Rethinking early childhood services - Change from within

‘Make no mistake, the justice system isn’t broken, it was built to work this way,’ Misty Rowan, Minneapolis poet and peace activist, told a Human Rights Day rally in 2014. Every time I see this quote, it speaks to me about the challenges in early childhood services.

The birth to five period impacts everyone’s life course, yet recent research found that 69 per cent of parents did not know the relationship between this period and later-life outcomes for health and well-being (Royal Foundation, 2021). This speaks volumes about the system we have built. Despite all the investment in universal services, we appear to be failing to equip parents with the knowledge and skills required for the most important role of their lives.

Moreover, in England, we appear to be defining the birth to five period in narratives linked to educational frameworks. In fact, the early childhood developmental period is birth to eight, yet we expect children to achieve things by five that other countries expect closer to the end of this stage.

When I try to unpick why this is the case, I keep coming back to our segregated rather than holistic approach to early childhood. In England, this is perpetuated at every level of the systems we operate in, and the occupations that work in them. We have no one professional that is akin to the European Social Pedagogue that starts with the child.

I hoped the Early Years Professional (now EYT) would evolve to bridge this gap. The title of my doctoral thesis was ‘The Early Years Professional: A New Professional or a Missed Opportunity?’ It was certainly a missed opportunity.

As a result of my thesis and other workforce development work, I went on to lead on the development of Early Childhood Graduate Practitioner Competencies, on behalf of the Early Childhood Studies Network. These aim to strengthen our Early Childhood Studies graduate skills in applying their holistic learning to their career trajectories in children and families’ services, not just in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC).

My biggest hope is that they will create a new genre of practitioner, one that will evolve into a global profession in its own right and navigate our complex systems, knock them down and build a new reality.

For me, Covid provides another opportunity on this journey. We must do better in addressing the challenges for all children, young people and families, laid bare by Covid.

The more we navigate the challenges of living and working in a pandemic, the more the challenges of working in complex systems have been exposed. ECEC is an excellent example.

Covid has highlighted further some of the thorny issues in this sector – principally, the core purpose, ‘care’ or ‘education’. Despite all the investment in workforce development and the 2006 Childcare Act, which enshrines ‘care’ and ‘education’ as being intrinsically connected, the divide now seems all the greater.

The challenges of neoliberal policies are also playing out in the mixed economy of the ECEC sector, with PVI and maintained nursery settings occupying the same space.

TIME TO TALK

It is in this context that I want to generate empowering, empathetic conversations about how we create anti-oppressive practice – akin to those in social work – that leads to a pedagogy of opportunity in early childhood. We need to debate all issues of diversity, not just racism.

The language of oppression may not sit well with the language of nurturing care, but the two go hand in hand. To nurture all, we must understand individual stories and provide new ways that eliminate the barriers they may face.

During the pandemic, I have heard things that have made me weep with both joy and despair. One conversation that filled me with hope was when someone said to me, ‘I’ve noticed this… I have challenged others to… and we need to…’ and, most importantly, ‘l am open to…’

This person understood how health, structural inequalities and racism impact the lives of others – and that the structures we have developed may inadvertently have created the barriers to delivering inclusion and opportunity for all.

All forms of racism, structural and health inequalities are played out every day in the ECEC sector. These challenges are reinforced by comments that are usually not intentional but reflect the pervasive oppression and discrimination embedded in society.

A recent example used derogatory language at children’s expense to explain the importance of nurturing care. The audience laughed, but I was left despairing and wondering ‘What are you going to do about this?’ – this piece has been the result.

Promoting anti-oppressive and anti-discriminatory practices is embedded in all my work. I need to be absolutely clear; language is powerful and does perpetuate oppression. No child should be talked about in deficit language; they are all special. It is their experiences in their families, communities and institutions they attend that serve to disempower or empower them.

Many practitioners have opted to work in the sector due to their own adverse childhood and educational experiences – experiences that generate practice from a place of knowing. So how, in a sector of multiple voices, do we create a pedagogy of opportunity for all, that can adapt to change and be underpinned by anti-oppressive practice?

Change will only come by holding a mirror to ourselves, our society and the value we place on children, their families and those employed in the occupations that work with them. However, reflection alone is not enough – we require new narratives, new structures, proactive training and communities focused on action.

We need to learn from our social work colleagues on how explicit anti-oppressive practice can create new narratives, understanding and environments. In 1964, Martin Luther King stated, ‘The time is always right to do what is right’, but real change will only come when one by one we can say ‘I’ve noticed this…’, ‘I have challenged others to…’, ‘We need to…’ and ‘l am open to…’.

Eunice Lumsden is subject lead for Childhood, Youth and Families at the University of Northampton