Social Leadership in Early Childhood Education and Care

An Introduction

June O'Sullivan, Mona Sakr

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350212176
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

"Bravo! This book brilliantly meets the moment." – Julie Nicholson, Mills College and Co-Director, Center for Equity in Early Childhood, USA "A lovely insightful exploration of leadership through a social justice lens." – Lord Victor Adebowale, UK Across the world, organisations in early childhood education (ECE) face major organisational challenges, including staff recruitment, retention and wellbeing, in the context of sectoral fragmentation and under-investment. These issues impact negatively on the experience of children, staff, parents and the wider community. Social leadership is a new model of leadership that aims to address these challenges by refocusing leadership through a much stronger social justice lens and a community. It highlights the significance of warm and inclusive modes of leadership as a means of driving positive change. Based on in-depth interviews with renowned global leaders in ECE, this book provides an introduction to the six-element model of social leadership and shows how it can be developed and implemented by organisations, training bodies and educational institutions. Written in accessible language and illustrated with original international case studies the book begins a much-needed dialogue about how we can work from within ECE to overcome the workforce and sectoral hurdles we face.

1

Committing to a social purpose

In this chapter, we explore how and why social leaders need to commit to a social purpose in ECEC. We ask:

• What do we understand by social purpose in ECEC?

• Why must social leaders promote the importance of social purpose in ECEC?

• How can social leaders drive social purpose in ECEC?

What do we understand by social purpose in ECEC?

When organizations and businesses describe their social purpose, they refer to the reason for their existence: the ways they want to create a better world or be an engine for good and a positive force in society. Organizations that drive a social purpose can be formed in many ways.

LEYF is a social enterprise and is constituted within a charitable governance structure so that it can blend together social and commercial goals in the pursuit of a fairer society by designing social enterprise nurseries where over one-third of the places are subsidized to enable children from poor and disadvantaged communities to access high-quality ECEC operating a social pedagogy (see Chapter 2). Indigo Childcare Group in Scotland and Learning Enrichment Foundation in Canada use a similar model to deliver their social purpose while Early Years in Northern Ireland is a more traditional charity with heavier reliance on grants and fundraising.

Stepping Stones in Australia, Experiential Play in Scotland and Horizon Centre of Early Childhood in Malaysia are commercial businesses, but still have a strong social purpose running right through their constitution and their activities. State provision of ECEC, which may be in the form of playschools (the Scandinavian model), maintained nursery schools (as in the UK) or nurseries that sit within schools (as with the nursery at Reach Academy in London) are all founded on a strong social purpose.

While social leadership in ECEC must involve a strong sense of social purpose, there is flexibility as to how ECEC professionals within organizations connect with this purpose and how exactly they define the purpose. Some focus exclusively on the child’s experience and their learning, while others focus more on what is happening around the child, such as the family, the staff and the wider community. The common element is that they want to create a more equitable world and do this by enabling all children, and particularly those experiencing disadvantage, to access high-quality ECEC provision that is supportive, ambitious and accessible. Jacqueline Lamb describes the approach at Indigo Childcare Group:

I think as far as our governance terms are concerned, they’ve always been about supporting families in areas of deprivation to get back into work. That’s the technical aspect of the governance. In my view, it’s a lot bigger than that. I think there are two strands to it. It’s about breaking that generational cycle of poverty, because it’s so deeply entrenched here in Castlemilk (an area of Glasgow, Scotland). And alongside that, it’s about doing something to close that attainment gap – whatever contribution you can make to close that attainment gap, to contribute to breaking that cycle of poverty … It’s about inspiring new families that comes through to reach for the best that they can possibly reach for regardless of where they’re coming from and the experiences they’ve had.

How we articulate social purpose will depend on the specific context in which we work. For Pauline Walmsey, leading the charity Early Years in Northern Ireland, the social purpose is about supporting children and families to thrive in the context of a peaceful society:

From the beginning, 55 years ago when our organisation was developed it began from a child-centred perspective. Our vision was and remains ‘children are strong, confident and visible in their own community’, ‘children are emotionally and physically well’, ‘children are respectful of difference’ and ‘children grow up in a peaceful and shared society’. This is something very important for us in Northern Ireland. Our social purpose is to promote and develop high quality evidence-informed early childhood services for young children and their families. That has remained the purpose of the organisation going back to when those founding mothers met in 1965. That’s why they came together, to try and develop and further their practice with the children they were working with at the time, and we have continued to place that purpose very centrally in the organisation.

For Alice Sharp, leading what she describes as a private limited Early Years Training Company in Scotland, there is a similar focus on supporting local communities through ECEC:

My company came from me buying the Scottish Independent Nurseries Association and reshaping it so I could run courses that reflected the challenges we were facing such as teaching staff how to walk with fragile families and gathering expertise from organisations such as Sheffield Children’s Centre and LEYF – I wanted to be much more focused on a social purpose of equity and access and that kind of clashed with the Board, which were not about that, so very quickly they offered me the opportunity to buy the company. As a teacher I’d never wanted to own a company. I hate being responsible for staff salaries. It’s the bit of the job I worry about the most. It’s never been on my radar. But what I’ve loved is the change of ethos that my ownership gives me, I can now choose the purpose that we have, and although we’re a limited company, at the heart of what we do is how we can help change communities. Making profit out of that sits uncomfortably with me but we have to pay staff salaries and we have to invest in the future. You’re always fighting against the attitude of ‘oh that’s a limited company, we’re not giving them any money’ but what they fail to understand is that we’re investing it back, so I believe we are socially motivated, even though it might not say it explicitly in our paperwork.

This stance also resonates with Chantal Williams from Stepping Stones in Australia, who focuses more closely on the needs of parents – often single mothers living in relatively isolated areas – and how parents can be supported through ECEC:

Well, the very first Centre we set up was because people didn’t have access to childcare. The centre that was already in our town was catering just for people who were working and they didn’t have any spare places. In Australia you have to run by the guidelines which is that people working or studying have to come first, children at risk of some sort of abuse have to come second, and then it pretty much all falls away for everyone else. We wanted to change that and open up spaces for everybody else. And some of my favourite memories over the last 25 years have been parents coming in, more often than not, single mums, and they’d come up to the counter and wouldn’t even look you in the eye, they would be looking down and have their child with them and say ‘I just want to see if he can come here, maybe just once a week’ and we’d say ‘yes have you made your list?’ and they’d say ‘what list?’ and we’d say ‘of all the things you can do when you’re on your own’. ‘Ahhh no no, it’s not about me’. And I’d say ‘yes it is about you – it’s as much about you as it is about your child’. And they’d start to stand up a bit straighter because someone heard them and someone could see that they needed some time. They just needed a hot cup of coffee that they could drink to the end, to visit a friend or do the shopping or the housework without the children running around behind them. So, for us it was about providing care to empower – to give parents time to ease their load, to have someone else to talk to. Sometimes they didn’t have anyone else. And we would be it. So, whilst we do have lots of and lots of working parents, we are quite often that person who will listen. But their children have a chance to get out and about and meet other children as well. So for us, it’s a no-brainer that if you’re working you need childcare. But we really promote the social aspect of childcare and for us giving parents a break is as much important ass giving their children an opportunity to learn and develop in childcare.

It can be confusing for social leaders to make sense of the social purpose that drives them, particularly when they are operating in the context of private business. When we wrote to Zaridah Abu Zarin in Malaysia, owner and manager of the Horizon Early Childhood Centre in Kuala Lumpur, she commented:

To be honest with you June, I have never thought of myself as a social leader but more of a business owner. In Malaysia the term social business is only recently introduced. All I know is that I am paying my staff much higher than the rate most practitioners are getting paid and trying my best to share good practices that I carry from the time I worked at LEYF.

Many of us think about national systems of compulsory education as a basic ‘social right’, designed to equalize people’s life chances by compensating for social disadvantage (Gilbert, 2010). We talk about schools as giving everyone the skills to get a job and participate fully in society. However, Gilbert suggests that this vision has essentially failed and while schools can make a difference to people’s life chances, in general they do not, and, in many cases, they actively reproduce social inequities, a point also made forcefully by Fullan and Quinn (2016).

In terms of social purpose, the ECEC sector paints an even more complicated picture than other parts of the education system because many of the ECEC models are shaped by market forces. According to the OECD (2019) most countries continue to have low-funded ECEC services despite the UNCRC recognizing that child’s right to free and accessible ECEC. In the UK, the ECEC sector grew as a response to Tony Blair’s announcement when he became prime minister that poverty was solved by employment and therefore a childcare infrastructure was necessary. This led to the first National Childcare Strategy in 1998, when money was set aside to build nurseries and children’s centres and respond to the real paucity of available childcare. Twenty years on and the landscape has changed. Subsequent governments have added to childcare provision through occasional financial and policy incentives, but it has been haphazard and driven by short-term initiatives and projects. Consequently, social leaders have been uncomfortable with leaving the response to poverty and disadvantage entirely to the market because there is no history of the market fully addressing inequality of education provision especially when funding is inadequate. Most subsidies are given directly to parents through the funded entitlement, the universal credit childcare element, working tax credits and tax-free childcare. According to the National Audit Office (2020) parents find there is an insufficiency of ECEC places in disadvantaged areas particularly for flexible childcare, childcare for atypical hours, or places for children with SEND. Private providers complain that operating in such neighbourhoods is not financially viable.

Understanding social purpose in ECEC depends on understanding the national policy context. Childcare in the UK, where we write from, provides a £6.7billion annual contribution to the national economy and is a key part of our social infrastructure. There are over 24,000 nurseries with 1.1 million places for children. According to the independent UK-based ECEC research body Ceeda (2019), private, voluntary and independent nurseries are responsible for 80 per cent of childcare places in England and employ over 250,000 staff in a workforce of 365,000. Most English nurseries (71 per cent) are defined as ‘Mommas and Poppas’ which describes the one or two nurseries with a single owner. Next in line are the groups of three and four nurseries which constitute 10 per cent, then we have the groups of five to nineteen nurseries which also constitute 10 per cent of the sector and the biggest groups of twenty plus nurseries are 9 per cent of the market. Together all the nurseries offer 1,064,677 places. Childminder numbers are falling but there are still 37,299 providing 240,724 places. However, once you look deeper less than 20 per cent of those settings are focused on providing children from disadvantage with a significant number of places and the continual reason is that they cannot afford to subsidize the Government contribution towards funding ‘free’ places for children whose families cannot afford the full cost of nursery.

Across the world we are seeing movement in the ECEC market space driven by the increased involvement of international venture capitalists in the sector. These are groups of investors who form a partnership to provide capital to businesses which seem to have high growth potential in exchange for an equity stake. The Venture Capital fund will invest and nurture the growth of those businesses with a view to sell with a substantial return on the investment.

There is also a new route to investment in the sector from social investors. Like venture capitalists, they raise money but choose to invest in companies that are actively creating positive social or environmental change by consciously tackling society’s challenges. Of course, they also want to make some form of financial return. Much of the funding from social investors is debt at a high interest rate to cover their set up and management costs.

There are concerns about the rise of the venture capitalist involvement in the sector. The language of investors talking about lively market opportunities and overseas investment portfolios can be uncomfortable and for many completely at odds with the conversation of social purpose, pedagogy and quality. Scandals like Southern Cross in the social care sector and the ABC Nursery chain in Australia caused consternation. Southern Cross private equity funded care homes over-extended themselves and ran out of cash, causing the business to collapse. The Australian ABC nursery chain, which had become the biggest in the world, went into liquidation in 2008 as a result of burdening itself with debt while chasing aggressive expansion. It was simply too big to fail and the Australian Government had to provide a bailout of millions to keep the nurseries running until new buyers took over. Interestingly, the biggest provider to rescue ABC was the social enterprise partnership Goodstart.

A report from NEF (2019) argues that services run increasingly by globalized chains focus on provision of large settings in high-end areas with decline in places in more disadvantaged areas and a 48 per cent rise in affluent areas. The consequence can be ‘childcare deserts’, which are geographical areas without sufficient childcare. These are more likely to fall in areas where ECEC would serve low-income communities, rural communities, families of colour and families with irregular working patterns (Zeng et al., 2021). Reich (2019) notes a corresponding increase in hyper competitiveness among parents especially in the United States as they worry about getting their children into the best preschool to increase their chances of becoming successful and getting into the best school so parents can feel confident that they are passing their economic status to their children and in doing so creating even more rigid class divisions. Marianne Cooper (2020) tracked the increasing unequal income distribution and the corresponding financial and emotional burden on families where parents’ anxiety about financial security has led to a frenzy of intensive parenting. The economists Doepke and Zilibotti (2019) explain that in countries with high social inequality, such as the United States and China, parents are required to do far more to support and prepare their children, because business and government do so little. This reality stands in contrast to low-social-inequality countries with more family-friendly policies.

Given this complex global context, the debate about social purpose in ECEC is timely as we negotiate the best systems to build more equity for the youngest children and their families. Social purpose as a common good resonates from all the social leaders we interviewed. For social leaders, it is about providing a means of making ECEC accessible to children from disadvantaged and poor backgrounds while ensuring all efforts to embed continuous improvement to drive quality. Operationally, this can be achieved in different ways, whether through a strong social business and pedagogy model at LEYF or higher remuneration for staff provided by Zaridah Abu Zarin or Alice Sharp developing training and support for poor families to help them leverage better educational and financial outcomes for them and their families.

Why must social leaders promote the importance of social purpose in ECEC?

Social leaders actively seek out disadvantage and look for ways to respond. Many social leaders are also social entrepreneurs and that is unsurprising. Social entrepreneurs seek out complex issues and try and create a business or organizational response to address the issue but in a way that empowers those experiencing the problems. They also generally reject the deficit narrative associated with disadvantage and reframe it both positively and creatively. Social leaders accept that while building an organization is desirable, the main purpose for social leadership is to lead with a purpose and shape a service that encourages a balanced focus on economic profits, employee well-being and social and ecological impact.

One of the biggest challenges to social leaders in ECEC is how to address child poverty, a situation which produces social and economic inequity with manifold negative outcomes for everyone. Left unaddressed, poverty can alter the trajectory of a child’s entire life increasing the likelihood of long-term poverty, poor educational outcomes, developing obesity, mental health issues as well as dying early. Poverty is the strongest statistical predictor of how well a child will achieve at school. At the end of primary school, pupils living in poverty are often over nine months behind their peers in reading, writing and maths. For example, in the UK, the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) report (2020) states that children with a high persistence of poverty (those on free school meals for over 80 per cent of their time at school) have a learning gap of 22.7 months ‒ twice that of children with a low persistence of poverty (those on free schools’ meals for less than 20 per cent of their time at school), who have a learning gap of 11.3 months.

The attainment gap persists for pupils throughout secondary school. UK Students eligible for free school meals are half as likely to achieve a good pass at GCSE in English and Maths in comparison to other students living in poverty who are four times more likely to be permanently excluded from school than their peers. And finally, even when disadvantaged students gain the same qualifications as their peers, they are 50 per cent more likely to be Not in Education, Employment, or Training (NEET). Sadly, this pattern is also evident in other rich Western economies (Fullan & Quinn, 2016).

Even though the UK is the fifth richest economy in the world, poverty exists in every corner of the UK. To be defined as living in pover...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Committing to a social purpose
• 2 Driving a social pedagogy
• 3 Creating a culture of collaborative innovation
• 4 Investing in others’ leadership
• 5 Facilitating powerful conversations
• 6 Sowing the seeds of sustainability
• 7 Conclusion
• References
• Index
• Imprint