Excessive early years managerial control also has detrimental impacts upon early years practitioners' well-being and mental health, as noted in Chapter 5. Early years workers, respondents in research into the pilot of the RBA (Roberts-Holmes et al. 2020), spoke of the stress such testing regimes induced:

Get rid of it [the RBA] and for once look after the staff and their well-being. We do far too much paperwork as it is.

Mental health and well-being of pupils and staff need this funding not additional assessments.

The education system is completely out of hand. Teachers are not happy and the stress level is high.

Invest in teachers and reduce workload!! So many good teachers are leaving due lack of support, workload, stress and pressure!

A survey of 2,000 childcare workers by the Pre-school Learning Alliance reported 'out of control' workload pressures, driven by the paperwork and administration generated by excessive accountability. Respondents in the survey commented that:

The paperwork and EYFS goals are ridiculous. I do not agree with the way the UK [sic] government perceives children as robots reaching milestones at set points in their lives.

Early years has become about making children fit a criteria [sic] – no consideration is given to the speed the children learn at the moment … Everything is now about ticking the right box. (Preschool Learning Alliance 2018, 7)

A quarter of the respondents in the survey were considering quitting the sector as a result of stress and mental health difficulties. This teacher, in the study of the pilot RBA, had gone beyond considering to actually quitting:

I handed in my resignation earlier in the academic year. One of my concerns was the Baseline testing and the constant pressures put upon EYFS to produce the appropriate data. When there was talk that the Baseline was returning, I knew it was time for me to leave teaching.

Given the above deeply problematic consequences of the English government's tightly controlled and managerial approach to accountability in early years education, I would argue it should be scrapped and replaced by a more participatory and democratic approach based on professional judgements. Trusting early years professional judgements is an essential step in moving early years education away from its current 'dead zone of the imagination' (Giroux 2014, 503) and towards democratic child-led possibilities, diversity and difference. The chapter now turns its attention towards such democratic alternatives and possibilities.

## Towards transformative change

From managerial control to democratic assessment and accountability

A socio-cultural approach to learning respects and values the complexity of teachers and children's relationships and so offers a democratic, participatory and meaningful approach to assessment and accountability. The defining features of such an approach to assessment and accountability are premised upon the respectful and democratic image of a 'rich' child (and 'rich' teachers) with their myriad potentialities and possibilities and who are collaborative actors in their own learning. A 'rich' child is:

a child born with great potential that can be expressed in a hundred languages; an active learner, seeking the meaning of the world from birth, a co-creator of knowledge, identity, culture and values; a child that can live, learn, listen and communicate, but always in relation with others; the whole child, the child with body, mind, emotions, creativity, history and social identity; an individual, whose individuality and autonomy depend upon interdependence … and a citizen and a subject of rights. (Moss 2014, 88)

A democratic assessment is one concerned with the participation of young children in meaningful and authentic contexts, in collaboration with other children and adults, and one which is embedded in tasks that children see as significant, meaningful and worthwhile. This approach to assessment and accountability values early years teachers' professional judgements to observe and listen to children in their everyday authentic experiences and contexts such as play. Through an engagement with a discourse of meaning-making rather than a functional and utilitarian discourse of standards, performance measures and outcomes, early years teachers can reclaim the idea of professional judgement.

Informal assessments, carried out as children engage in experiences they see as relevant and meaningful, such as play, are likely to produce the best and most comprehensive rich picture of early learning and development. Unlike positivist norm-based accountability, which seeks to govern and control through simplistic categories, numbers and linear outcomes, democratic assessment focuses upon the learning process itself. It embraces a participatory and democratic co-construction of knowledge between children and adults that is driven by children's questions and curiosity.

Examples of a democratic socio-cultural approach to assessment and accountability include learning stories (Carr and Lee 2012), originally from New Zealand, and pedagogical documentation (Moss 2014), originally from Reggio Emilia in northern Italy. Both have already appeared in this book; see in particular Chapter 8 for a discussion of learning stories and pedagogical documentation. Learning stories and pedagogical documentation are democratic because they trust early years teachers to make their own contextualised professional judgements as members of teams working collaboratively and having deep knowledge of the life circumstances of the children in their care. These democratic assessment approaches embrace diversity, uncertainty, contingency and unpredictability of processes and outcomes. Indeed, according to the New Zealand early childhood curriculum, *Te Whāriki*, young children 'need to learn how to learn … [to] support lifelong learning' (Ministry of Education 2017, 7). Both approaches document learning that is chosen and led by the children themselves, with the educator participating as a facilitator, enabler and co-constructor who is open to the unexpected and the unpredictable. They use a narrative assessment approach that respectfully documents, interprets and reflects upon a rich and complex picture of children and teachers as co-constructors of meaning and knowledge. They emphasise and focus upon the importance of making a wide range of children's early learning visible and evident to the children themselves, families and teachers so that all can democratically participate and reflect upon the learning that children *can* do.

Learning that may be made visible with learning stories and pedagogical documentation includes, for example, learning dispositions, a range of cognitive abilities, emotional well-being and sociability (Dunphy 2008). This rich and democratic approach to assessment and making learning visible is formative, because it can be used to promote further learning with children and families. Learning stories and pedagogical documentation take listening to young children seriously, as children seek to communicate through multi-modal expressions of meaning-making, their hundred languages. Over time, early years teachers carefully and sensitively use the methods of observation, communication, documentation and reflection to write narrative assessments compiled from a variety of sources including observations, conversations, photographs, drawings, art work and notes. A particularly useful time to engage in such observations and listening to children is when they are participating in meaningful play activities (Dunphy 2008). Indeed a child's well-being and the characteristics of effective learning, such as resilience, perseverance and self-regulation learned in the context of meaningful play, are seen to be more reliable predictors of later academic achievement, rather than 'short-term academic results', which may not last (Whitebread and Bingham 2012).

Pedagogical documentation (such as drawings, artefacts and photographs), along with storytelling and dialogue with teachers, allows teachers to democratically respect young children's competence and ability to have a say in and recognise their own learning journeys, enabling children to construct positive 'possible learner selves' (Carr and Lee 2012). These positive alternatives and possibilities of the self are situated within the school and home and ascribe an agency to the young learner that enables her or him to take on an 'authoring role' in the construction of themselves. Here, educational outcomes become 'the appropriation of a repertoire of learner identities and possible selves' (Carr and Lee 2012, 32), which can help to remedy children's negative self-perceptions.

An excellent example of pedagogical documentation is the Crow Project (Moss 2014), undertaken in a Swedish preschool. The documentation consisted of children's (and teachers') drawings, paintings, photographs from the woods, research notes, plaster and papier-mâché models of crows, made over the course of a year. Ongoing democratic discussion with the children about their artefacts made visible the social-learning processes to the children and teachers. The Crow Project had a strong emphasis upon open-ended project work, listening to children and 'a strong belief in the unlimited potentiality of children' (Carr and Lee 2012, 139), and focused upon the learning processes of participation, dialogue and imagination. Within the Crow Project, learning in its myriad of forms and contexts was locally generated, owned and used by the children, teachers and families for their own democratically decided purposes.

However, Dunphy (2008) has noted the challenges for the implementation of such an approach. First, there is a need for professional preparation and understanding of how authentic participatory assessments can be carried out. Second, narrative formative assessments and their collaborative interpretation take considerable time – a scarce commodity for early years teachers already straining under immense workloads. Third, there are structural issues, such as adult to child ratios, that militate against a complex narrative approach to assessment and accountability.

The democratic assessment and accountability approach outlined above involves professional teams and families taking responsibility for the assessment of children's learning rather than relying on 'outside experts' with their supposedly objective indicators and performance measures. Taking local, shared responsibility involves decision-making from a position of mutual understanding. Such a cooperatively democratic accountability is a moral and political process because it involves a shared, mutual trust and responsibility (Fielding and Moss 2011) from teachers, families, children and local early years' advisors. For example, Alison Peacock (2016, 132), the headteacher of an English primary school, advocates a shared responsibility approach to accountability based on socio-cultural pedagogy:

What we need next is to lead the way in finding a means to improve our accountability systems, informed and inspired by dispositions of trust, openness, generosity and professional courage … As teachers we have the opportunity (and responsibility) to make a difference for those within our own learning sphere today. We can make the decision to listen, to trust, to work collaboratively and most importantly, to believe that there is another way.

The accountability approach I am advocating, of democratic participation and shared responsibility engaging with meaningful learning, is quite different from an accountability approach of managerial control, where children and teachers have little shared social responsibility for assessment beyond a functional and instrumental requirement to provide performance 'evidence'. This is because neoliberalism 'attempts to undermine all forms of solidarity capable of challenging market-driven values and social relations, promoting the virtues of an unbridled individualism almost pathological in its disdain for community, social responsibility, public values and the public good' (Giroux 2014, 2). However, as Peacock and her comments quoted above exemplify, there are many courageous teachers involved in a resistance movement to neoliberalism, managerial accountability and their damaging effects upon early years education: it is heartening to note that the neoliberal accountability reforms outlined in this chapter are challenged and contested.

There are other examples. On a local scale, Archer (2019) has identified early years professionals' and teachers' 'stories of activism' made in response to political decisions. These micro 'stories of activism' included lobbying, social media activity, petitions and meetings, which had the effect of developing a critical literacy among teachers. This critical literacy enabled teachers to 'recognise the power of dominant narratives and how these shape policy trajectories'. On a larger scale, there are a range of early years organisations engaged in an urgent advocacy for children's voices to be heard and teachers' professionalism to be respected. For example, the Early Years Coalition is a campaigning coalition made up of different early years sector organisations working together to represent the sector's views to the Department for Education, particularly around proposed new ELGs (Pascal et al. 2019).

Additionally, primary school teacher unions such as the National Education Union have led successful campaigns against the introduction of the RBA. For example, in 2016, nearly 5,000 primary schools *refused* to implement the English government's first attempt to introduce the RBA in England, and this contributed to the government withdrawing, albeit returning later with a second attempt at introducing this new testing regime. Alison Peacock was one of the thousands of headteachers and early years teachers who refused baseline testing. She noted that:

understanding children's thinking and developing their ideas through building and sustaining dialogue as an expert form of teaching, enables high challenge within a richly supportive environment. This is the beauty and the art of early years teaching that cannot be reduced to scores on a page, or to boxes on a tracking screen … we need to put assessment back in its box; thereby refusing temptation to place labels on children or their teachers. (Peacock 2016, 36)

Early years teachers' activism in 2016 demonstrated that an apparently dominant, totalising and monolithic accountability regime was in fact, contestable. Moreover, in 2019 over 7,000 schools refused to pilot the government's latest RBA (Nursery World 2019). One of the headteachers who decided not to participate commented that if:

the government really wanted to make a difference to education what you do is, you massively, massively invest in early years education, as in nursery schools and pre-schools and you get all of that community stuff going again such as Sure Start and libraries and health visitors.

 By contesting the English government's commitment to managerial control, early years activism at both the micro and macro scale can demonstrate a critical disposition and literacy towards market-driven educational reforms. Such activism provides hope to contest neoliberal reforms *and* advocate for local democratic, participatory and authentic assessment that respects and values both children and teachers.

## Further reading

*Alternative Narratives in Early Childhood* by Peter Moss (Routledge, 2019) is an important book that gives the reader an accessible entry into what neoliberalism means and its impacts upon early years education. It also provides an excellent introduction to the importance of telling alternative narratives, which contest the 'dictatorship of no alternative' that is currently prevalent in English early years education.

Guy Roberts-Holmes's article 'School readiness, governance and early years ability grouping' (*Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood*, 2019), available at doi.org/10.1177/1463949119863128, presents research evidence from a national project that suggests that performance measures, such as the early learning goals and the phonics screening check, govern and steer early years teachers towards inappropriate ability-grouping practices to obtain required outputs and results.

Finally, the website for More Than A Score, at morethanascore.org. uk, carries videos, stories and blogs that demonstrate how the early years should be a time for self-discovery, building confidence and nourishing potential. It argues that young children in England are being let down by a system that cares more about measurement than their education, imagination and possibilities.

## Note

1. On 25 June 2020, the English Department for Education (DfE, 2020, n.p.) announced that 'the statutory introduction of the Reception Baseline Assessment will be delayed for a year because of the issues brought about by the Covid 19 pandemic.'

## References

## 12 Towards empowerment for food and eating in ECEC

Francesca Vaghi

## The need for transformative change

Where do children fit?

What roles do food and eating play in English early years settings? Given that only voluntary guidelines for food provision currently exist in policy frameworks for early childhood education and care (ECEC), mealtimes in early years settings can take any number of configurations, depending on the available resources a setting is able to dedicate to this. Food has a central function in providing nutrition to children, yet is implicated in myriad other projects. Several scholars, following Norbert Elias (1994), have already noted that infant feeding is central to the 'civilising process' we all undergo as human beings (for example, Lupton 1996; Albon and Hellman 2018); table manners and the regulation of the self when eating, for example, are considered clear markers of what makes a 'civilised body'. In current ECEC discourse, which increasingly prioritises school readiness, feeding children also becomes part of the task of preparing children to become integrated into the primary education system.

Adherence to voluntary food guidelines is also among the criteria considered in the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills (Ofsted) assessments of early years institutions in England; these are provided in the 'Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage' from the English Department for Education (DfE). This document indicates a few broad standards for food and drink: 'Where children are provided with meals, snacks and drinks, they must be healthy, balanced and nutritious' (DfE 2017, 28). It also emphasises the importance of food hygiene and outlines the procedure that should be followed in the event of a food poisoning incident. Parallel to the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS), the 'Eat Better Start Better' (EBSB) programme, developed by the (now defunct) charity the Children's Food Trust in 2012, is also used by some settings as a reference for food provision (Action for Children 2017). In contrast to the lack of specificity in the EYFS, EBSB provides meticulous advice on food groups, portion sizes and sample menus for all the meals that settings might offer to children (breakfast, lunch, snacks and supper). Aside from these two actors, the National Health Service (NHS 2018) also offers general guidance to early years settings, through campaigns such as 'Change4Life'.

Aside from being considered in Ofsted inspections, what children are fed in ECEC certainly matters greatly to parents as well. Menus are often part of what might make a setting more or less appealing to families, and this is particularly salient in the largely marketised context that currently exists in England, in which different private settings compete with each other to attract clients (see Chapter 6).

Yet, where do children fit into these considerations? If looking at ECEC policy frameworks, food seems to be largely implicated in reinforcing a still-prevailing vision of the child as a malleable future adult. If considered as a criterion that will contribute to receiving a positive Ofsted report, or a quality that potential (parent) customers will look at in making a decision about where to pay for ECEC, children's food and eating become a lot more about validating institutions in the eyes of official actors and families than about valuing children's daily experiences and preferences.

This chapter thus aims to propose a different view of food and eating in the ECEC context, through ethnographic accounts drawn from research conducted over a 12-month period in a state-maintained nursery and children's centre in inner London. The purpose of conducting this research on children's food policy and practice in ECEC is to show that the universalism of policy and bureaucracy sits uncomfortably alongside the particularism that feeding and eating in the early years entails. This results in unintended consequences, such as contradictory public health messaging and arbitrary policy interventions, which rarely align with practitioners', parents' and children's practices and intentions.

An overview of the policy frameworks and assumptions that operated in the setting where I conducted my ethnographic fieldwork will be provided to contextualise my case study. Following the work of Clark (2017) on listening to children (see Chapter 9), and of Nolas, Aruldoss and Varvantakis (2018) on 'idioms of childhood', the chapter will then delve into an exploration of the alternatives that children created in their daily mealtime routines. It will be shown that children valued the convivial and social roles that food and eating played for them at school, which in turn were an important way in which self and peer identities were constructed by the children in this setting. I argue that this has significant implications for how we might (re)think what constitutes children's well-being, beyond biomedical understandings of this notion. Drawing from Ruth Levitas' utopian studies, the premise that 'alternative or oppositional social practices [can] create new, or at least slightly different, social institutions' (Levitas 2013, xiii) will be put forward.

### Policy and bureaucracy in ECEC

It is July 2017, and I am interviewing Ipsa, one of the lunchtime assistants working at Ladybird Nursery School and Children's Centre.1 As with all staff members who are involved in feeding children at the setting, I ask her what she thinks is the most important aspect of her job. She replies:

To make sure that the children have a nutritional, balanced diet, and encouraging the child to try different foods. Because certain children are just used to their traditional foods … so it's really important that we open them up to all the different kinds of food that is available … [E]ach child is different so you have to go with each child, you can't just have the same … how can I put it … routine for all of them, because it doesn't work, some children get too emotional when they don't want something on their plate. And just that they enjoy it [lunchtime] as well. Eating can be fun as well. So letting them experiment, even if it means touching and feeling as well, it's important … yeah, we encourage them to use their knives and forks but it's important to have the sensory … because there are children … like, in my tradition [Indian], we use our hands to eat, so a lot of children that do come, we tend to notice that they really do use their fingers and their hands to eat, because that's what they're used to back home. So yeah, just understanding every child's background, because we have such diverse children that come in, it's important to understand what their background is as well.

I am struck by Ipsa's answer to this general question, as she encapsulated in just a few minutes many of the aims that staff members had to take into account, often simultaneously, when feeding children at Ladybird. Looking back on our conversation, months after the end of my fieldwork, I realise Ipsa's account highlighted the way in which many ECEC and public health policy discourses play out in the daily lives of the people that I worked with. It also made it clear that there is a need to transform the way in which food and mealtimes are thought of in ECEC, not as part of a set of mechanisms that should result in measurable outcomes, but as components of a 'slow pedagogy' (see Chapter 9) that takes children's experiences and viewpoints into consideration.

Nonetheless, this approach sits in contrast to how ECEC policy in the UK has evolved in the post-Second World War era. Randall argues that, relative to other welfare states in Europe, the UK has given little priority to the establishment of reliable ECEC services; she attributes this to the government's '(partial) incorporation of a liberal philosophy … and strong male breadwinner assumptions' (2002, 219) in the years after the war. In subsequent decades, ECEC policy has tended to be changeable and inconsistent because 'the primary groups affected as "consumers" – mothers and children – lack political organization or leverage' (Randall 2002, 224). This, she further contends, is also linked to, and contributes to, the devalued status of care work. Such devaluation, it needs to be said, is not a phenomenon confined to the UK; women's (and children's) lack of political leverage is historically and geographically pervasive (Lister 2003). Alongside these ideological underpinnings, Randall has also shown that ECEC in the UK is a particularly fragmented policy domain, with a tension between childcare and early education, but also historically between education and public health, which further blurs the aims and outcomes sought by official actors when developing legislations (Randall 2002).

This, in part, created a fruitful environment for the proliferation of a more market-orientated model of ECEC provision during the Thatcher years, when maternalism remained influential but also became ambiguous as women began to form an increasing part of the workforce (Randall 2002). This stance carried on, under subsequent Conservative as well as Labour administrations, and some of the rhetoric around ECEC policy that emerged in these decades continues to this day.

Currently, preparing infants for primary education is an increasingly prominent aim in ECEC policy and curriculum (DfE 2011, 2017), and one in which the language of early intervention and neuroscience frequently gets invoked (an important critique of this policy discourse has been developed by Gillies et al. 2017). The rhetoric around school readiness, for obvious reasons, is largely future-orientated. The DfE (2017, 5), for example, states that the EYFS framework 'promotes teaching and learning to ensure children's "school readiness" and gives children the broad range of knowledge and skills that provide the right foundation for good future progress through school and life'.

The future-orientated language of ECEC policy needs to be evaluated. As already suggested, it reinforces a view of children as 'becomings' rather than 'beings', valuable for their potential as future adults (Qvortrup 2005, 5). Several scholars in the sociology and anthropology of childhood have taken issue with this. Mayall argues that this is a result of a 'continued dominance in the UK of positivist development psychology' that frames children as 'socialisation projects' (2006, 13). By a similar token, Moran-Ellis suggests that embedded within ECEC policy is a paradoxical assumption about children being simultaneously 'dangerous' and 'in danger', which leads both to an overemphasis on safeguarding and guaranteeing children's rights, as well as a desire to control them through policy interventions (2010, 189). These underlying assumptions have important implications with regard to children's food policy. In particular, the notion that early intervention matters because habits developed in the initial stages of life are irreplaceable and/or irreversible (Albon 2015) also plays a big role in this discourse.

These conceptualisations of the child and ECEC aims are linked to several other policy domains in England. Childhood obesity and related non-communicable diseases, such as Type 2 diabetes, have been a central public health concern across nations in recent decades, and England is no exception (NHS 2016; Goisis et al. 2016; Perkins and DeSousa 2018). The Health and Social Care Information Centre has conducted the National Child Measurement Programme (NCMP) since 2005, which entails the collection of body mass index (BMI) data for children in reception class (4 to 5 years old) and Year 6 (10 to 11 years old) in state-maintained schools in England. Results from the most recent NCMP report show that in the reception class 9.5 per cent of 610,435 children were either overweight or obese (Stats Team, NHS Digital 2018, 2). Similar trends have been recorded elsewhere; for instance, in 2014 the Centre for Longitudinal Studies (CLS) published a briefing using data from the Millennium Cohort Study, which revealed that one in five children born in the UK at the beginning of the new century were obese by the age of 11 (CLS 2014).

The notion that health trends reflect structural inequalities is prevalent in these reports; the level of obesity at reception class age was twice as high in the most socio-economically deprived areas compared with the least deprived (Stats Team, NHS Digital 2018, 13). Although several scholars have called the 'crisis' narrative of childhood obesity into question (see, for example, Moffat 2010; Maher et al. 2010; Warin et al. 2008), and measures such as the BMI are also increasingly deemed problematic by social scientists and health professionals alike (Kelly and Daniels 2017), this trend is nonetheless a cause for concern, particularly its role in widening health inequalities (Schrecker 2017; Rougeaux et al. 2017).

The discourse about food provision in the early years context has responded to such evidence. Indeed, in a 2018 report on the government's childhood obesity strategy published by the Health and Social Care Commons Select Committee, the early years sector is identified as a crucial domain for intervention (House of Commons Health Committee 2018). Nonetheless, as stated earlier, only voluntary food guidelines are available for early years settings, and service providers face a number of challenges in their attempts to meet these, particularly within the state-maintained sector in which I conducted my research. Although Ofsted follows mandatory regulations for providers of early childhood services within the EYFS, there are no associated statutory nutritional standards; this has meant that actors such as the Children's Food Trust and the NHS were key promoters of voluntary dietary guidelines at the time during which I carried out my fieldwork.

#### Daily practices

To return to my conversation with Ipsa, we can see how these official discourses have had an impact on daily practices within ECEC settings. Ipsa's concern with promoting healthy eating and a varied diet was salient, as well as managing children's 'emotions' during lunchtime, which other staff said to me was something important that children should learn for their transition between nursery and primary school. Ipsa also expressed the difficulties professionals can face when applying public policies in a diverse context, such as the one in which she worked. As stated earlier, the EYFS talks about food provision in vague terms, overlooking that healthy food and eating might mean very different things to different people. The cultural significance attached to food is also often missing from nutrition-driven perspectives, as other scholars have emphasised (see, for example, Karrebæk 2013; Caldwell 2014). However, the precise guidelines that are put forward in the EBSB programme – which emphasises that children's diets should be varied, consist of fresh ingredients, and be cooked on the premises if possible – do not acknowledge the material constraints that settings might face in providing meals to children. At Ladybird, staff often mentioned that the cost of offering the food suggested in EBSB was beyond the school's budget. The setting did not have its own kitchen, so the food served was made by an external provider. The competencies staff might need to develop in order to prepare such meals are also not addressed in the guidelines.

Indeed, the task of feeding children in an institutional setting was further complicated by the various (and at times competing) ethics of care (Tronto 2010) of different staff members. Ruby, who fed children at breakfast and 'tea club' (supper), was much more determined to get children ready for 'big', or primary, school than some of her colleagues. During our interview she explained why she believed mealtimes to be so important in preparing them for this change:

The transition from nursery to reception is very different, because the children in the reception age group they eat in a big hall … and it's very, it's big, there's rows … the comfy environment that you have in nursery, it's not like that in the schools. So children could get lost in that kind of setting … they need to learn how to be independent, to do things for themselves.

Not all staff members were equally committed to fulfilling these aims, however. In Ipsa's account above, wanting to teach children about healthy eating and manners was emphasised; she also expressed a desire to make mealtimes 'fun', and a concern for being mindful of each child's 'routine'. Others were critical of the contradiction posed by the structured nature of mealtimes, in which children were engaged in a much more formal mode of learning (about the nutrients in food or about table manners, for example). This stood in contrast to the rest of the day's activities at Ladybird, which were far more child-led. Joyce, the lead early years practitioner at the children's centre, said to me that:

the children are here all day, they are doing an activity on the table and being encouraged to play with this, feel this, then they [the adults] clear the table and put food on it and they're told, 'Don't play'. But 10 minutes ago they were playing on that table … so that to me, that's part of it, they have to play with their food …  How are these kids supposed to know they're not playing now?

Joyce's comment, as opposed to some of the views that other staff members shared with me, highlighted the mismatch that can often exist between how official ECEC guidelines specify what should happen within a setting, and children's daily lived experiences. While teaching children about healthy eating and preparing them for primary school can perpetuate a future-orientated vision of childhood, Joyce's position seems to get closer to an approach that takes listening to children's viewpoints into consideration.

### Towards transformative change

#### The children's perspectives

The work of Clark and Moss on the Mosaic approach and listening to children (Clark 2017) was fundamental to my exploration of the alternative practices that children created during mealtimes at Ladybird (see also Chapter 9). As well as valuing the multi-method and participatory framework developed by Clark and Moss through the Mosaic approach, I consider their commitment to understanding children's lived experiences within institutions particularly important. As they argue, it is crucial to explore 'children's views and experiences of *everyday life* in the institutions they attend; as members of communities rather than consumers of education or users of products' (Clark 2017, 27, original emphasis). Parallel to this, I also draw from the work of Nolas, Varvantakis and Aruldoss (2018), in which they extend the concept of listening to children by calling for researchers to further engage with children's everyday, embodied and creative forms of communication, what they call 'idioms of childhood'; a process that 'helps us to make sense of children's worlds, and to identify their meanings and agency' (Nolas et al. 2018, 4).

In my own work, I consider children's drawings, role-play, humour, conversations, and non-verbal interactions as idioms of childhood. I was particularly interested in the ways in which children contested adult norms and re-appropriated mealtimes at Ladybird, emphasising the social, caring and convivial dimension of sharing food, which I understood to be most valuable to them. Particularly during breakfast and 'tea club', children monitored each other's behaviour and preferences more openly, often assuming an adult-like role when doing so, and expressing what they thought was right or wrong about each other's food practices, showing an awareness of staff members' expectations about their eating habits. Children also claimed some authority during mealtimes through role reversal. For instance, they reminded each other to say 'please' and 'thank you' when asking for food, a task that was pervasive among the staff, alongside the frequent reminders to 'be kind to each other' and the repetition of 'sharing is caring'. In line with my aim to adopt a 'least adult role' (Warming 2005) in my research, I also complied when children asked me to lend them my badge, which other adults did not do. When this happened, they would 'become' me, and I them, which then meant they would boss me around a little, either telling me to wash my hands or to also eat what was being served to them.

Acts of resistance performed by children, as I observed them, were a way to subvert adults' control, yet also a way to establish unity and express group belonging. Showing that they knew what others liked was one of the ways in which this manifested itself. One morning, when Ruby asked Eva (4 years old) what she would like for breakfast, Crystal (also 4 years old) answered instead of her, saying enthusiastically, 'She's a Rice Krispies girl!' – as indeed Eva was, since this was always her choice of breakfast food during the time I spent at Ladybird. Similar moments were also common during the more logistically complex and formal lunch hours. Once, while one of the lunchtime assistants was passing food to the group she and I were sitting with, Amir very decisively told her what she should give his friend Cem (both 4 years old): 'He likes chicken, and baked potato, and salad!'

Unity was also emphasised in the new mealtime norms that children established, in a manner similar to that in which adults communicated the standards they wanted children to abide by. For instance, rules were created about how certain foods should be eaten: a recurrent case was that of the berry compote and Greek yogurt dessert option at lunch, which children unfailingly instructed each other to mix, 'to make it pink'. On an occasion during which I too ate this, but kept the compote and yogurt separate, Crystal was puzzled about my choice and asked me if she could mix my pudding for me, to which I agreed. During 'tea club', if spaghetti was being served, children would very often dangle the pasta above their faces from their forks and into their mouths, a technique that was predictably not appreciated by the staff members, yet one through which the children bonded by exhibiting each other's ability to eat spaghetti in this way.

Humorous talk was one of the most effective ways in which children challenged adults' attempts to regulate their mealtimes, as in this instance that I observed in April 2017:

For a couple of weeks now, the children's silverware has been missing from the children's centre, so we have had to use plastic cutlery at tea club instead. This has not gone unnoticed by the children, and Crystal brings it up today as she struggles to stab a piece of broccoli with her plastic fork. A humorous conversation between Ruby and the children, about what could have possibly happened to the metal cutlery, ensues: 'Is it in the microwave?' 'Is it in the fridge?' 'Maybe it's in the office!' Fred says, 'I think Fran hid it!' I reply jokingly: 'No, I wouldn't do that!' and he continues, 'I think you hid it in the oven!' 'In the oven?!' I say. 'Yes,' he says, 'or I think you pooped on them!' I tell him that, 'I really wouldn't do that!' and he says, 'Or maybe you just peed on them! Or farted on them!' I laugh and keep saying that I wouldn't do any of those things. I notice that Ruby has meanwhile stopped partaking in the conversation, and she soon stops us from continuing with these jokes: 'This is not something we talk about at the table', she says.

Most provocations by children were certainly engaged with and recognised by the staff. Ruby's change of tone during the conversation about the missing cutlery signalled that talk of 'poo' and 'pee' were perceived as 'threats', or attempts by children to overturn adults' pedagogical roles at the table. Moments of tension such as these provided me with insights into the various resistances adults faced in trying to shape children's daily practices. This not only shifted the discourse about food and eating away from the control of adults, but it also challenged the much larger 'civilising' project in which food and mealtimes are implicated. Yet, observing these tensions also shed light on children's abilities to resolve any number of situations on their own.

One instance stands out from a day on which I was helping a lunchtime assistant by sitting with Simon, a 4-year-old boy with special needs. In the months that I spent getting to know him, Simon never seemed to like having lunch at Ladybird, and days on which the staff succeeded in persuading him to sit at the table with the other children were a cause for celebration. This alone was perceived as a victory, since Simon was unwilling and, to a considerable extent, also physically unable to eat the food provided at the nursery. His mother told us that, due to complications after being born prematurely, he had difficulties consuming solid meals, so his diet at home still consisted primarily of pureed foods. One of the aims of him attending lunch at Ladybird once a week, on Tuesdays, was to introduce him to different kinds of foods and it was hoped that eating with children his age would provide encouragement. On this particular day, Simon was more distressed than usual when the time to have lunch came; as he often did, he cried intensely and refused to sit on his chair, so I was holding him on my lap. At one point during the episode, he refused to continue sitting on my legs and lay down on the floor; as this was unfolding and the lunchtime assistant and I looked to each other concernedly, Johnny (3 years old), who was sitting to the left of Simon and me, leaned towards him and affectionately patted Simon on the head. After this brief interaction, Simon stopped crying and sat on his own chair, next to Johnny, and lunch continued without further difficulties.

Similar situations unfolded at 'tea club', where children were trusted to be more independent and staff members often took their preferences a lot more into account. Here, children had greater freedom to make mealtimes a caring and social time for themselves, and were often also able to resolve conflicts and issues unaided by adults. In December 2016, I observed the following interaction:

Jasmine fills her cup with milk and exclaims, 'I can pour myself!', followed by Lucy who also says happily, 'I poured it myself!', holding her cup of milk carefully with both hands. Robbie also grabs the milk jug and pours himself a drink, but doesn't stop in time: the milk overflows in his cup, causing a spill. He looks embarrassed by this and glances worriedly at Joyce, who is running tea club today, to check if she noticed what happened. In the meantime, Crystal jumps out of her seat and brings him some paper towels to help him clean up.

Instances like these shed light on the crucial role that group unity and peer culture dynamics played in children's daily life, and the importance of creating spaces in which self and peer identities can flourish on children's own terms. This has important implications for how we think of children's well-being, beyond a biomedical framework.

### Alternative institutional spaces and practices

In this chapter, I have argued that historical and current ECEC policy frameworks in England have tended to perpetuate a future-orientated vision of the child. Under this model, paying attention to what children find valuable and meaningful in the present can be neglected in favour of achieving measurable outcomes, preparing them for future education and, in the case of food and eating, teaching them about healthy habits. I have shown how these discourses have had an impact on adults' practices within the early years setting in which I conducted ethnographic fieldwork. Parallel to this, I have explored how children were able to contest adult attempts to regulate mealtimes through role-play, humorous conversations and non-verbal interactions and, in doing so, to promote group unity and conviviality during mealtimes. I have asked what food is for in the early years, taking adults' and children's perspectives into account.

To conclude, the question that remains is what this small-scale, ethnographic study can contribute to this book's vision of a transformed ECEC landscape in England. To move towards this transformative change, the competencies and knowledge of practitioners should be given proper consideration. Many of the Ladybird staff were aware of the contradictions that some of the policies and guidelines they were required to follow posed to their practices, with consequences on children's enjoyment of mealtimes. Listening to children should thus take precedence in this transition.

Drawing from Levitas's work on utopian studies (2013), I would like to suggest that we can view listening to children as an oppositional, or transformative, practice. I have shown that paying attention to idioms of childhood reveals what children deem most meaningful about food and mealtimes, with significant implications for how we might think about children's well-being within institutions. Creating a space in which children are trusted to be more independent and autonomous can empower them to resolve situations as they arise without the need for adults' intervention. As Moss and Petrie (2002, 113) have argued, creating 'children's spaces' means recognising the potential of 'the collectivity of children who will exert their own agency, and make use of the opportunities and resources that the space provides' so that '"children's spaces" [are] for children's own purposes'.

In developing these considerations, it is therefore important to also ask what the purpose of teaching children about healthy eating might be in a context such as the one in which I conducted my research. First, the question of diversity should be considered, as the notion of 'healthy eating' had various meanings to the children and families I met, who were from a number of different backgrounds, but also to the staff members who worked at Ladybird. Second, the context of austerity in which the (shrinking) public early years sector currently operates created a number of contradictions. At Ladybird, for instance, the local authority stopped providing funding to give fruit as snacks at the children's centre, while simultaneously increasing public health messaging about diet and nutrition. Similarly, nutrition-driven approaches that emphasise individual choice as a key determinant of health outcomes are also problematic when those to whom these messages are promoted are socioeconomically disadvantaged (Ulijaszek and McLennan 2016), as many of the families at Ladybird were.

With this in mind, it becomes even more apparent that what children deem meaningful about food and eating in an institutional setting should be prioritised.

## Further reading

An article by Sophie Alcock, 'Playing with rules around routines: Children making mealtimes meaningful and enjoyable' (*Early Years*, 2007), available at https://doi.org/10.1080/09575140701594426, is a case study from an early childhood centre in New Zealand. It offers interesting insights about children's participation in mealtime group activities, showing similar interactions to those described in this chapter. The author contends that playful behaviour is a way in which children express their own objectives during mealtimes, that is, to create a sense of 'togetherness' in the peer group, which is separate from the adult objective of giving nourishment and establishing a routine.

A brief paper by Francesca Vaghi, 'Drawing, sounds and play: Understanding children's viewpoints and participation', available free at https://entanglementsjournal.org/drawing-sounds-and-playunderstanding-childrens-viewpoints-and-participation/, delves deeper into the child-centred methodologies used in her research. It outlines how innovative methodological and theoretical approaches can be used to understand children's viewpoints, and how these might offer a way into recognising their voices in matters that have an impact on their dayto-day lives.

### Notes

## References

## 13 Towards an ECEC system in synergy with parenting leave

Margaret O'Brien and Peter Moss

## The need for transformative change

First day back at work today after two weeks' paternity leave. Bewildering that in the 21st century dads are granted only a fortnight after the birth to hang out with their new kids.  (Twitter, 5 June 2019, UK journalist)

In this chapter we consider the relationship between two important policy fields for young children and their families: early childhood education and care (ECEC) services, and leave for parents; in doing so, we develop the discussion in Chapter 6 about the need for 'a wider set of family-work policies', including leave, to complement and mesh with ECEC services. We shall argue that the relationship in the UK lacks synergy, the policies not being integrated, and that leave policy is more generally (like ECEC policy) flawed and dysfunctional. But we want to frame this discussion and critique within a wider introduction to leave policy itself – some definitions, its rationale and impact, and the spread internationally of leave policies in recent years that has made this field one of the most important today within national welfare states and social policy. We hope in this way to supply readers coming from an ECEC background, and who may know less about leave policy, with necessary information about this important field for children and parents.

## Some definitions

Leave policies provide job protection for a period so that a worker can take time away from employment to be available to care for a dependant – usually, though not always, a young child – and, after this period of time, return to employment with the same employer. Policies can also include an element of wage replacement during this period (Ray et al. 2010). These policies can take several forms. Maternity leave, first established in Germany in 1883, is usually available to mothers only, to be taken just before, during and immediately after childbirth; it is a health and welfare measure intended to protect the health of the mother and newborn child. Paternity leave is available to fathers only, to be taken soon after the birth of a child, and intended to enable the father to spend time with and care for his partner, new child and older children. By contrast, parental leave, introduced in Sweden in 1974, is available equally to mothers and fathers and is taken after the end of maternity leave; it can, however, assume various forms, for example being a 'family entitlement' that parents choose how to divide between themselves or an 'individual entitlement' that allots a period of leave to each parent, sometimes transferable to the other parent and sometimes on a 'use it or lose it' basis. It is usually understood to be a care measure, intended to give both parents an equal opportunity to spend time caring for a young child. A final form of leave enables parents to take time off work to care for a child who is ill or for some other medical reason.

In this chapter the summary term 'parenting leave' or 'leave' is adopted to encompass the full range of statutory leave policies, while the terms 'maternity leave', 'paternity leave' or 'parental leave' are used when these specific policy measures are being discussed.

#### Rationale for leave policies and their impact

As we shall discuss below, statutory leave policies are now widespread, and not only in rich countries. Why has parenting leave moved so widely onto the policy agenda? The introduction of maternity leave, the oldest form of parenting leave, was driven by health and welfare concerns, and more recent forms of leave, paternity and parental leave, have also been seen as supporting the health and well-being of children and their parents. But they have also been advocated for other reasons, including in some cases the stimulation of flagging fertility rates and, most importantly, the promotion of gender equality: maintaining the presence of mothers in the labour market (Dearing 2016), reducing gender pay gaps (Kamerman and Moss 2009; Andersen 2018), and increasing the opportunities for fathers to spend more time caring for their young children (O'Brien 2009; di Torella 2014). More generally, leave policies are seen as an important means of improving work–life balance for women and men with children, so contributing to better family lives.

Although the evidence base has focused mainly on the impact of maternity leave, there is a growing body of scholarship on economic, health and social advantages associated with parenting leave polices more generally (for example, Budig et al. 2016; Nandi et al. 2018). Early epidemiological research has shown improved child and maternal health, with child health benefits for instance in immunisation uptake, breast-feeding and employment retention (for example, Tanaka 2005; Han et al. 2009). Positive health gains for children are maximised when the maternity leave is paid, provided in a job-secure context and with a duration of at least 10 weeks.

The Nordic countries have provided fertile ground for 'before and after' studies of impact at a country level (Duvander and Johansson 2012; Ekberg et al. 2013) and, more recently, Germany, with its parental leave reform of 2007, created a new incentive for men to take parental leave by introducing two well-remunerated 'daddy months' (Schober 2014). The natural experiment paradigm, which has framed many of these studies, has produced evidence for greater engagement of leave-taking fathers in the care of children after policy reforms, in comparison with fathers who do not take leave. In addition, there are emerging indications that duration matters, with leave-taking of one month by fathers, particularly if taken alone, being a tipping point for priming subsequent greater engagement in the care of children (Buenning 2015; O'Brien and Wall 2017). Research in Denmark has found that a redistribution of care in the early years, from women to men, facilitated by parental leave policy reforms has been associated with a reduction of the within-household gender pay gap (Andersen 2018).

#### Being on leave: Personal experiences

There are a growing number of qualitative studies describing the transition to parenthood for employed men and women, including their experiences of parenting leave and returning to work (for example, Brannen and Moss 1991; Doucet 2009; Miller 2010). Parental experiences are diverse, and contingent on intersecting personal, workplace and institutional influences as well as the unique contribution of children to family dynamics. Understanding the experiences of fathers taking leave has been an area of interest particularly as, despite social change in gender norms, mothers still tend to be positioned as more salient in children's early years.

In her longitudinal qualitative study of a group of 17 employed men and their partners, when they anticipate and then experience parenthood for the first time, Miller (2010, 93) portrays their daily individual lives and everyday practices of caring: 'one of the biggest things I've noticed is, it's just this little baby, but … how much time it will take up, that was … yeh, that's the most phenomenal thing, we just weren't prepared for that', as one father said. The fathers described highly emotional encounters with their infant children, using the language of caring and conveying tender masculinities. Their accounts illuminate the tensions fathers face when they return to work after paternity leave and find it difficult to keep as connected to daily baby routines – 'returning to a new normal' (Miller 2010, 11).

Fathers taking more than one month's leave, particularly if taken alone, describe both the joys and emotional toll of intensive caregiving (O'Brien and Twamley 2017, 176):

*Interviewer:* So having taken more responsibility – in what way does it affect your relationship with [son]?

*Simon:* Well just because I know, like, I can just read him really well. Like I knew he was doing a poo earlier on, I saw half an hour ago he was getting quite tired and it's just you know what he's up to and what he's thinking, or how he's feeling. And also the way he responds to me when, I like, come home from work, he's generally quite happy. So we have this like – I don't know, quite a strong bond, which I don't think would have happened in quite the same way if I hadn't have been off with him. Just you know, trying to keep him from being grumpy before bed time, things like that. (Simon, lawyer, 35 years old, three months' leave)

Taking leave can be critical to help fathers establish a close relationship with their child, especially because of the female embodiment of pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding. Fathers taking leave describe experiences of intensive and involved caregiving, learning to take responsibility alone; being preoccupied and absorbed with their child; shaping daily life around their child's routines; enjoying increased physical contact with their child; sympathising with mothers' stress; learning to balance care and housework; experiencing the time as fulfilling, joyful, 'a luxury', 'an oasis' (O'Brien and Wall 2017). But as studies of mothers' experiences of care have repeatedly found, there is also ambivalence with reports of anxiety, saturation, fatigue, loneliness and boredom mixed with these affirming experiences.

Observations of fathers on leave demonstrate the routine and repetitive nature of life with a new baby, whatever the gender of the carer (O'Brien and Twamley 2017). The most time and effort is spent on feeding and encouraging babies to sleep, with fathers entering into long and detailed conversations about the various whims and particularities of their babies, along with how they attempt to arrange some order on the day, while also following their child's lead.

The emotionally and physically demanding hard work of caring for young children is exacerbated when social norms and public policies assume babyhood and early childhood care is best carried out in the private home by one primary caregiver only with 'support', as this mother makes clear:

I do like being a professional person and myself … I really felt by the end of my maternity leave that I was treading water and the whole world was getting on with their lives and mine was on hold … Even if I was achieving something with him, I didn't feel it was enough for me. That might sound selfish, I don't know? I felt so trapped by the end of my maternity leave, I felt so isolated. (Miller 2010, 164)

Interview accounts confirm epidemiological data that this period of early parenthood can be a time of high stress and worry, and for a minority trigger mental health concerns and not only for women (Ramchandani and Psychogiou 2009). New generations of women and men prefer family lives where they can integrate employment with caring for children. Parenting leave can help achieve this goal.

#### International leave policies

Today, the spread of leave policies has become global. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO 2014), in its 2013 survey of legal provision in 185 countries, all provided some form of statutory leave for pregnant women, and all but two (Papua New Guinea and the United States) included some payment. But widespread leave provision is no longer confined to women. The ILO's survey found that paternity leave was available in 79 out of 167 countries for which information was available, with payment of some sort in most cases. Parental leave in some form was present in 66 out of 169 countries supplying information, though only paid in 36 countries.

Coverage and standards of leave do, however, vary. According to the ILO (2014, xiii), 'only 34 per cent (57 countries) fully meet the requirements of [ILO] Convention No. 183 [2000] on three key aspects [of maternity leave]: they provide for at least 14 weeks of leave at a rate of at least two-thirds of previous earnings, paid by social insurance or public funds or in a manner determined by national law and practice where the employer is not solely responsible for payment'. Standards for leave are particularly low in Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean, with a mixed picture in Asia and the Middle East. Leave provision for men is found most often in higher-income countries.

Regionally, the highest levels of leave provision are to be found in Europe. But Europe's leadership on leave has not only been at national level; it is the only part of the world where leave provision is mandated through regional-level legislation, the European Union (EU) acting as a supra-national legal entity to require its member states to meet minimum standards for maternity leave (since 1992), parental leave (since 1996) and, most recently, paternity leave (2019). Following earlier directives on the first two kinds of leave, in 2019, the EU adopted a Directive on Work–Life Balance for Parents and Carers (https://data.consilium. europa.eu/doc/document/PE-20-2019-INIT/en/pdf), introducing more work–life balance measures throughout the EU. For the first time, at least 10 working days of paternity leave paid at the level of sick pay is mandated across all member states; while the existing right of each parent to four months of parental leave is amended to require that at least two months is non-transferable from one parent to another, an additional incentive to encourage greater take-up of this leave by fathers. The directive also introduces a new European entitlement: 5 days of carers' leave for workers providing personal care or support to a relative or person living in the same household.

The EU has recognised that not only do there need to be a variety of types of leave for parents, but that leave needs to be part of a package of policies. As far back as 1992, a Council Recommendation on Child Care (92/241/EEC) was adopted by member states of the European Economic Community (EEC; the precursor of the EU), including the UK, in the interests of 'the reconciliation of occupational, family and upbringing responsibilities arising from the care of children' and the furthering of gender equality. This document, a statement of political commitment rather than legal requirement, 'recommended that member states should take initiatives' in four related areas: (1) the environment, structure and organisation of work, (2) promoting increased participation by men in the care and upbringing of children, (3) childcare services and (4) leave.

Such legal and political initiatives do not, however, mean that leave policies are at a uniformly high level across Europe. Standards mandated by the EU are a minimum, and there are wide variations between countries in terms of length of leave, levels of payment, eligibility for leave and the degree and types of flexibility available to parents taking leave. Furthermore, synergy between leave policies and other measures for reconciling work and family life is lacking in most countries, producing a gap between the end of well-paid leave and the start of an entitlement to ECEC (Koslowski et al. 2019). Later in this chapter we will describe the leave entitlements in a country with some of the most advanced policies in Europe (though not a member of the EU); now, however, we turn to a country with a very different approach and far less generous entitlements.

From policy neglect …

The recent history of leave policies for parents of young children in the UK follows a similar trajectory to those for ECEC policies in England1 – a period of neglect followed by a burst of activism characterised by missed opportunities to rectify flaws and dysfunctionalities. The UK was late by European standards in introducing any form of statutory leave provision, maternity leave only being adopted and implemented in 1976–7. Maternity leave not only came late in the day, but was introduced in an unusual form, very different to other European countries. Whereas maternity leave in the six original member states of the EEC ran from 12 to 14 weeks (except for Italy, where it was 20 weeks), the UK's new legislation went for 40 weeks, with up to 29 weeks available after birth2 ; and while the full period of leave in the former countries was paid at a high level of earnings replacement, in the UK only 6 weeks were highly paid (at 90 per cent of earnings), the remainder being paid at a low flat rate (12 weeks) or unpaid (22 weeks).

For more than 20 years after the introduction of maternity leave, little further happened to UK leave policy. This was a period dominated by a Conservative government (1979–97) opposed on principle to regulation of the labour market, including leave policy. Indeed, the UK government used its veto to block a 1983 proposal from the European Commission (EC) for a directive setting minimum standards for parental leave, despite a Parliamentary Committee reporting in 1985 that 'parental leave can be seen as a bold social innovation bringing important benefits for childcare and equal opportunities at work … [and] is a proper subject for legislation' (House of Lords Select Committee on the European Communities 1985, para.83).

Similarly, in 1994 the Conservative government declined to support a recommendation, from the All Party Parliamentary Group on Parenting, for statutory paternity and parental leave, one of seven recommendations for the International Year of the Family (APPG 1994). The only change in UK policy during this period was an easing of the restrictive eligibility conditions for maternity leave, in 1994. This was not, however, voluntarily entered into, but resulted from another European directive, which the government on this occasion could not veto as it was a 'health and welfare' measure requiring only a majority vote of member states.

#### … to policy mainstream

We have already seen in earlier chapters how the election in 1997 of a Labour government brought about change in ECEC policy, moving it from decades of neglect into the policy mainstream. The same is true of leave policies for parents of young children, as the new administration made a priority of supporting employed parents and promoting gender equality. As well as measures to improve the supply of and access to 'childcare', steps were taken to develop leave policy. The government adopted, in 1999, an EU directive on parental leave that other member states had agreed in 1996 (at that time, the UK had an opt-out from such European social policies). It subsequently introduced paid paternity leave in 2003, and enhanced and amended maternity leave in 2003, 2007 and 2010.

Yet despite this activity, the overall results were problematic. The Labour government inherited one leave measure, a maternity leave that was both very long in duration and largely low paid or unpaid; as such it was out of kilter with most other European countries, which had shorter periods of leave, but all paid at a high level of income replacement. Rather than question this legacy, the new government put most of its energies into further enhancing maternity leave, increasing the already long period of leave from 9 to 12 months (2003) and the low flat-rate payment from 12 weeks to, first, 20 weeks (2003) and then to 33 weeks (2007).

Parental leave was adopted early on, but was very much the poor relation to maternity leave – thin in substance and marginalised in position. The UK opted for the bare minimum then required by EU law: three months per parent and unpaid. Furthermore, this leave could only be taken in short blocks of time: one month per year, spreading the entitlement over three years. While some other European countries permitted parental leave to be split and taken in short blocks, all allowed leave also to be taken as one continuous period of time. Over the two decades of its existence, the UK's parental leave has always looked like an afterthought and had minimal impact: unknown of by many, used by few and ignored in policy changes.

Apart from this weak measure, the Labour government did take some other steps to increase fathers' use of leave. A short period (2 weeks) of low paid paternity leave was introduced, but the main initiative was based on a change to maternity leave. Towards the end of its period in office, in 2010, Labour introduced a new twist to UK leave policy: mothers could transfer unused maternity leave and pay to fathers after 20 weeks. It also brought in another new feature of policy – the distortion of terminology. The new arrangement was called additional paternity leave (APL). A true paternity leave is a father-only entitlement, while APL was, in actual fact, a system of transferable maternity leave; fathers had no inherent entitlement to this leave, instead depending on the mother's eligibility for maternity leave and her willingness to transfer part of that leave.

When Labour lost power in May 2010, they left a UK policy that remained centred on maternity leave, indeed even more so than when they came to power. Opportunities for fundamental reform, by a government that took parental employment seriously, had been missed. Matters have not improved under subsequent governments. A proposal to reform leave policy (HM Government 2011), based on shortening maternity leave and extending parental leave, introduced by the Conservative-led Coalition government in 2011 was dropped, and in its place the existing policy was reinforced; since 2014, mothers can choose to transfer up to 50 weeks of maternity leave to their partners, now re-named, still incorrectly, 'shared parental leave' (for a fuller discussion of this attempt at reform and earlier missed opportunities, see Moss and O'Brien 2019).

After 40 years of intermittent development, the UK has today a leave policy based on a long period of mainly poorly paid or unpaid maternity leave, mostly transferable if the mother agrees, and then mis-labelled as 'parental leave'. Actual parental leave is unpaid and inflexible, languishing on the margins. Put another way, UK leave policy in practice reflects a maternalist assumption, that mothers are primarily responsible for the care and upbringing of very young children; if that responsibility is to be shared through taking leave, it is at the mother's behest, dependent on her agreement to transfer some of her entitlement to the child's father.

There is now much evidence that points to the key conditions for fathers' use of leave, in particular there should be a leave entitlement that is for fathers only *and* is well paid (Moss 2007, Schulze and Gergoric 2015). Since neither 'shared parental leave' nor the UK's actual parental leave meet these conditions, it is not surprising that fathers' use of leave (apart from the short period of paternity leave) is low in the UK. As one recent newspaper article put it, 'Shared parental leave is a flop because taking it makes no financial sense', going on to note that:

A recent freedom of information request by law firm EMW revealed that just 9,200 people took shared parental leave (SPL) in the year to March [2018]. That means that out of every 1,000 eligible people who had a baby during that period, around 15 opted to share their leave … Out of all new parents, just eight people per 1,000 used the scheme. That's even lower than the Government's dismal calculation that 2pc of eligible parents took advantage. (Davidson 2018)

Low take-up for fathers is not the only problem with leave policy for parents of young children in the UK. Since most leave is either paid at a low flat rate or unpaid, it is difficult for many women, as well as men, to take it – taking leave means a financial sacrifice for parents and families.

Moreover, not all parents are eligible. Recent evidence (O'Brien et al. 2017) has shown that there are significant minorities in the UK working population who are not eligible to receive basic paid forms of leave. Twenty-seven per cent of employed fathers who had had a child in the last year were not eligible for paid paternity leave due to their employment status – that is, self-employment (20 per cent) or not earning enough to reach an earnings threshold (7 per cent). A smaller minority (16 per cent) of employed mothers who had had a child in the last year were also not eligible for paid maternity leave because their earnings fell below the earnings threshold (7 per cent), they were self-employed (7 per cent) or they did not meet the continuous employment condition (2 per cent). In addition, 4 per cent of new mothers were not even eligible for the basic maternity allowance payment, designed as a fall-back. Similarly, even access to unpaid parental leave is restricted with the UK, alongside Greece and Ireland, having significantly lower eligibility than in other EU-28 countries (EIGE 2020); to be eligible for this parental leave, UK parents need a continuous record of 12 months' length of service, which is not always possible for those with a history of unstable and precarious employment.

Last but not least, there is a lack of synergy between leave and ECEC policy, with a long gap between the end of well-paid leave, at six weeks after birth, and the start of an entitlement to early childhood provision, when a child reaches 3 years of age. In this respect, the UK finds itself in the company of most European countries, though the gap of nearly three years is longer than most (Koslowski et al. 2019). The gap reflects a divide in responsibility within government: leave policy resides with the UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, ECEC with education ministries in the UK's four national governments, the former focused on employment and labour markets, the latter on children.

## Towards transformative change

#### What it looks like in practice: The case of Norway

To see what a transformed leave policy looks like in practice, we could turn to any of the Nordic countries, but we have chosen the case of Norway because, on balance, it has the most comprehensive and gender-equal system. It has also been a trail-blazer, 'the first country to reserve part of paid parental leave for fathers, making it a leader in parental leave policies and fathers' rights' (Brandth and Kvande 2009, 192). This innovation happened in 1993, when fathers were given the right to four weeks of paid parental leave that could not be transferred to the mother – a case of use it or lose it.

This 'father's quota' has subsequently been extended in length. Since July 2018 it is either 15 weeks paid at 100 per cent of earnings or 19 weeks at 80 per cent (up to a ceiling of six times the basic national insurance benefit payment, that is, NOK98,866 (about £7,910) per month as of May 2020). This is one part of the parenting leave system, which today is based on the total leave period being split equally into three portions: the 'father's quota', and similar periods for the mother (the 'mother's quota') and for the parents to divide between themselves as they choose (the 'shared period'). In addition, the mother is entitled to 3 paid weeks of leave before the birth. Overall, therefore, a two-parent family (including same-sex parents) can take up to 13 months of leave at 80 per cent of earnings or just under 11 months at 100 per cent.

There is flexibility in how leave can be used. As well as a choice between a longer period at a lower rate of benefit or a shorter period with full income compensation, parents can take leave at any time until a child is aged 3 years, can work part time and extend the period of leave accordingly and can take leave in one block of time or several.

How have parents responded to Norway's policy of well-paid, flexible leave, with increasing amounts earmarked for the sole use of fathers? It is clear that the introduction of a father's quota, in 1993, had an immediate and long-lasting impact. Leading Norwegian researchers, Berit Brandth and Elin Kvande (2019a, 7), conclude that:

In the years prior to the introduction of the father's quota, less than four per cent of fathers took some parental leave. Only a few years later, the take-up rate was over 70 per cent … [and with every subsequent] expansion of the father's quota, fathers have increased their uptake the following year … Fathers take the number of father's quota days that corresponds to the number of weeks granted by the rules.

But while most fathers use their quota, the 'shared period' of leave is mainly taken by mothers, a finding replicated in other countries – leave designated as a 'family' entitlement is, in practice, mainly leave for mothers.

Commonly 'fathers in Norway take their leave after the mother has taken hers, usually starting when the child is about nine months old' (Brandth and Kvande 2019b, 210). As the quota has extended, more fathers have used it flexibly, with around 25 per cent taking leave part time, combining work and care. Such flexible use, however, has adverse consequences for equality in caring: 'Our [research] results show that taking leave on a part-time basis in combination with part-time work has negative effects on fathers' caregiving … The boundaries between work and childcare become blurred and prevent men from becoming fully immersed with their babies' (Brandth and Kvande 2019b, 217–18). Taking leave piecemeal, that is in short blocks of time, may have similar negative effects on shared caring, if it involves a father taking leave as a holiday together with the mother; but if the block of leave taken is fairly long and the mother is at work, it can support equal sharing of caregiving.

In addition to parental leave, each parent of one or two children under 12 years has a right to 10 working days of leave per year when children are sick (or when the childminder or grandparent is ill, in the case that children are not in kindergarten), or 15 days if they have more than two children. Single parents have the right to 20 or 30 days a year.  Leave is paid by the employer at the same rate as sickness benefit, that is, at 100 per cent of earnings.

The ECEC system in Norway, which was discussed in Chapter 6, is in synergy with parenting leave policies. Well-paid leave is available for over 12 months, while there is an entitlement to a full-time place in a kindergarten from the age of 12 months. Parents with a child between 1 and 2 years old are entitled to receive a flat-rate cash benefit (NOK7,500 [about £600] per month) on condition they do not use a publicly funded ECEC service. This 'cash-for-care' scheme has had a chequered history. Originally introduced in 1999, and initially available to parents (in practice, mainly mothers) of 1- and 2-year-olds, take-up was high to begin with, at 75 per cent, but subsequently plunged, dropping to only 25 per cent of parents at the end of 2011 (Ellingsæter 2012). While take-up has fallen across all groups, 'those receiving the benefit have become more homogeneous. Parents with low income and education, immigrants from Asia and Africa and mothers with weak labour market attachment are overrepresented' (Duvander and Ellingsæter 2016, 80–1). As cash-forcare has dropped back, attendance at publicly funded ECEC has risen rapidly, and by 2016, 53 per cent of children under 3 years old were attending a formal service.

#### Towards reformed parenting leave and policy synergy

As with ECEC services, transformation of leave policies in England is not a case of starting from scratch, but of reforming in fundamental ways an existing system that is not fit for purpose. In some respects, that is much harder to do. It will require opening up a democratic debate about what society wants for its children and families, a debate that will call for better information and better understanding (for example, understanding that so-called 'shared parental leave' is not actually parental leave), but also arguing about changes that some people and organisations may regard as regressive, even if they are not so. Thus the 2011 attempt to reform UK leave policy fell prey, in part, to opposition to the proposed reduction in maternity leave and the compensating increase in parental leave, on the grounds that it undermined an established employment right for women – though the proposed change would actually have enabled women to take the same amount of leave as before if they had taken full advantage of the proposed extension to parental leave (Moss and O'Brien 2019). Making such change, therefore, requires careful and clear explanation. It would also be assisted if accompanied by the introduction of additional benefits, such as, for example, increased payments and greater flexibility.

Bearing these points in mind, and focusing again on the big picture rather than getting too embroiled in detail, we would propose the following seven steps:

1. A clear set of aims to be agreed for leave policy, for example, more equal sharing of leave-taking between women and men to promote gender equality. Where possible clear targets should be attached to these aims, for example, a level of take-up by fathers to be achieved within a defined period.

Such change would not complete the transformation of social policy to support the reconciliation of employment and child-rearing, and to promote gender equality based on a new and sustainable relationship between employment, care and gender. Going back to the 1992 Council Recommendation on Child Care, it would leave much still to be done in the workplace, as well as the need to find other ways to support more equal sharing of responsibility for children between women and men. It would, however, take England and the rest of the UK a long way forward in creating a society that took seriously the needs of children, parents and families and made early parenthood less demanding and stressful than it often is today.3

## Further reading

The annual *International Review of Leave Policies and Research* by the International Network on Leave Policies and Research, available free at www.leavenetwork.org/leave-policies-research/, is an invaluable reference source on leave policies in over 40 countries, including the relationship between these policies and ECEC provision.

A book edited by Margaret O'Brien and Karin Wall, *Comparative Perspectives on Work-Life Balance and Gender Equality: Fathers on leave alone* (Springer, 2017), available free at www.springer.com/gp/book/<PHONE_NUMBER>687, looks at the experience of men taking parental leave alone in 11 countries, both in Europe and elsewhere.

Exploring similar issues of gender and care, Andrea Doucet's book *Do Men Mother? Fathering, care, and domestic responsibility* (University of Toronto Press, 2006) is a study of Canadian fathers who decide to stay at home and care for their children rather than work full time outside the home. Doucet argues the case for leave as a universal right to care in a book edited by Peter Moss, Alison Koslowski and Ann-Zofie Duvander, *Parental Leave and Beyond* (Policy Press, 2019), which includes other contributions on possible future directions for leave policy, as well as examining a range of current issues in the field.

## Notes

## References

## 14 Conclusion: From 'the state we're in' to 'what do we want for our children?'

Peter Moss and Claire Cameron

The old world, which once looked stable, even immutable, is collapsing. A new era has begun, loaded with hazard if we fail to respond, charged with promise if we seize the moment. Whether the systems that emerge from this rupture are better or worse than the current dispensation depends on our ability to tell a new story, a story that learns from the past, places us in the present and guides the future. (Monbiot 2017, 1)

The preceding chapters have made the case that the state of early childhood education and care (ECEC) in England is not good. The system itself is flawed and dysfunctional, still split between 'childcare' and 'education', with fragmented services, many operating as private businesses, competing with each other in a market that treats services as commodities and parents as consumers; and the whole shaky edifice dependent on the hard work and commitment of a female workforce of early childhood workers, most of whom are scandalously poorly paid and (relative to school teachers) under qualified, indicative of the low value placed by society on this important work. Moreover, despite recent government recognition of the needs of employed parents, there is a lack of synergy between the two most important policy areas to address these needs: leave for parents and ECEC for their children.

To these structural faults (the subject of Chapters 4, 5, 6 and 13) can be added serious shortcomings in what goes on within the system, in its practices and governance, what might be called pedagogical problems (the subject of Chapters 7 to 12). ECEC is in the grip of a culture of accountability, with its emphasis on standardised and measurable outcomes, with its attendant risk: of 'a ridiculous simplification of knowledge, and a robbing of meaning from individual histories' (Cagliari et al. 2016, 378), with 'subtle and fleeting' signs of learning, so difficult to measure, easily overlooked; of schoolification, with downward pressure from a narrow compulsory schooling agenda of numeracy and literacy, accompanied by harmful effects on pedagogical practice such as ability grouping; and of a future-orientation, which not only uncritically and unrealistically assumes a future of more of the same, but prioritises a certain idea of what children should become at the expense of what is valuable and meaningful to children in the present.

Our contention then is, as we said in Chapter 1, that ECEC in England 'is a failure on many counts; it does not work for children or parents, workers or society' – though reiterating our qualification, that the failure lies with the system and the policies behind it, not those who work in it. But it is also evident that the parlous state for young children and their families goes well beyond the condition of ECEC (the subject of Chapters 2 and 3). After 40 years or more of neoliberal government, culminating in a decade of austerity, the welfare state has become threadbare, failing to prevent the lives of many young children and families from being blighted by poverty, insecurity, poor housing and homelessness. These lives, too, suffer from a diminution of vital services, including the hollowing out of the recently created network of children's centres as local authorities' budgets have been slashed (spending on local services in England fell by 21 per cent between 2009–10 and 2017–18) (Partington 2019).

The erosion of local authority services is part of a wider process undermining the social infrastructure of communities, a process vividly described by journalist Aditya Chakrabortty (2019):

Britain is being stripped of its social infrastructure: the institutions that make up its daily life, the buildings and spaces that host friends and gently push strangers together. Public parks are disappearing.  High streets are fast turning to desert. These trends are national, but their greatest force is felt in the poorest towns and suburbs, the most remote parts of the countryside, where there isn't the footfall to lure in the businesses or household wealth to save the local boozer … Politicians bemoan the loss of community, but that resonant word is not precise enough. A large part of what's missing is social infrastructure. It can be public or private. It is often slightly dog-eared and usually overlooked. But when it vanishes, the social damage can be huge.

The one exception to this picture of declining social provision is the inexorable rise in recent years of food banks, an emergency service unheard of before 2010, with the UK's largest food bank network reporting a record 1.6 million food parcels distributed in the year to March 2019 (Trussell Trust 2019).

Nor can we leave this dismaying account of the state we're in without acknowledging perhaps the greatest long-term threat to young children and their families, the converging crises of a ravaged environment: global heating, multiple forms of pollution, the depletion of essential resources and diminishing bio-diversity. Most immediately, this environmental emergency affects children's health, the World Health Organization (WHO 2018) estimating that 'every day around 93% of the world's children under the age of 15 years (1.8 billion children) breathe air that is so polluted it puts their health and development at serious risk'. Other effects of these converging crises will make themselves increasingly felt, with young children always most vulnerable, along with those both nationally and globally who are poorest (and least culpable).

Such is the state we are in, a state so serious that it justifies a call for transformative change, a change that goes beyond 'reformist tinkering' to a complete re-thinking that leads to radical, root-and-branch re-forming, calling on (in George Monbiot's words) 'our ability to tell a new story'. In this final chapter, we will focus on the transformation of ECEC; to tackle more is beyond our scope and capabilities. But we reiterate that this needs to be part of a larger transformation: a renewal of the whole education system, of the welfare state,1 of our social infrastructure, and above all, a radical transformation of the way we live if humankind is to survive the environmental emergency – for we cannot carry on as we are. A transformed ECEC should be seen, therefore, as but one part of a transformed society – democratic and just, caring and sustainable – in which all can flourish.

We approach our limited brief, with its focus on transforming ECEC, as a political task, by which we mean (as we argued at the start of this book) that change must be built on the answer to political questions, that is, 'not mere technical issues to be solved by experts … [but questions that] always involve decisions which require us to make choices between conflicting alternatives' (Mouffe 2007). Technical issues, of the 'what works?' and 'how to?' variety, have their place, but addressing these should come after political questions have been asked and political choices made.

## Some political questions and political choices

We proposed some political questions relevant to ECEC in Chapter 1, and will focus on just some here – those that we think are particularly important. First, *What is our image of the child*? That is, who do we think or imagine the child to be? This question follows the advice of Loris Malaguzzi 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' (Cagliari et al. 2016, 374). While no policy document in England has offered such a declaration, in practice the image of the child that is offered, reading between the lines, is that of the 'poor' child: in need, passive, malleable, under-developed, not ready, an empty vessel into which prescribed competencies and so-called 'fundamental British values' need to be poured. Our choice would be different, again following Malaguzzi in proposing an image of the 'rich' child, 'rich' not in the economic sense, but meaning that all children are 'better equipped, more talented, stronger and more intelligent than we can suppose' (Cagliari et al. 2016, 397), 'not bottles to be filled' but 'active in constructing the self and knowledge through social interactions and inter-dependencies'. Children born with great potential that can be expressed in a hundred languages. Children, too, who are citizens, 'not bearers of needs, but bearers of rights, values and competencies' (Cagliari et al. 2016, 377).

Second, *What is an early childhood education and care system for? What is its purpose*? Clearly, it has an educative purpose, though that raises the question of what we mean by 'education'. We favour 'education-in-its-broadest-sense':

a long-established concept of education that understands education as fostering and supporting the general well-being and development of children and young people, and their ability to interact effectively with their environment and to live a good life. This is education as a process of upbringing and increasing participation in the wider society, with the goal that both individual and society flourish. (Moss and Haydon 2008, 2)

But we would also see such a system as having many other potential purposes, responding to a range of needs and desires from children, parents, communities and societies. Other services, such as various health and welfare services, may be provided under its aegis, as already happens in many surviving children's centres; so, too, may numerous other projects – cultural, social, political, environmental and economic. Writing about the transformative potential of compulsory school education, but also, we think, with application to early childhood education, Keri Facer envisages schools as public spaces where community members have the opportunity 'to encounter each other and learn from each other' and where they can begin 'to build the intergenerational solidarity, respect for diversity and democratic capability needed to ensure fairness in the context of socio-technical change'. As such, education can contribute not only to improving the here and now, but also to that wider social transformation that we refer to above, including equipping 'communities to respond to and shape the socio-technical changes of the next few years' (Facer 2011, 28). Writing more recently, on the possible response of public education to the climate emergency, Facer further develops the solidaristic, democratic and transformative purpose of education, through its capacity to 'engage students and their wider communities in meaningful real-life projects of mitigation and community-building … Centrally, a key role of the public school is that it has the potential to convene publics around the challenge of reducing emissions' (Facer 2019, 209). To which might be added the potential to 'convene publics' around many of the other challenges that face us today.

Where does this leave 'childcare for working parents'? The 'care' part of 'early childhood education and care' has been by far the dominant theme of government policy in England in recent years. We see the support of parents in their many roles and activities as an important purpose for an ECEC system, and this includes support for parents in employment – but also for those studying, active in civic society and participating in other personally and socially important activities. One way this is provided is by services being open for a substantial period each day, up to 12 hours, though individual children would not attend for as long as this, except in very exceptional circumstances (we also recognise there is an important debate to be had about how far it is the job of ECEC to meet all demands of the labour market). But this support for parents in employment, and supporting parents to enter employment, is, as we have indicated above, just one of many purposes served by the ECEC system. Moreover, *all* children attending early childhood services, or indeed schools, require care, whether or not their parents are employed; care, we would suggest, that takes the form of an 'ethics of care', defining a relationship that includes 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).

This leads us to propose no more talk of 'childcare services', but much talk of how to work with an 'ethics of care' with all children and across all services for children. Indeed, we would suggest transforming the discourse from 'early childhood education and care' to 'early childhood education', taking a lead on this from New Zealand, where by the 1990s, as a result of re-thinking and reform, '"early childhood education" (ECE) again became the integrating concept and official term as people took for granted that early education involved care as well. Early childhood education continues to be used as the generic term covering the diverse range of types of ECE services in New Zealand' (Meade and Podmore 2010, 32). So, in future let us adopt the New Zealand way and talk of 'early childhood education' or ECE, recognising there can be no education without care.

Third, *What are the fundamental values of early childhood education?* We would propose four here, by no means a comprehensive listing. First, equality: all young children, including children with special educational needs, should have equal access to good, affordable and local services. Second, democracy, with its attendant qualities of listening, dialogue and respect for diversity, enacted in pedagogy and management, in everyday life and relationships. Third, cooperation, within and between services, replacing the present valuing of competition. Fourth, solidarity, replacing the current valuing of competitive individualism and privatised consumerism.

Solidarity is or can be apparent in many forms: workplace solidarity, intergenerational solidarity, cultural solidarity, solidarity with humankind and with our environment, solidarity within and between services. Solidarity, we believe, is a vital building block for a cohesive and caring society and a strong welfare state. Solidarity is a standpoint and a value representing common ground among citizens or others who share an interest; it expresses the principle that 'people ought to cooperate with each other not simply because of what they personally receive, but also from a real commitment to the well-being of others and a sense of moral obligation that it is right to do' (Wright 2019, 18). As such, it acts as a connector between peoples and provides a motivation for services from which all can benefit (Derpmann 2018); the recognition that is gained from standing in solidarity with others generates self-esteem for individuals (Honneth 1995).

These values – equality, democracy, cooperation, solidarity – do not stand alone, but are inter-connected, all contributing to a flourishing life, each fostering the others. Early childhood services, which have a responsibility for upbringing and are physically sited in communities, are 'portals in to the community' for young children, with potential to build social capital by enhancing both their internally focused 'bonding' ties and their externally orientated 'bridging' ties (Putnam 2000). Bridging ties are particularly important to avoid exclusionary practices, to learn about communities and to exercise community solidarity. In this way, ECE can connect diverse groups, which is essential for expanding networks and opportunities, and so promote social inclusion and cohesion.

Fourth, *What is our image of the early childhood centre*? In practice, the present-day image of the centre, while not officially stated, is as a factory intended to produce predetermined, standardised and measurable outcomes and as a private business, selling a commodity to parentcustomers in the market place. Our image is very different. We see the centre as a public space and a public resource, a place of encounter between citizens, children and adults, a forum in civil society where:

children and adults may participate together in projects of social, cultural, political and economic significance … Determining these projects – answering the basic question 'what are early childhood institutions for?' – is one of the political projects of the institution as forum, as well as for the wider society; it is an issue for continuous dialogue between children and adults, including local and national politicians. (Dahlberg et al. 2013, 80)

Picking up on earlier discussions, we also envisage early childhood centres as a place to 'convene publics' to address urgent challenges and as part of the social infrastructure, necessary for the health, vitality and solidarity of any local community.

Fifth, *What do we want for our children, here and now and in the future?* For a start, we as adults need to dwell less on preparing children for a predetermined (and impossible) future of intensifying competition, endless consumption and inexorable growth, a policy ambition that is linked to spiralling mental health crises and declining happiness among children (The Children's Society 2019), and more on how we can begin the hard task of changing course towards a sustainable, just and democratic world, in which today's children can flourish as tomorrow's adults. In short, as Facer (2011) puts it, prioritising future-building over future-proofing.

In the meantime, we must focus on making a better here and now for our children, valuing them as beings and not just becomings; and valuing, too, education and other services for children, in John Dewey's words, *'*as a process of living and not a preparation for future living' (Dewey 1897, 78). A good starting point is to take seriously the commitments already made by adults to children, yet too often ignored, commitments, for example, expressed in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, that include children's right to:

The subsequent General Comment No.7 of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) on 'Implementing child rights in early childhood' elaborates how these commitments apply to young children. It starts by stating that 'young children are holders of all rights enshrined in the Convention [on the Rights of the Child] and that early childhood is a critical period for the realization of these rights' (UNCRC 2005, para. 1). Not only are young children holders of rights, but they should be:

active participant[s] in the promotion, protection and monitoring of their rights … with freedom to express views and the right to be consulted in matters that affect [them] … The right to express views and feelings should be anchored in the child's daily life at home (including, when applicable, the extended family) and in [their] community; within the full range of early childhood health, care and education facilities, as well as in legal proceedings; and in the development of policies and services, including through research and consultations. (UNCRC 2005, para. 10)

The Committee emphasises that the 'Convention requires that children, including the very youngest children, be respected as persons in their own right. Young children should be recognized as active members of families, communities and societies, with their own concerns, interests and points of view' (UNCRC 2005, para. 6). The Committee reminds:

States parties (and others concerned) that the [young child's] right to survival and development can only be implemented in a holistic manner, through the enforcement of all the other provisions of the Convention, including rights to health, adequate nutrition, social security, an adequate standard of living, a healthy and safe environment, education and play. (UNCRC 2005, para. 10)

The Committee is critical of how services for young children are often fragmented and their 'planning often piecemeal and uncoordinated' (UNCRC 2005, para. 22), and argues that:

It is with this last right, to education beginning at birth, that we now turn, while holding in mind that it is just one of a number of important rights, a necessary but by no means sufficient condition for what we might want for our children, here and now.

## Towards transformative change of early childhood education

Based on political questions and choices, taking inspiration from the Convention on the Rights of the Child and informed by the preceding chapters, we propose transformative change towards a public system of early childhood education, available as of right to all children and their parents (or other carers). By 'public' we mean the public taking collective responsibility, through democratic decision-making: for providing services that are open to all young children and their families, based on the right to education from birth, and early childhood education being recognised as a public good, whose benefits reach beyond the individual users of these services to the wider society; and also services that are provided by public authorities (such as local authorities) or by private non-profit organisations that are accountable to these public authorities, and all of which subscribe to democratically determined and shared values, principles and goals. As we have discussed, 'education' is understood as a broad concept, and an 'education' system is not confined to learning (whether formal or informal) but includes other purposes. This public system would be inscribed with values of equality, democracy, cooperation and solidarity, and an ethics of care: values and ethics that would be expressed in the relationships between services, but also in relationships within services, including in the approach taken to management and leadership, pedagogical work and assessment.

The preceding chapters have provided detailed suggestions and examples for how different aspects of such transformative change might be enacted: some from other countries (Denmark, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Sweden), some from England. Here, therefore, we will confine ourselves to highlighting some broad structural principles of a transformed public system of early childhood education, the main building blocks of such a system:

10. Central government would have a commensurately reduced, but still important, strategic role, for example, being responsible for setting broad policy goals, creating a framework national curriculum, ensuring necessary national infrastructure (for example, education of early childhood workers), evaluating the system overall, sharing funding costs with local authorities, and overseeing and supporting local authorities in their role.

So far, our discussion of transformative structural change has focused very much on schools and other centre-based services. But there is another form of provision that plays an important part in today's early childhood system: childminding or family day care. Our view is that such provision should also form part of the proposed public system of early childhood education, benefiting, for example, from direct funding, improved qualifications (though not necessarily at graduate level) and working conditions, and strong support. However, we are less certain about the future place of childminding. The number of childminders has fallen substantially in recent years, down 29 per cent in England between 2012 and 2018 (Gaunt 2019). By 2019, they accounted for just 18 per cent of childcare and early years places, and this fall is likely to continue, with fewer joiners than leavers every year (Ofsted 2019), as the occupation proves less appealing to women.

We also think that demand for childminding will decrease, with parents opting to use a public system of local and affordable children's centres. We say this because there is evidence that existing publicly funded early childhood education services are already an attractive proposition: almost two-thirds (63 per cent) of state-funded nursery schools in England are rated 'Outstanding' by Ofsted and nearly all the rest are rated 'Good' (Ofsted 2019). The experience of Sweden is also telling: over time, accessible, affordable and well-run centres have proved to be highly popular, with childminding withering away as 'preschool' provision has been built up.

Transformative change requires attention to pedagogical as well as structural principles. Earlier chapters have reminded us that we have the good fortune, in implementing pedagogical principles, of drawing on rich traditions of educational thought and experience. We must take full advantage of this invaluable cultural heritage represented by the thought and work of past pedagogues such as Froebel, Dewey, McMillan, Isaacs, Freinet, Freire and Malaguzzi.

Drawing on these cultural reserves, as well as the intelligence and expertise of today's practitioners, a pedagogical transformation can be embarked upon, turning away from a culture of targets, measurement and what Paulo Freire (n.d.) termed a 'banking concept of education', which treats learners as empty containers into which predefined knowledge is deposited. Previous chapters in this book map out a new cultural direction for early childhood education in England. It is an education in which cooperation and participation, democracy and listening are central pedagogical values and ethics, informing our way of being with and relating to young children. It is an education that slows down, adopting notions of slow knowledge and slow thinking and slow pedagogy, notions that value lingering, revisiting, reflection, and that lead to deep learning and rich meaning-making. It is an education that is comfortable with uncertainty and unpredictability, and so opens up to the unexpected and the surprising, to rediscover and to express wonder about the immediate and abstract world. It is an education that understands the importance of context and interpretation, and is sceptical of attempts to apply, unquestioningly, universal standards. It is an education in which observation and documentation, and in particular pedagogical documentation, enable all learning of all children, in its full diversity and complexity, to become visible and valued, and which understands assessment as a cooperative and dynamic process embedded in everyday educational experience. It is an education that will enable a turning away from the current demand for managerial accounting, towards a search for democratic, participatory and meaningful accountability. It is an education that recognises the importance of skilled and trusted practitioners, able to co-construct both curriculum and learning with children understood to be valued protagonists in education. Last but not least, it is an education based on trust in and respect for the agency, capabilities and potentialities of all involved, whether children, practitioners, parents or others.

So, we are not against assessment, nor against evaluation or accountability, but we think there are major issues to be resolved around purpose, process and participation. What, how and who? Nor are we against measuring and counting, when there is a clear rationale for this, and as long as numbers are not reified but are treated as just one form of documentation, to be critically discussed, reflected upon and interpreted alongside other forms of documentation. On this we agree with management expert Henry Mintzberg (interview, in Caulkin 2003) when he says:

We've become prisoners of measurement: audits, league tables, targets. It just destroys creativity. Look, I'm not opposed to measuring things that can be measured – I'm opposed to letting those things drive everything else out. It has some destructive effect in business, but in education and healthcare it's absolutely devastating.

What would happen if we started from the premise that we can't measure what matters and go from there? Then instead of measurement we'd have to use something very scary: it's called judgment. A society without judgment is a society that's lost. And that's what bureaucracy does: it drives out judgment.

## Is this a real utopia?

The term 'real utopia' was coined by the American sociologist Erik Olin Wright to emphasise that proposals for transformative change should not only be desirable (that is, 'utopian'), but also viable and achievable (that is, 'real' or doable). 'Desirability' pays particular attention to values, ethics and goals; this is what we want for our children and our society. 'Viability' is:

a response to the perpetual objection to radical egalitarian proposals: 'it sounds good on paper, but it will never work' … Two kinds of analysis are especially pertinent here: systematic theoretical models of how particular social structures and institutions would work, and empirical studies of cases, both historical and contemporary, where at least some aspects of the proposal have been tried. (Wright 2007, 27)

While 'achievability' is about the process of transformation and the practical political work of strategies for social change: 'It asks of proposals for social change that have passed the test of desirability and viability, what it would take to actually implement them' (Wright 2007, 27). In short, how might you scale up such proposals.

Judged against these criteria, we think we have supplied sufficient evidence, either in actual case studies or theoretical models, to prove the *viability* of both structural and pedagogical transformation – these things could be done or are already to be found in practice today. Much more work is needed (which is true of any major change), but we contend that transformation is patently doable. *Achievability*, putting our proposals for transformational change into general usage, is, we admit, more problematic, because of the scale and complexity of what is needed to extend from local instances to general application.

There are, we think, three main conditions that need to be in place if achievability is to happen, and none of them are easy. First, politically there needs to be a turn away from the neoliberal regime of the last 40 years, which has brought marketisation, privatisation, individualism and competition to the fore, including but going far beyond early childhood education. Transformative change, as presented here, assumes a politics based on very different beliefs and values, not least equality, democracy, cooperation and solidarity, with a renewed welfare state infused by a rediscovered sense of public good and collective responsibility.

It's a big ask, but we see some slivers of hope. Neoliberalism remains a powerful force in the land, but its days may be numbered. Its claims are increasingly discredited, its harmful consequences are more and more apparent, its incompatibility with finding solutions to the converging environmental problems manifest; in short, its time may be nearly up as its cycle of dominance draws to an end and it enters into crisis. Or, as George Monbiot puts it in the excerpt that starts this chapter, the old world is collapsing and a new era beginning. At which stage the words of Milton Friedman (1962/1982, ix), one of the godfathers of neoliberalism quoted at the start of this book, come to mind again:

Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.

Like Milton Friedman and his neoliberal allies in the 1960s anticipating the imminent crisis of the then-dominant regime of social democracy, today those who oppose neoliberalism need to be prepared for its imminent crisis, ensuring there are transformative ideas 'lying around', developing 'alternatives to existing policies', getting ready for when the 'politically impossible becomes politically inevitable'. Or, in Monbiot's words, for a better system we must be able to tell a new story. This book, then, is a contribution to that task, of developing new ideas or telling a new story, in one relatively small but important field.

The first condition, therefore, that needs to be in place for achievability is profound political change. The second condition is more prosaic, finding a way to transition from what we have to where we want to get to. Such a shift between two very different systems, from one based on markets and competing businesses to one based on co-operation and public services, from one based on managerialism and measurement to one based on democracy and deliberation, would generate opposition especially from private, for-profit providers who would not fit into a public system based on values of equality, democracy, cooperation and solidarity. Such providers would not and could not be forced out of business by legal prohibition, but would lose access to their life-blood of public funding.

It should be emphasised that any major transformation cannot and will not occur overnight. There needs to be a long transition period, to build up both new institutions and a new workforce, of probably at least 15 years. During that period, all public funding of early childhood services would be consolidated in a single early childhood fund, and gradually shifted from the current split disbursement (some money paid to services, some to parents) to a single funding system involving direct payment to an expanding public system and its network of preferred services, that is, children's centres.

This means the gradual withdrawal of public funding from the private, for-profit sector. The sector would have time for adjustment, allowing some nursery providers and their financial backers to turn to full reliance on parental fees (like private schools) and others to withdraw from the field; childminders could choose to become part of the public system, becoming essentially salaried workers, or else opt to work outside it. Measures, too, would be put in place for existing 'childcare workers' to upgrade their qualifications to become professionals in the early childhood education system, and for some nursery owners, too, to find employment in the new public system; transformation should not lead to redundancies, but rather to better working conditions and improved job status. However, with the changes in funding and the development of an integrated public system, there is no escaping the fact that transformation would bring, as political rhetoric says, 'hard choices' that mean unwelcome disruption to some service providers, but this might be kept to a minimum through central-funding mechanisms, a transition period and local authority-led sector expertise.

A final condition for transformative change is continuity. Structural changes, including to the workforce, will take years to complete. Pedagogical changes, which involve profound shifts in culture and thinking, as well as in practice, may take even longer; indeed, they might be thought of as a continuous process of movement and experimentation. If we take, for example, the cases of New Zealand or Sweden, featured in earlier chapters, transformation has taken decades to bring about and is still in progress; especially in the former case, changes of government have caused disruptions and uncertainties. England does not have a good track record here, the post-2010 Conservative-led governments thoughtlessly dismantling or neglecting much that the preceding Labour government had sought to build up (for example, children's centres, extended schools, policies such as 'Every Child Matters').

Yet at the same time, there have been continuities, in particular an ongoing commitment to marketisation and privatisation, individual choice and provider competition, strong central control and the importance of 'childcare'. What underpinned this continuity was a shared belief by successive Labour and Conservative governments in neoliberalism and the methods of new public management, with its emphasis on standard setting and performance measurement. Perhaps in a future where neoliberalism has lost its allure, and another political regimen has gained prominence, one more suited to the times we live in, valuing democracy and decentralisation, equality and inclusion, solidarity and sustainability, a degree of continuity could be rebuilt on other foundations – and this time, also, involving a stronger role for local democracy.

We are confident in the desirability and viability of our utopian proposal for transformative change. Its achievability is, we admit, less certain, dependent on a number of imponderables – while the ominous shadow of the environmental emergency hangs over all, making it especially hard to see what the future may hold. But, like so much else in England today, early childhood education is in a poor state, unfit for purpose and unable to do justice to our young children, endlessly telling an old story that was never up to much. Surely we are capable of telling a better story.

### Notes

## References

Wright, E.O. (2007) 'Guidelines for envisioning real utopias'. *Soundings*, 36 (Summer), 26–39. Wright, E.O. (2019) *How to be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century*. London: Verso.

## Index

'ability' grouping 177–8, 185, 221 accountability 130, 132, 171, 179–84, 229, 232 culture of 119, 220–1 achievability of change 233–6 activism in response to political decisions 183–5 activities charts 162–3 additional paternity leave (APL) 211 advocacy in health services 46–7 air pollution 222 Alcock, Sophie 200 All Party Parliamentary Group on Parenting 210 Alston, Philip 19–20, 26 Ang, Lynn vii; *co-author of Chapter 7* assessment 107–10, 129–32, 180–5, 232 cooperative 164 formative 162, 182 international 175 statutory 120 summative 125 *see also* reception baseline assessment asthma 38, 42–3 attainment gap 171 austerity measures 9, 12, 19, 25, 29, 50, 96, 101, 199, 221 authoritarian regimes 152 autumn-born children 178 Baltimore 43–4 baseline testing 184; *see also* reception baseline assessment belonging, sense of 139 'benefit cap' 25 benefits 83, 93; *see also* welfare policy and the welfare state Bennett, John 65 Bertram, Tony 114 Blair, Tony 24–5 blame culture 29 body mass index (BMI) 192–3 bonding between parents and children 206 Bourdieu, Pierre 110–11 Brandth, Berit 214 Brannen, Julia viii; *co-author of Chapter 2* Brexit referendum (2016) 36, 70, 153 bridgeing ties 226 British Cohort Study 48–9

Brooklands Project 54 Brown, Gordon 24 burnout 71 Cameron, Cheryl 142, 147 Cameron, Claire vii, 70, 78; *co-editor, author of Chapter 5 and co-author of Chapters 1 and 14* Cameron, David 25 Caol Primary School 143 care, forms of 224; *see also* childcare Carr, Margaret 107, 111, 128–9, 182 case studies 20, 121 cash-for-care systems 215 central government, role of 231 centralised government 11 Centre for Longitudinal Studies 192 Chakrabortty, Aditya 221 charity 28, 48 Child Behaviour Checklist 43 child-centredness 100, 125 Child at Heart campaign 36 Child Poverty Act (2010–2015) 25 Child Poverty Action Group 46 childcare 207–10 access to 210 blurred boundaries with education 214 costs and funding of *see* financing of ECEC as a distinct concept 58–9 formal and informal 94 parents' engagement with 205–9 Childcare Act (2006) 57, 84, 100 childcare workers 2, 58, 68–70, 235 childhood, early years of 34 childhood centres 223–5, 229–31, 235–6 childminding and childminders 4, 68–9, 84, 231, 235 childrearing by parents 94 children, conceptualisations of 192 Children Act (1989) 4, 134 children's centres 6–9, 27–8, 48, 55–8, 64–5, 85, 87, 221 Children's Commissioners 34, 85 Children's Food Trust 189, 193 children's services 36–7 Clark, Alison viii, 109, 147, 189, 195; *author of Chapter 9* climate change 224 clock-based practices 140

co-construction of knowledge 141, 181 Cohen, Bronwen 66 Common World Research Collective 144 competencies 106, 223 competition between schools 177 competitiveness, international 104–5 compulsory schooling 2, 13, 55, 60, 64, 68–9 conditions of employment 71 context 106–10 core periods for children's attendance 230 core workers 78 corporate chains involved in provision of childcare 84, 87 Coustley, Adam 147 COVID-19 pandemic 26 Cowan, Kate viii; *co-author of Chapter 8* critical literacy 183 Crow Project 113, 115, 182 culturally relevant assessment 110 curriculum 104–11, 130, 172 child-centred 100

Dahlberg, Gunilla 64, 106, 113, 136, 226 Dalli, Carmen 79, 138 'datafication' 131, 176 'dataveillance' 176 Davis, Sandra 21–9 debt, personal 26–7 dehumanisation 130 Deleuze, Gilles 145–6 demand-side funding 230 democracy and democratic education 65, 151–62, 165–7, 180–3 democratic deficit 3 Denmark 68, 70, 75–9, 112, 205 Department for Education (DfE) 2, 85, 94, 135, 174–5, 184, 188, 191–2 Department of Health and Social Care 85 Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) 85 dependency on welfare 24 developmental potential 34 developmental stages 120 Dewey, Evelyn 167 Dewey, John 151–2, 167, 226, 231 diabetes 38–9 digital technologies 120–1, 124–32 constraints on the use of 131 shortcomings of 125 disability 39, 43; *see also* special educational needs and disabilities disadvantaged groups 100, 121, 171 diversity in the ECEC sector 101, 126 division between education and care 2, 6, 8–9, 55–9, 62–4, 80, 85–6, 220 documentation, pedagogical 119–32, 138, 142, 147, 164, 181–2 children contributing to 125 practitioner reflections on 123 'domains' of early learning 175 Dorothy Gardner Children's Centre 56 Doucet, Andrea 217 Drummond, Mary Jane 136

early childhood education and care (ECEC) system 1–13, 48, 54–7, 60, 140, 220–5 diversity of settings for 101, 126