Early Years Policy

The impact on practice

Zenna Kingdon, Jan Gourd, Zenna Kingdon, Jan Gourd

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317950424
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

How does early years policy impact on practitioners, children, settings and families?

What are the implications of current policy for the future?

How can early years professionals shape and craft practice in ways that genuinely focus on the needs of children and families, rather than the interests of policy makers?

This exciting new text explores the changing context and increasing importance of early years policy. It takes a broad look at policy developments and shows how these have affected children, settings, parents and the early years workforce.

Divided into two parts, the first examines theoretical perspectives and sets out the early years policy context, looking at issues surrounding accountability, international influences on policy and the Early Years Foundation Stage. The second half of the book directly shows how policy has influenced practice, and considers:

• the upskilling of the workforce and the impact of this on practitioners;
• the development of the learning environment including outdoor provision;
• sustained shared thinking and its link to high quality learning and teaching;
• the impact of policy on parents.

Offering a fresh perspective on early years policy, this timely textbook will be essential reading for students on undergraduate and postgraduate Early Years and Childhood Studies courses and those working towards Early Years Teacher status.

PART I Theoretical perspectives

DOI: 10.4324/9781315863016-2

CHAPTER 1 Early years work, professionalism and the translation of policy into practice

Sue Lea

DOI: 10.4324/9781315863016-3

Introduction

This chapter does not seek to describe or analyse current early years policy but to offer a framework by which policy can be critically interrogated by early years practitioners as part of their ongoing professional formation and development. It is concerned primarily with the ways in which central government policy sets out to influence outcomes for children at the local level, and seeks to explore how well-informed early years practitioners and managers can learn to shape and craft the environments in which early years services are delivered within a framework that sets the rights and interests of children at the centre of practice. In order to do this the chapter seeks to highlight some of the different theoretical and value positions that inform policy, including the education and training of early years professionals and the various systems of alternative accountability that operate at the local level. By this broad critical exploration of the policy process, it is hoped that early years workers will be equipped to understand how to interrogate policy aims and objectives in both current and future guises while recognising that they are key actors in the struggle over policy implementation that is always present at the point of local delivery where practice is actively constructed (Apple 2013; Lipsky 2010; Ball 2008).

Interrogating policy

Policy is not abstract. Early years policy sets out to design particular types of interventions into the lives of children, families and communities based often on the hidden theoretical assumptions and value preferences of policy makers. The basic challenge for all professional workers is therefore to understand what policy is trying to achieve and how it is trying to achieve it. Meaningful explorations of these questions involve examination of both the explicit and implicit assumptions embedded in policy and their ultimate impact on the values and purpose of professional practice in early years education. This impact is felt at the local level where the lives of professionals, children and parents intersect, and so it is here that values are negotiated as policy texts are interpreted and translated into practice. It is also at the local level that the evidence of impact of policy implementation on social justice and the potential flourishing of the child can be seen. This chapter therefore explores how early years professionals can move from being mere street-level bureaucrats to become policy entrepreneurs who can ‘think globally and act locally’ while translating and interpreting policy into practice in ways that enhance the lives of children and contribute to their flourishing through early education.

• Policy sets out to design particular types of intervention.
• Policy is felt at the local level where professionals, children and parents intersect.

The meaning and purpose of education

If early years policy is seen as key to improving the lived experience of children, it is intimately connected to questions about the meaning and purpose of education that are now being constructed from within a global neoliberal economic perspective. MacNaughton (2005) claims that understanding the local micro-practices of power can help us to under stand how pedagogical practices are intimately connected to power. Ultimately then, approaches to early years practices involve a local struggle over the ‘true’ meaning and purpose of education, where practitioners need global analytical frameworks but also values as a guide for their practice. In current times the struggle for emancipatory education is one that often sacrifices the flourishing of the whole child as global educational policy landscapes now emphasise the economic importance of education, while diminishing its social and democratic benefits. Here policy serves to operate as both ‘a system of values and a symbolic system’ that is used in order to legitimate political decisions (Ball 2008: 13).

These contested understandings and interests are evidenced in policy in a variety of ways set out here. Early years policy impacts disproportionately on the lives of women, particularly poorer and black women. Gender discrimination is clearly evidenced with reference to early years pay, qualifications and workforce development. Early years policy implies judgements about the different parenting styles of different groups of women, often based on ‘race’, social class (which includes both income and neighbourhood) and age. In terms of child development, policy also assumes a set of developmental ‘norms’, which are ‘raced’, classed and gendered. Competing interpretations about the importance, meaning and purpose of play are obscured as curriculum policy; practice guidelines and inspection regimes prioritise measurable outcomes. All of these implicit assumptions are embedded in policy in ways that have the power to directly or indirectly impact on the lived experience of professionals, parents and children.

• Early years policy is linked to questions of the meaning and purpose of education.
• Early years policy implies judgements about a variety of issues in a variety of ways.

Identifying a role: locating yourself in the policy context

Questioning power and values raises different issues from those that emerge from discursively constructed debates about quality and accountability highlighted above. Fundamental questions about policy intentions and the assumptions about the issues that need to be addressed become more obvious from a values perspective. If policy aims at improvement in the lives of all children, early years practitioners need to reflect critically on how they might encourage all children to flourish, in a society that offers them unequal opportunities to do so. This requires that practitioners explore their own roles, values and professional responsibilities in relation to improving the lives of the children, particularly through partnership working, where they are often viewed as the least powerful occupational group with the lowest professional status. By acquiring a different understanding of what policy implies in terms of values and power, and by understanding how professionals mediate the interface between the state and the citizen, the early years professional can start to reflect on his or her work in order to make better-informed interventions. It is over 30 years since Lipsky (2010) originally defined the role of welfare professionals in policy as ‘streetlevel bureaucrats’ and identified them as important policy makers in their own right. Early years workers need to recognise their potential role in the policy process and to build their professional confidence on a set of values explicitly directed to achieving positive outcomes for children.

Values and the global policy landscape

As informed and empowered professionals early years practitioners can redefine their role and, rather than act merely as conduits for policy makers, can construct themselves as proactive leaders and decision makers who actually translate and interpret policy texts into practice contexts (Lea 2012). Understanding how globalisation changes values is key here and Beck (1992) recognised some time ago the emerging requirement for individuals to engage with education merely to manage personal risk in a globalising world. This potential (mis)use of education for indoctrination stretches back much further, and Dewey (1916) claimed that education has no meaning unless we define the type of society we want to create. Dewey was writing about a world in which different education systems operated in different countries, but with the process of globalisation we are now entering a situation where it is ‘especially striking how some of the central education policy issues transcend national boundaries’ (Spillane, in Sugrue 2008: xi). Within this environ ment of global policy reach, concern is now being expressed about the expansion of neoliberal, market-driven rationalities that weave education into a new global economic base, through current political philosophy and policy making (Bansel 2007).

Collin and Apple (2007) further claim that the consent to a particular notion of globalisation is actively being constructed through schooling and education. They believe that school features prominently as a site of intervention because this is ‘where societies develop the human capital necessary for both the running of the informational economy and, relatedly, the steerage of the unfolding processes of globalisation’ (ibid.: 433). For this reason Nguyen (2010) claims that we must question the taken-for-granted assumptions about the benefits of global capitalism that are now embedded in educational policies, as we can only fully understand their impact if we learn to identify and question their hidden assumptions. By doing this, educators across the life course have a basis on which to reflect on the rationale of league tables, inspections and the private sector management practices being imposed on educational settings. This raises the questions, are we measuring what we value (Biesta 2009) and are the measures we use neutral (Apple 2005)? If managerialism and performativity colonise practice they also colonise values, and diminish the focus on social inequalities in favour of competition and economic purpose. Fairclough (2001: 3) highlights the impact on practice as ‘people becom[ing] uncon sciously positioned within a discourse’, and where the power of the neo liberal discourse has been in its ability to appear natural and normal with no obvious alternative to competition and markets. All educational pro fessionals need to question why and how the hegemonic domination of market philosophies has been imported into education through managerial ism, competitive individualism and consumerism. The fundamental challenge for early years professionals is therefore to interrogate their own positions in order that they can consciously (re)position themselves in value terms within policy discourses. This challenge is an intellectual and a value one in both the personal and professional domains if the personal is understood to be political.

• Early years professionals can construct themselves as proactive leaders and decision makers.
• There is a need to question the assumptions of the benefits of globalisation.

A neoliberal paradigm

Apple (2013: 6) explains the dangers well. He argues that current educational interventions are designed from within a neoliberal philosophy with ‘a vision that sees every sector of society as subject to the logics of commodification, marketisation, competition and cost-benefit analysis’. In the early years, as elsewhere, this market logic and language ‘opens a space for certain identities and closes down others’ (ibid.: 7), while policy expects the early years worker to become the midwife of the global child who is market ready and discursively formed by education and care. This policy approach ensures that ‘no aspect of the child must be left uneducated: education touches the spirit, soul, motivation, wishes, desires, dispositions and attitudes of the child to be educated’ (Fendler 2001, in Dahlberg and Moss 2005: 39). For Dahlberg and Moss (2005), this creation of the child as a self-governing subject is the key to participation in the new world order. Apple (2013) concludes that a key question that needs to be addressed by educators is the extent to which they comply with or challenge assumptions about current educational directions as they ask themselves whether or not their educational interventions change society. This question can only be addressed if practitioners are able to recognise and position themselves, and the children they work with, as empowered social actors rather than passive recipients of a policy process that seeks to create them discursively within neoliberal paradigms.

The above claims are significant for practice as they assume a new discourse where global education policy promotes neoliberal economics and market freedoms at the expense of social justice and welfare. If global education policy assumes a global capitalist society, it will embed particular values, dispositions and discursive practices in the minds of future genera tions. Through education early years workers could unintentionally be indoctrinating children from an early age into a competitive global future where individualism and competit...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I Theoretical perspectives
• PART II Policy in practice
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Index