those creating them should have ‘the best interest of children and families’ in the local context as their foundation. As many have pointed out (Cleveland, 2017; Moss et al., 2016; Pence, 2016) there is a danger that in valuing and measuring standardised outcomes, one might destroy what one is measuring. Creative solutions are needed that avoid compounding the existing complexities of schoolification. As we conclude this Handbook, large numbers of nursery schools (Weale, 2017) are under serious threat in England. Nursery schools are long established, high quality teacher-led provision, usually sited in areas of social disadvantage; they not only offer crucial support to children and families but model professional standards for the sector. The proposed changes to government funding mean this flagship service cannot survive. At the same time, the Handbook chapters point to the need for a wide range of provisions, encompassing both existing long-standing, well-resourced and high quality ones as well as more innovative low-resource solutions to suit diverse cultures and contexts. Within this mix of provision and services, a further signpost for future consideration is the call for ‘joined up’ and crosssectoral approaches to ECEC which put the whole child at the centre, consider all facets of development – including health, nutrition and

protection – address inequalities and embrace diversity. Matching aspirations of this kind with policies that work ‘on the ground’ in diverse contexts remains a challenge and handbooks such as this contribute to a growing but still incomplete knowledge base. Having reached the end of this Handbook and looking forward to the future, we propose that a series of questions about the process of developing informed and relevant policy, remain pertinent. These include: Who gets to inform policymaking? Are all necessary parties and perspectives at the table? Do we have all of the information necessary to help develop policies for young children? What areas of research are still needed? Which infrastructures need to be developed in order to engage in the kind of work necessary to improve ECEC policy and the lives of families and children around the world in all their diverse characteristics?

References Bennett, J. (2006). Starting Strong II: Early Child­hood Education and Care. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD Publishing. Cleveland, G. (2017). Early childhood education: Equality, quality and availability. Public seminar, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, 23 February. Engle, P. L., Rao, N., & Petrovic, O. (2013). Situational analysis of young children in a changing world. In P. Rebello Britto, P. L. Engle, & C. M. Super (Eds), Handbook of early childhood development research and its impact on global policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Institute of Medicine (IOM) and National Research Council (NRC). (2015). Transforming the workforce for children birth through age 8: A unifying foundation. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. Kaga, Y., Bennett, J., & Moss, P. (2010). Caring and learning together: A cross-national study on the integration of early childhood care

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and education within education. Paris: UNESCO. Milotay, N. (2016). From research to policy: The case of early childhood education and care. In M. Vandenbroeck, & J. Peeters (Eds), Pathways to professionalism in early education and care. European Early Childhood Education Association (EECERA). Moss, P., Dahlberg, G., Grieshaber, S., Mantovani, S., May, H., Pence, A., Rayna, S., Swadener, B. B., & Vandenbroeck, M. (2016). The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s International Early Learning Study: Opening for debate and contestation. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 17(3), 343–351. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). (2012). Starting Strong III – A quality toolbox for early childhood education and care. Available at http:// www.oecd.org/edu/school/49325825.pdf (accessed 22 February 2017). OECD. (2016a). PF3.2: Enrolment in childcare and pre-school. OECD Family Database. OECD – Social Policy Division – Directorate of Employment, Labour and Social Affairs http:// www.oecd.org/els/family/database.htm OECD. (2016b). States of Fragility 2016. Highlights. Available at https://www.oecd.org/

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dac/conflict-fragility-resilience/docs/FragileStates-highlights-2016.pdf (accessed 22 February 2017). Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). (2017). International Early Learning and Child Well-being Study (IELS). Available at http://www.oecd.org/edu/ school/international-early-learning-andchild-well-being-study.htm (accessed 22 ­February 2017). Pence, A. (2016). Baby PISA: Dangers that can arise when foundations shift. Journal of Childhood Studies, 41(3), 54–58. Vargos-Barón, E. (2013). Building and strengthening national systems for early child development. In P. Rebello Britto, P. L. Engle, & C. M. Super (Eds), Handbook of early childhood development research and its impact on global policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weale, S. (2017). One in 10 nursery schools in England face closure within months, The Guardian, 24 January. Woodhead, M., & Strueli, S. (2013). Early education for all: Is there a role for the private sector? In P. Rebello Britto, P. L. Engle, & C. M. Super (Eds), Handbook of early childhood development research and its impact on global policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Index ‘Abbott Districts’, 142 ABC Learning (corporation), 13, 280, 538, 544–5 Abecedarian Project, 135–6, 312, 388, 492–5, 568 absence from school, children’s, 412 abuse of children, 10, 358, 360, 365, 473, 478–80 accountability, 125, 129 vertical and horizontal, 26 Ackerman, D.J., 288 action research, 25 Adelstein, S., 496–7 Adlerstein, Cynthia, xiv, 2, 185, 608, 612; co-author of Chapter 11 adoption of children, 357–8, 363–4 adult:child ratios, 74–5, 82–3, 154, 511, 514, 558, 599 adult-child relationships, 507 Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study, 391 advocacy and advocacy organisations, 109–10, 456, 555–6, 562, 597 aeioTU, 249 African Americans, 134–5 Aga Khan Foundation, 241 age of children appropriateness of provision for, 230–1 as a basis for separation in school, 406 related to return on investment, 500 agenda-setting, 27 ‘Agenda 2010’, 50–1 Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) in the US, 134 Alexander, K.L., 292 Allsopp, Merle, xiv, 2, 10, 606; co-author of Chapter 20 Alt, C., 60 ‘alternative care’, 10 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) (2009), 139 Amhara (Ethiopia), 228 Anand, P., 392 Anderson, A., 468 Ang, Lynn, xiv, 2, 6, 608, 610; author of Chapter 6 anganwadi centres, 35, 37, 41–6, 246

Annan, Kofi, 331 Aotearoa, 152, 156, 433–7, 443, 446–7; see also New Zealand apartheid, 8, 203–8, 339–40 Archard, D., 463 Ardanaz, M., 498–9 Argentina, 187 Arizona, 144 armed conflicts, 183 Armendáriz, E., 498–9 Ashton, Catherine, 373 ‘asset lock’ devices, 327 attachment theory, 408, 505–7 attunement, 333, 359, 507 au pair agencies, 599 austerity measures, 278 Australia, 13, 280, 291, 355, 461, 537–48 Accord on Economic and Social Policy, 543, 547 Human Rights Commission, 459 Productivity Commission, 537–41, 545–8 Austria, 75 Ayurvedic texts, 27–8 Babu, M.S., 40 Badheka, Gijubhai, 41 Bainbridge, J., 459 Balagopalan, S., 40 balwadi programmes, 41–2 Ban Ki-moon, 110, 220 Barbour, Nancy, xiii–xiv; co-author of Introduction and Chapter 36; also co-editor Barcelona Targets, 72 Barnett, W.S., xv, 2, 13, 216, 288, 488, 568, 606–7, 609–11; co-author of Chapter 29 Barroso, José Manuel, 21 Bartik, T.J., 496–7 Bath, Caroline, 461–2 Before Five policies, 153–5, 585, 595 behaviour difficulties, 363 Behrman, J.R., 498–9 Belgium, 270, 523, 529–33, 611 Belsky, J., 362

Index

benefit-cost analysis see cost-benefit analysis Bennett, J., 73, 75, 88 Bentley, T., 420 Bertram, T., 330 ‘best interests of the child’, 459, 462–4, 614 Beth Johnson Foundation, 334–5 Bettison, David, 439 biboho children, 472–5 Biersteker, L., 230 Biesta, G., 411 bilingualism, 407–8, 410, 433, 435, 508 Bingham, S., 296 Binney, J., 436, 445 Black, M.M., 237 Blackman, Danny, 543 Blair, Tony, 369–70, 373 Blanco, Rosa, 184 Bloch, M.N., 289 Blunkett, David, 372 Bolivia, 498 Bologna Process, 62 bonding between parents, 409 books in the home, 238–9 Borchorst, A., 72 Bornstein, M., 392 Borzaga, C., 325 Boshier, P.F., 453 Boston, Massachusetts, 140–1 boundary-spanning entities, 186 Bourdieu, Pierre, 455–6 Boyce, W.T., 390 brain development in young children, 359–60, 386–9, 567 Brazil, 189, 191–2 Brennan, D., 542, 548 bridging between parents, 409–11 British Empire, 39, 436 Broadhurst, K., 358 Bronfenbrenner, U., 328, 468, 487 Brown, Christopher P., xv, 2, 8–9, 297, 607, 612; author of Chapter 17 Brown, Gordon, 369–70 Bruce, Tina, 156 Buffett, Susie, 306 Buitrago Rodriguez, N., 190 Bulgaria, 552–63 Burchinal, P., 61 Bush, George senior, 290–1

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Buzelli, C.A., 270 Buzov, E., 556 Caetano, G., 180 Cagliari, P., 263 Cai, Y.Q., 123 Cambodia, 112 Cameron, Claire, xiii, 2, 13, 356, 611–12; co-author of Introduction and Chapters 35 and 36; also co-editor Canada, 339 capacity building, 26 care, ethic of, 265–6 ‘caring’ approach to early years education, 76 cash transfers to families, 250–1, 396 Caspi, A., 389 Cass, B., 548 Catholic Church, 419 centrally-planned economies, 165, 167 centre-based care, 505–6, 512, 611 Centre of Innovation (COI) programme, New Zealand, 592 ‘change agent’ role, 594 Chen, Jennifer J., xv, 2, 606, 611–12; author of Chapter 10 Cherrington, Kate, 444 Cherrington, Riki, 444–5 Chicago Child Parent Center (CPC) programs, 492, 494–5, 568 Child Care Development Block Grant (CCDBG), US, 137, 139, 144–5 child protection see abuse of children childcare, 8, 10, 51–5, 58–60, 72, 75, 133, 152, 181, 404 as a benefit for working parents, 263–6, 271, 370–1, 382, 491, 537, 547, 585 definition and use of the term, 266, 486, 538, 597–8, 600, 611 marketisation of, 73, 81, 268–70, 273–80, 324, 543–4 relationship with education, 256–66 supply-side and demand-side factors in the use of, 60 childcare studies, 11 ‘childcare sufficiency duty’, 274 childhood studies, 455, 458, 464 childminding, 271, 584–5, 591, 598–600

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children conceptualisation of, 113, 454, 458, 609 seen as human resources, 42–4 children’s centres, 260, 271, 276, 278, 373–4, 377–81, 587 children’s homes, 355 Chile, 180, 183, 186–90, 194, 498–9 China, 120, 123–4, 165–77, 485, 611–12 foreign influences on early education, 168–9 links with North Korea, 469–74, 478–9 nationalist and socialist regimes, 167 reform programme and open-door policy, 167–9, 177 regulatory structures, 168–70 chronosystem, 468 Chung, H.J., 474 ‘churning’, 221 citizenship, 462, 610 civic society, 81 civil rights movement, 456 civil society, 181, 183, 191–2, 562 Clark, Helen, 157 Clark, K., 595 Cleveland, G., 614 Clinton, Bill, 134, 147, 290 Cohen, B., 597 Cohen, David, 568 Cohen, N.E., 573 collaboration between national and local levels of government, 396 collectivism, 169, 469–70, 610 Colombia, 186, 249–50, 396, 498–9 colonisation, 39–40, 433–6, 448 Colorado, 144 commodification of services, 544, 547–8 communication, verbal and non-verbal, 331 community awareness of ECEC, 46 community-based programmes, 212 competences and competent systems, 93, 525–6, 558 competitiveness of countries, 103, 105, 607–8, 614 complex adaptive theory, 575 comprehensive spending review (CSR) process, 370–1 compulsory education, 191, 262–3 Confucianism, 172 Connor, S., 4 contingent talk, 508

continuing professional development (CPD), 522–9, 532–3 continuity of care, 507–8, 513 ‘conventions’ as distinct from ‘declarations’, 453 Cook, H., 595 Cook, James, 436 Cooper, Yvette, 373 coordination mechanisms between early years sectors, 257–8 CoRe study, 523–6, 529, 532–3, 554, 557–9 corporal punishment, 455, 473 corporeality, 81 cortisol levels, 388, 506 Costa Rica, 188 cost-benefit analysis, 270, 486, 490–500, 568–9, 608 recent examples of, 495–9 Cox, C., 180, 182 Cox, Eva, 547–8 Cristia, J., 498–9 Crouch, L., 220–1 Cuba, 189 cultural change, 194, 196 Cultural Revolution, 167 cultural values, 169, 605 Cuomo, Andrew, 147 curative care, 394 curriculum frameworks, 93–6, 104, 168–9, 188, 330–2, 424, 461, 511–12, 558–9, 587 Curthoys, Ann, 542 Czech Republic, 73 Dagtilbudsloven, 75, 82 Dahlberg, G., 104, 113–14, 411, 430 Dakar Framework for Action (2000), 109, 112 Dalli, Carmen, xiii, 2, 13, 152, 154–5, 611; co-author of Introduction and Chapters 35 and 36; also co-editor Dalsgaard, C.T., 83 Dalton Plan, 425–6 ‘dandelion’ children, 390 Danese, A., 391 Darcos, Xavier, 97 Dauber, S.L., 292 Dawes, Andrew, xv, 2–3, 8, 606; co-author of Chapter 13 daycare, 190, 259–60, 271, 404, 538, 584, 586, 597, 600 De Armas, G., 180

Index

decision-making power of children, 426–7 Defourney, J., 325 deinstitutionalization of care, 355–6 Delaware, 144 democracy, definition of, 420 democratic processes, 11, 116, 183, 186, 413, 418–19 in early childhood education, 419–29, 610 Deng Xiaoping, 165, 167 Denmark, 6, 25, 71–84, 355, 459, 499, 609–11 enrolment rates and types of children’s centre, 76–7 funding of education in, 76 integrated thinking in, 72 tradition and practice in, 79–84 Derrida, J., 412 developing countries, 237, 245, 251–2 developmental child psychology, 32, 93, 104–5, 188, 406, 454 Dewey, John, 169, 181, 420, 430 DiMaggio, P.J., 575 disadvantaged groups, 175–7, 182, 187, 205, 237–44, 274–80, 323–4, 327–31, 335, 362–3, 379, 388–9, 496, 504–6, 509, 512–15, 523, 588; see also social disadvantage ‘disruptive innovator’ role, 26–8, 605 diversity, 403–7, 410, 413–14 divorce, 462 Dlamini, Bathabile, 344–5 Dlamini, Hloniphile, xv–xvi, 2, 10; co-author of Chapter 20 Douglas, Roger, 153 Du Toit, Lesley, 341 Dugger, R., 397 Duncan, G.J., 396 Dupraz, L., 403 Durlauf, S., 397 early child development (ECD), 384–8, 391, 394–7 early childhood, definition of, 34 early childhood education and care (ECEC), 1–6 access to programmes, 111–12 benefits from, 220, 236–7, 323, 393–7, 459–60, 489–91, 500, 504–6, 513 broader conception of, 578–80 building blocks for, 573 ‘coherent’ system of, 73 conceptual tensions in, 113–14

619

coverage of, 584 critiques of, 63 deficient types of, 190 definition of, 578–9 diversity of, 3–4, 11, 72, 485, 487 European-level policy on, 19, 23–9 future prospects for, 12–14, 578–80 goals of, 189–90, 486–7 impact on children under three, 12 inter-relationships between research, practice and policy-making, 522–4, 532–3, 613 as a joint product (both education and care), 194, 486 lack of data on, 192–5 models of, 4 multi-sectoral nature of, 45 new emphasis on, 4, 39, 53–4 rationales for, 269–71 reconceptualisation of, 102 seen as a social issue, 185 short-term and long-term impacts of, 568 use of the term, 585 early childhood education and care in particular countries and regions Australia, 538–41, 544–8 China, 120, 165–77, 485 Denmark, 71–2, 79, 81, 84 East Asia and the Asia Pacific region, 110–13 England, 268–82, 600 Ethiopia, 219–20, 224–9 Germany, 49–56, 60–4 Hong Kong, 122–6 India, 33–6, 43–6 in Latin America and the Caribbean, 181–96, 485–6 New Zealand, 158–61 Poland, 418–24, 429 South Africa, 216 Sweden, 91 United States, 489 ‘early childhood teachers’ in New Zealand, 592–4 Early Head Start program, 137, 304–5, 495, 497 early learning, 133 early life experiences, impact of, 391–3, 397, 460, 464

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Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS), 260, 329–30, 587 ‘early years professional’ status (EYFS) in England, 584, 588, 593–4 East Asia and the Asia Pacific region, 110–13, 608 eating habits, 333–4, 508–9 école maternelle model, 89–105 econometrics, 566–71, 579 Economist Intelligence Unit, 572 Educare programme, 9, 303–17 description of, 306–7 future goals, 314–15 guiding principles, 307 history of, 305–6 map of school locations, 306 research on, 310–13, 317 similarities to and differences from community-based programs, 315–16 strategies employed and policy impacts, 312–14 theory of change embodied in, 307–9 Education and Training (ET) 2020 Strategy, 23 Education for All (UNESCO monitoring reports) 109–11 education, definition of, 263–6, 333, 587 egalitarian culture, 104 Eisenstadt, Naomi, xvi, 2, 9, 375; author of Chapter 22 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), US, 137–8, 145 Ellis, B.J., 390 embedded values, 570 Emery, C.R., 473, 478 England, 8–10, 71, 73, 79, 81, 256–66, 268–82, 511–14, 584–600, 611–13 Engle, P.L., 394, 498 English language, 39–41, 403–4 Entwisle, D.R., 293 epigenetics, 389 EPPI-Centre, 527 equality, principle of, 427 equity and inequity, 8, 112, 180, 184, 203–4, 230–1 educational, 171, 174–7 intergenerational, 459 Ereky-Stevens, Katharina, xvi, 2, 12–13, 612; co-author of Chapter 30

Ethiopia, 8, 219–33, 295 early years provision in, 223–6 educational revolution since 1990, 221–2 regional education bureaus (REBs), 226–8 Eurofound study (2015), 523–4, 527–9, 533 Europe, comparison between western and eastern countries in, 73–4 European Commission, 279 European Parliament Research Service (EPRS), 21 European Political Strategy Centre (EPSC), 21 European Quality Framework (EQF), 12, 551–62 nine action statements in, 555–62 European Union (EU), 5, 21–3, 50, 72, 74 Evans, Jane, 213 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), US, 144 evidence-based policy-making, 5, 19–20, 22, 28, 182, 193–6, 377, 379, 454, 527 examination-oriented education, 172 exchange of experience, 252 expanding the range of provision, 556 expenditure on programmes as distinct from cost, 487 experts and expert knowledge, 20 Family and Day Care Trust (FDCT), 597 family involvement in education and care, 114, 192, 309, 460, 509, 560 family policy, 49–54, 65, 72 family support services, 272, 276, 479 family values, 570 Fanon, F., 446 Farquhar, Sandy, 156, 161 feminism, 540–3, 547–8, 595 Fernald, A., 331 Finland, 73, 75, 570–1 Fisher, Berenice, 265 Fishman, J.A., 443 Flynn, J., 543 Fong, R.W., 123 Fortin, P., 498 foster care, 10, 355–66 characteristics of providers, 363–4 everyday life in, 360–2 future research on, 364 and participation in early education, 362–3 ‘fragile’ countries, 111, 608 fragmentation of service provision, 244, 551, 608, 612

Index

621

France, 6, 74–5, 257, 273, 355 contrasted with Sweden, 87–105 Francis, N., 326 Fraser, Nancy, 266, 537, 540–1, 546–8 Fraser, Peter, 158 free education and care for very young children, 126–7, 130, 260–2, 278, 370, 515, 588, 597, 599 challenges in organisation of, 130 funding mechanisms for, 126–7 free schools (in Poland), 425 Freeman, Michael, 458, 463 Freinet, Celestin, 406, 425–6 Freire, P., 430, 434, 523 Frelow, V.S., 291 Fröbel, F.W.A., 41, 72, 81, 181, 331 Fulcher, Leon, xvi–xvii, 2, 10; co-author of Chapter 20 Fullan, M., 191 funding of early education and care, 126–7, 248–52, 260, 270, 279, 309–10, 315–17, 487–9, 513, 595, 608–9, 613 supply-side and demand-side, 281, 514, 577 funding for research, 579 Funky Dragon project, 457 future earnings, estimation of, 500

Ghysels, J., 270 Gibbons, Andrew, 161 Glass, Norman, 370–1 global financial crisis (2008), 592 globalisation, 87–9, 102–5 Glover, Ann, 21 Gobel, C., 420 Godbout, L., 498 Goldschmied, E., 332 Gomez, Rebecca E., xvii, 2, 13, 612; co-author of Chapter 34 Gormley, W., 496–7 governance of policy and research, 23–4, 26, 89–91, 562, 576 government responsibility for early childhood provision, 51–5, 540–1, 546, 570–1 government sectors, linkages between, 396 graduate employment in early years services, 276, 510, 513, 532, 557, 585, 590–3, 598–600 Graue, M.E., 288–9 Greece, 75 guanxi, 173 The Guardian, 262 Guatemala, 186, 189, 191, 498–9 Gupta, A., 39

Gallagher, J., 572 Gandhi, Mahatma, 39, 41 Gannon, Brian, 339 García, O., 435 Gawlicz, Katarzyna, xvii, 2, 11, 610; author of Chapter 25 Gebremedhin, L., 233 Geens, N., 410 Geier, B., 60 gender distinctions, 171 gene variants, 390 genetic modifications, 389 Geneva Declaration on the Rights of the Child (1924), 453 Germany, 6, 49–64, 323, 363, 530, 607 contrasts between East and West, 54–8, 62 reforms implemented in the last two decades, 50 Gertler, P., 498 Ghana, 220 Ghent, 522–3, 613

habituation, 359 habitus, 61, 455, 456 Haeck, C., 498 Hägglund, S., 461 Hai, Y., 123 ‘hanging out’ and ‘hanging in’ with children, 351 Harcourt, D. 461 Hargreaves, A., 191 harmonious relationships, 332–3 Harris, Teresa T., xvii, 2, 8; co-author of Chapter 12 Haskins, R., 488 Hawke, Bob, 543, 547 Head Start program, 9, 137–8, 289–90, 294, 304–5, 315, 396, 488–9, 495, 497, 613 head teachers, 95–6, 98 health services, 9–10, 394–6, 612 healthy development of children, 384–5, 506 Heckman, James, 269–70, 294–5, 392–4, 397, 459–60, 493 ‘Heckman curve’, 500 Hemara, W., 439–40

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Hevey, D., 594 Himmelweit, S., 548 Hincapie, D., 498–9 HIV/AIDS, 10, 340–4, 350–1 Hoffman, D.J., 475 Hollingworth, Katie E., xvii, 2, 10; co-author of Chapter 21 Holmes, L., 363 home-based education and care (HBEC), 505, 512–13, 586, 591, 598–600 home learning environment (HLE), 334, 357, 408 homogeneity, myth of, 414 in education, 406–8 in parent support, 408–10 Honduras, 186 Hong, S., 476 Hong Kong, 6, 120–31, 612 Horgan, G., 329 Horm, Diane, xvii–xviii, 2, 8, 303, 608; co-author of Chapter 18 Hu, X., 174 Hübenthal, M., 63 human capital theory, 14, 49–50, 53, 113, 115, 187, 221, 270, 295, 545, 607–8, 614 Hungary, 6, 71–3, 79, 81 Hunia, Maraea, 444–5 Ifland, A., 63 Ilifa Labantwana organisation, 215 image of the child, 104–5 ‘immersion’ in language, 413 immigrant children, 100 impact studies, 527 implementation of policy, 20, 27–8, 35, 161 incentives to improve quality of provision, 514 India, 5–6, 32–46, 114, 221, 246–7, 609, 611 cyclic planning in, 36–7, 42–3 need for contextualisation and flexibility, 46 ‘single-window’ approach in, 45 indigenous peoples, 434 individualism, 104, 169, 541, 612 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), US, 137–9, 144–5 inequalities, 237 in access to early education across countries, 230–1 inequality, social, 64, 185, 269, 277–80, 397, 407, 410, 540, 586

Infant Health and Development Program (IHDP), 497 infrastructure of service provision, 574, 579 Institute for Fiscal Studies, 279 institutional architectures, 185–6, 191–6 fragmentation in, 191–2 institutional deprivation, 391 integration of early years provision, 72, 102, 186, 192, 217, 244–8, 256–66, 542, 584–8, 597–600, 605, 610–12 intelligence quotient (IQ), 490 intensity of programmes (hours per day), 506 Inter-American Development Bank, 184 intergovernmental organisations, 184, 195 international early years policy 109–10 International Journal of Chinese Education, 122–3 International Labour Organisation, 188 international organisations in general, 184, 410, 608 International Step by Step Association (ISSA), 12, 574; see also ISSA Quality Framework International Year of the Child (1979), 453 ‘investment approach’ to ECEC, 3, 5–6, 13, 50, 113, 115, 191, 270, 405, 606–8 involvement of practitioners in processes of change, 529 Ionescu, Mihaela, xviii, 2, 12; co-author of Chapter 33 Ireland, 274, 323 Isibindi model of childcare, 4, 10, 338, 341–52 being, interpreting and doing aspects of, 350–2 expansion of projects, 344–5 success stories, 345–9 working with families, 349–50 ISSA Quality Framework, 551–63 development of, 553–4 focus areas in, 552 introduction in three countries, 554–63 Italy, 74–5, 257 Jackson, Cynthia D., xviii, 10, 303, 608; co-author of Chapter 18 Jackson, Sonia, xviii, 2, 332; co-author of Chapter 21 Jacobs, Lucky, xviii–xix, 2, 10; co-author of Chapter 20

Index

623

Jailoo kindergartens, 241–4 Jamaica, 8, 232, 236, 245–7, 498, 568 James, A., 452, 462 James, Colin, 159 Japan, 167, 169 Jarosz, E., 425 Jebb, Eglantyne, 453 Jeffrey, B., 291 Jensen, Jytte Juul, xix, 2, 6, 608–9; author of Chapter 4 Jochim, A., 575 Johnson, Lyndon, 134, 137, 289, 294, 304 Jomtien Conference (1990), 43 Jones, Jacqueline, xix, 2, 608, 611–13; author of Chapter 8 Jordan, A.L.T., 83 Joseph, S., 40, 455 Jowell, Tessa, 371, 373 Juche ideology, 469–70 Juncker, Jean-Claude, 21

in Germany, 39–41, 51–9, 607 in Hong Kong, 120–31 in mainland China, 166–8, 171–7 in New Zealand, 154–7 Nordic, 73, 75, 78, 81–2, 89, 91, 258, 280 privatisation of, 168, 172, 595 quality rating of, 173–4 ‘satellite’ types, 241–2 King, Martin Luther, 145, 523 King Baudouin Foundation (KBF), 531 Kirton, D., 363 Klinkhammer, Nicole, xx–xxi, 2, 6, 607; co-author of Chapter 3 K¯ohanga Reo movement, 11, 433–49 Kopelman, L.M., 462 Korczak, Janusz, 422, 428 kotjebi children, 472–3 Kragh-Møller, G., 82–3 Kura Kaupapa M¯aori, 433 Kyrgyzstan, 8, 239, 244

Kaga, Yoshie, xix, 2, 6, 258, 585, 607; author of Chapter 5 Kagan, Sharon Lynn, xix–xx, 2, 13, 288, 292, 572, 574, 612; co-author of Chapter 34 Kahukiwa, Robyn, 445 Kalitowski, S., 598 Kang, Shin Ji, xx, 2, 11–12, 610; co-author of Chapter 28 Kauapapa M¯aori education, 435 Kaul, Venita, xx, 2, 5, 606, 609, 611; co-author of Chapter 2 Kendall, Thomas, 11, 435–7, 445–6, 449 Kennel, Portia, xx, 2, 303, 608; co-author of Chapter 18 key workers, 513–14, 594 Khululeka Community Education Development Centre, 212 KIDS programme, 82 Kim, M.A., 478 Kim, S., 476 Kim Il-sung, 469 Kim Jong-il, 469 Kim Jong-un, 467, 469 Kind en Gezin organisation, 531–2 Kindergarten Teachers’ Association (KTA), New Zealand, 594 kindergartens

‘lady health workers’, 247 Lan, Y., 297 Lange, A., 63 Lange, David, 151–3 Langsted, O., 84 language awareness, 413 language development, 54, 414, 508 language environment, 393 language loss, 434 Lankov, A., 477 Lao People’s Democratic Republic, 110, 112 Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), 180–95, 237–8, 485–6, 567, 608, 612 Lau, M.M.Y.L., 123 lead, susceptibility to, 391 Leadbetter, Charles, 324–5 leadership roles, 594 learning, conceptualisation of, 512 learning communities, 560–1 learning cycles in France, 88 in Latin America, 188 Lebanon, 455 Lee, Emily Seulgi, xxi, 2, 11–12, 408, 610; co-author of Chapter 28 Lee, S.K., 475 Lefebvre, P., 498

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Leininger, J., 420 Lenz Taguchi, H., 97, 259 Letourneau, N., 391 Leung, S.O., 123 Levin, B., 420–1, 427 Lewinter-Suskind, L., 393 Li, Hui, xxi, 2, 6, 123, 612; co-author of Chapter 7 Li, K., 174 life-course health-development model, 386, 394, 608 lifelong learning, 32, 88, 91–4, 102, 508 light encounters among parents, 410 Lindblom, Charles, 568 linguicism, 443 linguistics, 446 Lipscomb, S.T., 356, 362 listening to young children, 461 Lithuania, 552–63 Liu, Z.L., 174 ‘lived reality’ of childhood, 14, 609–10 Lloyd, Eva, xxi, 2, 8–9, 324, 609; author of Chapter 16 Lofland, L.H., 410 London Early Years Foundation (LEYF), 324–36 longitudinal studies, 568 looked-after children, 354; see also residential care Lord, H., 289 love, 456–7 low and middle income countries (LAMIC), 111 lump sum grants (LSGs) for educational provision, 127 Lynch, Phillip, 541 Macau, 120, 123 Macaulay, Lord, 39 McCarty, T.L., 434 McDermid, S., 363 McDonald, Geraldine, 152, 156, 438 McDowell Clark, R., 594 McPhee, S., 473 macrosystem, 468 Makaton, 331 Malaguzzi, Loris, 263–4, 266 ‘male breadwinner’ model, 49–51 male workers in early education, 78–9 Mallard, Trevor, 157, 596 Mallory, B.L., 40 Mamabolo, Seeng, xxi–xxii, 2, 10; co-author of Chapter 20

Mandela, Nelson, 340 Mao Zedong, 167 M¯aori language, 11, 433–49 Marchman, V.A., 331 market economies, 165, 167 marketisation of services, 537–8, 543–9, 609 Marmot Review (2010), 279 Marsden, Samuel, 436 Marshall, Russell, 151 Marsland, K., 289 Martin, R., 327–9 Mathers, Sandra, xxii, 2, 12–13, 593–4, 599, 612; co-author of Chapter 30 ‘Matthew effect’, 125 Maurás, M., 454 May, Helen, xxii, 2, 610; author of Chapter 9 May, J.R., 575 May, S., 446 Mayall, Berry, 454 Meade, Anne (and Meade Report, 1988), 152–7 Meaney, M.J., 389 measurement of children’s development, 396–7, 573 Meisels, Sam, 288–9 Melbourne, Hirini, 444 Meloy, M.E., 356 Melton, G.B., 453 mental models, 21 Merrigan, P., 498 Merseth, K.A., 220–1 meta-analyses, 495–6, 500, 576–7 Mexico, 250 Meyer, J.W., 575 microsystem, 468 middle-class habitus, 61 migration, 60, 174, 176, 405–6, 410, 468, 471–2 Migration Policy Institute (MPI), 531–2 Milburn, Alan, 329 military dictatorships, 183 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), 385 Miller, Linda, xiii; co-author of Introduction and Chapetr 36; also co-editor Milotay, Nora, xxii, 2, 5, 523–4, 605, 613; author of Chapter 1 Minett, J.W., 434 Mission: Readiness program, 294 missionary activity, 39 Mitchell, C., 388–90

Index

Mitchell, Linda, 152, 155–60 mixed-age groups of children, 76, 81 ‘mixed economy’ of care, 4 Miyaoka, O., 434 Modak, Tarabai, 41 monitoring of ECEC, 175–7 Montessori, Maria, 39, 41, 181, 331–2, 421, 425–6 Mony, M., 403 Morales, Francisca, 184 Moroney, R., 572 Morrrison, A., 593 Moss, Peter, xxii, 2, 8, 113–14, 159, 270, 282, 289, 296–8, 411, 420–1, 587, 610–14; author of Chapter 15 mother-child bonding, 394 ‘mud child’ image, 79, 609 multiculturalism, 405, 411, 480 multigenerational approach to learning, 334–5 multilingualism, 407, 411–14 Munkammar, I., 97, 259 Murray, Lynne, 359 Myanmar, 6, 114–17, 608 Nagel, S.S., 572 Nam, S.Y., 475 nannies, 546, 548 nation states, 404 National Health Service (NHS), 271, 376, 381 National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), 358 Native Americans, 139 neoliberalism, 40, 73, 81, 185, 276, 418–19, 459, 537, 540–8 Netherlands, the, 273–4, 355 Neuman, Michelle J., xxiii, 2, 8, 72, 74, 77, 606–9, 612–13; author of Chapter 14 neuroscience, 566–71, 579 New, R.S., 40 new-born children, 357 New Jersey, 142 New York City, 141 New Zealand, 13, 110–11, 151–62, 244, 261, 263, 291, 391, 433–49, 455, 461, 552, 558, 584–600, 610–13 New Zealand Educational Institute (NZIE), 595–6 Ngonyama, Donald, 341–2 NIcaragua, 180, 250

625

Niger, 251 NITI Aayog, 36 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policy, 291, 293 non-governmental organisations (NGOs), 108, 168 Noonan, Rosslyn, 152 Nores, Milagros, xxiii, 2, 13, 216–17, 568, 606–11; author of Chapter 29 North Korea, 11–12, 467–80, 610 context of, 468–70 refugees from, 468–78 Norway, 244, 280–1, 459, 499 Ntataise organisation, 212–13, 216 ‘nudges’ in behavioural governance, 21 nursery schools, 614 nutrition, 232, 245, 247, 333, 385, 508 Nuttall, Joce, 161 Nyerere, Julius, 323 Obama, Barack, 139, 145, 292, 295, 313 Oberhuemer, P., 72, 74, 77 obesity, 508 Ochoa, S., 190 ‘O Classes’, 219, 223–4, 228–9 O’Connell, R., 599 Oelkers, N., 63 Office for Standards in Education and Skills (Ofsted), 274, 327, 363, 587, 599–600 Ohio, 144 Oklahoma, 496 ‘one child’ policy in China, 166, 172, 176 Open Method of Coordination in the EU, 23–5 ‘orchid’ children, 390 Oregon, 363 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 20, 22, 26–7, 91, 108–9, 111, 279–81, 327, 407–8, 460, 487–8, 585, 605–8 Osberg, S., 327–9, 335–6 Ostner, I., 51 O’Sullivan, June, xxiii, 2, 10, 609; author of Chapter 19 Ounce of Prevention Fund, 305–7, 314 Pak, S., 475 Pakistan, 8, 112, 245–8 Pankhurst, Alula, xxiii, 2–3, 8, 606; co-author of Chapter 13

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Papakura, Maggie, 440 Pardo, Marcela, xxiii–xxiv, 2, 185, 191, 608, 612; co-author of Chapter 11 parent-led and parent-run services, 586, 597 parental authority, 425, 427 parental choice, 412, 514 parental influence, 509 parental involvement, 556–7, 560 parental leave, 53, 56–8, 74, 147, 266, 269 parental responsibility for education and care, 63–4 parental support, 409–11 parenting, 392–4, 408, 410, 462 participation rates for children’s services, 2–3, 55–6, 63–4, 87–8, 162, 187, 485, 513, 556, 611 participatory principles and practice, 458–64 Pascal, C., 330 pay and conditions of staff, 514, 584–6, 591–5, 600 Pears, K.C., 356, 363–4 Pearson, J., 595 pedagogical coaching, 523–4, 529 pedagogical documentation, 413, 522–3, 528 pedagogical support centres (PSCs), 529–31 pedagogues and pedagogical learning, 71–84 ‘pedagogy of care’, 557–9 peer interaction and peer learning, 508–9 Peeters, Jan, xxiv, 2, 13, 613; co-author of Chapter 31 Peleman, Brecht, xxiv, 2, 13, 613; co-author of Chapter 31 Pence, A., 614 Penn, H., 324 Peralta, M., 188 Percy-Smith, B., 456 Pere, Rose, 439 Perry Preschool Programme, 135–6, 491–6, 568 Persson, Göran, 91 Peru, 221 Peters, B.G., 568 Petersen, J.S., 83 Pettigrew, A.M., 570 Pew Charitable Trust, 140 Phatudi, Nkidi C., xxiv, 2, 8; co-author of Chapter 12 phenotypes, 386 Phillips, D., 356, 460, 567 physical development of young children, 508

Piaget, Jean, 40, 169 Pianta, R.C., 295 Picchio, M., 528 Pierson, P., 276 PISA see Programme for Inter-national Student Assessment play, 81–2, 331–2, 508 child-initiated, 81 playgroups, 259, 272–3, 597 Poland, 11, 73, 363, 418–30, 453 policy on ECEC for children over three, 74–5 for children under three, 73–4 ‘policy elixirs’, 571 policy instruments, 110 policy development, 12–14, 20, 24, 185–9 policy levers, 606 policy-making, nature of, 605 policy research, policy analysis and policy evaluation, 572, 574 political priorities, 190 political will, 606, population-based studies, 571 Portugal, 75 poverty and its alleviation, 8–9, 34, 41, 134–6, 146–8, 171, 181, 185, 219, 238, 269–70, 277, 281–2, 290, 295, 304–5, 329, 369–77, 381, 385, 388–9, 392–3, 409, 504–5, 513, 523, 587, 597, 607 Powell, W.W., 575 Pramling Samuelson, I., 95, 98 ‘Pre-K’ studies, 140, 294–5, 496–7 preparation for life, 136 Pre-School Learning Alliance (PLA), 597 preschool sector, 74, 81, 136, 407 in China, 166 in France and Sweden, 89–106 in Latin America, 187 in Poland, 419–23 ‘preschoolification’ of compulsory education, 101 Press, Frances, xxiv–xxv, 2, 13, 609; co-author of Chapter 32 preventive care, 394 primary education’s relationship with ECEC in France and Sweden, 87–117 private education private provision for early years care and education, 4, 34, 40–1, 46, 56, 76, 125,

Index

168–9, 171–4, 261, 268, 271–80, 324, 513, 544, 548, 606 process quality of children’s experience, 507–9, 528 Professional Association for Childcare and Early Years (PACEY), 597–8 professional development of early years staff, 189, 308, 462, 510–11, 514, 530, 556–8, 586 professionalisation of early years staff, 13, 25, 144–6, 523, 557–8, 584, 593–4, 598, 600, 612–13 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), 6, 27, 50, 53, 98, 100–3, 407, 607, 614 promotive care, 394 ‘proportionate universalism’, 278 ‘public good’ justification for early years provision, 273, 459, 537, 548, 609, 613 public health models, 397 public-private partnerships, 609 public spending, 193, 195, 248, 278, 485, 585 Pugh, G., 462 ‘pupil premium’, 278 Putnam, R.D., 328 Putnick, D., 392 qualifications of early years staff, 62, 98, 136–7, 144–5, 161–2, 189, 196, 276, 510, 514, 557, 586, 590–4, 598–600, 613 qualitative research, 527 quality assessment, 175–7 quality of early years provision, 61–3, 184, 188–9, 173–7, 184, 192, 270, 277, 324, 460–3, 495–6, 499–500, 504–15, 523–4, 574, 613 definition of, 507 drivers of, 509–13 meaning of, 611 quality frameworks, 12, 25, 27–8; see also European Quality Frame-work; ISSA Quality Framework quality rating improvement systems (QRIS), 295–7 quality standards of the US National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER), 140 Quebec, 498–9 randomised controlled trials (RCTs), 495–6, 527, 568 readiness for life, 99

627

Rebello Britto, P., 3 reciprocity between parents and practitioners, 411–13 between children and practitioners, 464 ‘redshirting’, 292 reflective practice, 528, 530, 559 refugee children, 352 from North Korea, 468–78 Reggio Emilia, 94, 101, 104, 249, 263–4, 429, 461–2, 552 registration of teachers and other staff, 592, 600 regulation of service providers, 609 research definition of, 571–2 disciplined, 569 on ECEC, 109, 193, 195, 485, 526–8, 566–78 link to policy, 13 polemics in, 570–5 policy implications policy and further studies, 499–500 usability of, 568–70, 579–80 see also systems research research capacity, 574–5, 579–80 residential care for children, 354–5 residential segregation, 60 respect for children’s views, 457–8, 463 ‘retained students’, 292–3 return on invesment in children, 112–13, 115, 191, 216, 294, 323, 613 Reynolds, A.J., 495 rich children, advantages of, 263 Riedel, Birgit, xxv, 2, 6, 60, 607; co-author of Chapter 3 rights, definition of, 452 rights of children, 5, 11, 37, 63, 108–9, 113, 157–60, 183–5, 190–6, 203, 206–9, 385, 428, 452–61, 552, 606, 609–10 bottom-up perspective on, 461 sociocultural theories on, 455–6 Rinaldi, Carla, 461 Ringsmose, C. 82–3 RISE project, 242–3 rituals and rites of passage, 38 Robert Taylor Homes (Chicago), 305 Roberts-Holmes, G., 594 Roets, G., 527 Romaine, S., 434

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Roope, L., 392 Roose, R., 527 Rose, R., 568 Ross, P., 545 Rossi, P.H., 570 Rossiter, Jack, xxv, 2–3, 8, 606; co-author of Chapter 13 Roth, Jessica L., xxv, 2, 13, 612; co-author of Chapter 34 Rowan, B., 575 Ruhm, C.J., 134 rural areas, education in, 171, 176, 187, 238, 240 Ryan, Edna, 543 Sabol, T.J., 295 St Cerny, S., 498 samaskaras, 38 Sameroff, A., 487 Samms-Vaughan, Maureen, 245 San Francisco, 147 ‘scaling up’ of ECEC, 229–33, 569, 607–8, 611–13 Schober, P.S., 59 school readiness, 9, 63, 89, 93–4, 99, 102–3, 191, 205, 219–21, 233, 236, 287–98, 371, 407, 507, 587, 607, 610 definition of, 288–9 educational significance, 292 empiricist and interactionist understandings of, 296–8 existing research on, 292–4 future directions for study, 297–8 as a policy problem, 289–92 ‘schoolification’, 6, 14, 90–4, 98–100, 105, 190, 262, 607, 614 Schreyer, I., 72, 74, 77 Schröder, Gerhard, 50–1 scientific advice on policy, 19–23, 28 Scott-Little, C. 291 screening programmes, 391 Selleck, D., 462 Senge, P., 479 Serjeant, Raiha, 438 Shaanxi Province (China), 171–2 ‘shadowing’, 526 Shanghai, 176 Sharma, Shipra, xxv, 2, 5, 606, 609, 611; co-author of Chapter 2

Shepard, L.A., 292 Sheridan, S., 95, 98, 528 Shipley, Jenny, 155, 157 Shonkoff, J., 460, 567 Sierens, S., 413 Signoretta, P., 363 Simon, Antonia, xxv–xxvi, 2, 13, 611; co-author of Chapter 35 Simpson, D., 329 Simpson, G., 4 Sinclair, A., 323 Sinclair, I., 358, 363 Singapore, 110 Siraj-Blatchford, I., 559 Skerrett, Mere, xxvi, 2, 11, 440, 610; author of Chapter 26 Skivenes, M., 463 Skolverket, 259 Skutnabb-Kangas, T., 448 Slovenia, 77, 93, 244, 258, 552–9, 562–3, 611 Smith, Anne B., xxvi, 2, 11, 154–5, 462, 610; author of Chapter 27 Smith, John, 370 Smith, M.L., 292 ‘social approach’ to early years education, 75–6 social construction of the child, 87–9, 102, 105 social disadvantage, 9–12, 32–3, 59; see also disadvantaged groups social-emotional competence, 364 social enterprise models, 327, 609 social enterprise nurseries, 332–5 Social Enterprise UK (SEUK), 326 social entrepreneurs, 325–30, 335–6 social equity, 112 social franchising, 249–51, 342 social inclusion and exclusion, 325, 410–11, 478, 523, 556, 561 social investment, 6, 50–3, 59, 63–4, 607 social investment states, 408–9 social justice, 188, 195, 269, 271, 324–5, 339–40, 452, 458 ‘social markets’ model, 280 social participation, 456 social perception of children, 425 social pressure on children, 103 social sciences, influence of, 566, 570 social support, 409–10 social transformation, 117

Index

societal attitudes to young children, 5, 133–4 sociocultural theory, 455 ‘soft’ policy-making, 23–4 solidarity, 457 Solomon Islands, 110–11 Song, J., 476 South Africa, 8, 10, 203–17, 230–1, 338–52 Centre for Early Childhood Development (CECD), 211 context and map of, 204–5 early childhood development and programmes in, 206–14 Early Learning Resource Unit (ELRU), 211–12 impact of local intervention, 214–16 National Association of Child Care Workers (NACCW), 338–42, 352 policies in the new democracy, 205–6 Training Resources for Early Education (TREE) organisation, 213–14, 216 South Korea, 467, 470–80 North Korean refugees in, 468–79 Soviet Union, 169 Spain, 74–5, 77, 355 ‘special needs’ provision, 78, 364 spiral curriculum, 330–2 Spivak, G.C., 411, 413 split between childcare and early education, 73, 186, 257, 262, 271–4, 585–8, 597–9, 610–12 Stahl, J.F., 59 standardised image of a successful student, 291–2 starting age of children participating in ECEC, 506, 513 Starting Strong toolbox, 3 Stevens, K.B., 134 Stewart, Kitty, 374 stress, 388–9, 392, 504, 506, 509, 593 Strueli, S., 609 subsidiarity, 23 subsidies, 127, 130–1, 269, 274–5, 278–80, 513, 545–8, 588, 609 suicide, 114 Sumsion, J., 280 ‘superdiversity’ in service provision, 406, 408, 411, 413, 610 supranational institutions, 109, 114–16 Sure Start, 272, 276, 369–81, 498, 587 achievements of, 381

629

challenges in, 378–9 evolution of, 373–4, 379 follow-up to, 377 foundations of, 370–1 key features and principles of, 371–3 lessons from, 379–81 national evaluation of (NESS), 374–9 survival rates of children, 385 Suskind, D. and B., 393 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 3, 45, 110, 219–20, 236–7, 251, 385, 393, 572, 579 Sutton, R., 20 Sweden, 6, 8, 73–5, 244, 256–61, 270, 355, 499, 607, 611 contrasted with France, 87–105 Sylva, K., 334, 357, 593 Syrian refugees, 352 systematic reviews, 524, 527 systems research, 13, 572–80 application of theory to practice, 576 nature of, 575–6 new tools and methods for, 578 training and support for, 579–80 Szebehely, M., 548 Szyf, M., 389 Tamburlini, G., 394 Tankersley, Dawn, xxvi, 2, 12; co-author of Chapter 33 targeted provision, 278–80, 377, 412, 459, 513 Tasman, Abel, 435 tax credits, 146–7, 260, 274–5, 278, 587, 594 teacher-centred tradition, 104 teacher education and supply, 90, 96–8, 219, 228–9, 232 teaching practices, 40 television, exposure to, 362 Te Wh¯ariki curriculum, 155–6, 161, 461, 586 Thailand, 112–13 think tanks, 21, 36 ‘third sector’, 326 Thomas, Nigel, 456–8 ‘3A’ problems, 172 ‘3A2S’ framework, 6, 120–1, 125–31 Tin Sheds Gallery, 542 Tobin, John, 79, 411, 413, 452 Tolley, Anne, 159–60

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trade unions, 192, 195, 543–4, 547, 586–8, 595–8, 600 training of researchers, 579 of staff, 77–8, 82, 510, 585–6 Transatlantic Forum on Inclusive Early Years (TFIEY), 531–2 Treasury power, 369–70 Trikic, Zorica, xxvi, 2, 12; co-author of Chapter 33 Trinidad and Tobago, 188 Tronto, Joan, 265 ‘tuned in’ adults, 332; see also attunement Tutu, Desmond, 335 TuTu clubs, 242 ‘two child’ policy in China, 166, 176–7 Uganda, 250–1 underachieving children, 27 ‘underground railroads’, 467 United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), 108, 113, 183, 480, 485, 567 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), 5, 10–12, 44, 109, 113, 181–4, 236, 352, 362, 425, 452–4, 458–9, 463–4, 478, 533, 610 cardinal principles of, 458, 464 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007), 434 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), 34, 111, 115–16, 184, 220 United States, 8–9, 73, 133–48, 169, 355, 461, 485, 488–9, 523, 570–1, 612–13 city-funded programs, 140–1 federal programs, 137–9 multiple funding streams, 141–3 National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE), 576–7 National Education Goals Panel (NEGP), 290 National Survey of Early Care and Education, 489 poverty and early childhood programs, 304–5 shifts in education policy, 290–2 state-funded programs, 139–40 State Preschool Yearbook, 140 see also Educare universal provision of services, 412, 459, 513, 577

values, 570–1, 605 Van Avermaet, P., 413 Van Lancker, W., 270 Vandenbroeck, Michel, xxvii, 2, 11, 410, 527, 610; author of Chapter 24 Vargas-Barón, E., 573, 612 Vaughan, J., 172 VBJK research centre (Ghent University), 522–7, 530–4 Vertovec, S., 406 ‘views’ studies, 527 Vijayalakshmi, M., 40 violence against children, 425, 473 Virginia, State of, 295 virtual schools, 364 voucher schemes for education, 121–2, 126–9, 274–5 vulnerable groups, 111–12, 159, 174, 211, 323, 329, 390–1, 460, 463, 523, 548, 552, 561 Vygotsky, L.S., 40, 169, 331, 439, 455 Waitangi Treaty, 437, 448 Walker, R., 438–9 Wang, D., 123 Wang, Jingying, xxvii, 2, 6, 612; co-author of Chapter 7 Wang, W.S., 434 Ward, Harriet, 356 Washington, State of, 144 Washington State Institute for Public Policy (WSIPP), 497 Wei, L., 435 Weikart, David, 135 Weiland, C., 141 Weisleder, A., 331 Welch-Ross, M., 570 ‘welfare’ approach to children’s services, 41–2, 44, 81, 113, 181, 190, 585 welfare policy, 71 welfare state provision, 50, 64, 71–4, 78–9, 84, 90, 405, 570 welfare-to-work programmes, 134, 460, 463 Wells, Clare, 152–7 ‘Westernisation’, 571, 608, 613–14 ‘what works’, evaluation of, 374, 396, 527, 533 Whitebread, D., 296 Whitlam, Gough, 541–2, 546

Index

Wilczyńska, Stefania, 422 Williams, William, 437 Woldehanna, T., 233 women’s employment, 13, 54, 57–8, 73–4, 134, 370–1, 382, 408, 491, 499, 505, 513, 537, 541–2, 547–8, 587, 611 women’s liberation and the women’s movement, 537, 541–2 Woodhead, Martin, xxvii, 2, 8, 455, 606–13; co-author of Chapter 13 Woodrow, Christine, xxvii, 2–3, 13, 190, 273, 609; co-author of Chapter 32 Woods, P., 291 work-life balance, 64 workforce in early years services, 13–14, 136–7, 144–6, 189, 194–5, 260, 378–9, 410, 592, 611 development of, 574 in France and Sweden, 95–8 involvement in policymaking, 192 preparation of, 510–11, 523 statistics of, 589–91 working conditions, 528 World Bank, 46, 112, 184, 233

631

World Bank Group Educational Strategy 2020 (2011), 109 World Development Report, 21 Wright, J.D., 570 Wuhan, 167 Xi’an (China), 172 Yazejian, Noreen, xxvii, 2, 303, 306, 608; co-author of Chapter 18 Yoon, S., 470 Yoshikawa, H., 141 Yosso, T.J., 297 Young, Mary Eming, xxviii, 2, 394, 608, 612; author of Chapter 23 Young Lives study, 219–23, 232–3 young people, 180–1 Yunus, Mohammed, 326, 336 Zambia, 352 Zanzibar, 8, 238–44 Zhao, L., 174 Zhejiang Province (China), 174 Zigler, E., 289