Quality Early Childhood Education and Care in a Time of COVID-19

Contextual approaches to high quality Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) seek to capture the complexity of children’s lives, developing pedagogical approaches that are responsive to children’s needs and interests. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic provided a complex layer to the question of what constitutes quality ECEC. A mixed methods appreciative inquiry of educators’ and parents’ views of quality in one ECEC setting in England, became an unexpected ethnographic exploration of quality ECEC in the time of a global pandemic. The findings indicate how features of quality, such as offering a range of learning environments and structuring the pedagogic environment to offer free-flowing play, had to be adapted to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The focus on quality shifted, prioritising the health and safety of families and staff, over the quality and variety of the curriculum. Greater emphasis was also placed on children’s social and emotional well-being to support their ability to understand and manage the changes to routines in response to the pandemic. The findings demonstrate that the early years workforce remains central to understanding and supporting quality, concluding that quality ECEC is shaped by adaptability – adapting to the needs of children, families, staff, and the unprecedented context of COVID-19. The focus on adaptability seeks to highlight how educators frequently respond to unique contexts in juggling concepts of quality ECEC. Consequently, a recommendation is made for future educator training to consider the importance of adaptability, in providing a useful framework for reimaging quality ECEC post COVID-19. </jats:p

The financial crisis and recent family policy reforms in Finland, Germany and the United Kingdom

The turmoil created by the financial crisis and economic recession in Europe has served as an impetus for austerity measures in many countries. In this article, we ask whether these crises have also triggered reforms in family policy, and we focus on three European welfare states – Finland, Germany and the United Kingdom – countries that are often considered members of different family policy regimes. The article addresses two main research questions. The first one relates to the number, direction and magnitude of family policy reforms in these three countries since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008/2009, while in the second we discuss whether the reforms observed during this period can be seen as being related to the financial crisis and its later repercussions on the Euro-zone area, or if there are other explanations

Global to local perspectives of early childhood education and care

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The Cosmos of a Public Sector Township: Democracy as an Intellectual Culture

The public sector plays an important role in responding to the rights of citizens and evolving norms of social interest (Qu 2015). Qu argues that the nature of public enterprise is never final and there is a constant negotiation between the private and the public emergence of life and rights. One such space where the tension between the private and the public manifests itself is the public sector township or the residential colony in India. The sociality of hierarchy in public sector organizations manifest itself in the public sector township and may nurture everyday aspirations, angsts and divides. The officer lives in a bigger hone, in a bungalow, and the clerk lives in a smaller home, many times with a larger family. [excerpt

The economy of childcare

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