Starting Strong: An Exercise in International Learning

ECEC and School

At a time when “an instrumental and narrow discourse about readiness for school is increasingly heard” (OECD, 2006, p.219), producing strong pressures to treat ECEC as simply a training ground for compulsory schooling, the Starting Strong review problematises this discourse and provokes us to ask more fundamental questions. What are the dangers of a relationship based on a “downward pressure on ECEC to adopt the content and methods of the primary school”, a process some have termed ‘schoolification’? How, in the words of the first report, can we create a’ strong and equal partnership’ between ECEC and school, based on a new pedagogical meeting place? What would that partnership and meeting place look like? Should we today be talking about preparing children for school? Or should we be talking about, as the conclusions of Starting Strong II say, how to “prepare schools for young children”?

With this question, Starting Strong II turns the spotlight on the school itself. And it turns up the intensity of that spotlight when it argues that the:

“Organisation, curriculum and decision-making in schools continue to resemble 19^th century patterns: curricula imbibed with the certainties of the past, formal testing of discrete skills and knowledge items, and the’ balkanisation’ of teachers into separate classrooms and disciplines. The school as an educational institution cannot continue in [its current] way” (OECD, 2006, p. 221–222).

The report goes on to pose an alternative way for the school to go, which suggests ECEC services influencing the school:

“Knowledge is inter-disciplinary and increasingly produced in small networks. In the future, it will be constructed through personal investigation, exchange and discussion with many sources, and co-constructed in communities of learners characterised by team teaching. This approach to knowledge can begin in early childhood and, in fact, fits well with the child’s natural learning strategies, which are fundamentally enquiry based and social” (OECD, 2006, p.222).

Starting Strong has turned a widely heard argument on its head. In doing so it suggests two further and profound political and ethical questions — what is a good education? what do we want for our children? -questions that have been marginalised by the current technical discussion about ‘school readiness’ which fuels the worrying tendency, noted in Starting Strong II, “of seeing the school as the benchmark”.

National Responsibility, Decentralisation and Democracy

At a time when educational discourse increasingly combines a rhetoric of (individual) choice with a practice of standardisation, the Starting Strong review asks us to think more critically about the relationship between uniformity and diversity, centralisation and decentralisation, individual and collective choice. The report’s conclusions propose a national framework of entitlements, values and goals, including broad curricular guidelines; and strong decentralisation, allowing space for local autonomy, interpretation and innovation — and, therefore, the practice of democracy.

“The decentralisation of management functions to local authorities is a gauge of participatory democracy. At the same time, the experience of ECEC policy reviews suggests that central governments have a pivotal role in creating strong and equitable early childhood systems, and in co-constructing and ensuring programme standards…In this vision of administration, the state can become the guarantor of democratic discussion and experimentation at local level, instead of simply applying policies from the centre” (OECD, 2006, p.220).

At the same time, the report recognises that certain conditions are needed if this relationship is to work, including adequate funding, strong infrastructure, well educated staff and pedagogical documentation, a tool which has a central role to play in a decentralised and democratic approach to early childhood education and care. The lesson I draw is that while “decentralisation is necessary for effective governance”, it is risky, difficult and needs constant thought, strong structures and tools, and regular evaluation.

Effective decentralisation and democracy are closely connected; decentralisation is a condition of democracy, but democracy is also a condition for effective decentralisation — or local autonomy. Democracy, too, Starting Strong II implies should be at the heart of ECEC services, a fundamental value and practice. I have already noted the conclusion that ECEC systems should support “participation and democracy”. This means an upbringing for children that foregrounds democratic ways of living: “In addition to learning and the acquisition of knowledge, an abiding purpose of public education is to enhance understanding of society and encourage democratic reflexes in children” (OECD, 2006, p.219). This important role for education is currently at risk.

“Today, society seems to be less concerned with such [democratic] ideals. Reflecting the growing marketisation of public services, consumer attitudes toward education and knowledge are increasing. Individual choice is put forward as a supreme value, without reference to social cohesion or the needs of the local community. In many schools, a focus on’ test-prep’ knowledge threatens the broad liberal arts tradition that sustained in the past informed and critical thinking” (OECD, 2006, p.219).

Here, indeed, is further strong criticism of much of today’s education and schools, with the final report raising serious concerns about the increasing trend to marketisation and privatisation of services and the consequences for democratic values and practice.

But democracy is not just about children. Parental involvement also has a strong democratic dimension, being “the exercise by parents of their basic right to be involved in the education of their children” (OECD, 2006, p.219). So, too, does policy making: “a major underlying lesson from the OECD reviews is that sound policy cannot be a quick fix from outside but more a matter of democratic consensus generated by careful consultation with the major stakeholders” (OECD, 2006, p.206).

This strong commitment to democracy as a key value also underpins the image of ECEC services in the second Starting Strong report. It proposes “a vision of early childhood services as a life space where educators and families work together to promote the well-being, participation and learning of young children”, and argues that this vision must be “based on the principle of democratic participation” (OECD, 2006, p.220). This image (and others in the report, such as early childhood centres as “communities of learners”) has much in common with the image proposed by Gunilla Dahlberg, Alan Pence and myself in our book ‘Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care’, of “[early childhood institutions] as public forums in civil society in which children and adults participate together in projects of social, cultural, political and economic significance” (Dahlberg, Moss, & Pence, 2007, p.73). This image has in turn been inspired by the thought and practice of Reggio Emilia:

The early childhood services of Reggio Emilia insist on the importance of viewing public services as a collective responsibility and offer us an understanding of the school as first and foremost a public space and as a site for ethical and political practice — a place of encounter, interaction and connections among citizens in a community, a place where relationships combine a profound respect for otherness and difference with a deep sense of responsibility for the other, a place of profound interdependency. In their work, the teachers of Reggio have struggled to realise the emancipatory potential of democracy, by giving each child possibilities to function as an active citizen and to have the possibility of a good life in a democratic community (Dahlberg & Moss, 2005b, p.10).

There are, of course, other images of early childhood institutions. Two are very prominent, at least in the Anglo-Saxon world of neoliberal economies: the early childhood institution as an enclosure where technology can be applied to produce predetermined outcomes (the metaphor is the factory); and the early childhood institution as a business, selling a commodity to consumers. The Starting Strong review has avoided uncritical adoption of these images, offering instead a very different and more subtle understanding of what early childhood services might be.

It is worth noting here that Starting Strong - exceptionally in policy documents in my experience - does recognise the importance of social constructions or images, whether of the child or the early childhood institution. It does not assume there is only one true way of seeing or understanding: there is acknowledgement that we have choices — and our choice of image is deeply ethical and political. Starting Strong I, for example, quotes Carlina Rinaldi speaking about the experience of Reggio Emilia: “One point appears to us to be fundamental and basic: the image of the child” and goes on to propose that policy makers “become aware of national or cultural constructions, and their impact on the indicators of quality put forward by different stakeholders” (OECD, 2001, p.63).

The Workforce

Starting Strong II concludes that many countries have a long way to go before achieving a well educated and paid workforce: “[The situation of staff and levels of training in ECEC across the countries covered] is mixed, with acceptable professional education standards being recorded in the Nordic countries but only in early education in most other countries…[There] is a wide pay gap between child care staff and teachers, with child care staff in most countries being poorly trained and paid around minimum wage levels” (OECD, 2006, p.15). The review is also clear on the need for improvement: a well educated workforce is required, it argues on the basis of research evidence, for quality services and children’s learning.

I would add two other arguments to support this position. First, equality. Why should young children require or get less than school children? Why should the workforce be devalued and treated so inequitably? Second, because new understandings of the complexity and importance of the work, including an understanding of early childhood services as sites of ethical and democratic practice, require a workforce with parity — in terms of qualification and pay — to school teachers (see Moss, 2006 for a discussion of the early childhood worker as a reflective and democratic professional).

But the political and ethical issues go deeper. Industrial societies have based their services for young children (but also those for elderly people) on exploiting an abundant supply of women with low levels of education, who have been prepared to work in services for poor pay and conditions. The underlying assumption has been that work with children and elderly people is something women are naturally suited for and is of intrinsically low value. This is neither desirable — nor sustainable: the traditional supply is diminishing as women become better qualified and have access to a widening range of occupations (Cameron & Moss, 2007). The ethical questions involve the acceptability of exploiting cheap labour to undertake important and demanding work; the political questions concern whether societies are willing to rethink, revalue and degender the work.

A few countries — such as Denmark, Sweden and New Zealand — have made the commitment to rethinking and revaluing work with young children, moving towards a mainly graduate workforce. This partly explains their higher levels of public expenditure on ECEC. But only Norway, as far as I know, has a serious commitment to degender with a national target for male workers. Elsewhere, politicians either do not see the issue or else hope it will go away with some minimal concessions.

The Question of Paradigm

Starting Strong II makes visible the existence of different paradigmatic views of the world. It recognises how ‘socio-cultural analysis and post-modernist research’ are helping to expand ECEC research agendas: “a wider research perspective using other focuses, disciplines and approaches can be seen emerging in the ECEC field” (OECD, 2006, p.193). While in its concluding chapter, the report again refers to “postmodernists [arguing] that the old certainties of history, culture, structures and knowledge are weakening”. It also references a few publications whose authors are working within a postmodern or poststructural paradigm.

Such recognition of diversity is rare in mainstream policy documents, which typically confine themselves to work produced within a positivistic paradigm — as if there was no other way of thinking about, researching and practicing ECEC. In my view, one of the major issues in the field of ECEC today is a widening divide between the mainstream, operating in a positivistic or modernistic paradigm; and a growing minority who are contesting this paradigm and developing new practices within alternative paradigms, one of which might be called postmodern, poststructural or postpositivistic. For the former, early childhood education is progressing inexorably to its apotheosis, based on the increasing ability of modern science to provide indisputable and universally applicable evidence of what works. While for the latter, early childhood education offers the prospect of infinite diverse possibilities informed by multiple perspectives, local knowledges, provisional truths: no final answer with closure, but the prospect of opening up to new understandings and new practices.

I have no time to go into this issue further and refer you to the growing literature on postmodern and poststructural theory and practice in early childhood education and care. But in my view the growing paradigmatic divide and the failure of most policy documents to recognise the issue are profoundly worrying. The absence of dialogue and debate impoverishes early childhood and weakens democratic politics. ‘Mainstream’ policy and practice are isolated from an important source of new and different thought, policy makers having little or no awareness of a growing movement that questions much of what they take (or have been advised to take) for granted. The dominant positivistic discourse is given too much uncritical space. In this situation, policy and practice choices are reduced to narrow and impoverished technical questions of the ‘what works?’ variety. (For a fuller discussion of the ‘paradigmatic divide’ in ECEC and whether some attempt can and should be made to bridge this divide, see Moss, 2007).

What Pedagogy?

The Starting Strong review and both its reports pose their own critical questions and provoke in us others. Not only do they reclaim early childhood education and care as a democratic project, they also remind us that it should be the subject of democratic debate — because we are confronted by choices, and choices that are political and ethical in nature. I have already mentioned some: the image of the child and the early childhood service; relationships between central and local, standardisation and diversity, ECEC and school; diversity of paradigm. Another choice, highlighted in Starting Strong, is in pedagogical orientation.

Starting Strong II identifies two common orientations: what it calls the ‘pre-primary’ and the ‘social pedagogy’ approaches. The former approach is most commonly found in English-speaking countries, though France is another example: “in addition to a downward transfer of subject fields, programme standards and pedagogical approaches from the primary school towards kindergarten, common teacher education is also practiced in several pre-primary systems (OECD, 2006, p.61). In the latter approach, ECEC services retain a strong identity distinct from the school; social pedagogy treats care, upbringing and education as an inseparable whole and places importance on work with the whole child, broad developmental goals, interactivity with peers and educators and quality of life; and it seeks a balance between culturally-valued topics of learning (such as, music, song, dance, environmental themes) and supporting the child’s meaning-making acquired through relationships and experience of the world. “In countries inheriting a social pedagogy tradition (Nordic and Central European countries), the kindergarten years are seen as a broad preparation for life and the foundation stage of lifelong learning” (OECD, 2006, p.13).

Starting Strong II cites a number of examples of how these approaches differ in policy and practice. In early childhood curricula, for example, “the early education tradition generally results in a more centralising and academic approach to curriculum content and methodology, while pedagogical frameworks in the social pedagogy tradition remain more local, child-centred and holistic”. Or, to take another example, the relationship between ECEC and school, “[in the social pedagogy approach] rather than’ schoolifying’ ECEC services, there is a strong belief that early childhood pedagogy should permeate the lower classes of primary school… [Countries adopting the pre-primary approach] tend to introduce the contents and methods of primary schooling into early education” (OECD, 2006, p.59, 61). (for a fuller discussion of the relationship between ECEC and compulsory schooling, see Woodhead & Moss, 2007).

There may well be other approaches to be identified, not to mention many different pedagogical theories, which can be cross-cutting influences on these broad approaches. The point, however, is that each approach and theory is inscribed with particular understandings, values and goals, from which emerge different ideas about practice and organisation. There is no objective way in which we can say which is best, all we can strive for is to understand better ways of working within each approach. Before research, we must make choices, political and collective — and we must take responsibility for the choices we make.