The Quality Agenda in Early Childhood Education : Questioning Local and Global Policy Perspectives [1st ed. 2019] 978-3-030-31626-6, 978-3-030-31627-3

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xi
Perspectives of Quality in Early Childhood Settings (Elise Hunkin)....Pages 1-12
‘For the Little Ones, the Best’: Australian Early Childhood Service and Policy Histories (Elise Hunkin)....Pages 13-36
‘There Is a Quantum Difference Between the Provision of Age-Appropriate Play-Based Care and an Early Learning and Care Environment’: The Quality Agenda for Australian Early Childhood (Elise Hunkin)....Pages 37-64
‘Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) Brings a Wide Range of Benefits… But All These Benefits Are Conditional on Quality’: Questioning the Only Quality Reform Agenda (Elise Hunkin)....Pages 65-90
‘Wiping Noses and Stopping Children from Killing Each Other’: Contesting an Only Quality Agenda (Elise Hunkin)....Pages 91-107
Quality Futures? The Case for Re-democratising Early Childhood Education and Care (Elise Hunkin)....Pages 109-121
Back Matter ....Pages 123-125

Citation preview

The Quality Agenda in Early Childhood Education Questioning Local and Global Policy Perspectives

Elise Hunkin

The Quality Agenda in Early Childhood Education

Elise Hunkin

The Quality Agenda in Early Childhood Education Questioning Local and Global Policy Perspectives

Elise Hunkin RMIT Bundoora Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology Bundoora, VIC, Australia

ISBN 978-3-030-31626-6 ISBN 978-3-030-31627-3  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31627-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Floriana, who makes all things possible and for our little one, who was with me throughout.

Acknowledgements

All my thanks to RMIT University and my School of Education colleagues for the continued research support and encouragement. Thank you to Artelingua.com.au for the expert guidance, editing and formatting assistance at the eleventh hour.

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Contents

1 Perspectives of Quality in Early Childhood Settings 1 2 ‘For the Little Ones, the Best’: Australian Early Childhood Service and Policy Histories 13 3 ‘There Is a Quantum Difference Between the Provision of Age-Appropriate Play-Based Care and an Early Learning and Care Environment’: The Quality Agenda for Australian Early Childhood 37 4 ‘Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) Brings a Wide Range of Benefits… But All These Benefits Are Conditional on Quality’: Questioning the Only Quality Reform Agenda 65 5 ‘Wiping Noses and Stopping Children from Killing Each Other’: Contesting an Only Quality Agenda 91 6 Quality Futures? The Case for Re-democratising Early Childhood Education and Care 109 Index 123

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List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 The dominant ideas of ‘neoliberalism plus’ social investment approaches to early childhood quality reform Fig. 3.2 The Australian early childhood quality reform agenda truth claims Fig. 4.1 The dominant ideas of ‘neoliberalism minus’ social investment approaches to early childhood quality reform Fig. 4.2 Global and locally informed: the truth politics of an only quality agenda

44 56 75 81

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CHAPTER 1

Perspectives of Quality in Early Childhood Settings

Abstract The introductory chapter explores the author’s context and establishes the scope of the book as providing a response to government assumptions about what constitutes quality in early childhood settings. A post-structural view of policy as value-laden is presented, and linked to the need for early childhood stakeholders locally and globally to engage with the complex policyscape of quality reform. The nature of global policy and policymaking is outlined as well as the Australian early childhood service and policy context to set the scene for the following chapters. Keywords Quality reform · Policy · Policy-making · Early childhood · Australia

Whose Quality? This book and the research that it reports began in an early childhood classroom. I began my career as a kindergarten (prior to school year) director at a time when Australia did not have a National Quality Reform Agenda for early childhood (Council of Australian Governments [COAG] 2009) and consequently, my work was not guided by quality standards and ratings, outcomes or frameworks. When I tell my university students this they are often incredulous but I am not that old. How did you know what to do? © The Author(s) 2019 E. Hunkin, The Quality Agenda in Early Childhood Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31627-3_1

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they wonder. Later, I spent some time working in the primary sector before transitioning back to kindergarten teaching. There, I found myself adrift in the new discursive and policy landscape of quality that I soon learnt was reflective of global assumptions and conversations taking place far away from educators, families and children. I also learnt that it was not just the Australian government that had identified quality as the foremost reform agenda for early childhood, but also the governments of developed and developing countries alike, informed by influential networks of local and international organisations. It took me some time to adapt to the new ‘quality’ regime of frameworks, standards and so on, but that wasn’t what concerned me about the new discursivity of early childhood work—my concern was that my practices and pedagogy were mostly unchanged and I was translating them into the new compliance structures. Despite being sympathetic to a quality agenda, I questioned the difference between my practices and training and the new state-regulated quality, since the former seemed more robust than the latter. I wondered if there had been a quality ‘problem’ in Australian early childhood settings as the notion of ‘quality reform’ suggests. Most of all, I wondered how I had not been aware of the changes afoot, since I had only been adjacent to the field, teaching children in their first year of primary school who had graduated early childhood settings mere months earlier. These questions led me to postgraduate research with the aim to investigate how policy notions of quality in early childhood have emerged and changed over time. I was concerned to find that economic questions and answers frame global policy notions of quality in early childhood settings, creating new ‘experts’ in what constitutes quality in early childhood, and what does not (Hunkin 2018a). Further, that quality reform policies tend to position quality as the site of government investment, rather than service access more broadly conceived (Hunkin 2018b). To say this is concerning draws on a post-structural view of reality that acknowledges societies as places of competing interests and agenda, some of which are privileged by policy and some of which are not (Taylor et al. 1997). Therefore, how can what constitutes ‘quality’ for one family and child also be ‘quality’ for another, in a difference place or time (Dahlberg et al. 2006)? What are the implications for the early childhood sector if governments begin to selectively promote certain parts of early childhood work and settings as ‘quality’ and not others? In the first half of this book I will revisit aspects of this work, outlining how the current policy view of quality has come to be at this point in time and not another, as well as the regime of truth that

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embeds it (Foucault 1998). I draw on the Australian context that has been my experience but also investigate how local perspectives have increasingly become responsive to global agenda, discourse and targets (Fenwick et al. 2014). The second half of the book moves into new research as I question the contemporary policyscape, reviewing local and global early childhood policy happenings and knowledge production about quality early childhood settings. I argue that over time the policy view of quality has shifted to promote a troubling new agenda—that only quality early childhood settings are beneficial or worthwhile. I explore how this shift from quality to ‘only quality’ occurred in the Australian policyscape due to changes in governance ideology and also trace local influences into the global policyscape and its key international players, such as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD 2012, 9). The goal isn’t to prove the existence of a single, unilateral idea or discourse but rather, to look at how the policies and politics of quality reform agenda locally and globally have created the conditions for some truths to dominate and frame our view of children and early childhood services over time, with varied implications. This approach draws on a post-structural view of policy as value-laden process and text that sits within local and global systems of agenda and influence.

Policy-Making in Contemporary Times Traditional views of policy have often cast it as a rational and value-natural ‘best’ outcome solution to a problem. However, since societies aren’t places where we experience or perceive problems in the same way, the post-structural view is that policy is both process and text—a value-laden non-linear tangle of competing interests and power struggles ultimately made manifest in a product that imbues government agenda. Peck and Theodore (2010) call this a view of policy as a “field of power” (169) which highlights how governments seek to persuade through policy, constructing discourse and text that promote certain truths and ideologies over others to meet their agenda (Osgood 2009). Discourse is a word that is used often within and across disciplines but in this book refers to Michel Foucault’s (1972) theorisation of discourse as a “collective consciousness” (22). In his use of discourse, Foucault (1972) is referring to the way that populations can broadly understand a certain

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notion or idea without being told of or having discussed it explicitly— quality in early childhood settings is a good example of this. Discourse is “secretly based on an ‘already said’” (Foucault 1972, 25) which puts analytical emphasis on the conditions in which we consider certain statements the ‘truth’ (Ball 2013). These conditions are always changing because discourse evolves and changes, overlaps and contradicts with the addition and/or subtraction of utterances and statements (Foucault 1991b). That makes statements a central part of Foucauldian discourse analysis because they “combine with each other in predictable ways… regulated by a set of rules” (Mills 2003, 54). Uncovering these rules and their governing logics can therefore provide insight into the unspoken rules that govern discourse. This book draws on policy documents and the statements within as a means by to investigate the discursive logics being established by policy discourse and the underlying agenda. In recent times, policy discourse has become increasingly politicised because the nature of policy-making has changed. More than ever governments now outsource policy assistance for the increasingly difficult social problems of modern times, such as increased population flow, climate change and national security (Rizvi and Lingard 2010). This decentralisation of policy-making has enabled new policy actors and agencies, whose success in influencing policy is significantly improved by belonging to varied formal and informal policy networks through which shared knowledge, information and agenda flow (Stone 2012; Spring 2008). As a result, local policy reform discourse and agenda are increasingly oriented in global policy power relations, taking on globally dominant knowledges, targets and agenda (Fairclough 2001; Zittoun 2014; Fenwick et al. 2014). Within these processes, the state relinquishes some guises of power but “is also acquiring new powers and new forms of power” (Ball 2012, 22) concerned with shaping the behaviour of populations (Ball 2003), as I will explore in this book. Since policy discourse and agenda is increasingly globally oriented, local governments must work to promote and produce the values, knowledges and logics that meet its agenda and translate them into the local context (Fairclough 2001). This leads Fairclough (2001) to describe policy discourse as “technologised” (231) since through discourse governments are creating representations of “how things are and have been [but also] imaginaries – representations of how things might or could or should be” (233). For this reason, Nicoll and Edwards (2004) note that policy works as persuasion and should not be accepted out of hand.

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Understanding the way that governments now shape and deploy policy and policy discourse sits within a broader concept of state power and governance that Foucault (1991) called governmentality. Foucault (1991a) noticed that modern liberal (often called neoliberal) governments no longer exercise direct force or coercion over populations to progress an agenda. Instead, modern governance seems to involve deploying power to create the conditions in which populations will govern themselves according to the state agenda. Foucault (2009a) called this “the art of government” (193), which is a way to conceptualise how governments engage in truth politics—the promotion and production of some knowledges, discourse, schemes and ideas over others—in order to shape how population groups are and be. Governmentality is a theory that highlights how influencing or changing the way that we think about or relate to something can help the state shift the way that we see ourselves and our world and therefore, how we enact our roles and responsibilities as a subject (Foucault 1982). Governmentality spans a lot of different state activities which is why Foucault describes it as an “ensemble” of power deployment (2009b, 108). Taking a governmentality view of policy is to highlight how policy as process and text is tactically imbued with government reason, ideology and ambition (Doherty 2007), as I do in this book. Doherty (2007) describes this as an analytical lens that emphasises the “technical character of policy” (201), that is, how policy represents state reason operationalised through assemblages of policy technologies, knowledges, discourses, texts, and so on.

The Australian Early Childhood Context In Australia, early childhood services have a philanthropic history and now comprise a variety of service types across the private and public sectors in the Australian states and territories. I will not detail that history now as it is discussed throughout the book, particularly Chapter 2. Instead, what follows is a summary of the current sector context in order to orientate the discussion to come. At present, the early childhood sector in Australia is comprised of a number of different services offered nationwide. Long day care refers to out-of-home childcare catering for children aged 0–6 years, operating in a centre-based format. Family day care offers a similar service by providing child day care but does so in the educator’s home, and on a smaller scale.

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Both long day care and family day care providers typically offer part-time and full-time attendance options. Occasional care is another form of centrebased childcare that is available for irregular use by families (such as for appointments, work commitments) and regular use, like long day care. Outside of School Hours Care (OSHC) is a childcare service that offers care to school age children before and after school hours, usually on premises within or associated with the school. Sheppard (2015, 1) reports that in 2011, 45% of children aged 2–3 in Australia were accessing long day care, in 2016 that had jumped to two-thirds (Pascoe and Brennan 2018, 31). In 2019, there are 15,902 accredited early childhood education and care services in Australia (Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority [ACECQA] 2019, 4). This book will focus on childcare (long day care) and preschool or kindergarten services predominantly, due to scope. Kindergarten or Preschool services in Australia are government funded early childhood programs for 4-year-old children in the year prior to attending school. 3-year-old kindergarten programs are also commonly available but are not yet universally government funded and operate as a private service, typically staffed by a Bachelor-qualified early childhood teachers as 4 year-old programs are. Kindergartens or preschools have historically developed independently from childcare, but have increasingly integrated with them in response to family childcare needs (Elliot 2006). For example, a child might attend preschool for two or three days per week and access childcare on the alternate business days, or access childcare before/after the funded preschool hours. The states and territories in partnership with the federal government fund 15 hours of preschool per week, per child (COAG 2009). Preschools operate in a variety of formats including parttime (known as sessional) and extended hours if offered in conjunction with childcare. In 2013, 30% of 4- to 5-year-old children enrolled in preschool programs attended for more than 15 hours (Sheppard 2015, 4). Preschool educators are required to be degree-qualified and registered with the state- and territory-based teacher registration bodies. Childcare educators need to be either diploma- or certificate-qualified, in accordance with the staff qualification ratio requirements outlined in the Education and Care National Regulations 2011 (Cth). Only families utilising accredited childcare are eligible for federal childcare subsidies and tax benefits. To become accredited providers of childcare in Australia, services must meet the eligibility requirements of Australia’s National Quality Framework (ACECQA 2010). The National Quality Framework (NQF) (ACECQA

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2010; COAG 2009) was introduced incrementally from 2007 by the federal Rudd-Labor Government, as part of a National Quality Agenda for early childhood services in Australia. Previously, childcare services and preschool programs had been provided in a ‘patchwork’ (Elliot 2006, 2) of services across the states and territories, governed by the laws, regulations and curriculum guidelines of the respective government. From 1994, a national Quality Improvement and Accreditation System (National Childcare Accreditation Council [NCAC] 2001) was introduced but it reflected the differing state and territory laws, regulations and curriculums and as such did not reflect or create a nationwide standard (Elliot 2006). The NQF sought to create this consistency by developing a national policy framework for all early childhood services (COAG 2009) that includes: the development of the Education and Care Services National Regulations 2011 (Cth) and the Education and Care Services National Law Act 2010 (Cth), a National Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) (Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations [DEEWR] 2009) and the National Quality Standard (NQS) (ACECQA 2012). The Education and Care National Regulations 2011 (Cth) and the Education and Care Services National Law Act 2010 (Cth) along with the NQS (ACECQA 2012) form the basis of updated national licensing and accreditation processes. The EYLF (DEEWR 2009) supports the National Quality Standard accreditation system (ACECQA 2012) by guiding teaching and learning programs in all early childhood settings toward five child outcomes. The development and implementation of the NQF is overseen by a national body called the ACECQA, which was formed for the purpose. The NQF represents an indelible change in the policy landscape for early childhood in Australia, and as such it should not be accepted out of hand (Fenech et al. 2012). Policy and reform agenda are imbued with the ambitions, values and ideology of governments and seek to privileges some truths about quality in early childhood settings—what it is and does—over others (Fenech et al. 2012). Through the NQF, ‘quality’ values and norms are being set against which populations such as educators, children and parents must comply (Doherty 2007; Foucault 1991b). Moreover, these ideas are not a fixed but changing over time. Hence, this book reviews quality policy reform agenda and discourse over time in Australia, in order to question the changing ideology, values, attitudes and ambitions that embed it, and their orientation in the global policyscape.

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Navigating This Book I have been clear in this introduction about what brought me to this book to emphasise that what follows is my telling and questioning of early childhood quality policy histories because I see great value in that. In contemporary times, policy is globally mobile, moving “in bits and pieces – as selective discourses, inchoate ideas, and synthesized models” (Peck and Theodore 2010, 170). For education policy, this involves a flow and circulation of sanctioned ideology and models of education via complex policy networks, comprising global and local actors (Ball 2012) that are becoming increasingly coordinated (Sahlberg 2016). To become mobile, policy needs to attract advocates that, despite having potentially different interests, values and political constraints, create connections to other policy actors (either within existing networks and beyond them) (Stone 2012). These allegiances tend to follow prior ideological ties, leading to policy content that affirms the dominant ideas and powerful interests of global networks, creating an increasingly hegemonic global policyscape (Ball 2015; Peck and Theodore 2010; Verger et al. 2012). This is particularly problematic for education, since sanctioned policy agenda and/or discourse have significantly hegemonised the policyscape by “standardizing the flow of educational ideas internationally and changing fundamentally what education is and can be” (Carney 2009, 68) including in early childhood (Moss 2014; Sims 2017; Urban 2015). The networking activities of powerful world actors such as the OECD, European Union, World Bank and are central to this new paradigm for education (Rizvi and Lingard 2010) as well as think tanks, private sector businesses and education entrepreneurs whose influence has been growing steadily (Ball 2009, 2012). As an example, the nation-states and International Organisations might collaborate to create and ratify conventions and initiatives that establish a coordinated path of policy action, based on shared discourse and agenda, such as the Lisbon Strategy or Lisbon Agenda 2000 which outlined reform action for the European Union (2012) or the United Nationals 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (UNICEF, n.d.). In this way, education policy and discourse spaces imbue broader global messages, ideologies and allegiances (Carney 2009, 69) to the extent that Sahlberg (2016) asserts there is now a cohesive and coordinated Global Education Reform Movement that spans: the US, England, Central and Eastern Europe, Australia, Chile, South Africa and to a lesser extent Sweden, Spain and East Asia (189). It is within this context that I assert that

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critical education policy research that complexifies local stories of policy discourse and agenda hold value. The book spans six chapters including this introduction. Chapter 2 takes a historical view of Australian early childhood services and policies in order to question what has been thought of as best for children over time, and how that has shaped early childhood service development, including notions of quality. Chapter 3 focuses on Australia’s National Quality Reform era for early childhood, drawing on local and global happenings and knowledge production, including policy documents, to question what quality was presumed to be and do in the Australian early childhood context. Chapter 4 investigates the contemporary developments in the Australian and global quality policyscapes for early childhood in order to establish the emergence of an ‘only quality’ agenda in recent times. Although some critique is implicit to the investigation presented in Chapter 4, Chapter 5 then picks up those concerns in a line of questioning that problematises the dominant assumptions of ‘only quality’ policy discourse and agenda. Through those questions, I ask that we evaluate the reality presented by ‘only quality’ truth claims and whether we accept that reality, and its implications. Last, Chapter 6 brings the book themes together in an examination of early childhood institutions—what they are presumed to be and do, and not do and be. This is a caution about how far we have come from the notion of early childhood education and care settings as sites of democracy and transformative change, and how quality reform distracts us in their absence. The book concludes by reinvigorating questions about what early childhood services might be and could be by situating them within contemplations of re-democratisation and our changing and turbulent world. Drawing on existing research and country examples, I theorise pathways to those alternative futures of quality both theoretical and non-theoretical, including every day examples of resistive practice, agency and change.

References Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority (ACECQA). 2010. National Quality Framework. http://www.acecqa.gov.au/national-qualityframework. Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority (ACECQA). 2012. National Quality Standards. http://www.acecqa.gov.au/nationalquality-framework/the-national-quality-standard.

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Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority (ACECQA). 2019. NQF Snapshot Q1 2019. https://www.acecqa.gov.au/sites/default/files/ 2019-05/NQFSnapshot-Q12019.PDF. Ball, S. J. 2003. “The Teacher’s Soul and the Terrors of Performativity.” Journal of Education Policy 18 (2): 215–228. Ball, S. J. 2009. “Privatising Education, Privatising Education Policy, Privatising Educational Research: Network Governance and the ‘Competition State’.” Journal of Education Policy 24 (1): 83–99. Ball, S. J. 2012. Global Education Inc. New Policy Networks and the Neo-Liberal Imaginary. London and New York: Routledge. Ball, S. J. 2013. Foucault, Power and Education. London and New York: Routledge. Ball, S. J. 2015. “Education, Governance and the Tyranny of Numbers”. Journal of Education Policy 30 (3): 299–301. Carney, S. 2009. “Negotiating Policy in an Age of Globalisation: Exploring Educational ‘Policyscapes’ in Denmark, Nepal, and China.” Comparative Education Review 53 (1): 63–88. Council of Australian Governments (COAG). 2009. National Partnership Agreement on the National Quality Agenda for Early Childhood Education and Care. https://cabinet.qld.gov.au/documents/2009/Nov/National% 20Quality%20Agenda%20for%20Early%20Childhood%20Ed%20and%20Care/ Attachments/national_partnership_on_early_childhood_education.pdf. Dahlberg, G., P. Moss, and A. Pence. 2006. Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care: Languages of Evaluation, 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR). 2009. Belonging, Being & Becoming: The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia. Canberra, ACT: Commonwealth of Australia. Doherty, R. 2007. “Critically Framing Education Policy: Foucault, Discourse and Governmentality.” In Why Foucault? New Directions in Educational Research, edited by M. A. Peters and R. Besley, 193–203. New York: Peter Lang. Elliot, A. 2006. Early Childhood Education: Pathways to Quality and Equity for All Children. Melbourne: ACER Press. European Union. 2012. “Lisbon Agenda.” European Union. Accessed 2 December. http://www.euractiv.com/section/future-eu/linksdossier/lisbonagenda/. Fairclough, N. 2001. “The Discourse of New Labour: Critical Discourse Analysis.” In Discourse as Data: A Guide for Analysis, edited by M. Wetherall, S. Taylor, and S. Yates, 229–266. London: Sage and Open University. Fenech, M., M. Giugni, and K. Bown. 2012. “A Critical Analysis of the National Quality Framework: Mobilising for a Vision of Children Beyond Minimum Standards.” Australasian Journal of Early Childhood 37 (4): 5–14. Fenwick, T., E. Mangez, and J. Ozga. 2014. “Governing Knowledge: Comparison, Knowledge-Based Technologies and Expertise in the Regulation of Education.”

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In World Yearbook of Education 2014, edited by T. Fenwick, E. Mangez, and J. Ozga, 25–28. New York: Routledge. Foucault, M. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge. Foucault, M. 1982. “The Subject and Power.” Critical Inquiry 8 (4): 777–795. Foucault, M. 1991a. “Governmentality.” In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, edited by G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller, 87–104. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, M., 1991b. “Politics and the Study of Discourse.” In The Foucault Effect, edited by G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller, 53–72. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, M. 1998. “Polemics, Politics and Problematizations.” In Essential Works of Foucault: “Ethics”, edited by P. Rabinow. New York: The New Press. Foucault, M. 2009a. “1 March 1978.” In Security, Territory, Population: Lecture at the College de France, edited by M. Senellart, 191–227. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. 2009b. “1 February 1978.” In Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, edited by M. Senellart, 87–115. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hunkin, E. 2018a. “Whose Quality? The (Mis)uses of Quality Reform in Early Childhood and Education Policy.” Journal of Education Policy 33 (4): 443– 456. Hunkin, E. 2018b. “If Not Quality, Then What? The Discursive Risks in Early Childhood Quality Reform.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2018.1453780. Mills, S. 2003. Michel Foucault. London: Routledge. Moss, P. 2014. Transformative Change and Real Utopias in Early Childhood Education: A Story of Democracy, Experimentation and Potentiality. Oxon: Routledge. National Childcare Accreditation Council (NCAC). 2001. Putting Children First: Quality Improvement and Accreditation System. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. Nicoll, K., and R. Edwards. 2004. “Lifelong Learning and the Sultans of Spin: Policy as Persuasion?” Journal of Education Policy 19 (1): 43–55. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). 2012. Starting Strong III: A Quality Toolbox for Early Childhood Education and Care. Paris: OECD. Osgood, J. 2009. “Childcare Workforce Reform in England and ‘the Early Years Professional’: A Critical Discourse Analysis.” Journal of Education Policy 24 (6): 733–751. Pascoe, S., and D. Brennan. 2018. Lifting Our Game: Report of the Review to Achieve Educational Excellence in Australian Schools Through Early Childhood Interventions. https://www.education.act.gov.au/__data/assets/ pdf_file/0004/1159357/Lifting-Our-Game-Final-Report.pdf.

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Peck, J., and N. Theodore. 2010. “Mobilizing Policy: Models, Methods, and Mutations.” Geoforum 41 (2): 169–174. Rizvi, F., and B. Lingard. 2010. Globalizing Education Policy. Oxon: Routledge. Sahlberg, P. 2016. “The Global Education Reform Movement and Its Impact on Schooling.” In The Handbook of Global Education Policy, edited by K. Mundy, A. Green, B. Lingard, and A. Verger, 128–144. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Sheppard, M. 2015. Child Care in Australia: A Quick Guide. Canberra: Parliamentary Library. Sims, M. 2017. “Neoliberalism and Early Childhood.” Cogent Education 4: 1–10. Spring, J. 2008. Globalization of Education: An Introduction. New York: Routledge. Stone, D. 2012. “Transfer and Translation of Policy.” Policy Studies 33 (6): 483– 499. Taylor, S., F. Rizvi, B. Lingard, and M. Henry. 1997. Education Policy and the Politics of Change. Oxon: Routledge. UNICEF. n.d. “The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” https://www. unicef.org/agenda2030/. Urban, M. 2015. “From ‘Closing the Gap’ to an Ethics of Affirmation: Reconceptualising the Role of Early Childhood Services in Times of Uncertainty.” European Journal of Education 50 (4): 293–306. https://doi.org/10.1111/ ejed.12131. Verger, A., M. Novelli, and H. Altinyelken. 2012. “Global Education Policy and International Development: An Introductory Framework.” In Global Education Policy and International Development: New Agendas, Issues and Policies, edited by A. Verger, H. Altinyelken, and M. Novelli, 3–33. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Zittoun, P. 2014. The Political Process of Policymaking: A Pragmatic Approach to Public Policy. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 2

‘For the Little Ones, the Best’: Australian Early Childhood Service and Policy Histories

Abstract Over time ideas about what is best for young children in Australia have changed significantly, but also not very much. The quotation in this chapter heading, ‘For the little ones, the best,’ was the motto of the Sydney Day Nursery teacher’s college in 1946 (Huntsman 2005, 7) and signals the central discussion of this chapter: what has been thought of as best for young children in Australia? The chapter critiques Australian early childhood service and policy histories since settlement to show that the Australian zeitgeist has always assumed young children should be in the care of their mothers. It is argued that this ‘mother-care paradigm’ framed the development of early childhood services and policy, including contemporary ideas about quality. Keywords Childcare history · Preschool history · Childhood · Mother-care · Early childhood policy · Early childhood service development

Mother-Care Is Best---1788--1950 From British invasion until the 1972, the Australian governments steadfastly positioned child-rearing and childcare as a mother’s responsibility and this view has impacted significantly on the development of early care services—or lack thereof. Colonised from 1788, Australia’s development of © The Author(s) 2019 E. Hunkin, The Quality Agenda in Early Childhood Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31627-3_2

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children’s services was unique in a number of ways: first, the states retained the majority of power and so each state had a unique path to establishing education and early childhood services; second, there were no great mitigating social pressures such as industrialisation, revolution or war (save for the gold rushes and 1890 economic downturn) (Clyde 2000); third, there were strong British and American connections, with the former being enormously influential in terms of how government and policy were established initially (Hyams 1979; Dyson 2005); last, in the Australian context there were no provisions made for children’s services prior to or at the time of colonisation (Mellor 1990; Brennan 1998), even though the first settlers consisted of male and female convicts, jailers and their families, and some pregnant women (Clyde 2000). This made the Australian experience uniquely problematic in that the early settlements experienced large numbers of destitute women and children, and no resolutions were forthcoming in regards to whose responsibility it was to provide services for them. For those who could afford it, formal education was available through church-run private primary and secondary schools, as well as home tutors. Although qualified teachers were hard to come by in the new colonies (Hyams 1979). For the majority, life in the new colonies was difficult. Female convicts typically had little education or prior work experience out of the home, so even domestic roles were difficult to sustain. There was no other assistance from governments like welfare or unemployment benefits and as the settlers had no extended family nearby, there were few opportunities for familial or informal/social child day care (Brennan 1998). Further, family dislocation or abandonment was common because men often travelled between colonies to find work, such as mining and agriculture (and later in the gold rushes of the 1840s, 1880s and 1890s). This meant that for many isolated and desperate single mothers the only options were to take young children to work, which was rarely allowed, leave children unattended during work hours or abandon infants shortly after birth, either in the streets or to charitable organisations (Brennan 1998). Considering these challenges, it seems unlikely that the new Australian governments would expect families (mothers) to independently provide and care for their children. Nonetheless, “children’s services in the first half of the nineteenth century were of little importance” (Mellor 1990, 4) to the Australian governments because child-rearing was considered a private responsibility. It wasn’t unusual for

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“gangs of ‘neglected, deserted or orphaned children’ [to roam] the settlement at Sydney Cove” (Clyde 2000, 88) and the emerging middle classes were none too pleased. In response to the rising number of vagrant children, state orphanages were opened from 1803 in Sydney by way of ad hoc partnerships between the state and the church (Mellor 1990). In time, these first children’s services expanded to include children’s training institutions and other small provincial orphanages run by the church (Mellor 1990). Apart from these, children would typically be committed to the same prisons and institutions (i.e. hospitals) as adults (Brennan 1998). Later, the new colonies opened Australia’s first free public schools called ‘Ragged schools’ as a way to take the groups of poor, unsupervised children off the streets and distance them from the influence of their families, whose inability to care for them was heavily stigmatised (Clyde 2000). Beginning in Sydney in 1860, Ragged schools were funded by the states and run by the clergy. They catered only to poor children and included infant classes for children under the age of six (Clyde 2000) in loud, overcrowded halls, with little curriculum or outdoor space, since the primary goals weren’t educative (Brennan 1998). Despite these efforts, the Australian colonies continued to have a higher infant mortality rate than British cities (Mellor 1990), indicating that the needs of many young children and their families were still unmet. The origins of children’s services in Australia are important because they demonstrate how the first children’s services were aligned with child welfare, charity and the stigma of being a ‘bad family’ or mother. Clyde (2000) concludes that two interrelated assumptions have always been present in Australian society: that families are able to provide for their children, and that women are in the home. As I will explore in this book, those expectations still dominate policy approaches to early childhood services both in Australian society and also in the broader context of what governments assume to be best for children. However, history tells us that these expectations may never have been reasonable or fair. This raises questions about why it has ever been—and continues to be—assumed that mothers will provide in-home care for children. The Mother-Care Paradigm The lack of provision for children’s services in the Australian colonies highlights the importance of understanding government policy as value-laden and ideological (Blackmore and Lauder 2005), not neutral or the ‘right’

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answer to a problem, as policy is sometimes presented. The British and Western governments of the nineteenth century exercised a style of governance called classic liberalism, an ideology that values individual freedom and self-sufficiency above all else. This era is sometimes described as laissezfaire liberalism because governments strived for minimal intervention into social affairs. As Fenna (2013) explains: Under the classical liberal regime of laissez faire, governments did little or nothing to intervene: no public education, no public healthcare, no health and safety regulations, no limit on age or hours of work, no poverty alleviate, no insurance against unemployment. (118)

For a classic liberal government, the types of public services that Fenna (2013) describes above are considered an unfair imposition on the rights of those whose taxes would fund them. However, it is important to note that classic and laissez-faire liberalism did not extend the notions of personal and market freedoms to women (Mahon 2002) as the policies assumed and privilaged a male breadwinner. Classic liberalism considered the economic role of women in society to be a crucial source of unpaid care labour (Fenna 2013). This meant that a Victorian or nuclear family model—the breadwinner father, stay-at-home mother with two children—was vigorously promoted by the Australian, UK, USA and Canadian governments throughout the nineteenth century. In tandem, there was a rise in and promotion of social beliefs about motherhood as powerful, virtuous and unique or irreplaceable (Pence 1989, 142). These ideas were widely promoted through popular culture, policy, and later, through the first early childhood researchers. Pence (1989) calls this way of thinking a “mother-care paradigm” (145) because the assumption that mother-care is best for children framed the way that society thought about families, child-rearing and services for women and children. While this might have always been the case for Australia, Pence (1989) recalls that Britain (early 1800s century), America (1820s) and Canada (1830s) all had well-established infant school traditions available to all families and children under five by the mid-1800s. However, infant schools were slowly de-funded across the Anglophone countries as socio-political preference for the Victorian, nuclear family grew (Pence 1989). Pence (1989) writes how:

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The Infant School programs were eclipsed by a very different social movement, the Victorian or industrial model of motherhood and mother-care… the histories of all day care/early childhood movements since the mid 1830s have been written in the shadow, within the eclipse, of that particular model of mother-care. (143)

Above, Pence makes two key observations: first, that the mother-care paradigm has been so powerful since the mid-1830s that divergent ideas about what is best for children have been marginalised ever since. Second, the mother-care paradigm serves to promote an ‘industrial’ family model that reserved employment for the men whilst also capitalising on the unpaid labour of women in times of labour excesses in Britain and North America (Pence 1989). Here the Australian context differs because in the first decades of settlement men, women and children often worked together on newly acquired land (Brennan 1998), so the promotion of mothercare in Australia probably served to maintain a pre-industrial family model where women worked in the home. This meant that despite the social reality suggesting otherwise, expectations of mother-care dominated the new Australian colonies and framed their organisation. Schooling Is for School Age Children Towards the end of the nineteenth century it had become clear that laissezfaire governance did not benefit the majority and there was a global shift as Western liberalists moved broadly into two schools of thought: the classics liberalists, who retained a faith in the free market and individualism, and the ‘new’ or ‘reform’ liberalists, who believed in the “therapeutic use of government authority” (Mahon 2002, 119). In Australia, the uptake of reform liberalism led to the introduction of a Public Schools Act in 1866— just prior to federation—that legislated state funding of primary and secondary schools. This was a significant policy because it consigned schooling as a state responsibility and introduced a compulsory school age of either five or six (Brennan 1998). Private (denominational) schools were given the option to remain private with minimal assistance from the state and in time, most ragged schools closed because there was no longer a need for them (Brennan 1998). To draw a line between ‘school age’ and ‘below school age’ enshrined in legislation the continued assumption that the care and education of young children is a private (family) matter, not a public (government) one.

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The compulsory school age had an enormous impact on lower-income families because it meant that older siblings could no longer assist with child day care or for other forms of labour, such as household chores or farm work, during school hours (Brennan 1998). Perhaps for this reason, numerous reports from the Australian states indicated that very young children were attending public primary schools despite not being of legal age (Brennan 1998). Commonly, there were haphazard infant classes held for 2- to 5-year-olds that operated in the corners of classrooms to avoid interference with formal lessons, supervised by whoever was available, usually the mothers or wives of the clergymen (Aspland 2006). Attending public school was not free or probably very much fun, as large numbers of children were packed into halls and taught using didactic teaching methods, so it speaks volumes that families still elected to send very young children. After the 1890 economic downturn infant classes ended because cuts to funding meant that primary schools could no longer afford them (Brennan 1998). This raises questions about who was making policy decisions about what was best for young children and on what grounds? There is also reason to question the extent to which the mother-care paradigm reflected social need, or the perspectives of all societal stakeholders. Despite the lack of childcare services, participation of women in the Australian workforce grew steadily. Single mothers, either due to family dislocation, abandonment or death, accounted for one fifth of the industrial workforce in Victoria in 1886, and half it by 1907 (Brennan 1998, 23). By 1891, women were the family breadwinners in one sixth of Sydney households (Mellor 1990, 53). Figures are unavailable for the lessindustrialised cities of Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth, but typically female employment consisted of domestic duties such as child minding, cleaning, washing clothes, sewing, and so on. This work paid very little and usually involved long hours. As a result, the outcomes for Australian children continued to decline in the new colonies before the end of the nineteenth century, despite the newly funded public schools and a broad desire to grow the population (Mellor 1990). Despite these circumstances, the expectation of mother-care did not change and perhaps strengthened, as the Australian governments began to intervene in order to protect and rehabilitate children from ‘bad homes’ by removing the children from them. This has been called the child rescue era (Brennan 1998).

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The Child Rescue Era The child rescue era is a difficult period in the history of Australian children’s services that contributes a lot to our understanding of what was considered ‘best’ for children at the time, and how this has impacted the development of early childhood services over time. As poor health and welfare outcomes for young children continued over time in the new colonies it became clear that many families could not independently care for their children. However, late nineteenth century interpretations of Christianity considered inadequacies and/or poverty to be the result of laziness and other personal faults (Mellor 1990). Even reform liberalism assumed that every individual was similarly responsible for their own prosperity (Mahon 2002), so families that could not care for their children due to poverty or other misfortune were considered a negative influence or ‘bad home’. For these reasons, children’s services were expanded to cater to children’s health and welfare (Brennan 1998). As Clyde (2000) explains: Obviously, hard work and independence were valued highly, and poor homes were viewed as being “bad” homes. Combined with the growing perception in England and elsewhere that children were both vulnerable and innocent and in need of protection from physical and moral harm, there was a belief that children must be “saved” from poor (and bad) homes. (90)

In the growing colonies, there was also a developing sense of nationalism and the high infant mortality rates embarrassed Australians to the extent that “the provision of services for those children … became not only a matter of Christian compassion and private charity, it became a matter of national interest” (Mellor 1990, 13). The state governments began establishing residential care systems for destitute children, with three outof-home services for children being developed between 1860 and 1890: orphanages, industrial schools and ‘boarding-out’ schemes that operated much like foster care (Mellor 1990). In keeping with the established pattern, these residential services were charitable, typically church-run institutions or schemes that relied on donations and ad-hoc government grants to survive. Importantly, whether or not children attended these services was not a decision made by parents, as between 1864 and 1874 all states passed legislation that gave permission for children deemed destitute or criminal to be committed to government care without parental consent (see Mellor 1990, 20). Therefore, despite the policies of child rescue being relatively short-lived—except for

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the Indigenous communities for whom child rescue practices continued up until the 1970s with tragic consequences—the child rescue era is an important part of Australia’s children’s services history. It shows the strength of the mother-care paradigm and its logics, considering that the preference for governments at this time was to remove children from their families rather than provide assistance in the home. Not only did this slow the evolution of child day care services in Australia, it also strengthened the stigma of out-of-home childcare by positioning it as a family welfare or child protection service. It took some time for attitudes about out-of-home care to change.

Mother-Care and Early Education Is Best---1900--1970 The twentieth century brought a change of heart in regard to poverty and family hardship that created the conditions for the first free kindergartens and child day care nurseries to open in Australia. The global economic downturn in 1880 had comparably little impact on Australia, yet unemployment rose and many families lost their savings, homes and jobs. The belief that poor homes were bad homes was eroded by the fact that the majority of the poor were formerly stable, middle-class Australians (Brennan 1998). It was also a time for the increasing emancipation of women (Clyde 2000), along with a new unionist movement and Labor Party from 1900 that advocated for moderate social democratic principles—the belief that government should intervene in social matters (i.e. provide services or assistance, policies, laws) to ensure fairer and more just societies (Fenna 2013). The moderate quality of the Labor Party created a “common ground between the new liberalism and social democracy [that] established a framework for Australian policy over much of the 20th century” (Fenna 2013, 127). However even with social democratic sympathies, New Liberalism continued to reserve notions of individual and market freedom, and now also fairness and justness, for men (Fenna 2013). This lead Brennan (1998) to assert that Australia developed a ‘male welfare state’: The assumption of women’s dependence was built into the very foundations of the Australian welfare state. Most pensions and benefits assumed the presence of a male breadwinner and a female caregiver. Even the industrial relations system was based on this assumption. (98)

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The emergence of an Australian male welfare state meant that despite some significant changes to attitudes and family policies, the mother-care paradigm went from strength to strength. The Australian governments expanded the existing public services for young children and families that focused on child health and welfare, including hospitals, maternal child and health programs, and orphanages (Brennan 1998) and the philanthropic sector stepped into fill the gaps. Kindergartens and Child Day Care Nurseries From the late 1880s, Australian churches, philanthropists and middle-class female volunteers came together to establish the first kindergartens and child day care settings with the aim was to assist families in need (Brennan 1998). The first Kindergarten Union was established in Sydney in 1895, followed by the Sydney Day Nursery Association in 1905. The day care and kindergarten movements evolved alongside one another, often with members and premises in common but they had different agenda, values and status and were relatively autonomous—except in the state of Queensland, where both services similarly emphasised care and evolved in partnership (Brennan 1998). The first day nurseries opened in Victoria, South Australia, and Brisbane in the late 1880s and early 1890s to provide services for mothers, usually single, who had no choice but to work (Brennan 2002). The primary concern of day nurseries was to keep families together by providing affordable child day care that also optimised children’s health and wellbeing (Brennan 1998, 28). Unlike kindergarten, child day care was affordable but not free, costing a similar amount to a public school (Brennan 1998). The first free kindergartens also targeted poor communities with programs that included activities such as washing, feeding and clothing children, and teaching ‘proper’ manners, religion and values (Clyde 2000). Taking advantage of the philanthropic activity of the time, free kindergartens opened in every state by 1920, typically operating out of town halls and other public venues, run by groups of middle-class female volunteers and Kindergarten Union trained kindergarten teachers (Brennan 1998). It wasn’t long before kindergarten gained widespread middle-class support and its emphasis shifted to early education. The minimum age of attendance was set at 3 years and kindergartens operated only on a parttime basis (Clyde 2000), which was a way of setting kindergarten apart from child day care. Brennan (1998) explained that

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Although they obviously provided a limited child minding service for the mothers of their charges this was regarded as purely incidental; kindergartens, as their proponents never tired of saying, were not in the business of relieving mothers of their responsibilities. (26, original italics)

Attempts by the Kindergarten Unions to distinguish kindergarten from child minding was a reflection of the socio-political views of the time. Drawing on pedagogues like Fredrick Froebel and John Dewey, the Kindergarten Unions saw kindergarten and its play-based kindergarten pedagogy as education reform, different to both formal education and child day care (Whitehead 2010). The Kindergarten Unions opened and operated private teacher training colleges and aspiring kindergarten teachers undertook equal or more teacher training than pre-service teachers training for primary and secondary schools (Brennan 1998). Kindergarten teaching was promoted as a female, charitable vocation, not a profession (Brennan 1998) which aligned with the broader Anglophone kindergarten movements that promoted Froebel’s vision of the most suitable kindergarten teacher being a maternal, well-bred, self-sacrificing woman (Dombrowski 2002). Importantly, these beliefs also aligned with the mother-care paradigm and Victorian family model, which Dombrowski (2002) suggests allowed kindergarten teaching in Britain and America to become accepted as respectable employment and purpose for middle-class women. As an example, the 1908 prospectus of Sydney’s Kindergarten Teachers’ College read: Few, if any occupations, unless that of nursing, are better calculated to keep alive and develop more of the potential of motherhood…In choosing a means of livelihood for our girls, the fact must never be lost sight of that a woman’s deepest instincts centre in the home… her natural place. (as quoted in Stonehouse 1994, 6)

As kindergarten teachers also earned very little it was a vocation that also posed no threat to the sanctity of motherhood and the male breadwinner (Whitehead 2008, 36), despite also elevating women to positions of substantial import and influence that would not have been appropriate otherwise, such as, lecturers, kindergarten directors and managers. For the Kindergarten Unions, the educative benefits of kindergarten justified the separation of mother and child for a short while. Gradually, more psychology-based developmental theory and practices were adopted in Australian kindergartens, such as child observations (Brennan 1998; Clyde

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2000). By the 1940s, the Kindergarten Union had successfully lobbied the Commonwealth Government to provide some funding towards demonstrative kindergarten centres and state and territory government funding towards teacher training colleges. By the 1950s, the majority of children attending kindergarten were from an upper-middle class background showing the extent of socio-political support for early education (Brennan 1998). On the other hand, Brennan (1998) notes that “the suggestion that there might be any mutual benefits for mother, baby and other family members in the provision of day care service appeared only rarely” (61). This status distinction between early education and early care was not unique to the Australian context, as American (see Rose 1999), British (see Pence 1989; Penn 2011) and Canadian (see Friendly and Prentice 2012; Pence and Pacini-Ketchabaw 2008) child day care services were similarly stigmatised as charity or welfare, rather than a social right or good. Until as late as the 1960s, the term ‘day nursery’ and later ‘childcare’ was socially synonymous with child welfare in Anglophone countries (Rose 1999; Brennan 2002), long after many women had begun to enter the workforce voluntarily. The Australian Kindergarten Unions’ views were heavily influenced by emerging early childhood research from America and Britain that warned of the ‘dangers’ of out-of-home, non-maternal childcare (Brennan 1998). The research was popular across the liberal Anglophone countries (Pence and Pacini-Ketchabaw 2008), particularly John Bowlby, whose work linked childrens’ mental health to their maternal attachment (1951) and the antisocial and delinquent behaviour of the thieves to early childhood maternal deprivation (1944). Brennan (1998) notes that the Australian “Kindergarten Unions regarded the work of John Bowlby (1951) on maternal deprivation as ‘virtually gospel’ and used it to oppose the establishment of child care centres” (91). Other influential research included studies by Goldfarb (1943, 1945, 1947) who argued that institutionalised children had lower levels of intelligence and had incurred “permanent harm to personality” (Goldfarb 1943, 106). Despite most of the research being difficult to generalise to the broader community due to its participants being predominantly orphaned or institutionalised children or adults, the findings were “extrapolated as part of a ‘science-based’, socio-political polemic against non-maternal child day care” (Pence and Pacini-Ketchabaw 2008, 243). Further, Australia experienced a resurgence of traditional values in post-World War II society that placed a “renewed emphasis on the nuclear

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family” (Strachan 2010, 120) as a means for economic and societal stability. Mother-care became the symbol of the stable, progressive new world. It is interesting to note that although Day Nursery Unions appear to have challenged the stigma of out-of-home care, they did not necessarily challenge the assumptions about mother-care that were socio-politically dominant. For example, in 1946 the Sydney Day Nursery School Teacher’s College adopted the motto ‘For the little ones, the best ’ (Huntsman 2005, 7) which suggests an optimistic view of day nursery environments and what they offered to children. Yet, childcare access was restricted to single working mothers. Women wanting to access day nursery services were required to provide a letter from their employer and also pay a fee, which could be seen a deterrent (Brennan 1998). There was doubtless to need to preserve the scarce child day care places for those who needed them, but these practices also communicate the mind-set that child day care is preferable only to extreme poverty or family dislocation. As an example of the view of leadership figures, Brennan (1998, 61) notes the address by Joan Fry, the principal of the Sydney Nursery School Teacher’s College. To the Victoria Australian Pre-school Association in 1969, Fry stated that We may not agree with the motives of mothers who work but we must accept their right to do so… We must not allow our judgment of adults to prevent us from seeing out responsibility to children who are unable to defend their own rights for justice. (as quoted in Brennan 1998, 61)

Thus, while the Day Nursery Unions promoted child day care as a suitable environment for children, this was still embedded in the assumption that childcare was a social necessity, rather than a social right or good (Brennan 1998). Australian child day care nurseries experienced some growth during the first and the second world wars, when services were expanded to cater for all mothers and to include long day care or occasional care. This had a positive effect of views of the services, as Mellor (1990) explains: During the war years, working outside the home lost the stigma it had previously had for all but professional women. Day-care centres came to be regarded not as charitable services for poor women but as important services to enable women to return to the workforce. (99)

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However, these expanded child day care services were de-funded after the war as part of Australia’s return to traditional family values. At this point, women comprised one quarter of the Australian workforce (Strachan 2010) and acute labour shortages followed (and were tolerated). Despite a population boom following World War II, women’s workforce participation continued to rise steadily, including amongst married women who comprised 19.8% of the female workforce in 1947, 34.3% in 1954 and 42% in 1961 (Strachan 2010, 120). Despite this, childcare services expanded very little during these decades. This history is important because it highlights how from the very beginning a distinction was made by all stakeholders between early education and early care. The mother-care paradigm was socially and politically dominant, it framed the notion that early education was a reasonable cause of mother-child separation, assumed to provide benefits to children, whereas early care settings was a potentially harmful social necessity. The notion of harm is important here because as the book progresses, I will discuss how the assumption that out-of-home care as inherently risky or harmful has endured into the present via notions of quality.

Mother-Care or Employment Is Best---1960s--2000 The need for childcare was so powerfully eclipsed by the mother-care paradigm (Pence 1989) that the issue was absent from public debate and policy in Australia until the early 1960s (Brennan 1998). The Kindergarten Unions advocated with consistent success for various kindergarten funding grants but these commitments were never long-term (Brennan 1998). Child day care fared no better, for as Brennan (1998) pointed out, “the voluntary organisations which might have brought the issue of child care to the attention of governments, continued to regard child care centres, which made possible women’s full-time employment, with concern, if not hostility…” (59). A turning point came in the 1970s, when a new generation of female workers agitating for better wages and less discrimination meant that childcare became an election issue in Australia in the 1970s (Brennan 1998; Strachan 2010). By this time political thought had shifted anew, with the Great Depression prompting economists to rethink free market logic as the solution to social problems. Led by British economist John Keyes, so-called ‘Keynesian’ social democratic ideology rose to dominance across the Anglophone

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governments; principally, the notion that the government could best support the economy by intervening cyclically at times of economic fluctuation with expenditure and funding schemes. As Mahon (2010) summarises: This involved governments supporting job creation, business investment and welfare spending through heavy doses of public expenditure and tax cuts when an economic downturn was threatening, to be counterbalanced by government spending, cuts and tax increases during times of economic boom. (128)

Yet until the 1970s, Keynesian politics in Australia—a mix of reform liberalism and social democracy—worked to expanded public services around the existing male welfare state. There had been some changes to the female welfare state, but these served to increase the need for childcare, such as, the removal of the marriage bar in 1966, equal pay, anti-discrimination legislation and female wage increases (Strachan 2010). This institutional change also coincided with a global spate of “social upheaval” (Ailwood 2004, 24), influenced by the Vietnam War anti-war protests, and the progression of gay and civil rights. Once child day care was an election issue it became a highly politicised arena (Brennan 1993). The attitudes of the major political parties and other stakeholders (media, community, trade unions, advocacy groups) were hugely varied and there was wide community debate. The mounting pressure on the Federal government to take ownership of childcare provision and regulation came from three distinct areas at this time (Brennan 1998; Logan et al. 2012; Press and Hayes 2000): the Australian feminist groups, rising social need as single parent families also continued to grow (Brennan 2002) and most pressing, the economic need to grow the workforce. Trade unions advocated for industry and its need for cheap female labour in manufacturing, calling on the Commonwealth to “take child care provision seriously” (Press and Hayes 2000, 18). The Child Care Act 1972 The landmark Child Care Act 1972 (Cth) was the first acknowledgement of Commonwealth government responsibility for Australian child day care, instated by the McMahon Liberal-Country government at a time of social and political instability, mere months before losing the Federal election

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after 23 years of Liberal governments (Logan et al. 2013). Kindergartens remained a state and territory responsibility, like schools. The initial terms of the Child Care Act 1972 (Cth) strengthened the historical pattern of government partnerships with community groups, as the Commonwealth committed to funding only community-run, not-forprofit, long day childcare services (Brennan 1998). The funding model linked staff qualification and wages to Commonwealth subsidies, meaning that centres had to uphold award wages and staff qualifications in order to receive other entitlements (Adamson and Brennan 2014). This was a progressive approach in that it made an explicit link between certain quality factors and federal funding (Logan et al. 2012). As Keynesian ideology dominated in the Australian context at this time, childcare was one of many public services expanded under the ‘welfare state’ approach (Mahon 2002). Whilst the Child Care Act 1972 (Cth) took positive steps towards expanding the provision of public, community-operated long day care services, aspects of the funding model reveal its embeddedness in mother-care agenda. Such as, the income threshold for subsidised child day care was so low that it excluded most two-income families and acted as a disincentive for mothers to return to work (Rigg 1972; Spearitt 1979). The alternative for two-income families was costly private or full-fee childcare places, of which there were very few (Ailwood 2004). In addition, state funding was set aside for research investigating why parents sought childcare and centres were asked to provide family counselling for those placing children under three in child day care (Ailwood 2004). These provisions show how the privileging of mother-care and stigma of childcare was continued by Commonwealth funding policy, not challenged. Or as Ailwood (2004) puts it, the Child Care Act 1972 (Cth) “was by no means a signal for mothers to begin working beyond the home” (24). Providing Commonwealth funds for only public sector childcare was justified as a means for ensuring the quality of childcare services, as community groups had done since the turn of the century (Brennan 2010). However, it also slowed the evolution of flexible and diverse modes of childcare, such as occasional care, private services and family day care (Brennan 1998). This shows how policy is complex, value-laden and sometimes contradictory, for even though the demand for female labour was “the major catalyst for the legislation” (Brennan 2002, 98), the funding structures actually deterred women from entering the workforce. This raises questions about the ways that early childhood policy in Australia has been wielded by governments as a way to shape the behaviour of populations in line with its agenda. Is withholding

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childcare funding for some families and children equitable? Whose interests are privileged and whose are marginalised by these policy structures? A radical change came to Australian politics shortly after the Child Care Act 1972 (Cth) with the incoming Whitlam-Labor government. Whitlam had a feminist agenda for social and education reform and a considered childcare a social right, as Ailwood (2004) explains: The Whitlam government was not only committed to child care as a right for all mothers, especially those who worked outside of the home, it was also proposing a significant level of federal intervention into the states’ and territories’ educational provisions. (24)

In 1974 the Whitlam government acted on this commitment and the Commonwealth began subsidising childcare and kindergarten for every child, not just those who qualified for subsidies (Brennan 1993), but only in non-profit centres. This led to a modest expansion in childcare places (Brennan 1998). Shortly after in that same year, amid concerns for government spending and an economic recession, and after numerous political scandals and miscalculations, the Whitlam government was dismissed (Brennan 2002). However, the legacy of subsidising every child remained (Sumsion 2006). Globalising Economies As time passed, subsequent conservative Liberal governments tolerated the progressive Child Care Act 1972 (Cth) that they had inherited but slowly unwound the amounts of funding made available. The funding cuts coincided with a loss of confidence in Keynesian ideology across the developed countries as, from the mid-1970s, Australia followed the majority of the developed countries by adopting policy advice from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to adopt neoliberal economic ideology (Dyster and Meredith 2012; Rizvi and Lingard 2010). As Fenna (2013) explains, neoliberalism “put[s] market principles back squarely in the political arena… [and is] concerned with reducing the role of the government in the economy” (128). Neoliberalism went hand-in-hand with the processes of globalisation, since the OECD affiliated governments worked together to stimulate the slumping global economy through free market principles (Rizvi and Lingard 2010). Stability and global competitiveness became foremost state priorities but neoliberal

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ideology at this point discredited women’s participation in the workforce, since it would remove women from unpaid care roles (for children, the elderly) and increase the need for public services (Fenna 2013). To that end, the subsequent Australian Liberal Commonwealth governments followed other conservative Anglophone governments such as Prime Minister Thatcher in the UK and President Reagan in the US, to launch a wider ideological attack on women’s workforce participation. From the 1970s, working mothers in Australia were implicated in numerous issues from inflation to family breakdowns and excessive public expenditure (Brennan 1998, 105). Despite this, the numbers of single parent families and women in the workforce rose steadily (Strachan 2010). Similar social pressures were being felt elsewhere in the Western world because freer global markets had led to an increased need for economic competitiveness and diversified job markets, making it more common for families to require two salaries to make ends meet (Morgan 2002). By the 1990s it became clear that governments could not rely on female unpaid labour in the home, though they might like to. The urgent priority of the OECD countries then became increasing the quantity of childcare places at as little cost as possible to the government (Moss 2009). A Child Care Market In 1991, the Australian Labor Commonwealth government acted on the advice of its own financial department and extended childcare fee subsidies to the for-profit childcare sector, creating a childcare market. A childcare market means that funding subsidies are provided to families (per child), who then ‘purchase’ the childcare service. This style of subsidy casts childcare as a private commodity, families as its consumers/customers and the government as the market regulator. The decision to privatise childcare in Australia was strongly opposed by community, volunteer and feminist advocacy groups (Logan et al. 2013). Yet, both the Labor and Liberal parties have tacitly agreed to a marketised childcare sector in Australia ever since (Brennan 1998). It was not just Australia that created childcare markets in the 1990s, the marketisation of public care sectors (eldercare, childcare, healthcare) took on a global spread (Brennan et al. 2012; Moss 2009) after neoliberal policy advice was vigorously promoted by powerful international organisations such as the World Bank, United Nations, OECD and their

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related supranational policy networks (Mahon 2010; McNutt and Pal 2011; Rizvi and Lingard 2010). Creating market models for care services was considered an important final step in restructuring modern neoliberal governments but over time it proved more complex than anticipated, due to the contextual logistics and logics underpinning services in each country (Brennan et al. 2012). Care markets also require ongoing government assistance to ensure that the market operates as needed, such as funding, legislation and regulations. For this reason, they have been conceptualised by researchers (Marginson 1997; Sumsion 2006) as ‘quasi-markets’. At the time of marketisation, the divisions of for-profit and not-for-profit childcare were at 47% and 53% respectively in Australia, with marginally more community-operated services available to families but fewer than approximately 80,000 places available nationally (Wannan 2007, 121). By 2005, this had jumped to 70% for-profit provision (Wannan 2007, 121), an increase from 36,700 for-profit places in 1991 to 122,000 in 1996 (Newberry and Brennan 2013, 9). Comparatively, the not-for-profit sector grew from 40,000 places to 45,000 between 1991 and 1996 (Newberry and Brennan 2013, 9). This gives an indication of how few constraints were placed on the private sector following the introduction of for-profit subsidies. To govern the new childcare quasi-market, the Australian Commonwealth government introduced an accreditation system, which also helped to allay the fears of opposing community and industry groups about the quality of for-profit care. Accreditation completed the neoliberal policy package (Ball 2003) for Australian early childhood sector of managerialism, privatisation and accountability. The policy package allows governments to influence the way that the market operates from a ‘distance’ because governments impose certain standards and systems of accountability that the centre is responsible for maintaining (managerialism) and to which the services are accountable (Adamson and Brennan 2014). This communicates the typically neoliberal view that early childhood centres and staff are responsible for executing or establishing quality childcare settings, not governments (Hunkin 2018; Kilderry 2015). In 1994, a Quality Improvement and Accreditation System (QIAS) (National Childcare Accreditation Council [NCAC] 2001) was introduced and implemented for long day childcare services in Australia that encompassed 52 quality principles. The aim of the QIAS was to create a minimum standard of quality across childcare services, as well as a ‘quality profile’ of each service based on the evaluations of the centre director and staff, as

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well as the independent assessor (Rowe et al. 2006). To qualify for federal subsidies, long day childcare services need to pass accreditation. Quality profiles and later, ratings, also serve as a means by which to guide the family-customer who is ‘purchasing’ the childcare. The QIAS initiative was well-received by sector advocates, as the peak bodies had been investigating the possibility of an accreditation system in Australia since the late 1980s, when statistical data showed that forprofit childcare providers typically had fewer staff with fewer qualifications (Brennan 1998). Accreditation was thought by the advocacy groups to be a well-rounded way of assessing operations, as Brennan (1998) explains: The rationale for accreditation was that, with increasing numbers of children spending large parts of their lives in childcare, there ought to be some mechanism for ‘quality assurance’. State and territory regulations (which vary considerably around the country) were not seen as sufficient for this purpose… Regulations deal with quantifiable ‘inputs’; staff/child ratios, the qualification of staff, building specification and open space and other physical requirements. Accreditation, in contrast, requires a focus on the way in which a centre actually functions. (201)

The 52 quality principles that underpinned the QIAS (NCAC 2001) reflected the growing field of early childhood research that investigated quality factors or markers. Remembering that research had considered outof-home care harmful since the 1940s, early childhood research from the mid-1970s attempted to identify factors in the environment that impacted positively or negatively on a child (Pence and Pacini-Ketchabaw 2008). Work from the US has been noted by numerous scholars (Dahlberg et al. 2006; Dalli et al. 2011, 26; Pence and Pacini-Ketchabaw 2008) as particularly influential at this time, identifying numerous factors as protective indicators of quality including staff-child ratios, interactions and group size. In time, these factors were distilled into two categories: process quality and structural quality (Fenech 2011). Various rating scales were developed that attempted to measure quality levels through the assessment of indicators in the environment, such as the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale (ECERS) (Harms and Clifford 1980), and the Infant/Toddler Environment Rating Scale (ITERS) (Harms et al. 1990). Many of these tools have been updated by researchers and remain widely used, such as, the updated ECERS-R (Harms et al. 1990) and the UK version, ECERS-E (Sylva et al. 2006) as well as the Classroom Assessment Scoring System

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(Pianta et al. 2008). Once available, these quality factors and scales formed the basis of accreditation systems across the developed countries (Australia was the first), who needed ways to regulate the newly created childcare markets (Dalli et al. 2011). This is an empirical, positivist view of quality that assumes quality for all children to be universal, identifiable and measurable (Dahlberg et al. 2006; Fenech 2011) that has continued to dominated policy landscapes in Australia and globally ever since, in various iterations. This raises questions about whether the assumption that what is ‘best’ for one child is also ‘best’ for another reflects the social reality. If used as the benchmark for a minimum standard across childcare settings, how does this assumption privilege the experiences of some children and marginalise the experiences of others? Do universal quality factors or indicators homogenise childcare experiences?

Concluding Thoughts: Mother-Care or the ‘Minimum Standard’ This chapter highlights how the socio-political prejudice against taking children away from their mother for non-educative reasons has always shaped our ways of thinking about early childhood services in Australia. In turn, this prejudice has also shaped notions of quality into a deficit or deficiency (Osgood 2009, 739) discourse that constructs the subject (childcare) in deficit terms (741) based on an assumed risk of harm. Policy translations of the risk of harm assumption created a ‘minimum standard’ construct that framed accreditation policy. Preschools on the other hand, did not participate in quality accreditation in most Australian states, which expresses the long-held view that early education is a worthwhile reason for mother-child separation (Brennan 1998). Quality accreditation gave form to the mothercare agenda by providing a language, unit and means of measurement to the assumed, inherent risk of harm of non-maternal care (Hunkin 2018). Deficit discourse marginalises and silences some subject/s by rendering them outside of the truth, without the status to assert another point of view (Osgood 2009). This marginalisation of childcare and mothers and young children is important because it is not clear that the prejudice of out-of-home care was ever justified, particularly when we think about what is ‘best’ for children. Despite a history that shows it has never been the case that all Australian mothers/families could care for young children without assistance, this has remained the dominant socio-political expectation. We need to question why that is so. As I will explore in the next chapter, the global uptake of an early childhood quality reform agenda reinterpreted

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some ideas about early childhood settings but has continued, rather than challenged, deficit assumptions about childcare.

References Adamson, E., and M. Brennan. 2014. “Social Investment or Private Profit? Diverging Notions of ‘Investment’ in Early Childhood Education and Care.” International Journal of Early Childhood 46 (1): 47–61. Ailwood, J. 2004. “Genealogies of Governmentality: Producing and Managing Young Children and Their Education.” The Australian Educational Researcher 31 (3): 19–33. Aspland, T. 2006. “Changing Patterns of Teacher Education in Australia.” Education Research and Perspectives 133 (2): 140–163. Ball, S. J. 2003. “The Teacher’s Soul and the Terrors of Performativity.” Journal of Education Policy 18 (2): 215–228. Blackmore, J., and H. Lauder. 2005. “Researching Policy.” In Research Methods in the Social Sciences, edited by B. Somekh and C. Lewin, 97–104. London: Sage. Bowlby, J. 1944. “Fourty-four juvenile thieves: Their characters and home life.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 25 (19): 107–127. Bowlby, J. 1951. Maternal Care and Mental Health. Geneva: World Health Organization. Brennan, D. 1993. “Australia.” In International Handbook of Child Care Policies and Programs, edited by M. Cochran, 11–22. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Brennan, D. 1998. The Politics of Australia Child Care: Philanthropy to Feminism and Beyond. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Brennan, D. 2002. “Australia: Child Care and State-Centered Feminism in a Liberal Welfare Regime”. In Child Care Policy at the Crossroads: Gender and Welfare State Restructuring, edited by S. Michel and R. Mahon, 95–112. New York: Routledge. Brennan, D. 2010. “Federalism, Childcare and Multilevel Governance in Australia.” In Federalism, Feminism and Multilevel Governance, edited by M. Haussman, M. Sawer, and J. Vickers, 37–50. Surrey, UK: Ashgate. Brennan, D., B. Cass, S. Himmelweit, and M. Szebehely. 2012. “Marketisation of Care: Rationales and Consequences in Nordic and Liberal Care Regimes.” Journal of European Social Policy 22 (4): 377–391. Clyde, M. 2000. “The Development of Kindergarten in Australia at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: A Response to Social Pressures and Educational Influences.” In Kindergartens and Cultures: The Global Diffusion of an Idea, edited by R. Wollons, 87–112. New York: Yale University Press. Dahlberg, G., P. Moss, and A. Pence. 2006. Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care: Languages of Evaluation, 2nd ed. London: Routledge.

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Dalli, C., E. J. White, J. Rockel, I. Duhn, E. Buchanan, S. Davidson, S. Ganly, L. Kus, and B. Wang. 2011. Quality Early Childhood Education for Under-TwoYear-Olds: What Should It Look Like? A Literature Review. Wellington, New Zealand: New Zealand Ministry of Education. Dombrowski, K. 2002. “Kindergarten Teacher Training in England and the United States 1950–1918.” History of Education 31 (5): 475–489. Dyson, M. 2005. “Australian Teacher Education: Although Reviewed to the Eyeballs Is There Evidence of Significant Change and Where to Now?” Australian Journal of Teacher Education 30 (1): 37–54. Dyster, B., and D. Meredith. 2012. Australia in the Global Economy: Continuity and Change. Port Melbourne, Australia: Cambridge University Press. Fenech, M. 2011. “An Analysis of the Conceptualisation of ‘Quality’ in Early Childhood Education and Care Empirical Research: Promoting ‘Blind Spots’ as Foci for Future Research.” Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 12 (2): 102–117. Fenna, A. 2013. “Political Ideologies.” In Government Politics in Australia, edited by A. Fenna, J. Robbins, and J. Summers, 112–136. Frenchs Forest, NSW: Pearsons. Friendly, M., and S. Prentice. 2012. “Provision, Policy and Politics in ECE and Care.” In Recent Perspectives on Early Childhood Education and Care in Canada, edited by N. Howe and L. Prochner, 50–80. Toronto: University of Toronto. Goldfarb, W. 1943. “The Effects of Early Institutional Care on Adolescent Personality.” Journal of Experimental Education 12: 106–129. Goldfarb, W. 1945. “Psychological Privation in Infancy and Subsequent Adjustment.” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 15: 247–255. Goldfarb, W. 1947. “Variations in Adolescence Adjustment of Institutionally Reared Children.” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 17: 449–457. Harms, T., and R. Clifford. 1980. Early Childhood Environmental Rating Scale. New York: Teachers College Press. Harms, T., D. Cryer, and R. Clifford. 1990. Infant/Toddler Environment Rating Scale. New York: Teachers College Press. Hunkin, E. 2018. “If Not Quality, Then What? The Discursive Risks in Early Childhood Quality Reform.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2018.1453780. Huntsman, L. 2005. “For the Little Ones, the Best: SDN Children’s Services 1905–2005.” https://www.sdn.org.au/media/1890/for-the-little-onesthe-best-sdn-childrens-services-1905-2005.pdf. Hyams, B. 1979. Teacher Preparation in Australia: A History of Its Development from 1850 to 1950. Melbourne: Australian Council for Educational Research. Kilderry, A. 2015. “The Intensification of Performativity in Early Childhood Education.” Journal of Curriculum Studies 47 (5): 633–652.

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Logan, H., F. Press, and J. Sumsion. 2012. “The Quality Imperative: Tracing the Rise of ‘Quality’ in Australian Early Childhood Education and Care Policy.” Australia Journal of Early Childhood 37 (3): 4–13. Logan, H., J. Sumsion, and F. Press. 2013. “The Child Care Act 1972: A Critical Juncture in Australian ECEC and the Emergence of ‘Quality’.” Australasian Journal of Early Childhood 38 (4): 84–91. Mahon, R. 2002. “Gender and Welfare State Restructuring: Through the Lens of Child Care.” In Child Care Policy at the Crossroad: Gender and Welfare State Restructuring, edited by S. Michel and R. Mahon, 1–27. New York: Routledge. Mahon, R. 2010. “After Neo-Liberalism? The OECD, the World Bank and the Child.” Global Social Policy 10 (2): 172–192. Marginson, S. 1997. “Competition and Contestability in Australian Higher Education.” The Australian Universities Review 1: 5–14. McNutt, K., and L. Pal. 2011. “‘Modernizing Government’: Mapping Global Public Policy Networks.” Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration, and Institutions 24 (3): 439–467. Mellor, E. 1990. Stepping Stones: The Development of Early Childhood Services in Australia. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Morgan, K. 2002. “Does Anyone Have a ‘Libre Choix’? Subversive Liberalism and the Politics of French Child Care Policy.” In Child Car Policy at the Crossroads: Gender and Welfare State Restructuring, edited by S. Michel and R. Mahon, 143–167. New York, NY: Routledge. Moss, P. 2009. There Are Alternatives! Markets and Democratic Experimentalism in Early Childhood Education and Care. Working Paper No. 53, Bernard van Leer Foundation and Bertelsmann Stiftung, The Hague, The Netherlands. National Childcare Accreditation Council (NCAC). 2001. Putting Children First: Quality Improvement and Accreditation System. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. Newberry, S., and D. Brennan. 2013. “The Marketisation of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) in Australia: A Structured Response.” Financial Accountability & Management 29 (3): 227–245. Osgood, J. 2009. “Childcare Workforce Reform in England and ‘the Early Years Professional’: A Critical Discourse Analysis.” Journal of Education Policy 24 (6): 733–751. Pence, A. 1989. “In the Shadow of Mother-Care: Contexts for an Understanding of Child Day Care in North America.” Canadian Psychology 30 (2): 140–147. Pence, A., and V. Pacini-Ketchabaw. 2008. “Discourses on Quality Care: The Investigating ‘Quality’ Project and the Canadian Experience.” Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 9 (3): 241–255. Penn, H. 2011. Quality in Early Childhood Services: An International Perspective. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

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Pianta, R., K. La Paro, and B. Hamre. 2008. Classroom Assessment Scoring System Manual: Pre-K. Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes. Press, F., and A. Hayes. 2000. OECD Thematic Review of Early Childhood Education and Care Policy: Australian Background Report. Paris: OECD. Rigg, J. 1972. “The Control of Women Workers.” National Review (October 14– 20): 1524. Rizvi, F., and B. Lingard. 2010. Globalizing Education Policy. Oxon: Routledge. Rose, E. 1999. A Mother’s Job: The History of Day Care 1890–1960. New York: Oxford University Press. Rowe, K., J. Tainton, and D. Taylor. 2006. Key Feature of the Quality Improvement Accreditation System (QIAS) Administered by the National Childcare Accreditation Council (Australia). Surrey Hills, NSW: National Childcare Accreditation Council. Spearitt, P. 1979. “Child Care and Kindergartens in Australia 1980–1975.” In Early Childhood Education and Care in Australia, edited by P. Langford and P. Sebastian, 10–38. Sydney: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Group. Stonehouse, A. 1994. Not Just Nice Ladies. Castle Hill, NSW: Pandemelon Press. Strachan, G. 2010. “Still Working for the Man? Women’s Employment Experiences in Australia Since 1950.” Australian Journal of Social Issues 45 (1): 117–131. Sumsion, J. 2006. “The Corporatization of Australian Childcare: Towards an Ethical Audit and Research Agenda.” Journal of Early Childhood Research 4 (2): 99–120. Sylva, K., I. Siraj-Batchford, and B. Taggart. 2006. Assessing Quality in the Early Years: Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale Extension (ECERS-E), Four Curricular Subscales. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books. Wannan, L. 2007. “Getting the Basics Right—Goals That Would Deliver a Good National Children’s Services System.” In Kids Count: Better Early Childhood Education and Care in Australia, edited by E. Hill, B. Pocock, and A. Elliot, 112–133. Sydney: Sydney University Press. Whitehead, K. 2008. “The Construction of Early Childhood Teachers’ Professional Identities, Then and Now”. Australasian Journal of Early Childhood 33 (3): 34– 41 Whitehead, K. 2010. “A Decided Disadvantage for the Kindergarten Students to Mix with the State Teachers.” Paedagogica Historica 46 (1–2): 85–97. https:// doi.org/10.1080/00309230903528470.

CHAPTER 3

‘There Is a Quantum Difference Between the Provision of Age-Appropriate Play-Based Care and an Early Learning and Care Environment’: The Quality Agenda for Australian Early Childhood

Abstract The quotation in this chapter heading comes from a policy document co-written by future Prime Minister Kevin Rudd (Rudd and Macklin in New Directions for Early Childhood Education: Universal Access to Early Learning for 4 Year Olds, Australian Labor Party, Canberra, ACT, 2007) prior to the election. It frames the focus of this chapter which asks, how did quality reform come about? What was ‘quality’ reform assumed to be and do in the Australian context? The chapter discusses the socio-political happenings and reviews Australian policy documents to identify the dominant truth assumptions being made about quality and how those linked to global conversations. It is shown that quality in early childhood settings remained a deficit discourse even as it was reimagined by social investment theory. This constitutes a selective quality investment agenda that has created both opportunities and tensions, highlighted in this chapter. Keywords Quality reform agenda · Early childhood · Social investment · Human capital theory · Lifelong learning

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Childcare Markets and Quality Problems By the mid-2000s, Australian early childhood academics, commentators and advocates had raised numerous concerns about the quality of private and corporate childcare, and of the Quality Improvement and Accreditation System (QIAS) (NCAC 2001) to manage quality control. Anecdotal reports circulated Australia-wide about poorer standards in for-profit centres, mostly from former staff (Brennan 2007). While it was difficult to confirm the claims, some independent institutes were able to show that forprofit centres in Australia typically had fewer and/or lesser-qualified staff, fewer resources and lower food budgets (Australian Services Union [ASU] 2009; Rush 2006; Rush and Downie 2006). As Sumsion (2012) points out, for-profit providers typically declined invitations to participate in research, which meant that empirical evidence about the quality of for-profit services was difficult to generate. However, continuity of care in for-profit centres was reported as problematic, with poorer staff conditions held to blame for higher staff turnovers and a higher dependency on relief staff (Rush 2006; also see Elliot 2006; Press and Hayes 2000). As an example, the ASU report (2009) compared the award conditions at a for-profit provider to the award conditions of a Victorian council management groups, and found that comparatively for-profit service staff had no paid rostered days off or training days, were not entitled to penalty rates and worked longer hours daily for less pay (ASU 2009, 11). The problem was that private and corporate childcare claimed to make use of economics of scale “by spreading costs over a large number of centres” (Sumsion 2012, 216) rather than sacrificing quality for profits. However important key aspects of quality, such as staff-child ratios, food, resources and staff qualifications, do not hold to this principle, meaning that cutbacks in these areas are highly likely if childcare is to be a profitable enterprise (Press and Woodrow 2005; Sumsion 2006b) and this can compromise the quality of services. More broadly, there were also concerns regarding the in/ability of the consumer-commodity relationship to adequately service families and children (Sumsion 2006b; Press and Woodrow 2005) because markets position the consumer (parent and child) as the source of revenue (Sumsion 2006b). This was evidenced by rural and low socio-economic areas which remained poorly serviced due to low profitability potential (low enrolment and competition potential), despite the private sector growing childcare places quickly elsewhere (Sumsion 2006b, 1). The expansion figures used by government to show successful growth

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masked the patchiness of actual attendance and availability (Elliot 2006), yet with no national and/or state data available this was again difficult to evidence. On the basis of these issues, the Australian media reported a crisis of availability and affordability of childcare (Bown 2014). Australia’s QIAS (NCAC 2001) was the first of its kind and attracted worldwide attention as a model of quality accreditation in childcare (Rowe et al. 2006). However, there was a rising number of concerns about its efficacy, primarily that the quality indicators considered by the QIAS (NCAC 2001) did not overlap with state and territory regulations, leaving out some key indicators of quality such as staff-child ratios (Rowe et al. 2006). This meant that accreditation could not establish or maintain a national minimum standard of service quality for governments or for families, as it aimed to (Elliot 2006). There were also concerns about the QIAS procedures, insofar as the inspections took place at a predetermined date so centres were able to prepare for the inspection and presumably present a better standard of quality at the time of inspection than was usual (Radich 2002). On the basis of this, Sumsion’s (2006a) ethical audit suggested that it had become possible to circumvent accreditation structures. Last, it was considered problematic that flexible forms of childcare such as after school care and family day care, as well as preschools and kindergartens in some states, were not required to undergo accreditation (Elliot 2006; Radich 2002). Like the uptake of childcare market models, concerns for the quality of for-profit childcare extended beyond Australia across the developed world (Penn 2011), and were particularly strong in the US where an increasingly large number of children were accessing for-profit childcare (Dahlberg et al. 2006, 4). Dahlberg et al. (2006) note the impact of one particular US study called ‘Cost, Quality and Child Outcomes Study’ (Cost, Quality and Child Outcomes Study Team 1995) after it reported that 86% of childcare settings were poor to mediocre in quality, and that 40% of babies and toddler rooms were endangering children’s health and wellbeing (Kagan et al. 1996). The study had examined the relationship between the cost of childcare and the quality of childcare across four American states, over time, and found that children accessing higher quality settings had better developmental outcomes that were sustained later in life (Kagan et al. 1996). Specifically, it was concluded that the privatisation of the sector had led to the deterioration of early childhood services for some populations (low income, disadvantaged) due to the inherent inequities in the system and that poor-quality childcare negatively affected children’s outcomes later

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in life (Kagan et al. 1996, 4). As noted in Chapter 2, this was one study among many that formed a body of work measuring which quality ‘factors’ affected children’s outcomes whether positively or negatively. These also formed the basis of quality standards, rating scales and later, accreditation systems in Australia and elsewhere (Dalli et al. 2011). Due to the prominence of US research dissemination, the message that poor-quality childcare could be detrimental to children was extrapolated across Europe and the developed world (Dahlberg et al. 2006). Of importance to this book, is that the original message about a link between privatisation and poorer quality of care seems to be have been lost, or rather generalised into the assumption that low or poor-quality childcare is harmful. As Penn (2011) points out, this is a tenuous conclusion to draw from any body of research because there are no universal measures of what constitutes ‘detrimental outcomes,’ or ‘poor to mediocre’ care or even ‘endangering’ or ‘harmful’ conditions, particularly when generalising across time, place or population groups. Further, the research in general could not and did not account for the unmeasurable dimensions of childcare experiences, such as the child’s happiness and opportunities (Penn 2011, 43). Despite these tensions, the message that poor quality care was risky sat firmly within the historical stigma of removing children from the home for non-educative reasons, outlined in detail in Chapter 2, and so the deficit discourse of quality continued to gain momentum. Hence, the response from the Australian Commonwealth Government, along with many of the developed governments around the world, was to strengthen the existing policies of accountability and surveillance, such as accreditation, licensing and regulations (Kilderry 2015). As this response actually strengthened market forces, it ignored the original nature of the quality concerns which were to do with the tensions between key quality factors and for-profit childcare. The Australian government continued to vigorously promote for-profit childcare through various market-friendly policies such as tax exemptions and various tax-free rebate schemes (Brennan 2014)—even after Australia’s largest for-profit childcare provider went bankrupt, costing the government millions of dollars (Sumsion 2012). Over time, it seems that these original concerns about for-profit childcare and quality were lost, for as far as neoliberal logic is concerned, the quality of markets are self-regulating through choice and competition. This raises questions about who is responsible for providing and/or co-providing good quality childcare. For, if the broad concerns in Australia and globally about the quality of for-profit childcare

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were not the impetus for early childhood quality reform agenda in Australia and elsewhere, what was?

The Quality Policy Reform Era It is puzzling to think that at approximately the same that Australia and other Anglophone countries were strengthening market-friendly policies thought to compromise the quality of childcare (see Penn 2011), a global reform agenda was gaining momentum that positioned quality reform in early childhood as a foremost economic reform agenda (Ang 2014). To better make sense of this, I take a Foucauldian (1991) governmentality view of policy as “operationalised political thought” (Doherty 2007, 201) wherein governments construct and present a version of reality including truth assumptions, values, ambition and agenda that frame its preferred policy ‘problem’ and ‘solution’ (Zittoun 2014). In Australia at the new millennium, there were significant economic concerns for the ageing population and increasing international competition. Despite the Liberal-Federal Government “relentlessly” (Quiggin 2014, 47) legislating to improve national productivity, Australian workforce productivity still lagged below several other OECD countries, particularly the workforce participation of women and single-parent families (Gellop 2008; Hill 2007). In response, the Victorian State government proposed a social investment agenda to the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) in 2005, promoting social investment as a way for Australia to reduce inequity and maximise human capital (see DPC and DTF 2005). Social investment theory asserts that public expenditure can be used to support the economy by optimising human capital potential and previously underutilised human resources (Jenson 2010). Hence, human capital theory is a key theory informing social investment policy approaches because it distinguishes between investment-worthy public services that develop and optimise human capital (like education, early intervention), and the investment unworthy public services that only provide reparations for lost capital (such as welfare or unemployment benefits) (Moss 2014). It was not just Australia that showed an interest in social investment, from the new millennium social investment ideology gained popularity among powerful international organisations like the World Bank and Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), framed as a way to combat expanding inequities and disadvantages among some populations, whilst still working within neoliberal microeconomics (Mahon 2010).

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The popularity of social investment and human capital theory went hand in hand with a new global emphasis on expanding economies through knowledge capital rather than for example, growth in industry or labour— called the knowledge economy (OECD 1996). Knowledge capital is hard to define but can be broadly thought of as “stocks of knowledge” including human, intellectual and organisational capital, and knowledge “activity” or ideas and the creation of new knowledge products such as data and patents (Powell and Snellman 2004, 202). The new emphasis on growing economies and productivity through knowledge capital meant that education and training systems came to the fore as a global policy priority called lifelong learning—the notion that human capital and economic growth will depend on the individual’s continued engagement with and development of knowledge capital and skills (Olssen 2008). Lifelong learning discourse dates back to the 1800s and has had many iterations, but contemporary interpretations foreground the transformative potential of education and skills training through continued access over the life span (Rizvi and Lingard 2010). It is a key aspect of human capital theory and lifelong learning discourse that knowledge capital is assumed to potentially grow without depletion (OECD 1996; Rizvi and Lingard 2010), provided that the individual engages in ongoing education and innovation, creating new emphasis on the economic role of the education and training sectors. Although lifelong learning ideas have been around for a long time, contemporary interpretations are grounded in neoliberal globalism, meaning that the knowledge worker is presumed to be the neoliberal subject-selfinterested, entrepreneurial and free/equal to navigate the market and access education and training for their personal/private good (Rizvi and Lingard 2010). Hence, although social investment approaches represented a change of heart (Mahon 2010) in regard to the treatment of some public policy like education, they often did so by extending not challenging the dominant assumptions and ambitions of neoliberal globalism. I will expand on the implications of this later in the chapter. By February 2006, a National Reform Agenda (NRA) (COAG 2006) for Australia had been ratified that targeted education and social disadvantage services as key investment sites (Productivity Commission 2006), in combination with the continuation of neoliberal microeconomics (Gellop 2008). The NRA (COAG 2006) meant that a political opportunity had opened up that was not a natural fit for the existing conservative LiberalFederal Government (Bown 2014). Instead, the opposition Labor party took up the social investment agenda with gusto and won the December

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2007 election with a policy platform that included plans for an Education Revolution (Gillard 2008), encompassing unprecedented spending for early childhood. This raises questions about what of early childhood services was being invested in and why? How did social investment reconceptualise what early childhood services are and do? Quality as Public Investment From the outset, Australian early childhood settings were realigned with education and subsumed into the Education Revolution (Gillard 2008) social investment reform strategies. The Labor party policy statement Quality Education: The Case for an Education Revolution in Our Schools (Rudd and Gillard 2008) explained this, as follows: Education and training starts with early childhood development, which provides the foundations for future skills formation. Investing in early childhood development provides benefits to individuals, our community and the economy. (9)

Taking a governmentality view, the realignment of early childhood services education and training was a significant and welcome shift (Hunkin 2016; Sumsion et al. 2009) in the Australian governments’ treatment of the early childhood sector. Chapter 2 outlined the long history of early childhood services aligned with family and child welfare policy in Australia (Brennan 1998), since mother-care was staunchly promoted as best for young children and out-of-home care considered risky. In contrast, the social investment view above asserted a new social or public agenda for early childhood settings as the starting point of the “lifecycle” (Gillard 2008, 19) of education. This is a view of education, training or skills access and its resultant knowledge capital as a private capital that has public (social) benefit (Olssen 2008) (Fig. 3.1). Rizvi and Lingard (2010) note how lifelong learning discourse celebrates the values of social efficiency and the ability of individuals and countries to compete in the global knowledge economy. Effectively it rearticulates older, more liberal humanist constructions of lifelong learning. Promoted vigorously by international organisations, it does not simply imply the importance of learning new knowledge and gaining new skills on an ongoing basis. Rather it is located within a broader discourse of economic competitiveness. (84)

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Neoliberalism plus social investment

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knowledge economy lifelong learning

Market logics

Fig. 3.1 The dominant ideas of ‘neoliberalism plus’ social investment approaches to early childhood quality reform

As outlined above, social investment approaches broadly raised the status and funding imperatives for education, early childhood and training sectors on the one hand, but did so by re-imagining them as a type of economic policy on the other hand (Moss 2014). As an example of this thinking in action, Australia’s Education Revolution reform sat within a broader National Workforce Participation and Productivity agenda (COAG 2006). Numerous scholars (Apple 2018; Lingard 2010) point out that deploying education as economic policy problematically reimagines some of its core purposes and potentials and ignores its important moral, cultural, ethical and social value (Rizvi and Lingard 2010). As social investment policy approaches leverage the notion of investment and return, there must be an affective site of investment through which this return can be governed and measured. For the Education Revolution, the site of human capital investment was quality, as the Budget 2008–09: Education Revolution (Gillard 2008) explained: The Education Revolution will improve the country’s productivity performance through an increase in both the quantity of investment and the quality of education. It will drive substantial reform of Australia’s education and training systems to boost productivity and participation. (20, my italics)

The quotation above assumes a link between the quality of education services and Australia’s productivity performance that highlights the

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human capital agenda—government will selectively invest in and govern the desired economic/human capital outcomes through notions of quality (Hunkin 2018a). Human capital theory is not value neutral, it draws on lifelong learning discourse to interpret some skills and dispositions as desired knowledge capital (generative of economic impact) over others (OECD 1996). To that end, the Education Revolution could be described as a control and surveillance reform agenda in that it sought to groom and shape education institutions to effectively, efficiently and selectively grow human capital (Hunkin 2019). The Budget 2008–09: Education Revolution (Gillard 2008) articulates this, as follows: If Australia is to rise to these [productivity/participation] challenges it needs a revolution in the quality of our education outcomes, the nature of our investment in education and in collaboration between governments and the education and training sectors. It is time to raise the standard. (19, my italics)

The above quotation expresses an agenda to reposition governments at the forefront of decisions about what education is and does, as well as what students should learn and be—as translated through notions of quality. As expressed by Quality Education: The Case for an Education Revolution in Our Schools (Rudd and Gillard 2008) the imperative for the Australian governments was that “as well as supporting quality teaching, we must ensure that we are teaching young people the right things in the right way” (23, my italics). This is a coercive agenda that justifies public expenditure being channelled into private sector neoliberal managerial and accountability policy structures (Hunkin 2018b), often in collaboration with amounts of capital spending. The Education Revolution allocated $2 billion dollars nationwide to resources for teachers and schools, to improve school buildings and to provide literacy and numeracy teaching professional supports (Gillard 2008, 1–2). School and teacher resourcing focused on technology for a “Digital Education Revolution” (Gillard 2008, 1), which shows the privileging of skills assumed to be necessary for the developing industries of the knowledge economy (OECD 1996). A national Australian Curriculum (ACARA, n.d.) was developed across the Primary and Secondary sectors (previously state- and territory-based), as a means for raising student achievement (Rudd and Gillard 2008, 16). In addition, national teacher standards and

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registration systems were established, also previously State- and Territorybased. Policy document Quality Education: The Case for an Education Revolution in Our Schools (Rudd and Gillard 2008) explained how A fundamental starting point is to clearly identify what we mean by excellence in teaching and school leadership; clear national standards against which teachers can be accredited and which provide support for effective performance management are one way to achieve this. (22, my italics)

An additional means of performance management involved a revitalised national standardised testing scheme from 2008, called the National Assessment Program-Literacy and Numeracy, known as NAPLAN (ACARA 2008). NAPLAN (ACARA 2008) generates yearly literacy and numeracy test data and is completed by students from Years 3 to 9 (tested at intervals) across Australia. Data are used to rank individual schools’ performance compared to other ‘like schools’ (similar socio-economic status and demographic) across the country. Individual schools are encouraged to use the data to compare/improve teacher performance (Garrett 2011). From 2010, NAPLAN (ACARA 2008) results have been published on a website called myschool.com with the intention of assisting parents to make informed decisions about their child’s school (Garrett 2011). These data also allow governments to shape and regulate the markets at a distance, since schools remain responsible for improving and performing against state standards (Carney 2009). Thus, at the same time as the state ‘invests’ in the “establishment of standards and evaluation mechanisms that determine whether schools and universities are achieving standards effectively” (Verger et al. 2012, 10), it is also enhancing the managerialism expectations and processes that decentralise it from the education provision. Governments are positioned instead as a surveyor and regulator of the education quasi-markets (Carney 2009). This highlights a tension in the way that social investment reconstructs education outcomes as a public good, but also contradictorily constructs education as a private (human) capital (Olssen 2008). Mahon (2010) describes this as a “neoliberalism plus” (173) approach to social investment because governments typically execute public investment through private or market policy levers, based on the interpretation of education as private human capital with public benefit. This approach was championed by the World Bank economists after modelling on North American social policy and was taken on predominantly by the Anglophone countries from

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the 1990s, most of whom had already marketised public sector services (Adamson and Brennan 2014). For the early childhood sector, the Education Revolution quality reform agenda resulted in policy levers that followed the broad pattern of the formal education sectors. However, with quality governance policies already in application in Australia and numerous other countries through legislative and accreditation structures (Dalli et al. 2011)—based on the assumption that ‘quality’ in early childhood settings was universal, measurable and salient factors—the quality reform policies in early childhood settings sought to establish a firmer delineation of what constituted ‘investmentworthy’ quality inputs and outputs of early childhood education, and what did not. There was also a policy imperative for this, since early childhood had not been historically considered a public (state) responsibility or to sit within education policy portfolios and so a public investment case for the sector was not taken-for-granted. Early Childhood: A Sensitive Period of Investment In 2008, all of the Australian governments signed a National Partnership Agreement on Early Childhood Education (COAG 2008) that stipulated the terms and initiatives of the reform partnership and trajectory for early childhood services. It was written that the Federal, States and Territory governments acknowledged their “mutual interest in improving childhood outcomes” (4) because Early childhood is a critical time in human development. There is now comprehensive research that shows that experiences children have in the early years of life set neurological and biological pathways that can have lifelong impacts on health, learning and behaviour. (3)

The above quotation shows how the inclusion of early childhood settings in the Australian Education Revolution was strongly motivated by the assumption that early childhood is a critical or sensitive period of human capital development. Looking outward, this view reflects a research consensus disseminated from 1990s, as neurologists and developmental psychologists reported that young children who had suffered conditions of abuse and neglect showed affection to the biology of the brain (see Perry 1996). The brain was identified as being uniquely malleable in first three years of development (McCain and Mustard 1999; Perry 1996) or from birth

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to five years (Shonkoff and Phillips 2000) and early childhood deemed a ‘sensitive period’ of development and learning. Translated through a social investment agenda, this is akin to an assumption that early childhood is a sensitive period of investment in human capital. Prior to the election, the Labor party policy statement called New Directions for Early Childhood Education (Rudd and Macklin 2007) outlined this investment agenda for the sector, as follows: A substantial and growing body of international research indicates that investment in human capital offers substantial returns to both individuals and the nation as a whole. Across many indicators of educational attainment Australia falls short of both its competitors and its potential. Our failure to invest in our youngest citizens is particularly troubling given strong evidence that such investment yields enormous dividends. Australia must find new sources of competitive advantage. We believe that investment in human capital is essential for creating an innovative, productive workforce that can adapt to a rapidly changing world. (3, my italics)

New Directions for Early Childhood Education (Rudd and Macklin 2007) goes on the draw from “overwhelming international evidence” (3) to highlight the unique human capital opportunities present at early childhood: Brain research explaining the importance of early learning has expanded in recent years. Leading developmental researcher Jack Shonkoff argues that ‘all children are born wired for feelings and ready to learn’, and that it is from birth to age five that ‘children rapidly develop foundational capabilities on which subsequent development builds’… When brain research is combined with economic analysis of the benefits of early childhood education, the case for greater investment in childhood learning becomes overwhelming. Professor James Heckman, Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences, concludes that learning starts before formal education begins, and sets the foundation for success or failure at school and life beyond. Heckman argues that even by school age it may be too late to intervene… Heckman particularly emphasises the exponential impact of quality learning, that early learning in life means later educational experiences have greater impact: “Childhood is a multistage process where early investments feed into later investments. Skill begets skill; learning begets learning.” (4)

Above, the policy excerpt shows how the lifelong learning agenda interprets education and learning outcomes across the lifespan as the

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desired human capital outcome of childhood settings and social investment therein. Further, there is the discursive linkage of quality to these education/learning outcomes across the lifespan, wherein quality is the presumed human capital lever. This view of quality represents international research consensus at the time, as researchers had studied children from disadvantaged backgrounds to show that those who participated in high-quality (demonstration) preschools had better short and long-term outcomes (Penn 2011). Four highly influential American studies provided the data for this initial work and remain key policy drivers today (Penn 2011): the High/Scope Perry Preschool Study (from the 1960s, Chicago; Heckman et al. 2010; Schweinhart et al. 2005), the Abecedarian Intervention Project (from the 1970s, Carolina; Muennig et al. 2011; Ramey and Campbell 1991), the Chicago Child-Parent programme (from the 1980s; Mersky et al. 2011; Reynolds et al. 2002), and Head Start (from the 1960s; Ludwig and Phillips 2007). Broadly, it was shown that the participants of the high-quality US early childhood programs had lower participation rates in crime, reduced school dropout-out rates, better health outcomes and enhanced employment across their life span compared to control groups (Cleveland 2012). Other significant studies included those undertaken by the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development Early Childcare Research Network (NICHD-ECCRN) in the United States which found from a number of different controls that the impact of average quality was only modest, but that this modest impact was compounded by the positive effects of access at 3 or 4 years of age (NICHD-ECCRN and Duncan 2003). Similarly, the highly influential longitudinal Effective Provision of Pre-school Education Project (EPPE) undertaken in the United Kingdom measured the short and long-term impact of preschool attendance for a sample of 3000 children (Sylva et al. 2004, 2011). In 2004, the study confirmed links between higher quality preschool and higher intellectual and social/emotional outcomes for children (Sylva et al. 2004, 4) in the short term. In the longer term, the authors argued that although preschool access of any quality appears to be broadly beneficial, only the effects of high-quality preschool are sustained later in life (Sylva et al. 2011, 119). Economists built on this research by developing economic models the extrapolated the presumed higher cost-to-benefit returns of investment in quality early childhood settings (see Heckman 2006; Heckman and Masterov 2007; Esping-Anderson 2002, 2005; Shonkoff and Phillips 2000). James Heckman (2000)—whose work features prominently in Australian

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policy documents (COAG 2008; Rudd and Macklin 2007; Rudd and Gillard 2008)—was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2000 for research applying High/Scope Perry preschool data to show that the cost-to-benefit profile of state investment in high quality early years programs is highest, compared to the middle or adult years of education. Drawing on these economic and business arguments, New Directions for Early Childhood Education (Rudd and Macklin 2007) concluded that “as an investment, early childhood learning brings a high rate of return, considerably higher than educational investments in school age children or in people already of working age” (4). To make this conclusion without drawing Australian research is noted but not considered problematic, as New Directions for Early Childhood Education (Rudd and Macklin 2007) argued that “both ‘brain research’ and economic analysis of early childhood learning are less developed in Australia, in part because of Australia’s lower participation and investment in this key sector of education” (6). This highlights how Australia’s reform discourse and agenda sat within an increasingly global policyscape, then applied or translated into the local setting (Fenwick et al. 2014). In fact, on the strength of these business and economic cases for social investment early childhood settings were catapulted into the global spotlight as key economic policy (Ang 2014; Moss 2014). Despite the problematic aspects of generalising data predominantly from Africa American populations in targeted programs reflective of ‘quality’ practices from decades earlier, Penn (2011) asserts that the business and economic literature for quality early childhood investment were so “endlessly recycled” (39) through global policy networks of international organisations, think tanks and so on, that “there is now a small sub-industry around the use of economic and business arguments for early childhood (39). As Moss (2014) points out, this is a story of quality in early childhood settings as a type of economic ‘future proofing’” (371) with a particular emphasis on preschool access and quality (Cleveland 2012). For childcare on the other hand, research consensus was much less unified as investigations continued to stagnate in the ‘quagmire’ (Pence and Pacini-Ketchabaw 2008, 243) of whether out-of-home care was positive or negative for young children. As Harrison (2008) points out, numerous examples can be found of both positives and negatives based on different variables and outcomes, since a universal consensus, across place, time, contexts and populations seems unlikely. As an example, the US NICHD studies reported that higher hours of attendance at childcare (at 24 months

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and 54 months) equated to more behavioural problems, negative interactions with carers and fewer social competencies (NICHD-ECCRN 2001, 2003). In Australia, studies of young children’s stress (cortisol) levels suggested a high stress response to childcare settings, that only lessened in high-quality environments (Sims et al. 2005). A Canadian study (Baker et al. 2008) that investigated universal access to childcare policy in Quebec used parental report to evidence “consistent and robust evidence of negative effects of the policy change” (713). For children, this included poorer motor skills, health and socio-emotional outcomes. The authors also noted negative outcomes for parents including poorer health and parent-child relationships including greater hostility and less consistent parenting (9) which have critics pointed out, was a finding that did not take into consideration adjustment to the “rapid phasing in” (92) of the program. On the other hand, the Australian Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (Harrison 2008) found little difference in the social and emotional outcomes of young children cared for in the home, or out of the home (22). A longitudinal study in Norway looked at the effects of universal access to childcare for children aged 3–6 years from the 1970s and found that “child care exposure improves the long-run prospects of children considerably” (39), such as by affecting substantial increases in workforce participation and a reduced dependency on welfare 30 years later (Havnes and Mogstad 2009). Further, universal access to childcare was shown to have an equalising effect on gender in that it improved outcomes for girls later in life, such as education attainment, time in employment and wages (Havnes and Mogstad 2009). In comparison to the research with young children in childcare, the consensus around the cost/benefit of quality preschool programs was a clear and consistent message that could be intercepted for policy (Penn 2011). To that end, a key policy initiative of the Education Revolution was universal access to preschool for all four-year-old children, no matter the circumstances of their parents. As outlined by New Directions for Early Childhood (Rudd and Macklin 2007): Under Labor, all Australian four year olds will have enshrined in a new Commonwealth Early Childhood Education Act a universal right to access early learning programs. These programs will be supported by national standards that promote quality learning and care, including ways for parents to advise government about issues of quality in the centres their children attend.

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Our aim is to improve the quality of early childhood education and care by ensuring four year olds receive access to early learning. All four year olds will be eligible to receive 15 hours of Government-funded early learning programs per week, for a minimum of 40 weeks a year. This would include a requirement for all early childhood education or care services catering to four year olds to have sufficient degree-qualified early childhood teachers to meet this entitlement. Structured play-based learning would be provided to assist the development of pre-literacy and pre-numeracy skills. Considerable evidence, as discussed above, demonstrates that early learning programs have particular benefit for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. (10)

The policy excerpt above shows how the lifelong learning agenda led to a discursive linkage of ‘quality’ with ‘early learning’ to promote a view of quality in early childhood settings as early education. The explicit privileging of pre-literacy and pre-numeracy skills is consistent with the Education Revolution policy agenda and structures for the formal school sectors. The focus on preschool services for older children continued the existing policy divide between funded preschool (quality, a public good) and childcare (a private, market commodity), since childcare remained marketised and received no pledge for universal hours of access. New Directions for Early Childhood Education (Rudd and Macklin 2007) explains as follows: Federal Labor will put learning and development at the centre of Australia’s approach to early childhood education and care. For Labor, early childhood policies are not just about providing more care. Affordable and accessible childcare is important in terms of lifting workforce participation. However this should not be the totality of any Government’s ambitions in providing services for children during their early years. (Rudd and Macklin 2007, 10)

The above distinction between ‘more care’—which the quality agenda is not—and putting ‘learning and development’ at the centre of services, reminds that Australian quality policy discourse has always constructed childcare in deficit terms, as outlined in Chapter 2, and that the quality reform agenda continued that deficiently construction (Osgood 2009) through the assumption is that ‘more care’ isn’t inherently beneficial to children, early education is. This assumption is outlined in New Direction for Early Childhood Education (Rudd and Macklin 2007), as follows:

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First, the focus of early years services has been predominantly on care, rather than learning or pre-learning. This focus reflects an emphasis by the national Government on childcare as a means to increase workforce participation of parents. Labor believes that high quality and affordable childcare for our children is critical. Labor understands that childcare providers generally deliver a good service that keeps children safe, yet there is a quantum difference between the provision of age-appropriate play-based care and an early learning and care environment that seeks to equip a young child for a life of learning. While providing opportunities for parents to achieve greater participation in the workforce is vital to Australia’s future prosperity it is equally important that an effective early childhood education framework be incorporated into the care that children receive. The benefits of boosting participation for parents are immediate. But when a child participates in an early learning program under the supervision of a degree-qualified early childhood educator, the long term economic benefits of early childhood education are even greater. Australia’s underdeveloped attention to early learning must be dealt with as a matter of national priority now, for both individuals and the country. (4)

Above, there is a clear, selective privileging of ‘quality early learning’ over ‘age-appropriate play-based care’ that is ‘safe’. The former is linked to lifelong learning and human capital outcomes for ‘both individuals and the country’, the latter to workforce participation (private). Hence, only universal access was deployed for four-year-old preschool at 15 hours per week, and investment across the sector more broadly was deployed via a framework of market policy levers designed to strengthen the minimum standard of quality policies through a firmer governance of the sector inputs and outputs. The agenda to selectively invest in only some inputs and outputs of early childhood work through notions of ‘quality’ establishes a concerning governmentality mandate: the state must develop policy structures that determine, coerce, scrutinise, measure and compare those quality inputs and outputs because the social investment is made for the national economic good. A responsible government must manage the investment and ensure its dividends. To that end, in 2009 another partnership agreement was ratified by all of the Australian governments called National Partnership Agreement on the National Quality Agenda for Early Childhood Education and Care (COAG 2009), initiating a joint commitment to develop “a jointly governed unified National Quality Framework for early childhood education and care and Outside School Hours Care (OSHC) services” (COAG 2009, 3). This

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joint commitment included an unprecedented $970 million dollar funding allocation with contributions from all governments. The inputs of early childhood services (what happens before children arrive) were nationalised through National Quality Framework policy initiatives that included a new National Early Childhood Education and Care Regulations Act (Cth) and National Early Childhood Education and Care Law Act (Cth) to underpin licensing, previously State- and Territory-based. The outputs of early childhood services (what happens when children arrive) were nationalised through the development of a national curriculum framework called Being, Belonging, Becoming: The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia (DEEWR 2009), previously State- and Territorybased. Governance of both the inputs and outputs of services are overarched by accreditation systems (Brennan et al. 2012), hence the existing quality accreditation system was retained and substantially revitalised to incorporate the new National Quality Framework legislation and policy. Named the National Quality Standard (NQS) and quality rating system (ACECQA 2012), the NQS comprises seven quality areas against which services are externally assessed and awarded a rating (COAG 2009) and unlike its predecessor, must be completed by all early childhood services including family day care, preschools and after school care in order to qualify for government subsidies. Active from 2010, the first NQS assessment visits occurred from 2012 with each accredited service awarded a quality profile and overall quality rating that is published on a national registry via the mychild.gov.au website to guide parental choice, much like NAPLAN test scores. It is also regulated that services must display their quality rating on the premises (Cth; COAG 2009). The national quality agenda partnership agreement (COAG 2009) outlined how these policies contributed to the desired outcomes of investment, including: c. a single National Quality Standard (NQS) that provides clarity, for the first time at a national level, about the expectations for the provision of quality early childhood education and care and OSHC care services across seven quality areas, including the new Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) that guides early childhood educators in developing quality early childhood programs d. a national quality rating system based on the NQS that provides more transparent accountability and that combines the seven quality areas with a five-point rating scale that describes the quality of early childhood education and care and OSHC care that all parents, carers and the community should

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expect to find in the diverse childhood education and care settings available across Australia. (COAG 2009, 8; my italics)

Although early childhood settings are noted as ‘diverse’ in the policy statement above, the agenda to homogenise is clearly expressed by the view that one might know what to “expect what to find” (8) in regard to some salient, universal quality factors. This invokes the ‘minimum standard’ notion that was noted in Chapter 2 as embedding accreditation policies and continues the assumption that quality is universal, salient and measurable factors. This approach to quality reform reflects the typically neoliberal view that the responsibility for executing ‘quality’ (as per the terms of the governments) is with the early childhood setting. It means that despite having national and economic interests in quality, the state is not constructed as a co-provider or co-contributor to quality. The National Quality Framework is demonstrative of this logic in that little of the $970 million in funds raised for early childhood quality reform by COAG trickled down to the centres themselves (O’Connell et al. 2016). Taking a governmentality view, these truth politics deployed for neoliberalism plus (Mahon 2010) governance position quality as the site of public investment, not access to the early childhood service more broadly (see Hunkin 2018a). This is a highly problematic agenda because it doesn’t establish an imperative to broadly fund or support early childhood service access for children under the age of 4 years—unless they are identified as vulnerable or at risk—or to fund services that are perceived to be less aligned with early education. Hence, the mother-care paradigm is continued and not challenged by neoliberalism plus social investment approaches because only some aspects of early childhood settings have been identified as a public good (quality, access to preschool) but the services more broadly remain constructed as a private commodity. As quality is the site of the social investment and its assumed affect, not the sector and its work or benefits more broadly conceived (see Fig. 3.2), only the former is raised up in terms of status and funding, not necessarily the latter. Considering the complexity of early childhood work with its play-based, holistic pedagogies, any agenda that only acknowledges part of that is concerning (Moss 2014; Sims 2017). Particularly, since it divorces early childhood services of their diverse social, moral and ethical benefits and transformative potentials (Moss 2014). Moreover, interpretations of quality inputs and outputs are based on narrow economic questions and answers, not necessarily the views of early childhood professionals and pedagogues, or

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Fig. 3.2 The Australian early childhood quality reform agenda truth claims

is early education

is a sensitive period of human capital investment EC QUALITY is the site of social investment is universal, observable, measureable factors

families and children, who are arguably best placed to speak to what quality is and does for them (Moss 2014; Hunkin 2018b). This raises questions about whether neoliberal plus (Mahon 2010) quality reform approaches ultimately affect quality compliance or quality reform and improvement. Principally, as the policy wisdom of childcare markets goes unchallenged, even though market models are known to compromise some crucial aspects of quality (Urban and Rubiano 2014); in Australia, market model policy levers strengthened despite the operations of for-profit services having raised quality concerns across the sector in the first place. The truth claims that embed the Australian quality reform agenda for early childhood raise additional questions about how stable the reform reimagining and investment will be in the longer term, since future funding, status and policy attention relies on compliance and the production of the desired (economic) outcomes. How will this agenda impact on practices and values in early childhood settings? What and whose views are not represented in these determinations of what quality is and can do, and what and whose views are not?

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Conclusion: Quality Reform as Opportunity Despite the fact that the quality of early childhood services was never identified politically as a policy ‘problem’ in Australia, as no such data was available (Elliot 2006), quality investment in early childhood and education more broadly was identified as a policy solution to the workforce participation and productivity problem. As I think of it, this means that education and early childhood quality reform was an economic policy opportunity rather than a policy problem. This might seem like a semantic distinction but there is a noticeable separation of this agenda from the sectors and stakeholders that it affects. A view of early childhood settings as an economic opportunity fundamentally shifts socio-political constructions of what early childhood work is and does but not necessarily in ways that align with early childhood pedagogy, philosophy and values. Although quality social investment policy discourse seeks to acknowledge and raise the status of some types of early childhood services and outcomes, this is not value-free and should be approached with caution. Researchers have problematised the notion that research can qualify and quantify certain benefits or ‘harms’ in early childhood settings, because this type of work often problematically assumes in-home (mother) care as the neutral point of comparison (Sims 2009) and can only speak to what is measurable (Penn 2011). The latter marginalises key outcomes or benefits of early childhood settings that are difficult to measure or represent, such as child and parent happiness, opportunities and every day experiences (Penn 2011), making it hard for research to recognise the complexity of early childhood work and outcomes (Moss 2014). Hence, despite some funding and status increases, a neoliberalism plus (Mahon 2010) quality reform agenda actually takes us further and further away from the important questions of whether access to early childhood services is a social right for women and children of any age, by distracting us with self-fulfilling questions of cost and benefit, investment and accountability. Last, since governments have the final say as to which quality inputs and outputs constitute quality in early childhood and which don’t, the ‘goalposts’ of quality policy can shift significantly in ways that affect children, families and the early childhood workforce, without necessarily consulting with those stakeholders. The next chapter will explore this dynamic in more depth, investigating contemporary policy debates about quality in early childhood, and the changing agenda, ambition and ideology that embed them.

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Kagan, S., N. Cohen, and M. Neuman. 1996. “Introduction: The Changing Context of American Early Care and Education.” In Reinventing Early Care and Education: A Vision for a Quality System, edited by S. Kagan and N. Cohen, 1–20. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Kilderry, A. 2015. “The Intensification of Performativity in Early Childhood Education.” Journal of Curriculum Studies 47 (5): 633–652. Lingard, B. 2010. “Policy Borrowing, Policy Learning: Testing Times in Australian Schooling.” Critical Studies in Education 51 (2): 129–147. Ludwig, J., and D. Phillips. 2007. The Benefits and Costs of Head Start. Working Paper No. 12973. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. Mahon, R. 2010. “After Neo-Liberalism? The OECD, the World Bank and the Child.” Global Social Policy 10 (2): 172–192. McCain, M., and J. F. Mustard. 1999. Reversing the Real Brain Drain: Early Years Study Final Report. Toronto: Ontario Children’s Secretariat. Mersky, J., J. Topitzes, and A. Reynold. 2011. “Maltreatment Prevention Through Early Childhood Intervention: A Confirmatory Evaluation of the Chicago Child-Parent Center Preschool Program.” Children and Youth Services Review 33 (8): 1454–1463. Moss, P. 2014. Transformative Change and Real Utopias in Early Childhood Education: A Story of Democracy, Experimentation and Potentiality. Oxon: Routledge. Muennig, P., D. Robertson, G. Johnson, F. Campbell, E. Pugello, and M. Neidell. 2011. “The Effect of an Early Education Program on Adult Health: The Carolina Abecedarian Project Randomized Controlled Trial.” American Journal of Public Health 101 (3): 512–516. National Childcare Accreditation Council (NCAC). 2001. Putting Children First: Quality Improvement and Accreditation System. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Early Child Care Research Network (NICHD-ECCRN). 2001. “Child Care and Children’s Peer Interaction at 24 and 36 Months: The NICHD Study of Early Child Care.” Child Development 72: 1005–1498. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Early Child Care Research Network (NICHD-ECCRN). 2003. “Does Amount of Time Spent in Childcare Predict Socio-Emotional Adjustment During the Transition to Kindergarten?” Child Development 74: 976–1005. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Early Child Care Research Network (NICHD-ECCRN) and G. Duncan. 2003. “Modeling the Impacts of Child Care Quality on Children’s Preschool Cognitive Development.” Child Development 74: 1454–1474. O’Connell, M., S. Fox, B. Hinz, and H. Cole. 2016. Quality Early Education for All: Fostering Creative, Entrepreneurial, Resilient and Capable Learners. Melbourne: Mitchell Institute.

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Olssen, M. 2008. “Understanding the Mechanisms of Neoliberal Control: Lifelong Learning, Flexibility and Knowledge Capitalism.” In Foucault and Lifelong Learning: Governing the Subject, edited by A. Fejes and K. Nicoll, 34–47. Abingdon, Axon: Routledge. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). 1996. The Knowledge-Based Economy. Paris: OECD. Osgood, J. 2009. “Childcare Workforce Reform in England and ‘the Early Years Professional’: A Critical Discourse Analysis.” Journal of Education Policy 24 (6): 733–751. Pence, A., and V. Pacini-Ketchabaw. 2008. “Discourses on Quality Care: The Investigating ‘Quality’ Project and the Canadian Experience.” Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 9 (3): 241–255. Penn, H. 2011. Quality in Early Childhood Services: An International Perspective. Mainhead: Open University Press. Perry, B. 1996. The Mismatch Between Opportunity and Investment. Chicago: CIVITAS. Powell, W., and K. Snellman. 2004. “The Knowledge Economy.” Annual Review of Sociology 30: 199–220. Press, F., and A. Hayes. 2000. OECD Thematic Review of Early Childhood Education and Care Policy: Australian Background Report. Paris: OECD. Press, F., and C. Woodrow. 2005. “Commodification, Corporatisation and Children’s Spaces.” Australian Journal of Early Childhood 49 (3): 278–291. Productivity Commission. 2006. Potential Benefits of the National Reform Agenda. https://www.pc.gov.au/research/completed/national-reformagenda/nationalreformagenda.pdf. Quiggin, J. 2014. “Macroeconomic Policy After the Global Financial Crisis.” In Australian Public Policy: Progressive Ideas in the Neoliberal Ascendency, edited by C. Miller and L. Orchard, 45–62. Bristol: Policy Press. Radich, J. 2002. Confronting the Realities: What Next for the Quality Improvement and Accreditation System? Contribution to the Environmental Scan Undertaken by the National Childcare Accreditation Council to Support Its Future Strategic Planning. http://www.earlychildhoodaustralia.org.au/ early_childhood_news/speeches/confronting_the_realities_what_next_for_ the_quality_improvement_and_accreditation_system_sep_2002.html. Ramey, C., and F. Campbell. 1991. “Poverty, Early Childhood Education, and Academic Competence: The Abecedarian Experiment.” In Children in Poverty: Child Development and Public Policy, edited by A. C. Huston, 190–221. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Reynolds, A., A. Temple, and D. Robertson. 2002. “Age 21 Cost-Benefit Analysis of the Title 1 Chicago Child-Parent Centres.” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 24: 267–303. Rizvi, F., and B. Lingard. 2010. Globalizing Education Policy. Oxon: Routledge.

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Rowe, K., J. Tainton, and D. Taylor. 2006. Key Feature of the Quality Improvement Accreditation System (QIAS) Administered by the National Childcare Accreditation Council (Australia). Surrey Hills, NSW: National Childcare Accreditation Council. Rudd, K., and J. Macklin. 2007. New Directions for Early Childhood Education: Universal Access to Early Learning for 4 Year Olds. Canberra, ACT: Australian Labor Party. Rudd, K., and J. Gillard. 2008. Quality Education: The Case for an Education Revolution in our Schools. https://apo.org.au/sites/default/files/resource-files/ 2008/08/apo-nid9133-1132301.pdf. Rush, E. 2006. Child Care Quality in Australia. Discussion Paper No. 84. Canberra: The Australia Institute. Rush, E., and C. Downie. 2006. ABC Learning Centres: A Case Study of Australia’s Largest Child Care Corporation. Discussion Paper No. 84. Canberra: The Australia Institute. Schweinhart, L., J. Montie, X. Zongping, W. Barnett, C. Belfield, and N. Milagros. 2005. Lifetime Effects: The High/Scope Perry Preschool Study Through Age 40. Ypsilanti: High/Scope Press. Shonkoff, J. P., and D. Phillips. 2000. From Neurons to Neighbourhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development. Washington, DC: National Academic Press. Sims, M. 2009. “Neurobiology and Child Development: Challenging Current Interpretation and Policy Implications.” Australasian Journal of Early Childhood 34 (1): 36–42. Sims, M. 2017. “Neoliberalism and Early Childhood.” Cogent Education 4: 1–10. Sims, M., A. Guilfoyle, and T. Parry. 2005. “What Cortisol Levels Tell Us About Quality in Child Care Centres.” Australian Journal of Early Childhood 30 (2): 29–39. Sumsion, J. 2006a. “The Corporatization of Australian Childcare: Towards an Ethical Audit and Research Agenda.” Journal of Early Childhood Research 4 (2): 99–120. Sumsion, J. 2006b. “From Whitlam to Economic Rationalism and Beyond: A Conceptual Framework for Political Activism in Children’s Services.” Australian Journal of Early Childhood 31 (1): 1–11. Sumsion, J. 2012. “ABC Learning and Australian Early Education and Care: A Retrospective Ethical Audit of a Radical Experiment.” In Childcare Markets: Can They Deliver an Equitable Service, edited by E. Lloyd and H. Penn, 209– 226. Bristol: Policy Press. Sumsion, J., S. Cheeseman, A. Kennedy, S. Barnes, L. Harrison, and A. Stonehouse. 2009. “Insider Perspectives on Developing Belonging, Being & Becoming: The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia.” Australasian Journal of Early Childhood 34 (4): 4–13.

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CHAPTER 4

‘Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) Brings a Wide Range of Benefits… But All These Benefits Are Conditional on Quality’: Questioning the Only Quality Reform Agenda

Abstract The quotation that appears in this chapter title is from Starting Strong III: A Quality Toolkit for ECEC (OECD 2012, 9) and starkly demonstrates the emerging ‘only quality’ reform agenda for early childhood that is under investigation in this chapter. Drawing on policy documents and knowledge production in Australia and globally, the chapter discusses ‘only quality’ agenda truth claims, logics and ambition. The goal is not to argue that ‘only quality’ discourse and agenda constitute a unilateral agreement or construct, but rather, to theorise how ‘only quality’ policy agenda reflects a shift in social investment governance approaches for early childhood settings. Some initial tensions and implications are discussed that set the scene for a broader critique in Chapter 5. Keywords Early childhood quality reform · Only quality agenda · Neoliberalism-minus · Policy analysis

© The Author(s) 2019 E. Hunkin, The Quality Agenda in Early Childhood Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31627-3_4

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The Only Quality Agenda After a change of Commonwealth government in 2013, Australia’s quality reform agenda for early childhood settings has been in flux. The incoming Federal-Liberal party won the election on a policy platform that emphasised neoliberal policy foci such as reducing state debt, stronger border protection, jobs creation and for early childhood, an ‘urgent review’ of childcare (Abbott 2013). To fulfil the latter promise, the Federal treasurer in partnership with the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) ordered the Productivity Commission (PC) to undertake a full review of Australian early childhood education and care, and the Education Council of Australia (ECA) to undertake a full review of the National Quality Framework. The PC is an independent research and advisory body to the Australian government but the review and its findings were strongly shaped by the Commonwealth government’s objectives and terms of reference (Cheeseman et al. 2014), as follows: The Australian Government’s objectives in commissioning this Inquiry are to examine and identify future options for a child care and early childhood learning system that: • supports workforce participation, particularly for women • addresses children’s learning and development needs, including the transition to schooling • is more flexible to suit the needs of families, including families with nonstandard work hours, disadvantaged children, and regional families • is based on appropriate and fiscally sustainable funding arrangements that better support flexible, affordable and accessible quality child care and early childhood learning. (PC 2014a, v, my italics)

In the above excerpt, the Commonwealth objectives including their ordering, present a view of early childhood services as primarily a workforce participation policy “particularly for women” (PC 2014a, v), with the secondary potential to “address children’s learning and development needs” (v, my italics). The objectives signal a significant paring back of the National Quality Agenda view of early childhood services as a means by which to generate economic dividends for children, families and society (COAG 2009a) and optimise learning and development, since “all Australian children deserve the best start in life” (Rudd and Macklin 2007, 3). The Commonwealth Government terms of reference further explained that

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The Australian Government is committed to establishing a sustainable future for a more flexible, affordable and accessible child care and early childhood learning market that helps underpin the national economy and supports the community… The market for child care and early childhood learning services is large, diverse and growing… The Australian Government is the largest funder of the sector, with outlays exceeding $5 billion a year and growing. It is important that this expenditure achieves the best possible impact in terms of benefits to families and children as well as the wider economy. (PC 2014a, iv, my italics)

This rationale signals an ideological shift back to the typically neoliberal preoccupations of reducing overall state expenditure and utilising market solutions for issues like childcare access, choice and affordability. Both childcare and ‘early learning’ services are repetitively described as markets which presents the suitability of market models for early childhood services as a taken-for-granted truth—in fact, the Commonwealth sought advice only “within current funding parameters” (PC 2014a, vi). Social investment notions are not dismissed entirely by the PC terms of reference, since the state funding of the ‘childcare and early childhood learning market’ is credited as having benefits to ‘the wider community’, however, the intention to delimit public expenditure is expressed through the ambition that “expenditure achieves the best possible impact in terms of benefits…” (4). Likewise, in 2014 when the Commonwealth engaged the ECA to undertake the scheduled review of the National Quality Agenda and the National Quality Framework (see COAG 2009a, 15, article 64), the requirement from COAG was that any resulting proposals would reduce the burden of the National Quality Framework (NQF) on services by “address[ing] regulatory shortcomings that have been identified and to refine the NQF with the aim of maximising the net public return it generates ” (ECA 2014, 16, my italics). This is an agenda to streamline NQF processes and bureaucracy in deference to its perceived, selective public returns, rather than, for example, in response to broader benefits, or stakeholder experiences and perspectives, although those were considered as part of the consultation period. Drawing on Mahon’s (2010) notion of “neoliberalism plus” (173) as the deployment of social investment through private policy structures, the Australian Commonwealth’s shift in quality investment and governance approach can be conceptualised as ‘neoliberalism-minus’ because the intention is to use private policy structures as a means by which to minimise public investment. Once reinterpreted through the ‘neoliberal minus’

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ideological frame, the Australian quality reform agenda for early childhood settings shifted to an ‘only quality’ agenda, wherein the aim was to delimit quality sites of investment in order to reduce overall public expenditure. To that end, the discourse of quality became a renewed battleground for early childhood policy and politics in Australia. Public and Private Cost/Benefit A governmentality view (Foucault 2009) conceptualises state power as deployed through “ensembles” (108) of tactical knowledge and discourse production activities that filter through institutions, their members and processes. In this way, a governmentality lens highlights how the incoming Commonwealth Government deployed the Productivity Commission and Education Council Australia reviews as a way to more strongly separate— and reduce—the public (economic) benefits of quality inputs and outputs, from the private. To do this, notions of evidence and cost/benefit were drawn into the spotlight once more, for as the terms of reference provided to the Productivity Commission for the Inquiry Report (2014a) stipulated: In undertaking this Inquiry, the Productivity Commission should use evidence from Australia and overseas to report on and make recommendations about the following: • The contribution that access to affordable, high quality child care can make to: (a) increased participation in the workforce, particularly for women (b) optimising children’s learning and development … • The benefits and other impacts of regulatory changes in child care over the past decade, including the implementation of the National Quality Framework (NQF) in States and Territories, with specific consideration given to compliance costs … (vi, my italics)

The above excerpt highlights how a ‘neoliberalism minus’ approach invokes the social investment emphasis on evidence-based policymaking (Dawkins 2010) but reimagines it through the typically neoliberal “assumption that everything, including the upbringing of young children, can and should first be understood in economic terms” (Urban 2012, 496). This serves to privilege narrower economic evidences of cost and benefit in early childhood settings. As a result, the PC Inquiry Report, Overview and Recommendations (2014a) discussions of quality were dominated by economic evidences on the basis of which it was concluded that ‘quality is important’ (8) but also that

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Research indicates that what constitutes ‘quality’ ECEC includes the nature of the physical environment of the classroom, programs and routines, qualifications and ratios of ECEC staff, professional development experience and educator’s personal characteristics such as attentiveness. These facets are all important for the quality of the child’s experiences, but unfortunately there is a lack of consistent evidence that any one of these factors is more important than any other in delivering improved learning and development outcomes, particularly for children under 3 years of age. Despite this, for younger children in particular, having nurturing, warm and attentive carers is arguably upheld as the most critical attribute of quality in any ECEC setting. (PC 2014a, 8, my italics)

The above finding highlights how neoliberalism minus ‘only quality’ agenda seek firmer economic evidences of public dividends than a neoliberalism plus quality agenda, which I noted in Chapter 3 as focused on human capital growth and potential. This communicates a truth assumption that only quality is evidenced, where evidence is sought and understood in economic terms. This means that unlike broader neoliberalism plus social investment approaches, neoliberalism minus approaches do not consider known research correlations or associations a mandate for public investment. Hence, this PC finding sat in tension to existing policy initiatives including the National Quality Agenda (COAG 2009b) which noted improved staff qualifications and ratios as key markers of quality (35), and the COAG-ratified National Early Years Workforce Strategy 2012–2016 (ECA 2012) that aimed to improve qualifications across the early years workforce in order to improve the quality of care and professionalism (10). The PC Inquiry Report found that “the inability to distinguish the benefits of different staff ratios and qualifications is of particular concern as the vast majority of additional costs attributable to the NQF are likely to stem from changes to these requirements ” (2014a, 8, my italics). Although the Commonwealth doesn’t contribute directly to staff wages within a market model of service provision, if staff ratio and qualification minimum standards drive up the prices of childcare government funding costs will increase due to fee subsidies. As the PC Inquiry Report (2014a) explained: There was strong disagreement from the ECEC sector in response to the inquiry draft report recommendations on minimum qualification requirements for ECEC workers. The Commission received and analysed a range of additional research and alternative views on existing research. It is accepted that children are learning and developing very rapidly in their early years; it

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is also accepted that the quality of children’s environment and interactions is important for learning and developing outcomes. What is not supported by the research evidence, and what the Commission does not accept, is that either (or a combination) of these findings necessitates that children require a tertiary qualified educator from birth. This is certainly an option that some parents may wish for and choose, but it should not be a minimum requirement imposed by governments, at considerable cost, on all families and taxpayers, until evidence substantiating the benefits for the additional cost is available. (8, my italics)

The above excerpt highlights how problematic it can be for narrow interpretations of evidence to guide policy ambition and knowledge production, as notions of what constitutes ‘clear evidence’ are value-laden and contestable. This raises questions about what constitutes ‘consistent evidence’ if a “strong” (PC 2014a, 8) message from sector professionals based on every day experiences and professional expertise does not? Who decides? In the absence of economic evidence to justify the public spend, ‘neoliberalismminus’ ideology interprets ‘not-quality’ and/or ‘extra-quality’ as a private cost and risk/benefit to be managed by the consumer and the market. The PC Inquiry Report: Overview (PC 2014a) summarises this view: While some of these identified benefits of broader ECEC participation would be felt by the community, most also result in benefits that accrue primarily to the child attending ECEC and to their family. This means that families should not expect governments to fully fund their use of ECEC. For families with children, there will always be trade-offs in work and lifestyle, and the responsibility for raising children and funding their care and early childhood education should lie predominantly with the family. (13–14, my italics)

The above logics invoke the existing assumptions outlined at length in Chapter 3 that quality is a site of social investment and is universal, measurable factors, and extends those assumptions to claim that only quality is public investment and returns. Therefore, any preferences for quality service provision or features additional to the public/social sites of investment and benefit should be dealt with by the market, such as, through competition and choice. This problematically assumes that families are willing and able to incur the cost of ‘private’ quality factors, moreover that families are responsible for doing so, which is contestable. This is also a homogenisation and standardisation agenda, since there is no policy interest in complex, personal and contextual perspectives of quality—quite the opposite, since it seeks to isolate and minimise social expenditure sites. To that end, following

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multiple periods of consultation and review, the final Education Council Decision Regulation Impact Statement for Changes to the National Quality Framework (RIS) was published in 2017 (ECA 2017), with recommended amendments that would “ensure the NQF more effectively and efficiently achieves its purpose” (2) in ways that ensure the “benefits of the change are likely to be greater than the costs” (2). Among the 29 formal proposals was the recommendation that the National Quality Standards (NQS) framing accreditation be simplified (ECA 2017, 141), as well as the accreditation process itself, in order to reduce administrative burdens. The revised NQS was implemented from February 2018 and included a reduction from 18 quality standards to 15, and 58 elements to 40 (ACECQA 2017). This outcome highlights the neoliberal policy emphasis on ‘effectiveness’, ‘efficiency’ and ‘packages’ that streamline and simplify (Novoa and Yasiv-Mashal 2014, 52). Early Education/Learning as Public Good Unlike early childhood settings, the formal education sectors are a universal public sector service in Australia, so it is little wonder that policy notions of ‘only quality’ privileged education performance evidence in determinations of public sites of quality investment. The PC Inquiry Report, Overview (2014a) review of research evidence determined that: Children are learning and developing from birth (and before) and the nature of interactions between a child, the adults around them, the environment and experiences to which the child is exposed all contribute to the child’s early learning foundations. The benefits of quality early learning for children in the year prior to starting school are largely undisputed… There is also some (mixed) evidence of the impacts on children’s development from attending quality early learning from about 1 to 3 years of age… Many parents prefer parental-only care, at home, for their children, particularly when they are very young. The research suggests that except where the home environment offers very poor development opportunities or places the child at risk, these children continue to rapidly learn and develop in the home environment without participation in formal ECEC services, at least until about 2 to 3 years of age. (6, my italics)

The above excerpt presents a reimagining of the young child as “waiting to learn” (Cheeseman et al. 2014, 38), despite the explicit and contradictory acknowledgement that they are ‘learning and developing from birth’.

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To reach this conclusion, the PC Inquiry Report, Volume 1 (PC 2014b, 150–152) drew on data-driven, longitudinal studies that linked children’s access to preschool and childcare to behavioural, cognitive or academic test scores later in life, both locally and internationally, which is a privilaging of academic interpretations of public benefit. For example, it was noted that preschool attendance has been linked to higher test scores in the OECD Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) (PC 2014b, 152), the Australian National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) (152) and higher General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) in the UK (153). On the basis of this work and other similar studies the PC concluded that “the impact of exposure to early learning and development programs provided through preschool programs for older children (generally 3 to 5 years) is unequivocal ” (PC 2014b, 152, my italics). These linkages draw on lifelong learning discourse that tends to interpret education and learning in academic terms and is highly problematic because it reflects an increasingly narrow, schoolified view of what constitutes learning and ‘benefits’ in early childhood settings (Urban 2015). To that end, the cost-to-benefit economic modelling studies by Heckman (2000) and others that had dominated the previous NQF policy statements reviewed in Chapter 3 were dismissed as reliable. The PC noted that it was “unclear whether or not such [US intervention] programs would generate as significant benefits in a different cultural context and where the general quality of ECEC services and schooling is different” (PC 2014b, 155). This is reasonable criticism also raised in Chapter 3 but its tactical application here—since the same could be said for the international studies and data foreground as ‘unequivocal’ evidence—reveals an intent to minimise the broader human capital view of quality as a lever for optimising human capital and potential, since it widens interpretations of potential sites of public investment. The human capital theory claim that quality can prevent the depreciation of human capital caused by disadvantage was upheld by the report, however, the interpretation of disadvantage were significantly narrowed to a home environment that “places the child at risk” (PC 2014a, 6). In contrast to preschool programs, the ‘mixed evidence’ of the outcomes of childcare led to the conclusion that “the benefits of formal ECEC for child development vary with the age of the child participating ” (PC 2014b, 6, my italics). To that end, the PC Inquiry Report (2014a) recommended that childcare subsidies and tax benefit schemes be streamlined into one rebate or subsidy, so that it could

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maximise child development and workforce participation outcomes that are, as far as possible, likely to be additional to those that might be achieved in the absence of government funding (not simply compensate families for choices that they would have made regardless). (19, original italics)

In 2018, the Commonwealth Government enacted this recommendation by introducing the Child Care Subsidy (DHS 2019), a subsidy scheme that bases childcare fee support on a family income and activity test, with provisions for low income earners (under $66,958 per annum) and carers or parents with disabilities who are exempt from the activity test and can receive up to 25 hours of funded childcare per week (Hearse 2018). Additional assistance of up to 100 hours per fortnight is provided for families experiencing hardship, however in most cases this only temporary and may go hand-in-hand with cooperation with other government agencies and regular re-evaluations (DET 2018). These vastly different interpretations of preschool and childcare services and their presumed social versus public cost/benefit outcomes raises questions about the equity and validity of ‘only quality’ discourse: can we assume such different potentials and agenda to early childhood services based simply on the child’s chronological age or perceived stage of development? Why shouldn’t young children have public access to the same opportunities as those who are aged 3 or 4 years? Why shouldn’t children aged 3 and 4 years and younger have access to the same opportunities as those who are school age? There is some evidence that these questions were being raised in the Australian early childhood policyscape when in July 2017 the Commonwealth Government established the Review to Achieve Educational Excellence in Australian Schools (Gonski et al. 2018) comprising an independent national panel of experts. For the first time the state and territory governments also commissioned an early childhood review that would sit alongside the school review with the intent that the report could “inform discussion on the role of early childhood education in improving school performance and student achievement ” (Pascoe and Brennan 2017, 96, my italics). The subsequent report called ‘Lifting Our Game: Report of the review to achieve educational excellence in Australian school through early childhood interventions ’ (Pascoe and Brennan 2017) noted the link between quality early childhood education and improved academic achievement later in life (6) but also highlighted that High quality early childhood education also has broader impacts; it is linked with higher levels of employment, income and financial security, improved

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health outcomes and reduced crime. It helps build the skills children will need for the jobs of the future… (6) For many families, access to early childhood education is combined with child care. Investing in integrating education and care creates the potential for a double dividend – promoting children’s wellbeing, learning and development, and supporting parental workforce participation. If supporting workforce participation eclipses children’s education, this opportunity is lost. Attending to these dual possibilities offers Australian governments the opportunity to maximise their investment. This means a change from the mindset of separating the concept of education from care. (7, my italics)

The above call for an integrated approach to care and education can be seen as reflective of the social reality, as well as early childhood pedagogy that views of children’s learning “dynamic, complex and holistic” (DEEWR 2009, 10). Yet bound by the terms of reference, this counter discursive thinking was later summarised by the argument that “if Australia is to improve school outcomes, a holistic approach to education must be taken” (7). This shows how ‘only quality’ agenda interprets even holistic approaches to understanding learning as in service of formal education outcomes, because only education/learning outcomes are framed as sites of social or public investment. The ‘only quality’ discourse truth assumption that only quality is education raises questions about how and where spaces can be made in Australian early childhood policy to value care-based work and diverse early childhood lived experiences and opportunities, particularly those of young children, in their own right? In 2019 the Australian Federal Budget 2019– 2020 (CoA 2019) announced by omission that the Commonwealth would no longer contribute funding to childcare via the National Partnership on the National Quality Agenda for Early Childhood Education and Care (COAG 2009a, 2015–2018). This means that the commitment of all Australian governments to “maintaining their focus on the early years” (COAG 2009b, 2) was not renewed. The National Partnership Agreement on Universal Access to Early Childhood Education—2018–2019 (COAG 2018– 2019) was continued but now takes the form of year-by-year commitments that create uncertainty for the sector. The Budget 2018–2019 (CoA 2019) stated that “universal access to a quality preschool education in the year before school [is] helping to prepare children for their future school education” (18) but there is an impression from the aligned policy action that the Commonwealth government is poised to withdraw if this truth assumption changed—likely on the basis of further economic evidence. Childcare is not mentioned in the Budget 2018–2019 (CoA 2019) at all which is a

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Neoliberalism minus social investment

concerning omission. As yet, no substantive changes have been made to staff ratio and qualification models. Taking a global view, ‘only quality’ agenda and logics that discursively link ‘only quality’ to lifelong learning interpretations of education outcomes (see Fig. 4.1) are visible across the knowledge production activities of key international organisations. In 2014, the World Bank Group (WBG) report called Stepping Up Early Childhood Development: Investing in Young Child for High Return (Denboba et al. 2014), intended as a guide for policymakers, presented five policy intervention packages for young children and the fourth was a preschool package for ages 3–6 (11). Childcare was not present among the broad range of medical and social intervention packages, yet funded preschool was recommended on the grounds that “evidence has demonstrated that the quality of a child’s early learning experience makes a significant difference to school preparation, participation, completion, and achievement ” (Denboba et al. 2014, 11, my italics). Building on these aims, the World Bank Group has established an Early Learning Partnership (ELP) initiative across more than 26 developing countries, with organisational partners including UNICEF, UNESCO and the Global Partnership for Education (WBG 2019). The WBG has spent more than 60 million dollars to date to “work with countries to build

Lifelong learning discourse

Human capital theory, remediaƟng capital

Market logics

Fig. 4.1 The dominant ideas of ‘neoliberalism minus’ social investment approaches to early childhood quality reform

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capacity to scale up access to early learning and to ensure quality as programs scale” (WBG 2019, my italics). Although the ELP programs themselves encompass a broad number of early childhood development programs including training women and mothers, purchasing books in local languages, home visits and nutrition programs, as well as access to quality preschool services (WBG 2019), the program situates itself within an early learning agenda. As the ELP website explains: We leverage World Bank strengths – a global presence, access to policymakers, and strong technical analysis – to improve early learning opportunities and outcomes for young children around the world… Our ambitious work program addresses pressing issues in early learning… (WBG 2019, n.p.)

The above excerpt provides insight into how ‘only quality’ agenda tends to interpret any public spending on young children as in service of education and learning outcomes, since that is the presumed public benefit. This positioning is echoed by the UNICEF Sustainable Development Goals (UNICEF 2019b) also referred to as the 2030 agenda (see UNICEF, n.d.). UNICEF consulted with millions of people including world leaders to develop the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), whose agenda for early childhood is explained in a recent report entitled A World Ready to Learn: Prioritizing Quality in Early Childhood Education (UNICEF 2019a): The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and target 4.2 specifically, convey a clear objective that all girls and boys have access to quality early childhood development, care and pre-primary education so that they are ready for primary education. This global report confirms the importance of early childhood education in achieving SDG 4 and supports a bold challenge: Provide all children with at least one year of quality pre-primary education by 2030. The reasons for this aspiration are clear, as a solid body of evidence shows that the foundations for learning are largely built in the early years of life, before a child ever crosses the threshold of a primary school. (6)

Above, the benefits of quality early childhood programs are interpreted as and assumed to be preparation for school and better schooling outcomes, policy despite acknowledgement that ‘the foundations for learning are largely built in the early years of life’. A World Ready to Learn (UNICEF 2019a) explains how

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Children between the ages of 3 and 6 might seem like they are only just beginning life’s journey. But in fact, more than 85 per cent of their brain development is already nearly in place. These early years provide a critical window of opportunity for girls and boys to build the foundations of learning and develop skills that can help them succeed in school and over the course of their lives. The evidence contained in this report shows that quality early childhood education – preschool – helps place this cycle in motion. By the time a child enters grade one, the foundations for success are already in place. (4, my italics)

Above, the age delineation of 3 to 6 is not explained but positioned as a taken-for-granted distinction resulting in the concerning invisibility of child learners under the age of three. Further, the discursive alignment of ‘quality early childhood education’ and ‘preschool’ is presented as common sense since the two terms are employed interchangeably. In fact, the report suggests that a new vernacular is emerging around the ‘only quality’ agenda, for ‘pre-primary education’ is referred to 928 times, whereas ‘preschool’ is used 89 times, ‘care’ appears 61 times, ‘kindergarten’ 22 times, and ‘childcare’ or ‘child-care’ is not mentioned at all. Taking a governmentality view, narrow, schoolified interpretations of the public or social benefits of (only) quality early childhood settings is intertwined with the neoliberal standardisation and systematisation agenda (Smith et al. 2016; Urban 2015; Sims 2017) that drives coordinated global education policy trends globally (Sahlberg 2016). Within these trends, comparative education performance data is a key policy driver (Lawn 2013; Sellar 2015) as these data provide a basis for evaluation and comparison within and between countries, as well as the identification of ‘best practice’ solutions and frameworks that are circulated by large international policy networks (Ball 2015). Recent initiatives from the OECD seem to exemplify this agenda, since from 2016 the OECD have been developing a controversial International Early Learning and Child Well-Being Study (IELS) (OECD 2019) for preschool children aged five years. The IELS compiles data on the five year old child’s learning (early numeracy and early literacy) and wellbeing (self regulation and empathy and trust) domains so that “countries will be able to share best practices, working towards the ultimate goal of improving children’s early learning outcomes and overall well-being” (OECD 2019, n.p., my italics). A key ambition is also to generate a data set that can be linked to PISA scores later in life (Pence 2016). As the 2018 OECD Education Work Paper No. 186, The Power

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and Promise of Early Learning (Shuey and Kankaras 2018), prepared to accompany IELS, explains: High-quality ECEC is associated with positive outcomes for children, but identifying causal impacts of ECEC programmes on early and later outcomes is challenging. Part of the variation in ECEC experiences is related to variation in the family and home learning contexts… it can be very difficult to know whether ECEC itself is associated with positive early learning outcomes, or whether it is the family and home environments of young children who attend ECEC that contribute to these outcomes. In reality, it is most likely to be a combination of both the home and ECEC environments (as well as other settings) that matters most for children. (46, my italics)

The above assumption that ‘causal impacts’ of quality in early childhood settings are there to be found reflects a positivist view of reality that is highly contestable (Urban and Swadener 2016). However, this assumption forms the basis of the OECD performance data mandate, as follows: Early learning matters. Moreover, early learning can be supported and strengthened through contexts where children spend much of their time, specifically the home and ECEC programmes. The importance of early learning, as well as inequalities in children’s access to high-quality early learning environments, make data on early childhood experiences essential. (Shuey and Kankaras 2018, 68, my italics)

The quotation above shows how the assumption that only quality is education can be tactically employed to justify performance and surveillance data mechanisms in early childhood, so that the desired public cost/benefit dividends can be governed and strengthened. The OECD is an international organisation with well-documented influence on education policy through the creation of international points of consensus and cooperation (Lingard and Sellar 2016; Martens and Jakobi 2010; Mahon 2010). Lingard and Sellar (2016) emphasise that this “soft power is exerted through processes of mutual surveillance and peer pressure, and has grown with the enhancement of the OECD’s statistical work from the mid-1990s” (437). The OECD generates a significant revenue stream from its statistical work and knowledge production in education policy (Ball 2012), meaning it has vested monetary interests in maintaining certain policy discourses and pathways. Hence, these views about early childhood quality and education data reflect value-laden ambition and interests and should not be accepted out of hand.

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It is not my intention in this discussion to disparage pre-primary or preschool programs or the work of local and/or international policy actors or international organisations but rather, to highlight the assumptions that embed ‘only quality’ reform agenda and the tensions and questions they raise. Whilst these examples of local global policy and knowledge production are by no means exhaustive, it can be seen that the only quality agenda creates a tenuous and hostile policyscape for early childhood settings by acknowledging only some benefits and outcomes of early childhood work as for public or social good, typically to the exclusion of childcare and/or the young child. This is a position that problematically ignores the vast and varied studies that investigate notions of quality and the outcomes of early childhood access through qualitative and post-modern methodologies (see Dahlberg et al. 2006) and constructs a contestable view of the child under three as either not a learner or not building academic learning foundations. It also creates the conditions in which services for young children can be directly interpreted as risky or harmful, since there is political motivation to rarefy notions of benefit in order to minimise social expenditure. Claims of risk and harm As discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, the assumption that out-of-home care is inherently harmful is deeply imbued in Anglophone early childhood histories and was tied to the socio-political desire to privilege the male breadwinner and utilise women’s unpaid care labour. A neoliberalism-minus agenda reinvigorates this mother-care agenda by positioning the care of young children as a family (private) responsibility and choice, whilst at the same time undermining that choice through narrow and often contradictory interpretations of benefit and risk. As an example, the PC Inquiry Report, Overview (PC 2014a) noted that There is also some (mixed) evidence of the impacts on children’s development from attending quality early learning from about 1 to 3 years of age, although the evidence of long term benefits from universal access (except for children from disadvantaged backgrounds or with additional needs) to such learning is currently less compelling. For children under 1 year of age, those who are from homes where the quality of care and the learning environment is below that available in ECEC, are most likely to benefit from ECEC participation. Although there may be some developmental benefits for other very young children from time spent

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in formal ECEC settings, there is also potential for negative effects (such as the emergence of behavioural problems later in childhood). These risks are greater the closer to birth the child commences ECEC and the longer the time the child spends in formal care – particularly if the care is of low quality. (6, my italics)

In the above excerpt, the assumption that out-of-home care is inherent risky is positioned as a taken-for-granted truth, despite the prior evaluation of the evidence of impacts as ‘mixed’. This raises questions about how evidence can be too ‘mixed’ to assume benefit but not too ‘mixed’ to assume harm? Looking at the expanded Inquiry Report: Volume 1 (PC 2014b) it was explained that Children’s experiences in the early years of their lives, both within and outside the home, can have profound impacts on their longer-term development. The early childhood period is a time of rapid brain development where the brain’s circuitry or ‘wiring’ is built. This process is particularly sensitive to the nature, extent and range of experiences provided by a child’s environment. This makes early childhood a period of both opportunity for enrichment and vulnerability to harm. (148)

In the above excerpt, the familiar assumption that early childhood is a sensitive period discussed in Chapter 3 becomes the basis from which notions of inherent risk or harm are positioned as common sense, or the other side of the coin. Following a review of the research literature on the impact of non-parental care it was noted that “the impacts of attending childcare on the development and early learning outcomes of younger children (aged 0 to 3 years) are not as consistently positive as the impacts of attending preschool on children aged 3 years and older” (149). The PC Inquiry Report: Volume 1 (2014b) concluded that: Generally, the research has tended to find that the potential risks from ECEC or childcare are less evident as the child ages, especially if the care is of high quality. However, the existing evidence is unclear as to the precise age these benefits, at least for the wider population, start to kick in and outweigh any potential negative impacts. (151, my italics)

Above, the ‘potential risks’ of childcare are again presented as a takenfor-granted truth, and quality is constructed as an antidote to this risk, as is age. This suggests a new truth assumption in the only quality truth regime, that only quality is beneficial, or generative of benefits (Fig. 4.2).

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Fig. 4.2 Global and locally informed: the truth politics of an only quality agenda

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is supported by evidence is public investment and returns ONLY QUALITY is education (interpreted as academics) is beneficial, or generates benefits

Considering the nature of the research evidence as ‘mixed’ or ‘unclear’, these claims of risk and harm could be interpreted as values-based and political, providing a tactical rhetoric and means by which to boundary the state responsibilities for public investment. As an example, the PC Inquiry Report concluded that “the two policy objectives that the Australian Government is seeking to meet – child development and workforce participation – are not always mutually consistent ” (PC 2014a, 16, my italics). Looking at knowledge production in Australia more broadly, there is an uptake and continuation of the ‘only quality is beneficial’ truth assumption from multiple policy agents, government and non-government. In 2015, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare—a Commonwealth research body that reports on key health and welfare issues in Australia—provided a Literature Review of the Impact of Early Childhood Education and Care on Learning and Development: Working Paper (AIHW 2015) with the view to inform “evidence-based policy and practice, as well as the ability to measure the effects of recent reform in child care quality in Australia” (1, my italics). The AIHW note that “the key rationales for government assistance to ECEC rely on the existence of community wide benefits ” (2, my italics) and in regard to quality it is concluded that: Attendance at ECEC programs has been inextricably linked to developmental outcomes for children, both positive and negative. The literature demonstrates

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that the quality of the program can predict children’s performance in cognitive and social assessments; indeed, quality has universal consequences for the child’s development (NICHD 2003, 2008). (8)

Above, there is the familiar assumption that quality and its affects and impacts are universal and measurable, yet only one US study is provided as evidence. The report goes on note that: There is some evidence of developmental benefits for children attending quality child care from about 1–3 years; although the evidence of long-term benefits from universal access (except for children from disadvantaged backgrounds or with additional needs) to such learning is equivocal: some studies find negative effects, some find no effects, and some find positive effects. Discrepant results may relate to age of starting and also probably at least partly to differences in the quality of child care received by children. (9, my italics)

The discursive logics above show how quality—its assumed universal affect—is interpreted as an antidote to the unknown—whether positive or negative—effects of childcare. Similarly, in 2016 a report from Australian policy thinktank the Mitchell Institute for Education and Health Policy called Quality Early Education for All: Fostering Creative, Entrepreneurial, Resilient and Capable Leaders (O’Connell et al. 2016) provided a broad discussion about quality in early childhood before concluding that: “ECEC must be high quality to have a positive effect on children’s short and longterm outcomes. There is broad consensus on what constitutes quality in early education” (7, my italics). Later, the notion of harm is invoked directly, as follows: There are significant differences in outcomes depending on the level of quality care provided. High-quality child care benefits cognitive development, improves concentration, and fosters better intellectual development, enhanced vocabularies and greater sociability. In contrast, poor quality care is associated with deficits in language and cognitive function for very young children, and has been associated with poorer social and emotional development (Productivity Commission, 2014; Sammons et al., 2012a, 2012b; Sylva, 2010; Belsky et al., 2007). (8, my italics)

It can be seen that to evidence these key claims, Quality Early Education for All (O’Connell et al. 2016) draws on the PC Inquiry Report (2014a), which speaks to the importance of that document in the Australian policyscape as well as the ways that policy discourse and knowledge production

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tend to be self-affirming as they circulate through networks of policy agents that share similar interests and/or ideologies (Ball 2015). Much like the PC Inquiry Report (PC 2014a), Quality Education for All (O’Connell et al. 2016) also draws on Australian and international studies that link preschool access and standardised test scores such as PISA and NAPLAN (8) to show the benefits of preschool, and emphasises the importance of intentional teaching experiences (19). Although the report draws predominantly on British and American studies, Quality Early Education for All (O’Connell et al. 2016) also stresses that “quality early education is play-based, requires positive educator-child relationships and places children’s social and emotional development at the forefront” (8). As this interpretation of quality is personal and contextual, it seems contradictory to also claim to know or predict the outcomes of quality, or to recommend, as the report does: Building the data and evidence infrastructure needed to drive policy reform and maximise investment decisions, including: • Strengthening nationally consistent data • Leveraging the opportunities of data linkage to answer the more finegrained questions about what works, for whom, and in what circumstances. (46)

The notion of data as a means by which to better evidence, understand and deploy quality for young children echoes the OECD (2019) rhetoric and ambition, previously discussed, and is consistent with how the only quality agenda privileges education and developmental standardised data sets as evidence of public good. Taking a global view, the assumption that only quality is beneficial— where quality is narrowly interpreted—has been a key message circulated by the OECD over time. It has been noted in previous chapters that the OECD played a significant role in guiding Australia’s early childhood policies over time as an influencer of policy pathways. It is significant then, that in 2013 the OECD drew on data from the Starting Strong report cards (2001, 2006) and produced Starting Strong III: A Quality Toolkit for ECEC (OECD 2012) which asserted that: A growing body of research recognises that early childhood education and care (ECEC) brings a wide range of benefits… but all these benefits are conditional on ‘quality’. Expanding access to services without attention to quality will not deliver good outcomes for children or the long-term productivity

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benefits for society. Furthermore, research has shown that if quality is low, it can have long-lasting detrimental effects on child development, instead of bringing positive effects. (9, my italics)

The above excerpt makes a clear assumption about early childhood settings and ‘quality’, despite earlier acknowledging that “quality means different things to different people” (4). Hence, there is an inherent contradiction to the discursive logic that raises questions about the coherence of ‘only quality’ risk claims, for if quality is personal and contextual, how can be assumed to have a universal, conditional affect? Reference to the ‘growing body of evidence’ positions the ‘only quality’ assumption as a taken-forgranted truth, despite the later admission that “evidence is still dearth [sic] to suggest a certain course of a definitive set of policy actions to encourage quality” (4). This further contradiction highlights the ‘value-ladenness’ of third-party policy and knowledge production, which is imbued with ideology and agenda much like any state or government including vested interests like power and income (Ball 2015). Of interest is how the OECD stance that ‘all benefits are conditional on quality’ has shifted over time to a broader privileging of quality over access. As recent report Engaging Young Children: Lessons from Research About Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care (OECD 2018) explains: Reflecting on the important role of early childhood education and care (ECEC) services in providing all children with the skills they need to be successful in school and in helping disadvantaged children to catch up, many countries have increased their financial support for early childhood provision in recent years. More recently, the focus of debate has been shifting from expanding access to affordable early childhood education and care to enhancing its quality. This is because a growing body of research suggests that the magnitude of the benefits for children will depend on the level of quality of services. (11, my italics)

The above quotation demonstrates the concerning application of only quality agenda as a mandate for improving quality above expanding access to early childhood services, wherein quality is a value-laden, selective and increasingly narrow construction reflective of education and economic agenda. This raises questions about equity, for if access is not a priority in its own right, who will reap the benefits of ‘only quality early education’? Who decides? Aside from universally accessible preschool programs, this leaves the rights of young children from birth to 3 or 4 years (depending

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on legislation) to the market forces of competition and choice. Much like in Australia, market logics are used by the OECD to alleviate the state of broad social responsibilities for childcare for young children, noting that “policy makers face complex decisions in spending on ECEC, and need to consider trade-offs between structural investment and investment that improves the quality of the interactions between ECEC staff and children” (OECD 2018, 14). The report urges governments to look beyond structural quality policy levers to look at ways to improve (process quality) interactions between staff and children in early childhood settings, and argues for increased data and monitoring as follows: Data and monitoring can be a powerful lever to encourage quality in early childhood education and care (ECEC) by establishing facts, trends and evidence about whether children have equitable access to high-quality ECEC, as well as to inform of measures to achieve improvements. (OECD 2018, 95)

The above summary excerpt shows how even attempts to advocate for the personal and contextualised (process) aspects of quality are framed within the only quality agenda as something that can be—must be—understood through positivist measurements and datified evidence. This sits alongside the controversial OECD International Early Learning and Child Wellbeing Study (OECD 2019) agenda. Similarly, The World Bank Group 2014 report Stepping Up Early Childhood Development: Investing in Young Child for High Return (Denboba et al. 2014) notes that “beyond access, quality in pre-primary education is equally critical. Children will only benefit from increased access to ECEC if the services being provided meet core quality standards” (11, my italics). The logic presented is that while access is important, it is not worth pursuing if there is not a measurable minimum standard of quality. Taken broadly, this is a problematic consensus that disregards the broad benefits and opportunities of early childhood services (Hunkin 2019).

Conclusion: Tensions and Troubles with Only Quality Whilst my investigation of local and global knowledge production is by no means exhaustive, it does uncover themes and trends that constitute an only quality policy agenda and distil into a two key discursive tensions—first, it is

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agreed that quality is difficult to evidence but that consensus is interpreted as a contradictory mandate to generate more evidence; second, it is agreed that quality should be a dominant feature of all early childhood programs accessed but that consensus is interpreted as a contradictory quality over access agenda. Most troubling is the way that only quality agenda seeks to discredit childcare, particularly for young children, of public or social benefits—or not enough public benefit to justify social investment. As Harrison (2008) points out, for every ‘evidence’ of negative outcomes in childcare there are numerous evidences of benefit, or null effect and/or evidences of contradiction that can be found. In fact, recent RAND Institute report Investing Early: Taking Stock of Outcomes and Economic Return from Early Childhood Programs (Cannon et al. 2017), an update of the 2005 report Early Childhood Interventions: Proven Results, Future Promise (Karoly et al. 2005), concluded that: Across the 115 [early childhood] programs we reviewed, 102 (89 percent) had a positive effect on at least one child outcome, indicating that it is relatively rare, among published evaluations, to find programs that have no demonstrable impacts on child outcomes. Almost one in three outcomes were improved: Twenty-nine percent of outcomes (923) were positive, only 1 percent (34 outcomes) were negative, and the rest were null. (Cannon et al. 2017, xix)

Considering the above, it isn’t the agenda of this book to prove or disprove whether certain environments or factors or aspects of early childhood services are beneficial or not. However, the consequences of only quality agenda interpretations of childcare are already manifesting and must be engaged with if childcare is to have a thriving future. For who is championing childcare social investment strategies locally and globally? To cast an entire essential service into the policy shadows through contestable notions of private cost, risk or harm is unacceptable, it brings us back to Pence’s (1989) observation that “the histories of all day care/early childhood movements since the mid-1830s have been written in the shadow, within the eclipse, of… mother-care” (143). In the next chapter, I will critique some of the key assumptions and logics outlined in this chapter, with the view to open up broader lines of thinking about quality.

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References Abbott, T. 2013. Our Plan: Real Solutions for All Australians. Canberra: Liberal Party of Australia. Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority (ACECQA). 2017. “Ministers Agree to Changes to the National Quality Framework.” https:// www.acecqa.gov.au/ministers-agree-changes-national-quality-framework. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW). 2015. Literature Review of the Impact of Early Childhood Education and Care on Learning and Development. Working Paper Cat. No. CWS 53. Canberra: AIHW. Ball, S. J. 2012. Global Education Inc. New Policy Networks and the Neo-Liberal Imaginary. London and New York: Routledge. Ball, S. J. 2015. “Education, Governance and the Tyranny of Numbers.” Journal of Education Policy 30 (3): 299–301. Cannon, J., M. Kilburn, L. Karoly, T. Mattox, A. Muchow, and M. Buenaventura. 2017. Investing Early: Taking Stock of Outcomes and Economic Returns from Early Childhood Programs. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/ RR1993.html. Cheeseman, S., J. Sumsion, and F. Press. 2014. “Infants of the Productivity Agenda: Learning from Birth or Waiting to Learn?” Australasian Journal of Early Childhood 40 (3): 38–45. Commonwealth of Australia (COA). 2019. Budget 2019–2020: Our plan for a stronger economy. https://www.budget.gov.au/2019-20/content/download/ overview.pdf. Council of Australian Governments (COAG). 2009a. National Partnership Agreement on the National Quality Agenda for Early Childhood Education and Care. https://cabinet.qld.gov.au/documents/2009/Nov/National% 20Quality%20Agenda%20for%20Early%20Childhood%20Ed%20and%20Care/ Attachments/national_partnership_on_early_childhood_education.pdf. Council of Australian Governments (COAG). 2009b. Investing in the Early Years: A National Early Childhood Development Strategy. Canberra: Council of Australian Governments. Council of Australian Governments (COAG). 2015–2018. National Partnership on the National Quality Agenda for Early Childhood Educaiton and Care—2015–2016 to 2017–2018. http://www.federalfinancialrelations.gov. au/content/npa/education/national-partnership/National-Quality-EarlyChildhood-Education-2018-NP.pdf. Council of Australian Governments (COAG). 2018–2019. “National Partnership on Universal Access to Early Childhood Education—2018 and 2019.” http://www.federalfinancialrelations.gov.au/content/npa/education/ national-partnership/UAECE_2018_and_2019-final.pdf. Dahlberg, G., P. Moss, and A. Pence. 2006. Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care: Languages of Evaluation, 2nd ed. London: Routledge.

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Dawkins, P. 2010. “Institutionalising an Evidence-Based Approach to Policy Making: The Case of the Human Capital Reform Agenda.” In Strengthening Evidence Based Policy in the Australian Federation: Roundtable Proceedings, 231–247. Canberra, Melbourne: Australian Government, Productivity Commission. Denboba, A., R. Sayre, Q. Wodon, L. Elder, L. Rawlings, and J. Lombardi. 2014. Stepping Up Early Childhood Development: Investing in Young Children for High Returns. http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/ en/868571468321240018/pdf/92988-REVISED-PUBLIC-WB-ECDMar2016-ENG-v2-web.pdf. Department of Education and Training (DET). 2018. “Additional Child Care Subsidy.” https://www.education.gov.au/additional-child-care-subsidy-0. Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR). 2009. Belonging, Being & Becoming: The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia. Canberra, ACT: Commonwealth of Australia. Department of Human Services (DHS). 2019. Child Care Subsidy. https://www. humanservices.gov.au/individuals/services/centrelink/child-care-subsidy. Education Council Australia (ECA). 2014. Regulation Impact Statement for proposed options for changes to the National Quality Framework. https://www.acecqa.gov.au/sites/default/files/acecqa/files/Reports/ COAGReviewConsultationRegulationImpactStatement.pdf. Education Council Australia (ECA). 2017. Decision Regulation Impact Statement for Changes to the National Quality Framework. https://ris.pmc.gov.au/sites/ default/files/posts/2017/03/changes_to_the_national_quality_framework_ decision_ris.pdf. Education Services Australia (ECA). 2012. The Early Childhood Education and Care Workforce Strategy for Australia. Carlton: Standing Council for School Education and Early Childhood (SCSEEC). Foucault, M. 2009. “1 February 1978.” In Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, edited by M. Senellart, 87–115. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Gonski, D., T. Arcus, K. Boston, V. Gould, W. Johnson, L. O’Brien, L. Perry, and M. Roberts. 2018. Report of the Review to Achieve Educational Excellence in Australian Schools. https://docs.education.gov.au/system/files/doc/ other/662684_tgta_accessible_final_0.pdf. Harrison, L. 2008. “Does Child Care Matter? Associations Between SocioEmotional Development and Non-parents Child Care in a Representative Sample of Australian Children.” Family Matters 79: 14–25. Hearse, M. 2018, June 17. “The New Child Care Subsidy and What It Means.” Choice.com.au. https://www.choice.com.au/babies-and-kids/education-andchildcare/childcare/articles/childcare-benefit-changes. Heckman, J. 2000. “Policies to Foster Human Capital.” Research in Economics 54 (1): 3–56.

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Hunkin, E. 2019. “Being Seen and Being Changed: A Story of ‘Quality’ Early Childhood Education and the Global Education Reform Movement.” In Thinking About Pedagogy in Early Education Series: Policy Intersecting Pedagogy, edited by M. Gasper and L. Gibbs, 193–209. London and New York Routledge. Karoly, L., M. Kilburn, and J. Cannon. 2005. Early Childhood Interventions: Proven Results, Future Promise. https://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG341. html. Lawn, M. 2013. “Introduction: The Rise of Data in Education.” In The Rise of Data in Education Systems: Collection, Visualization and Use, edited by M. Lawn, 7– 10. Oxford, UK: Symposium Books. Lingard, B., and S. Sellar. 2016. “The Changing Organizational and Global Significance of the OECD’s Education Work.” In The Handbook of Global Education Policy, edited by K. Mundy, A. Green, B. Lingard and A. Verger, 357–373. West Sussex, UK: Wiley Blackwell. Mahon, R. 2010. “After Neo-Liberalism? The OECD, the World Bank and the Child.” Global Social Policy 10 (2): 172–192. Martens, K., and A. Jakobi. 2010. Mechanisms of OECD Governance: International Incentives for National Policy Making?. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Novoa, A., and T. Yariv-Mashal. 2014. “Comparative Research in Education: A Mode of Governance or a Historical Journey?” In World Yearbook of Education 2014: Governing Knowledge: Comparison, Knowledge-Based Technologies and Expertise in the Regulation of Education, edited by T. Fenwick, E. Mangez, and J. Ozga, 48–85. New York: Routledge. O’Connell, M., S. Fox, B. Hinz, and H. Cole. 2016. Quality Early Education for All: Fostering Creative, Entrepreneurial, Resilient and Capable Learners. Melbourne: Mitchell Institute. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). 2012. Starting Strong III: A Quality Toolbox for Early Childhood Education and Care. Paris: OECD. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). 2018. Engaging Young Children: Lessons from Research About Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care. Paris: OECD. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). 2019. “International Early Learning and Child Well-Being Study.” http://www.oecd. org/education/school/international-early-learning-and-child-well-beingstudy.htm. Pascoe, S., and D. Brennan. 2017. Lifting Our Game: Report of the Review to Achieve Educational Excellence in Australian Schools Through Early Childhood Interventions. https://www.education.act.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/ 1159357/Lifting-Our-Game-Final-Report.pdf. Pence, A. 1989. In the Shadow of Mother-Care: Contexts for an Understanding of Child Day Care in North America. Canadian Psychology 30 (2): 140–147.

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Pence, A. (2016). “Baby PISA: Dangers that can Arise when Foundations Shift.” Journal of Childhood Studies 41 (3): 54. Productivity Commission (PC). 2014a. “Childcare and Early Childhood Learning: Productivity Commission Inquiry Report, Overview and Recommendations.” https://www.pc.gov.au/inquiries/completed/childcare/report/childcareoverview.pdf. Productivity Commission (PC). 2014b. “Volume 1 Inquiry Report: Childcare and Early Childhood Learning.” https://www.pc.gov.au/inquiries/completed/ childcare/report/childcare-volume1.pdf. Rudd, K., and J. Macklin. 2007. New Directions for Early Childhood Education: Universal Access to Early Learning for 4 Year Olds. Canberra, ACT: Australian Labor Party. Sahlberg, P. 2016. “The Global Education Reform Movement and Its Impact on Schooling.” In The Handbook of Global Education Policy, edited by K. Mundy, A. Green, B. Lingard, and A. Verger, 128–144. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Sellar, S. 2015. “A Feel for Numbers: Affect, Data and Education Policy.” Critical Studies in Education 56 (1): 131–146. Shuey, E., and M. Kankaras. 2018. The Power and Promise of Early Learning. OECD Education Working Paper No. 186. Paris: OECD Publishing. Sims, M. 2017. “Neoliberalism and Early Childhood.” Cogent Education 4: 1–10. Smith, K., M. Tesar, and C. Myers. 2016. “Edu-Capitalism and the Governing of Early Childhood Education and Care in Australia, New Zealand and the United States.” Global Studies of Childhood 6 (1):123–135. The World Bank Group (WBG). 2019. Early Learning Partnership. http://www. worldbank.org/en/topic/education/brief/early-learning-partnership. UNICEF. 2019a. A World Ready to Learn: Prioritizing Quality Early Childhood Education. New York: UNICEF. UNICEF. 2019b. “Early Childhood Education: Every Children Deserves Access to Quality Early Childhood Education”. https://www.unicef.org/education/ early-childhood-education. UNICEF. n.d. “The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”. https://www. unicef.org/agenda2030/. Urban, M. 2012. “Researching Early Childhood Policy and Practice: A Critical Ecology.” European Journal of Education 47 (4): 494–507. Urban, M. 2015. “From ‘Closing the Gap’ to an Ethics of Affirmation: Reconceptualising the Role of Early Childhood Services in Times of Uncertainty.” European Journal of Education 50 (4): 293–306. https://doi.org/10.1111/ ejed.12131. Urban, M., and B. Swadener. 2016. “Democratic Accountability and Contextualized Systemic Evaluation.” International Critical Childhood Policy Studies 5 (1): 6–18.

CHAPTER 5

‘Wiping Noses and Stopping Children from Killing Each Other’: Contesting an Only Quality Agenda

Abstract In 2017, Australian Federal Senator David Leyonhjelm appeared on a popular news television program. Asked if he supported funding increases to bolster the early childhood quality regulations, he replied that, “a lot of women, mostly women, used to look after kids in childcare centres. And then they brought in this national quality framework and they had to go and get a Certificate III in childcare in order to continue the job they were doing — you know, wiping noses and stopping the kids from killing each other” (Weir et al. in “Senator David Leyonhjelm’s Childcare Comments Leave Viewers Gobsmacked,” 2017). This quote sets the scene for this chapter, which presents a critique of the dominant themes, assumptions and logics of only quality agenda in early childhood policy. Keywords Only quality reform · Early childhood policy · Childcare · Early childhood funding · Mother-care

Is Mother-Care Best? Was It Ever? The steadfast privileging of mother-care as best for children throughout the history of Australian and Anglophone countries (Pence and PaciniKetchabaw 2008) is now expressed by a contemporary ‘only quality’

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agenda that assumes in-home care is a neutral, risk-free alternative to childcare; moreover, that childcare is a family responsibility and choice (see Chapter 4). In Chapters 2 and 3, I highlighted how these views have served economic agenda in the past and in Chapter 4 I highlighted their application presently as a means to justifying neoliberal minus governance approaches that seek to minimise sites of state investment in quality early childhood services. Considering this socio-political history, it is important that mother-care is not accepted out of hand as ‘best’ for children. In fact, as Pence (1989) pointed out, the mother-caregiver has never been the globally dominant child-rearing paradigm. This raises questions about what and whose purposes has the mother-care paradigm served and does it continue to serve? The fabric of Australian society has always been woven from the sociopolitical expectations that families (women) should care for their own children, and that women are in the home (Clyde 2000). Chapter 2 discussed how the Australian colonies were settled without plans for the provision of children’s services, despite pregnant women and children being among the first settlers, and noted the subsequent fallout: young children were frequently left unsupervised and there were high child mortality rates; packs of unsupervised children roamed the streets of the new colonies, prompting the first public ‘ragged schools’, public charities run in by the church that included infant classes until public schooling commenced in 1966 (Brennan 1998). Until the 1900s, any deviant parenting behaviours were stigmatised as bad homes, risking involuntary ‘child rescue’ intervention by the state (Brennan 1998). Even once societal views had softened and the first children’s services opened due to the effort of philanthropic kindergarten and child day care movements from the 1880s, child day care was heavily stigmatised (Brennan 1998). In Chapter 4 I showed how this stigmatisation continues today through policy notions of ‘only quality’ as education outcomes and of public benefit, not childcare. In fact, I found that childcare, particularly for young children, is problematically absent from numerous contemporary policy initiatives both in Australia and globally, due to the interpretation of quality investment outcomes through a narrow, schoolified lens of what constitutes public benefit. These histories tell us that the mother-care paradigm is a construct of Western Liberal economic ideology (Pence 1989), not a social reality. Over time, Western Liberalism has taken various forms but a constant value has been its interpretation of economic freedom as the right of men, and women’s labour as a crucial source of unpaid care labour until

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as late as the 1980s (Fenna 2013). That means that like Western liberalism itself, the mother-care paradigm is an elastic, shifting concept (Mahon 2002) that Australian history suggests has evolved in two broad iterations: first, mother-care was cast as a social and moral imperative, discursively aligned with nationalism and prosperity (Brennan 1998). This was a view of mother-care as a means by which to privilege the male-breadwinner in times of job scarcity due to industrialisation, immigration flow and postWorld Wars (1850s–1950s) (Pence 1989). During this era, Australia developed a ‘male welfare state’ (Brennan 2002) wherein women’s dependency was built into the welfare state policy structures such as industrial relations, pensions and benefits (98). This use of mother-care casts the Western Liberal government as the caretaker of society, and families as responsible for themselves. I call this mother-care (traditional) in order to distinguish it from the second iteration. From the mid-1970s, amid the broader context of women’s rights movements and increasing freedoms, the Australian Commonwealth made explicit attempts to promote women’s unpaid care labour as a key factor for economic competitiveness, promoting ‘pro-family’ rhetoric and policy that encouraged women to stay in the home (Brennan 1998). Similar regimes emerged in the post-cold war Anglophone governments, such as the Reagan (USA) and Thatcher (UK) administrations (Rizvi and Lingard 2010). These truth politics discursively position the government as the caretaker of the economy (and by proxy the nation/society), which signals the shift from reform liberal governance to neoliberal governance in Australia. This also foreshadows future policy developments by highlighting the increasing neoliberal mindset that all policy problems, including those in public services, are best understood and solved through an economic lens (Sumsion 2006; Urban 2012). I call this the mother-care (economic) paradigm and it is within this discursive logic and agenda that only quality policy agenda sits. Hence, if we are to question policy constructions of quality, we also need to understand how those constructions have been and continue to be entwined with women’s and children’s rights, and the political and economic assumption that mother-care is best. Taking a governmentality view, it is important to note that early childhood policy including the more recent quality reform agenda have always been operationalised by the state as a “mechanism of subjection” (Foucault 1982, 782) because governments have used service access, funding and policies to shape the identity formation and conduct of populations in line with its broader agenda. To an extent, education systems have always

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serviced this purpose within societies—such as, through citizenship—however within conservative, technocratic neoliberal approaches to policy these “forces…work on changing society through changing education” (Riddle and Apple 2019, 3). To that end, we now see how policy notions of quality or ‘only quality’ and quality or ‘only quality’ agenda allow governments to expand the reach of subjectification across family and motherhood to children and childhood. First, through quality and now emerging ‘only quality’ policy regimes of surveillance and performance review that shape the inputs and outputs of quality in early childhood, including the children who embody these outputs and are themselves surveyed and shaped by standardised testing and data collection regimes. Second, through the promotion of values and norms about out-of-home care that serve government ‘only quality’ investment agenda, perhaps typified by the claim that childcare is inherently harmful for young children. Last, as the performance and accountability policy structures of quality and emerging ‘only quality’ investment policies require the early childhood workforce to self-regulate, comply and perform against standardised values and norms even if they do not share them (Ball 2003). This standardises aspects of the experiences, practices and values across early childhood settings and with that, standardises childhoods. This raises questions about where the spaces are in early childhood policy and politics for resistance and activism and change (Riddle and Apple 2019)? For even those early childhood stakeholders that engage in workforce education and training, workforce advocacy and so on , who might typically take the lead in opening up discussions about politics and change, need to pay heed to the policy realities to be of service to the sector. As an example, part of the funding allocation for Australia’s quality reform era included significant government grants that were awarded to leading early childhood advocacy groups so that they could develop materials to assist educators to implement the EYLF (Gillard 2008). I myself encounter these competing interests frequently in my role as an early childhood lecturer, as it is part of my professional and ethical responsibility to prepare new graduates for the workforce, which includes policy compliance. I wonder, how can we teach compliance and also encourage resistance? Why would the workforce be inspired to advocacy and change when their daily work and reality revolves around compliance pressures? It is not my intention to imply that early childhood stakeholders can’t occupy multiple roles across varied dimensions but to note that quality

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reform in early childhood this is a complex and highly politicised policyscape whose affects disproportionately affect women and children, and seem to be intensifying with the emerging only quality agenda, rather than stabilising. The ‘sub-industry’ of quality in early childhood (Penn 2011) now propagates compliance-based policy tools based on performance data collection and evaluation reflective of economic viewpoints that are often problematic and contradictory. Such as, governments that are continue to ‘invest’ in ‘only quality’ improvement in early childhood through market model policy levers whose actual affects have been shown to compromise quality (OECD 2006; Urban and Rubiano 2014). Or, the developing world governments that are being supported by International Aid Organisations to develop ‘quality’ mechanisms in education settings that have not yet achieved universal access policies (Altinyelken 2012) and/or do not have the resources to enact them (Jakobi 2012), since that ‘only quality’ can be prioritised over access (as discussed in Chapter 4). Therefore, it is a democratic imperative that we question the assumption that mother-care is best, since it forms that universal base line against which quality inputs and outputs in early childhood settings are determined and presumed to be beneficial, universal and measurable. Further, that we take a critical lens to quality reform agenda and truth claims in order to acknowledge how it actively promotes cultured, gendered and inequitable assumptions about what is best for children, principally by assuming an available, superior mother-care alternative, regardless of social need or social reality.

Can There Be ‘Only Quality’? ‘Only quality’ discourse and agenda constructs quality as an antidote to the inherent risk of out-of-home care (see Chapter 4) and this raises questions about the discursive logics being mobilised, for what and where are the environments without risk of harm? If we accept that these environments don’t exist, further questions are raised about why research and policy has and continues to search for summations and representations of ‘harm versus benefit’ relationships in early childhood at all? Further, why does the search for these relations dominate the early childhood sector but not in the formal education settings, since evidence of this type could doubtless be found? This line of questioning highlights the importance of how the state constructs and interprets its responsibilities for the early childhood services,

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and the responsibilities of others (Dahlberg et al. 2006). Chapter 2 highlighted that responsibilities for early childhood services were not addressed at settlement in Australia, or perhaps were addressed by omission. Consequently, the Australian governments expanded children’s services by introducing health and welfare services through ad hoc partnerships with the church, such as orphanages and training institutes. Nowadays, the Child Care Act 1972 and Council of Australian Governments (COAG) National Partnership Agreements on the Quality Agenda (discontinued from 2019, see Chapter 4) and Universal Access to Preschool (now renewed yearly), denote the boundaries of government responsibility for early childhood services. However as recent events have shown, these agreements are not unchangeable and do not provide the stability of a national legislation, such as the Australian Public Schools Act 1866. The delineation of responsibilities for early childhood services can remain in flux so long as governments deploy notions of quality to draw and redraw the sites and boundaries of private and public cost, benefit and responsibility. Such as, the example presented in Chapter 4 of staff-child ratios and qualifications. This takes us further and further away from the what I see as the key questions about early childhood settings within a social liberal society, which include whether market models of provision are ethical and how it can be agreed that young children do not have the right to access services for them, as older children do? Here, the assumption of an inherent risk of harm services plays an important role in creating a moral landscape that distracts from these lines of inquiry. For, why would governments be complicit in, or contribute public funds in aid of, the harm or disadvantage of children? Instead, the government creates and steers markets that can serve the needs of families should they chose to engage in the assumed risky business of childcare; the market self-regulates quality through choice and competition once minimum standard legislation are in place. In Australia, we are very used to this is model of provision, but it is deeply problematic to accept out of hand because it assumes that childcare access, particularly those that are very young, is a choice. As Australian history shows us, that has never been the social reality for some population groups in Australia, such as single mothers (Brennan 1998; Strachan 2010). Not to mention the current social reality, in which 35% of children from birth-two years and two-thirds of three year olds already attend early childhood services (Pascoe and Brennan 2018, 31), a steady increase from 20% in 2003 that currently sits at the OECD average

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(OECD 2016, 8). For government to continue to cast aspersions on childcare services that are already—and always have been—a crucial support and source of opportunity for the majority of Australian families and children is deeply unhelpful and problematic. Particularly, since unlike ‘pure’ markets, early childhood and education markets do not self-regulate for quality (Da Silva and Wise 2006; Sumsion and Goodfellow 2009) because parents make their choices about childcare based on the resources they have available to them (income, distance from home, availability of childcare, cost) and cannot easily enter and exit the services for those the same reasons, as well as the importance of the interpersonal relationships formed (Moss 2009). This makes the use of market levers inappropriate as a means by which to manage and improve quality inputs and outputs in childcare, as the only quality agenda seeks to do. Ironically, this returns us to the concern that market models of childcare actually compromise quality and create risk (see Chapter 3), despite being contradictorily constructed by policy as a private quality solution to inherently risky environments.

Can There Be Only Education? Only quality policy agenda positions age as a mediating factor in the assumed risk of harm of out-of-home care, typically through ‘evidences’ that link quality or access to early childhood settings to education performance data (see Chapter 4). Both Australian and international knowledge production has been active in creating this linkage, perhaps as exemplified by the UNICEF (2019) Sustainable Development Goals which apply the term ‘pre-primary’ to preschool services. This reflects the trend toward increasingly narrow policy interpretations of ‘schoolified’ learning (Urban 2015, 296) as ‘quality’ outcomes in early childhood (Hunkin 2019) and raises questions about whether we accept that an individual’s capacity to learn is determined by their chronological age? Conversely and contradictorily, the notion of the early years as a sensitive developmental period is consistently invoked to underpin the assumed risk of harm in out-of-home care but not necessarily to benefit, meaning that the ‘sensitive period’ has been re-interpreted by only quality agenda as one-directional (see Chapter 4). This view of young children as “waiting to learn” (Cheeseman et al. 2014, 38) was identified a dominant and deeply problematic, particularly if we question, what and where are the environments and experiences without learning?

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With this line of questioning, my aim is not to conflate but to highlight a distinction between learning and education: the former as a broad notion encompassing the various ways that one develops in understanding, and the latter as the experience of instruction or tutorage, also linked to a discipline and tradition (Farquhar and White 2014). Early childhood philosophies take a broad view of both education and learning, creating tensions around policy interpretations of education as formal education. The claim that early childhood environments can exist that are without— or be ‘low’ on—education is a view that disregards the specialist nature of early childhood play-based pedagogy and the ways that very young children learn and are ‘taught’. It is a case of mistaken identity in the sense that the state is incentivised to invest in ‘only quality’ early childhood settings where quality is interpreted as academic education/learning, but the known quality factors and indicators of learning in early childhood settings are very different from those of the formal sectors, since the services draw on play-based pedagogy (Nitecki and Wasmuth 2017). Contradictorily, this approach to promoting quality may actually compromise it. Here, the tension lies with the way ‘only quality’ policy discourse and agenda interprets benefit and quality, particularly its politicised linkage of academic and education/learning outcomes with quality outcomes. I say this is politicised because it is an investment approach that constitutes “grooming education systems” (Hunkin 2019, 203) including early childhood for the type of education performance that is assumed to translate into economic competitiveness and success. Early childhood plays an important role in that ambition as the service that prepares children for later schooling success (Sims 2017). However, the early childhood sector has never seen itself as performing just this function. The early childhood sector has never seen itself as solely a preparation for schooling service, yet we cannot ignore that historically, early childhood services in Australia, as well as numerous other Western countries, have always been separated into early care or early education services (Pascoe and Brennan 2018) and continue to be today in various ways, such as, by policy and funding structures. This has created ‘fault lines’ that leave the sector open to the type of reimaging and distinctions that the ‘only quality’ discourse and agenda undertakes. However, it is critical to remember that even as it was aligned with early education, kindergartens and preschools have never conformed to traditional notions and pedagogies of education. Quite the opposite, in fact, as kindergartens were borne from a Froebel’s agenda of ‘revolutionary’ play-based learning pedagogy that in Australia,

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was protected fiercely by the kindergarten movement (Dombrowski 2002). As an example, the Kindergarten Union prioritised training its own teachers over the expansion of kindergartens (Brennan 1998) arguing that kindergarten pedagogy was too different to occur alongside formal education sector training (Whitehead 2010). Child day care tended to draw on medical models of care but over time, as services have expanded and were linked to policy devices such as government subsidies and accreditation, the sector has become increasingly focused on supporting play-based education and care (Brennan 1998). In fact, Australia’s first iteration of the Child Care Act 1972 had a clear early education and care agenda, setting aside funding for bachelor qualified early childhood (preschool) teachers in childcare settings (Hunkin 2014). Increasingly from the 1990s, childcare and preschool services have become integrated in Australia and globally, indicated by a global shift in terminology to an ‘early childhood education and care’ sector (Hunkin 2014). Perhaps exemplifying this integration is the National Quality Framework (ACECQA 2010) itself, which brought all early childhood services in Australia together under one national governance framework. In Australia in 2016, only 38% of preschool programs were ‘stand-alone’ or affiliated with primary schools, and 62% of preschool programs were provided within a long day care service (Pascoe and Brennan 2018, 27), showing that highly integrated delivery models dominate the Australian sector, despite material differences in the funding and workforce structures of childcare and preschool. Hence, the way that the only quality agenda aligns preschool with education and reimagines it as a prior-to-school year service is a problematic misunderstanding of the service, its values, pedagogy, intentions and functional partnerships. To assume that childcare settings are without or low on education is an unhelpful view of young children and how they learn that does not reflect service realities, social need or service potential. This raises question for the future of the early childhood sector and its revolutionary pedagogy and practice. For, if policy continues to search for evidence of education as instruction or tutelage, rather than holistic, playbased education that draws on a view of children as competent, capable learners from birth (Cheeseman et al. 2014), how and what means exist through which to recognise the broader benefits of early childhood settings? By broad benefits, I refer to those immeasurable, daily moments of happiness, development and learning that come from the unique opportunities available to children in a setting that is resourced and organised

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to meet their needs (Penn 2011; Moss 2014). There are also the cultural, social, ethical and moral (Moss 2014; Rizvi and Lingard 2010) economies of early childhood services that cannot be reflected in the data-driven education performance ‘evidences’ currently privileged by policy, since they are not easily measured or summated. Emerging research suggests that these tensions are already being felt in early childhood settings. Australian educators report that curriculum and pedagogical aspects not clearly visible within the Early Years Learning Frameworks (Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations [DEEWR] 2009) tend to be minimised or ignored (Sims 2017). Educators also report a perceived erosion of play (Barblett et al. 2016) amid a growing pressure to teach phonics (Campbell 2015). Unfortunately, the Australian experience appears to echo trends in the UK (Bradbury 2019; Roberts-Holmes 2014) and America (Nitecki and Wasmuth 2017) of ‘schoolification’. In fact, Sims (2017) asserts that the impact of the global reform agenda for early childhood as a preparation for schooling service has been “devastating” (1) and can be seen across the developed and developing countries (5). As such, we are reminded that there is a material quality to the ‘only quality’ policy agenda. It is changing the nature of early childhood settings in ways that don’t necessary reflect the holistic, play-based pedagogies of teaching and learning that typify the sector (Smith et al. 2016; Nitecki and Wasmuth 2017; Sims 2017) and as such, must be engaged with urgently by early childhood stakeholders.

Peddlers of Harm? Considering the Childcare Workforce As a final point of discussion, the ‘only quality’ agenda raises questions about the experiences of the early childhood workforce who are being progressively reimagined as the instruments of lifelong benefit or of lifelong harm. Elsewhere, I have written about how quality reform constitutes a high-stakes reform agenda (Hunkin 2018) and here I add that the emergence of ‘only quality’ discourse and agenda creates a troubling, highly emotive and moral dimension to the policy stakes, since educators are assumed to be complicit in harm to children if their services are not ‘quality’ (as per the increasingly limited, schoolified and economic policy view of what quality is and does). What must it be like to be implicated in the risk of harm to children? Particularly, when one’s professional ethics and expertise assert that play-based learning is both appropriate and conducive

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to children’s happiness, learning and development? Sims (2017) rightly notes that as we learn more about how important the early childhood years are, it is more important than ever that the early childhood workforce are thoughtful and critical in how they respond to policy agenda and its potential impacts (5). Yet, ‘only quality’ discourse and agenda create a dangerous discursive context in which to practice such resistance, since ‘not quality’ childcare settings are assumed to cause potential lifelong harm to children. Moreover, to demonstrate quality according to only quality policy agenda is to promote schoolified pedagogy and outcomes (Urban 2015) that are not in line with early childhood philosophy and hence, can feel akin to doing harm (Nitecki and Wasmuth 2017, 3). Finally, within a market model of provision, increases in policy performance expectations are not necessarily matched by increases in resourcing or workforce conditions (Urban and Rubiano 2014). This leads me to question, what must it be like to be implicated in the risk of harm to children? In Australia, the early childhood workforce has philanthropic roots, having emerged as charitable women’s work (Brennan 1998). Female teachers were sought from middle-class backgrounds to ensure they could afford the private tuition and were not in need to a professional salary (Whitehead 2008). The view that kindergarten teachers were pursuing a ‘calling’ or vocation—not a profession—was dominant across the international kindergarten movements, based on Froebel’s notion of the well-bred, maternal, self-sacrificing kindergartener (Dombrowski 2002). Hence, there is and always has been a strong moral and vocational imperative sustaining the early childhood workforce in Australia (Stonehouse 1994) that manifests today in poor wages and workforce conditions, but also highlights how potentially impactful these presumptions of harm might be. The National Quality Framework quality structures are currently sensitive enough that the charge of harm is not made openly or directly—for example, Australia’s National Quality Ratings categorise a poor performing service as ‘Working Towards National Quality Standard’ or as ‘Significant Improvement Needed’. The downside to this is that the assumption of inherent risk or harm, particularly for children under three years of age, remains shrouded in ambiguity and contradiction. For, how can it be that childcare is a place of consequence capable of causing harm but also a place of menial women’s work for children waiting to learn? Or put another way, how can childcare be a place where women are ‘wiping noses and stopping children from killing one another’ but also potentially facilitating lifelong harm and detriment? Since the ‘only quality’ discursive framework does

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not cast early childhood settings as inherently beneficial and also presumes to know how to evaluate its benefits, it is the workforce that shoulders the burden of quality compliance, for they alone are the executors (performers) of quality. All other stakeholders are positioned by market logics as investors (government) or consumers (families and children). This is a troubling policy mandate that can be interpreted as produce (our version of) quality or produce harm. Researchers note that the only consensus drawn from decades of costto-benefit studies in early childhood with some confidence across time and populations has been that the parent and family context are the most important factors that impact a child’s education outcomes later in life (Cleveland 2012; Pascoe and Brennan 2018). For example, international studies broadly indicate that the mother’s education (Harding et al. 2015; Jackson et al. 2017; Magnuson et al. 2009; Bjorklund and Salvanes 2011), particularly literacy skills (Sastry and Pebley 2010), are impactful across countries and socio-economic groups on a child’s academics. This highlights another concerning contradiction in that the ‘only quality’ agenda privileges in-home care by interpreting childcare an inherently risky, yet a more suitable policy response within the broader agenda of improving education performance might actually be to support mothers to return to study and/or work through universal access to childcare. This raises questions about what opportunities are missed when market logics construct the early childhood workforce as performers of quality and the family as only a consumer of quality? Viewed in this way, it is stark how ‘only quality’ discourse and reform agenda create unhelpful divisions not solely limited to ‘quality’ and ‘not-quality’, or ‘beneficial’ and ‘harmful’, but also between the very stakeholders that contribute to these outcomes. For the workforce, this manifests as a low-trust policy culture (Lingard 2010) of accountability and surveillance that can compromise relationships between services and families by pitting families as consumers, rather than partners.

Conclusion: The Phantom Alternative? ‘Only quality’ policy discourse and agenda rely on the assumption of a phantom alternative to childcare. This assumption is highly questionable, since the stories of history as well as the present tell us that families and mothers that have always needed, wanted and utilised childcare services. It also presumes a future in which women do not enjoy greater equity, choice and self-determination around their professional and economic futures. Yet

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as Sims (2009) points out, we have a choice as to whether or not we accept the only quality agenda and its assumptions: We could choose to believe that parents had a right to additional support to ensure that their children experienced the best possible child-rearing environments, and that it is our responsibility, as a society, to ensure that all parents participate in a range of services to best ensure all members of their family had a high quality of life. In this context, we would interpret… that children who have multiple, secure attachments are less at risk than children who have one secure primary attachment. No mother can guarantee that she will not get sick, be hospitalised or die in an accident, leaving her child without a primary attachment figure. No mother can guarantee that she can be physically and emotionally available to her child all the time. Children who have multiple secure attachments will always have others in their lives to rely on, ensuring that each individual in that circle of attachment is not called upon to supply more than s/he is capable of doing at any one time… Sharing the caring means the demands of caring are less for all, without compromising the quality of the care offered…Multiple secure attachments are a protective factor against negative outcomes as demonstrated across a range of human and animal societies. (39)

Drawing on Sims’ (2009) notion of what we ‘choose’ to believe, it is important to remember that the mother-care paradigm has not always dominated Anglophone Western culture—it is not unmoveable, it is not the ‘truth’ (Pence 1989). Although the policy pathway of quality reform and governance has become incredibly sticky and path dependent (Penn 2011) it would be a mistake to resign ourselves to its reality. It is a reality fraught with contradictions, tensions and most importantly, values and agenda that do not necessarily serve the social need or reality. For example, across Europe, growing numbers of young children are living in poverty (Urban 2015) and globally, women’s employment continues to rise (OECD 2018, 15) as does the number of children accessing formal early childhood services at younger and younger ages (2). How does ‘only quality’ policy discourse and agenda serve this social reality? ‘Only quality’ discourse and agenda are the vestiges of a collapsing neoliberal capitalist world order and like that world order, the ways that we think about quality and how it sits within early childhood settings—what they are and do—must evolve as we progress toward an unknown future. I am aware that these are bold claims and I don’t mean to be dismissive

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of quality reform policies unilaterally, as if decades of reform and investment had not brought gains to the sector because they have. However, in the next and final chapter I will discuss the unique chapter in history that we find ourselves in and why we must no longer tolerate neoliberal interpretations of early childhood settings or quality therein.

References Altinyelken, H. 2012. “A Converging Pedagogy in the Developing World? Insights from Uganda and Turkey.” In Global Education Policy and International Development: New Agendas, Issues and Policies, edited by A. Verger, M. Novell, and H. Altinyelken, 201–223. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority (ACECQA). 2010. National Quality Framework. http://www.acecqa.gov.au/national-qualityframework. Ball, S. J. 2003. “The Teacher’s Soul and the Terrors of Performativity.” Journal of Education Policy 18 (2): 215–228. Barblett, L., M. Knaus, and C. Barratt-Pugh. 2016. “The Pushes and Pulls of Pedagogy in the Early Years: Competing Knowledge and the Erosion of PlayBased Learning.” Australasian Journal of Early Childhood 41 (4): 36–43. Bjorklund, A., and K. G. Salvanes. 2011. “Education and Family Background: Mechanisms and Policies.” In Handbook of the Economics of Education, edited by E. Hanushek and F. Welch, 201–247. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: North Holland. Bradbury, A. 2019. “Datafied at Four: The Role of Data in the ‘Schoolification’ of Early Childhood Education in England.” Learning, Media and Technology 44 (1): 7–21. Brennan, D. 1998. The Politics of Australia Child Care: Philanthropy to Feminism and Beyond. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Brennan, D. 2002. “Australia: Child Care and State-Centered Feminism in a Liberal Welfare Regime.” In Child Care Policy at the Crossroads: Gender and Welfare State Restructuring, edited by S. Michel and R. Mahon, 95–112. New York: Routledge. Campbell, S. 2015. “Feeling the Pressure: Early Childhood Educators’ Reported Views About Learning and Teaching Phonics in Australian Prior-to-School Settings.” Australasian Journal of Language and Literacy 38 (1): 12–26. Cheeseman, S., J. Sumsion, and F. Press. 2014. “Infants of the Productivity Agenda: Learning from Birth or Waiting to Learn?” Australasian Journal of Early Childhood 40 (3): 38–45. Cleveland, G. 2012. “The Economic of Early Childhood Education and Care in Canada.” In Recent Perspectives on Early Childhood Education and Care in Canada, edited by N. Howe and L. Prochner, 80–109. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

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Clyde, M. 2000. “The Development of Kindergarten in Australia at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: A Response to Social Pressures and Educational Influences.” In Kindergartens and Cultures: The Global Diffusion of an Idea, edited by R. Wollons, 87–112. New York: Yale University Press. Dahlberg, G., P. Moss, and A. Pence. 2006. Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care: Languages of Evaluation, 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Da Silva, L., and S. Wise. 2006. “Parent Perspectives on Childcare Quality Among a Culturally Diverse Sample.” Australian Journal of Early Childhood 31 (3): 6–14. Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR). 2009. Belonging, Being & Becoming: The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia. Canberra, ACT: Commonwealth of Australia. Dombrowski, K. 2002. “Kindergarten Teacher Training in England and the United States 1950–1918.” History of Education 31 (5): 475–489. Farquhar, S., and E. J. White. 2014. “Philosophy and Pedagogy of Early Chlidhood.” Educational Philosophy and Theory 46 (8): 1–2. Fenna, A. 2013. “Political Ideologies.” In Government Politics in Australia, edited by A. Fenna, J. Robbins, and J. Summers, 112–136. Frenchs Forest, NSW: Pearsons. Foucault, M. 1982. “The Subject and Power.” Critical Inquiry 8 (4): 777–795. Gillard, J. 2008. Budget 2008–2009: Education Revolution. http://www.budget. gov.au/2008-09/content/ministerial_statements/download/Education.pdf. Harding, J., P. Morris, and D. Hughes. 2015. “The Relationship Between Maternal Education and Children’s Academic Outcomes: A Theoretical Framework.” Journal of Marriage and Family 77 (1): 60–76. Hunkin, E. 2014. “We’re Offering True Play-Based Learning: Teacher Perspectives on Education Dis/continuity in the Early Years.” Australasian Journal of Early Childhood 39 (2): 30–35. Hunkin, E. 2018. “If Not Quality, Then What? The Discursive Risks in Early Childhood Quality Reform.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2018.1453780. Hunkin, E. 2019. “Being Seen and Being Changed: A Story of ‘Quality’ Early Childhood Education and the Global Education Reform Movement.” In Thinking About Pedagogy in Early Education Series: Policy Intersecting Pedagogy, edited by M. Gasper and L. Gibbs, 193–209. London and New York Routledge. Jackson, M., K. Kiernan, and S. McLanahan. 2017. “Maternal Education, Changing Family Circumstances and Children’s Skill Development in the United States and UK.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 674 (1): 59–84. Jakobi, A. 2012. “International Organisation and Policy Diffusion: The Global Norm of Lifelong Learning.” Journal of International Relations and Development 15 (1): 31–64.

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Lingard, B. 2010. “Policy Borrowing, Policy Learning: Testing Times in Australian Schooling.” Critical Studies in Education 51 (2): 129–147. Magnuson, K., H. Sexton, P. Davis-Kean, and A. C. Huston. 2009. “Increases in Maternal Education and Young Children’s Language Skills.” Merill-Palmer Quarterly 55 (3): 319–350. Mahon, R. 2002. “Gender and Welfare State Restructuring: Through the Lens of Child Care.” In Child Care Policy at the Crossroad: Gender and Welfare State Restructuring, edited by S. Michel and R. Mahon, 1–27. New York: Routledge. Moss, P. 2009. There Are Alternatives! Markets and Democratic Experimentalism in Early Childhood Education and Care. Working Paper No. 53. The Hague, The Netherlands: Bernard van Leer Foundation and Bertelsmann Stiftung. Moss, P. 2014. Transformative Change and Real Utopias in Early Childhood Education: A Story of Democracy, Experimentation and Potentiality. Oxon: Routledge. Nitecki, E., and H. Wasmuth. 2017. “Global Trends in Early Childhood Practice: Working Within the Limitations of the Global Education Reform Movement.” Global Education Review 4 (3): 1–13. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). 2006. Starting Strong II: Early Childhood Education and Care. Paris: OECD. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). 2016. Starting Strong IV: Early Childhood Education and Care Data Country Note, Australia. Paris: OECD. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). 2018. OECD Labour Force Statistics 2008–2017. Paris: OECD. Pascoe, S., and D. Brennan. 2018. Lifting Our Game: Report of the Review to Achieve Educational Excellence in Australian Schools Through Early Childhood Interventions. https://www.education.act.gov.au/__data/assets/ pdf_file/0004/1159357/Lifting-Our-Game-Final-Report.pdf. Pence, A. 1989. “In the Shadow of Mother-Care: Contexts for an Understanding of Child Day Care in North America.” Canadian Psychology 30 (2): 140–147. Pence, A., and V. Pacini-Ketchabaw. 2008. “Discourses on Quality Care: The Investigating ‘Quality’ Project and the Canadian Experience.” Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 9 (3): 241–255. Penn, H. 2011. Quality in Early Childhood Services: An International Perspective. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Riddle, S., and M. Apple. 2019. “Education and Democracy in Dangerous Times.” In Re-imagining Education for Democracy, edited by S. Riddle and M. Apple, 1–11. London: Routledge. Rizvi, F., and B. Lingard. 2010. Globalizing Education Policy. Oxon: Routledge. Roberts-Holmes, G. 2014. “The ‘Datafication’ of Early Years Pedagogy: ‘If the Teaching Is Good, the Data Should Be Good and If There’s Bad Teaching, There Is Bad Data’.” Journal of Education Policy 30 (3): 302–315.

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Sastry, N., and A. Pebley. 2010. “Family and Neighborhood Sources of Socioeconomic Inequality in Children’s Achievement.” Demography 47 (3): 777–800. Sims, M. 2009. “Neurobiology and Child Development: Challenging Current Interpretation and Policy Implications.” Australasian Journal of Early Childhood 34 (1): 36–42. Sims, M. 2017. “Neoliberalism and Early Childhood.” Cogent Education 4: 1–10. Smith, K., M. Tesar, and C. Myers. 2016. “Edu-Capitalism and the Governing of Early Childhood Education and Care in Australia, New Zealand and the United States.” Global Studies of Childhood 6 (1): 123–135. Stonehouse, A. 1994. Not Just Nice Ladies. Castle Hill, NSW: Pandemelon Press. Strachan, G. 2010. “Still Working for the Man? Women’s Employment Experiences in Australia Since 1950.” Australian Journal of Social Issues 45 (1): 117–131. Sumsion, J. 2006. “From Whitlam to Economic Rationalism and Beyond: A Conceptual Framework for Political Activism in Children’s Services.” Australian Journal of Early Childhood 31 (1): 1–11. Sumsion, J., and J. Goodfellow. 2009. “Parents as Consumers of Early Childhood Education and Care: The Feasibility of Demand-Led Improvement to Quality.” In Paid Care in Australia: Politics, Profits, Practices, edited by D. King and G. Meagher, 167–202. Sydney: Sydney University Press. UNICEF. 2019. “Early Childhood Education: Every Children Deserves Access to Quality Early Childhood Education.” https://www.unicef.org/education/ early-childhood-education. Urban, M. 2012. “Researching Early Childhood Policy and Practice: A Critical Ecology.” European Journal of Education 47 (4): 494–507. Urban, M. 2015. “From ‘Closing the Gap’ to an Ethics of Affirmation: Reconceptualising the Role of Early Childhood Services in Times of Uncertainty.” European Journal of Education 50 (4): 293–306. https://doi.org/10.1111/ ejed.12131. Urban, M., and C. Rubiano. 2014. Privatisation in Early Childhood Education: An Explorative Study on Impacts and Implications. London: Education International. Weir, J., K. Stephens, and B. Brook. 2017. “Senator David Leyonhjelm’s Childcare Comments Leave Viewers Gobsmacked.” News.com.au, January 11. https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/tv/current-affairs/senator-davidleyonhjelms-childcare-comments-leave-viewers-gobsmacked/news-story/ ddb42928df23c0bde12f0e884430c45b. Whitehead, K. 2008. “The Construction of Early Childhood Teachers’ Professional Identities, Then and Now.” Australian Journal of Early Childhood 33 (3): 34– 41. Whitehead, K. 2010. “A Decided Disadvantage for the Kindergarten Students to Mix with the State Teachers.” Paedagogica Historica 46 (1–2): 85–97. https:// doi.org/10.1080/00309230903528470.

CHAPTER 6

Quality Futures? The Case for Re-democratising Early Childhood Education and Care

Abstract The conclusion chapter draws the book to a close by uniting the common threads of discussion into a single urgent line of questioning: what and who are early childhood education and care settings for, and who decides? Dominant historical and contemporary constructions of early childhood services are critiqued, and tensions are identified in regard to the inadequacy of neoliberal constructions of early childhood services in our uncertain times. Divergent futures for quality in early childhood settings are imagined as a means by which to identify pathways forward through every day examples of activism and change. Keywords Early childhood policy futures · Early childhood services · History and philosophy of early childhood

Questioning Early Childhood Services In the introduction to this book I relayed that its inquiry had begun in early childhood classrooms, so it seems fitting to conclude by returning to that same place. For as important as these questions of policy and politics, truth and discourse are, they ultimately sit within a broader line of questioning that early childhood post-structural researchers (Dahlberg et al. 2006; Moss 2010, 9; Pence and Pacini-Ketchabaw 2008; Urban 2015) have been pursuing for some time: what and who are early childhood services for? Who © The Author(s) 2019 E. Hunkin, The Quality Agenda in Early Childhood Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31627-3_6

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decides? As I have emphasised throughout this book, the answers to those questions are value-laden and have been changeable throughout history— but also, not that changeable, considering that the Anglophone countries have constructed a vision and mission for early childhood settings within a mother-care agenda since the 1850s (Brennan 1998; Dombrowski 2002; Pence 1989), an agenda that I have argued is now expressed through quality reform policy agenda. The mother-care agenda has meant that early childhood settings in the Anglophone countries have been conceptualised as places for reproducing at-home, maternal care since their inception (Dahlberg et al. 2006). Drawing on Froebel’s promotion of the maternal kindergarten teacher figure (Dombrowski 2002) and later, on attachment pedagogy and developmental psychology (Brennan 1998), Western Anglophone early childhood settings emphasised the bond between a primary caregiver (female) and child (Dahlberg et al. 2006) as a means by which to ensure that nonmaternal care was not detrimental. In Australia, the work of John Bowlby (1951) on maternal deprivation was particularly influential from the 1950s (Brennan 1998, 91), employed by the kindergarten movement as the basis for setting kindergarten attendance age at three years, and part-time hours. Hence, early childhood settings in the Western Anglophone countries have been and continue to be constructed as a “substitute home” (Dahlberg et al. 2006, 64) for young children, wherein the adult femalechild relationship is of paramount importance, as are the adult-centric features and potentials of the environment. This view framed early childhood research from the 1950s and 60s that focused on qualifying and quantifying the impact of childcare whether positive or negative and the factors that influence this impact (Pence and Pacini-Ketchabaw 2008). As these notions of ‘quality’ now form the basis of policy frameworks across the globe, such as licensing and regulations, frameworks or outcomes (Dalli et al. 2011) an echo-chamber has emerged wherein the construction of early childhood settings as a substitute for mother/in-home care frame the questions and answers about quality that inform research, interpretations of data, policy discourse, agenda and governance structures. Resultant policy mechanisms in turn, shape the behaviour and values of early childhood stakeholder populations. However, mother-care has never been confirmed as a dominant global child-rearing paradigm (Pence 1989). For example, current data suggests that whilst the majority of children globally live in two-parent families (Scott et al. 2015) the living arrangements do not necessarily correlate to

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child day care choices, which vary. Global trends suggest that where formal childcare options exist a mother’s working hours tend to reduce, whereas in the “poorer countries informal care is both cheaper and more likely to be provided by extended family” so the mother’s working hours are less affected, if at all (Scott et al. 2015, 67). Across 49 countries it was reported that “the majority of adults agree that working mothers can establish relationships with their children that are as strong as those of stay-at-home mothers” (5) which suggests that childcare decisions are not necessarily made on the basis of any presumed mother-care superiority. Further to that, the OECD reports that an average of 33% of children aged 0–3 years already access childcare (OECD 2018, 2) for an average of 25–35 hours per week (3) across the OECD countries. Highest access was at 50–60% in the Nordic countries and the lowest at under 1% in Turkey (2). Considering these rates of access, it is interesting that a correlation was reported between childcare access and family socio-economic status, where children from wealthier families and/or with degree qualified mothers were more likely to attend early childhood programs when aged 0–3 years (OECD 2018, 2). Across the OECD countries, access to early childhood or primary programs for 3–5 years sits at an 86.4% median (OECD 2018, 5) but enrolment for three year-olds is hugely variable between countries. My contention is that since mother-care isn’t a cultural or biological ‘norm’ or preference—should such things exist—then it must not continue as a default point of reference for what is best for children, and in turn, frame our views of what early childhood services are and can do. What speaks volumes is how little regulatory or research interest there has been over time in the important features of early childhood settings that are not adult(woman)-centric, like the contributions of peer groups, natural environments, culture and community involvement to child and family outcomes of early childhood programs (Dahlberg et al. 2006), or the impact of early childhood settings on child/family happiness, and opportunities (Penn 2011). As Penn (2011) points out, these factors are not easy measured or summated which makes them unattractive candidates for research evidences and policy discourse. Beyond this, they also represent a view of early childhood settings as broadly beneficial to children, families and communities—a social good—which is less compatible to the view of childrearing and childcare as a private (mother/family or business) endeavour that has dominated both historical and contemporary understandings of early childhood services in many countries.

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The view of child-rearing and childcare as a private responsibility has guided the Western Liberal construction and policy treatment of early childhood services as a private service since the 1850s, with the exception of kindergartens which have typically had various—albeit precarious— alignments with education (Dombrowski 2002). This is a dominant sociopolitical view of early childhood settings as a private enterprise or a business (Dahlberg et al. 2006) that is most dominant in the Western Liberalist countries due to the individualistic values that frame education outcomes as a private or personal benefit (Dahlberg et al. 2006). Here, there is an interesting dynamic to observe in that education outcomes are viewed by the Western liberal cultures as a private capital or private good, yet education institutions are still used by governments to perform a homogenising, productive social function, such as through the impartment of citizenship and community values (Freire 2004; Moss 2014). Hence, even when education sectors are privatised, governments still support the markets through policy structures like licensing, regulations, curriculums or practice frameworks and so on. These mechanisms in turn, allow the state to shape and steer the market, its inputs and its outputs, or products (Brennan et al. 2012). In this way, these two seemingly contradictory—private and public—constructions come together in what Goodman (2007) described as a “paradox of performativity” (143) that “threaten[s] to turn our schools into places of uniformity and barrenness – hardly a site on which standards will rise and educational inspiration flourish” (144). State policy regimes of surveillence and accountability are presented as measures of quality assurance but in actuality deploy value-laden judgements and comparisons in tandem with rewards and sanctions (i.e. funding, published performance data) to shape the behaviour of education stakeholders (Ball 2003) in ways that are not always fair or equitable. For, as Connell (2013) points out, the market relies on the creation of winners and losers so that the private sector can flourish. In recent times, the productive agenda of early childhood settings has intensified in tandem early childhood being identified as a sensitive period of development in the human lifespan (Moss 2014) and the global uptake of a lifelong learning agenda (Urban 2015). Translated by the dominant global neoliberal policy paradigm, lifelong learning discourse drives the increasingly narrow interpretation of early childhood settings as a preparation for school setting (Urban 2015, 296). The second key influence of lifelong learning agenda has been the recasting of quality early education settings as a means for the reparation of human capital (Moss 2014) as

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it pertains to schooling, like retention and achievement gaps due to disadvantage and inequity (Urban 2015). The message is that more and better quality education ameliorates disadvantage, which Urban (2015) points out “effectively prevents the critical question of whether the kind of education provided to children might actually be part of the problem” (296). To access ‘high quality’ early childhood education and not do well is then interpreted as the responsibility of the individual and/or the setting, rather than a failure of the dominant culture. This makes it increasingly difficult, but not impossible, for individuals and/or education sites themselves to engage in activism (Apple 2018; Urban 2015). As Goodman (2007) puts it, educators are encouraged to “take their hearts and minds from the enterprise and perform as technicians carrying out the mandates and mission of others…” (146). This is a concerning shift from the caring and personal values that were once the backbone of workforces like early childhood education. Since children/students embody the productive and reparative agenda of quality education outputs, an only quality agenda amounts to a very problematic state investment in and governance of children’s being and becoming —their self-identity, values and understanding of the world around them and their place in it. In Chapter 5 I drew on the history of mother-care policies to argue that early childhood services have always been wielded by government as a mechanism of subjection targetting family models and motherhood; now we must consider how these forces have extended to children and childhoods through quality policy agenda, and in service of economic ends (Smith et al. 2016; Moss 2014). Market model quality policy levers typically promote individualism, competition and personal autonomy/responsibility, which are concerning values to steep children in. This raises questions about how ethical quality performativity policy mechanisms are, such as, standardised tests and data collection regimes. How might these pressures affect children and students in regards to their well-being and self-determination (Apple 2018)? The last 50–60 years have seen a rise in student mental ill-health in the UK (NHS 2018), USA (Twenge et al. 2010) and Australia (Headspace 2019), trends that researchers have linked to competitive, coercive schooling trends (Herman et al. 2009) and a lack of self-directed activities (Gray 2011; Whitebread 2017). Observing this trend in early childhood settings, Nitecki and Wasmuth (2017) reflect that

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Too often, there is no joy in early childhood settings anymore and the question whether children should be happy when spending their time in such institutions seems to be naive for most people in power, who are making decisions about our field. (5)

Whilst these concerns might seem naïve to some as suggested above, they are also important questions about our experiences of democracy (Apple 2018). Is it ethical for a democratic state to wield early childhood and education settings as a mechanism of economic subjection (Apple 2018; Sims 2017) rather than to progress tolerance, democracy, equity and selfdetermination (Freire 2004; Giroux 2011)? Market liberalism promotes a competitive ethic that acknowledges others only as they affect the individual’s progress—other as consumers, competitors or markets—so “collectivism is both presupposed and disavowed” (Yeatman 2017, 7). This is a complex contradiction, since equitable, democratic societies rely on a deep understanding and engagement with diversity and difference through shared collectivist values and an agenda of tolerance and equity (Apple 2018; Freire 2004; Giroux 2015). Moreover, despite being presented as a type of universal common sense due to the championing of global networks and policy actors, the view of education and learning as a private capital and commodity does not represent the values of numerous populations and societies globally (Urban and Rubiano 2014). For example, Muslim, Asian, African and Indigenous communities tend to emphasise collectivist values, with diverse interpretations and applications (Urban and Rubiano 2014, 12). This means that to globalise and standardise the view of education and early childhood as a private, market commodity is to globalise and standardise Western liberal culture and values well into the future, not least through the circulation and uptake of globally dominant reform packages that include curriculum and pedagogies, frameworks and outcomes (Smith et al. 2016; Spring 2008). Or as Moss (2014) puts it, it is a globalised agenda of “making [children] fit for purpose in an inevitable, unchangeable and neoliberal world of more of the same” (72, my italics). Yeatman (2017) describes this as a “distinctly modern form of fatalism” (8) that is deeply problematic in light of the challenges that now dominate our collective future (Riddle and Apple 2019). In these “dangerous times” (Riddle and Apple 2019, 1) characterised by the collapse of ecological systems, capitalism and Western Liberalism, it is more urgent than ever that we question whether we believe in or want, as the neoliberalist does, in a future of more of the same (Moss 2014; Urban

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2015). What lies ahead for the future of our species and those species that live alongside us if we continue this cycle of ‘more of the same’ (Yeatman 2017)? Can we ignore the difficult but pressing uncertainty of whether there will be a future at all, if we continue as we are (Yeatman 2017)? As collective social institutions, these are questions that we must take to education settings (Riddle and Apple 2019). Sims (2017) sees this as a responsibility incumbent to all educators and stakeholders, for If we don’t take up this challenge, each and every one of us, then we are accepting that the best possible outcomes for children involve shaping them into a particular mould; ensuring they all learn what is defined in the standardised curriculum; and creating a future for them where they will function as uncritical neoliberal consumers… (8)

To look beyond neoliberal constructs of early childhood settings and education is also to raise the important ethical and moral questions that must be contemplated within societies as we face the urgent challenges of our rapidly changing world (Moss 2010; Urban 2015; Yeatman 2017): who are what are early childhood settings for, and who decides? Dominant constructions of early childhood and education settings do not acknowledge their unqualified potentials for the public good and transformative change, but it is these potentials that could change the course of our troubled human trajectory (Moss 2014). Our understanding of education including early childhood and its potentials must evolve and the pressing question is, how?

Re-democratising Quality The neoliberal world-order belongs to the possessive, self-concerned individual, so any antidote must involve our engagement in and work as “response and equal” collectives (Riddle and Apple 2019, 2) that draw on diverse perspectives to question the realities and futures of early childhood settings. As these questions have now become questions of quality and its child product this makes them stickier and more problematic than ever—for who would disagree with ‘quality’ early childhood services? Who would not want ‘quality’ services for children? (particularly when ‘not quality’ is discursively linked to harm) Who does not want children to access high quality early education? Since policy discourse is designed to persuade, these moral

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and emotional pulls of ‘quality’ in the early childhood are tactical and valueladen and must be engaged with as such. Crisis or harm rhetoric play an important role in creating reform imperatives that are urgent and hard to resist (Osgood 2009; Jones 2010) but as I have illustrated in this book, the assumptions on which quality rhetoric rests do not necessarily reflect social need or a robust picture of reality. Our courage to resist, as Sims (2017) urges, must therefore be found in our numbers as we “warm-up our voices and together fight for a better way” (7). This is a re-democratisation of education agenda, as Riddle and Apple (2019) conceptualise it, wherein education and early childhood settings can be for a democracy that offers possibilities for radical collective transformation, the re-imagining of societies and the reconstruction of institutions, including education, in the interests of those who are currently least advantaged. (3)

The notion of reconstituting education and early childhood institutions for robust democracy, social justice and equality might seem like a difficult, far-reaching task because it is (Riddle and Apple 2019) but it is also work that is expressed within the every day. As Sims (2017) and Nitecki and Wasmuth (2017) remind, educators are powerful in that they alone make decisions about what happens in classrooms and how. This is not to underestimate the tensions of policy compliance realities but rather to take those tensions as a collective starting point for actions (Riddle and Apple 2019) that “best suit circumstances and strengths” (Sims 2017, 7). In the early childhood context, researchers have already begun to emphasise key practice examples of re-democratisation actions that I have broadly collated and summarised, as follows: • Educators drawing on pedagogies and philosophies of practice that emphasise child rights (Sims 2017) and sharing decision making with all stakeholders (Moss 2009). • Educators learning from and incorporating Indigenous perspectives of teaching and learning (Urban 2015). • Educators building reciprocal partnerships with families to help empower them within their communities (Sims 2017). • Educators challenging and stretching the boundaries of educator roles and assumed ‘best practices’ with children, environments and families (Sims 2017). This is also described as engaging in the ‘micro-politics’

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(Dahlberg and Moss 2005) of daily life, a powerful way to challenge the status quo as it shapes our daily experiences. • Educators applying diverse and critical lenses to observation, planning and curriculum documentation requirements (Smith et al. 2016), which might include democratic processes of interpreting and representing learning with stakeholders (see Dahlberg et al. 2006). • Educators advocating for and enacting rich understandings of play as learning, dispelling the myth that play sits in opposition to academics (Nitecki and Wasmuth 2017). • Educators remaining open to change and hope (Moss 2009). Moss (2009) describes these types of resistance as ‘democratic experimentalism’ because it is through small, every day actions that we bring “…something new to life whether that something is a thought, knowledge, a service or a tangible product” (30). Re-democratisation and democratic experimentalism in education settings can forge a pathway for policy change because as Penn (2011) emphasises, the relationship between policy and practice will always be bi-directional, since policy must respond to practice and vice-versa. There are examples of re-democratisation policies and programs in early childhood settings that are already underway and these provide powerful points of reference. Such as, recent education and early childhood reform initiatives from Columbia (Urban 2015) and New Zealand (Education Central 2018) in which well-being and collaborative practices are at the forefront of state policy agenda. Other examples include the Reggio Emilia province in Italy whose pedagogues and early childhood services emphasise democratic participation (Moss 2016); the Nordic countries for whom democratic participation is at the heart of understandings of a ‘good childhood’ (Wagner 2006), expressed in policy as active student participation rights and high levels of school and teacher autonomy. Further, critical early childhood and education researchers have been active for decades through studies that draw on critical and post-structural theories to challenge the homogeny of education (Urban 2015). Examples include work to foreground Indigenous pedagogies of learning and teaching, such as the Possum Skin Pedagogy Learning Project in Australia (Yarn Strong Sista 2019), work providing exemplars of democratic early childhood practices in Aotearoa New Zealand (Mitchell 2019) and developing early childhood curriculum with Indigenous council in Canada (Ball and Pence 2000). The reconceptualising early childhood education (RECE)

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movement is another key example of critical scholarly engagement, wherein RECE scholars investigate themes of gender, power, culture, diversity and representing multiple voices in early childhood, in opposition to the myth of a universal ‘child’ (Pacini-Ketchabaw and Pence 2005). RECE has been hosting conferences and publications since the 1990s and has influenced thought in USA, Australia, New Zealand and Canada (Pacini-Ketchabaw and Pence 2005). My point in referring to this work, however briefly, is to note that there are vast communities of practice to draw on as we build our communities of resistance and transformation.

Conclusion: Quality Futures The big questions about the future belong to those who will inhabit it (Gustafson 2011). In the meantime, it is imperative that we continue to remind ourselves—as Moss (2009) put it a decade ago—that “there are alternatives!” (i) to market models of early childhood services and likewise, to the present policy interpretations of quality that drive and embed them. Early childhood quality reform presents a plethora of outdated, unhelpful and often untrue assumptions and constructions of early childhood settings, what they are and do, and for whom. Notions of risk and harm and cost and benefit distract us and discourage us from pursuing the more pressing and powerful questions about what early childhood services might do and be for children, families and communities, and how. Throughout this book I have identified a number of dominant assumptions about quality that I suggest future scholarship and activism in early childhood target in order to begin reclaiming quality early childhood settings as sites for democracy and transformative change. These include: • The assumption that quality is measurable, universal and salient factor/s and outcome/s. • The assumption that quality is education, where interpretations of education are increasingly academic and schoolified. • The assumption that quality is generative of human capital gains, not access to early childhood programs. • The assumption that quality is a site of social investment. As the world changes around us and we move closer to our unknown futures, we must relinquish false, neoliberal promises of quality and control,

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however seductive those promises might be. In their absence, our collective energies must turn toward progressing a view of early childhood institutions as radical democracies and places of transformative change (Moss 2014). For these are the institutions that our children will need if they are to inherit this world and forge a future as its custodians.

References Apple, M. 2018. The Struggle for Democracy in Education: Lessons from Social Realities. New York, NY: Routledge. Ball, S. J. 2003. “The Teacher’s Soul and the Terrors of Performativity.” Journal of Education Policy 18 (2): 215–228 Ball, J., and A. Pence. 2000. “Involving Communities in Constructions of Culturally Appropriate ECE Curriculum.” Australian Journal of Early Childhood Education 25: 21–25. Bowlby, J. 1951. Maternal Care and Mental Health. Geneva: World Health Organization. Brennan, D. 1998. The Politics of Australia Child Care: Philanthropy to Feminism and Beyond. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Brennan, D., B. Cass, S. Himmelweit, and M. Szebehely. 2012. “Marketisation of Care: Rationales and Consequences in Nordic and Liberal Care Regimes.” Journal of European Social Policy 22 (4): 377–391. Connell, R. 2013. “The Neoliberal Cascade and Education: An Essay on the Market Agenda and Its Consequences.” Critical Studies in Education 54 (2): 99–112 Dahlberg, G., and P. Moss. 2005. Ethics and Politics in Early Childhood Education. New York: Routledge Falmer. Dahlberg, G., P. Moss, and A. Pence. 2006. Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care: Languages of Evaluation, 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Dalli, C., E. J. White, J. Rockel, I. Duhn, E. Buchanan, S. Davidson, S. Ganly, L. Kus, and B. Wang. 2011. Quality Early Childhood Education for Under-TwoYear-Olds: What Should It Look Like? A Literature Review. Wellington, NZ: New Zealand Ministry of Education. Dombrowski, K. 2002. “Kindergarten Teacher Training in England and the United States 1950–1918.” History of Education 31 (5): 475–489. Education Central. 2018. “Education Minister Announces Major Education Reforms.” Educationcentral.co.nz, February 21. https://educationcentral.co. nz/education-minister-announces-major-education-reforms/. Freire, P. 2004. Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Continuum. Giroux, H. 2011. On Critical Pedagogy. New York: Continuum.

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Giroux, H. 2015. Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Goodman, I. 2007. “All the Lonely People: The Struggle for Private Meaning and Public Purpose in Education.” Critical studies in Education 48 (1): 1. Gray, P. 2011. “The Decline of Play and the Rise of Psychopathology in Children and Adolescents.” American Journal of Play 3 (4): 443–463. Gustafson, H. 2011. “Relational Futures in Preschool.” Journal of Future Studies 15 (4): 121–132. Headspace. 2019. “Majority of Aussie Student Stressed, Depressed.” https:// headspace.org.au/blog/majority-of-aussie-students-stressed-depressed/. Herman, K., , W. Reinke, J. Parkin, K. Traylor, and G. Agarwal. (2009). “Childhood Depression: Rethinking the Role of the School.” Psychology in the Schools 46 (5): 433–446. Jones, K. 2010. “Crisis, What Crisis?” Journal of Education Policy 35 (6): 793–798. Mitchell, L. 2019. Democratic Policies and Practices in Early Childhood Education: An Aotearoa New Zealand Case Study. Singapore: Springer. Moss, P. 2009. There Are Alternatives! Markets and Democratic Experimentalism in Early Childhood Education and Care. Working Paper No. 53. The Hague, The Netherlands: Bernard van Leer Foundation and Bertelsmann Stiftung. Moss, P. 2010. “We Cannot Continue as We Are: The Educator in an Education for Survival.” Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 11 (1): 8–19. Moss, P. 2014. Transformative Change and Real Utopias in Early Childhood Education: A Story of Democracy, Experimentation and Potentiality. Oxon: Routledge. Moss, P. 2016. “Loris Malaguzzi and the Schools of Reggio Emilia: Provocation and Hope for a Renewed Public Education.” Improving Schools 19 (2): 167– 176. NHS. 2018. Mental Health of Children and Young People in England, 2017: Summary of Key Findings. https://files.digital.nhs.uk/A6/EA7D58/MHCYP% 202017%20Summary.pdf. Nitecki, E., and H. Wasmuth. 2017. “Global Trends in Early Childhood Practice: Working Within the Limitations of the Global Education Reform Movement.” Global Education Review 4 (3): 1–13. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). 2018. OECD Labour Force Statistics 2008–2017. Paris: OECD. Osgood, J. 2009. “Childcare Workforce Reform in England and ‘the Early Years Professional’: A Critical Discourse Analysis.” Journal of Education Policy 24 (6): 733–751. Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., and A. Pence. 2005. “Contextualising the Reconceptualist Movement in Canadian Early Childhood Education.” In Canadian Early Childhood Education: Broadening and Deepening Discussions of Quality, edited by A. Pence and V. Pacini-Ketchabaw, 5–20. Ottawa, Canada: Canadian Child Care Federation.

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Pence, A. 1989. “In the Shadow of Mother-Care: Contexts for an Understanding of Child Day Care in North America.” Canadian Psychology 30 (2): 140–147. Pence, A., and V. Pacini-Ketchabaw. 2008. “Discourses on Quality Care: The Investigating ‘Quality’ Project and the Canadian Experience.” Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 9 (3): 241–255. Penn, H. 2011. Quality in Early Childhood Services: An International Perspective. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Riddle, S., and M. Apple. 2019. “Education and Democracy in Dangerous Times.” In Re-imagining Education for Democracy, edited by S. Riddle and M. Apple, 1–11. London: Routledge. Scott, M., W. Wilcox, R. Ryberg, and L. DeRose. 2015. World Family Map 2015: Mapping Family Change and Child Well-Being Outcomes. https://ifstudies.org/ ifs-admin/resources/reports/wfm-2015-forweb.pdf. Sims, M. 2017. “Neoliberalism and Early Childhood.” Cogent Education 4: 1–10. Smith, K., M. Tesar, and C. Myers. 2016. “Edu-Capitalism and the Governing of Early Childhood Education and Care in Australia, New Zealand and the United States.” Global Studies of Childhood 6 (1): 123–135. Spring, J. 2008. Globalization of Education: An Introduction. New York: Routledge. Twenge, J., B. Gentile, C. DeWall, D. Ma, K. Lacefield, and D. Schurtz. 2010. “Birth Cohort Increases in Psychopathology Among Young Americans, 1938– 2007: A Cross-Temporal Meta-Analysis of the MMPI.” Clinical Psychology Review 30 (2): 145–154. Urban, M. 2015. “From ‘Closing the Gap’ to an Ethics of Affirmation: Reconceptualising the Role of Early Childhood Services in Times of Uncertainty.” European Journal of Education 50 (4): 293–306. https://doi.org/10.1111/ ejed.12131. Urban, M., and C. Rubiano. 2014. Privatisation in Early Childhood Education: An Explorative Study on Impacts and Implications. London: Education International. Wagner, J. 2006. “An Outsider’s Perspective: Childhoods and Early Childhood in the Nordic Countries.” In Nordic Childhoods and Early Education: Philosophy, Research, Policy and Practice in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, edited by J. Einarsdottir and J. Wagner, 289–306. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing. Whitebread, D. 2017. “Free Play and Children’s Mental Health.” The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health 1: 167–169. Yarn Strong Sista. 2019. “APPEC Possum Skin Pedagogy Project.” https:// yarnstrongsista.com/pedagogy/. Yeatman, A. 2017. The Question for Our Times: Institution Design for a Free Society. Sydney, NSW: Whitlam Institute, University of Western Sydney.

Index

A accountability, 30, 40, 45, 57, 94, 102 accredite, accreditation, 6, 7, 30–32, 39, 40, 46, 47, 54, 55, 71, 99 activism, 94, 113, 118 anglophone, 16, 22, 23, 25, 29, 41, 46, 79, 91, 93, 103, 110

C care, 5, 6, 13–15, 17–25, 27, 29–32, 38–40, 43, 50, 51, 53–55, 57, 69, 70, 74, 77, 79, 80, 86, 92–95, 97–99, 102, 103, 110, 111 child development, 72, 81, 84 childcare, 5–7, 13, 18, 20, 23–33, 38–41, 50–53, 56, 66–69, 72–75, 77, 79–82, 85, 86, 92, 94, 96, 97, 99, 101, 102, 110–112 childhood, 47–49, 55, 80, 94, 113, 117 collectivist, 114 competition, competitiveness, 28, 29, 40, 41, 43, 70, 85, 93, 96, 113

Council of Australian Governments (COAG), 6, 7, 41, 42, 44, 47, 50, 53–55, 66, 67, 69, 74, 96 curriculum, 7, 15, 45, 54, 100, 112, 114, 115, 117 D democracy, democratic, 9, 20, 26, 114, 116–118 discourse, 3–5, 7–9, 32, 42, 43, 45, 50, 52, 57, 68, 72, 78, 82, 98, 109–112, 115 discursive, 2, 4, 49, 52, 74, 75, 77, 82, 84, 85, 93, 95, 101, 115 E early childhood, 1–9, 14–17, 19, 23, 27, 30–33, 38, 39, 43, 44, 47–50, 53–57, 66–68, 72–76, 78–80, 82–86, 93–104, 109–119 Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF), 7, 54, 94 education, 8, 9, 14, 16, 17, 21–23, 25, 28, 32, 41–52, 55, 57, 71, 72,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 E. Hunkin, The Quality Agenda in Early Childhood Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31627-3

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INDEX

74–78, 82–84, 92–95, 97–100, 102, 112–118 educator, 2, 5–7, 53, 54, 69, 83, 94, 100, 113, 116, 117 evaluation, 30, 46, 77, 80, 86, 95

F feminism, 26, 28, 29 Foucault, M., 3–5, 7, 68, 93 framework, 1, 2, 7, 20, 53, 54, 77, 99, 101, 110, 112, 114 Froebel, Fredrick, 22, 98, 101, 110 funding, 17, 18, 23, 25–30, 44, 54–57, 67, 69, 70, 73, 74, 93, 94, 98, 99

G global, 2–4, 7–9, 17, 20, 26, 28, 29, 32, 41–43, 50, 75–77, 79, 83, 85, 99, 100, 111, 112, 114 governance, 3, 5, 16, 17, 47, 53–55, 92, 93, 99, 103, 110, 113 governmentality, 5, 41, 43, 53, 55, 68, 93

H harm, 19, 23, 25, 32, 57, 80–82, 86, 96, 97, 100, 101, 115, 116, 118 homogenise, homogenisation, 55, 70

I individualism, 17, 113 inequity, 39, 41, 113 investment, 2, 26, 41–46, 48–50, 53–57, 67–72, 74, 75, 81, 83, 85, 86, 92, 94, 98, 104, 118

K Keynesian, 25–28

kindergarten, 1, 2, 6, 20–23, 25, 27, 28, 39, 77, 92, 98, 99, 101, 110, 112

L learning, 7, 47–52, 66, 68, 69, 71, 72, 74, 76–80, 97–100, 114, 116, 117 liberalism, 16, 17, 20, 26, 92, 93, 114 lifelong learning, 42, 43, 45, 48, 52, 53, 72, 75, 112

M managerialism, 30, 46 marketise, marketisation, 29, 30, 47, 52 maternal, 21–23, 101, 110 mother-care, 13, 15–18, 20–22, 24, 25, 27, 32, 43, 55, 79, 86, 91–93, 95, 103, 110, 111, 113 motherhood, 16, 17, 22, 94, 113

N National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), 46, 72, 83 National Quality Framework (NQF), 6, 7, 53–55, 66–68, 72, 99, 101 National Quality Standard (NQS), 7, 54, 71 neoliberal, neoliberalism, 5, 28, 30, 40–42, 45, 55–57, 66–68, 71, 77, 93, 94, 103, 104, 112, 114, 115, 118 numeracy, 45, 46, 77

O Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD),

INDEX

3, 8, 28, 29, 41, 42, 45, 72, 77, 78, 83–85, 95, 96, 103, 111 outcome, outcomes, 1, 3, 7, 18, 19, 39, 40, 45, 47–51, 53, 54, 56, 57, 69, 71, 72, 74–76, 78–83, 86, 92, 97, 98, 101–103, 110, 112, 114, 115, 118

P paradigm, 8, 92, 93, 110, 112 pedagogy, 2, 22, 55, 57, 74, 98–101, 110, 114, 116, 117 performativity, 112, 113 policy, 2–5, 7–9, 14–18, 20, 25, 27–30, 32, 41–57, 66–71, 74, 75, 77–79, 81–86, 92–95, 97–103, 109–118 policymaking, 68 policyscape, 3, 7–9, 50, 73, 79, 82, 95 politics, 3, 5, 26, 28, 55, 68, 93, 109 positivist, 32, 78 preschool, 6, 7, 32, 39, 49–55, 72–77, 79, 80, 83, 84, 96–99 privatise, privatisation, 29, 30, 39, 112 privilege, 7, 79, 83, 93, 102 productivity, 41, 42, 44, 45, 57, 83 Productivity Commission (PC), 42, 66–70, 72, 79–82

Q qualification, 6, 27, 31, 38, 69, 75, 96 quality, 1–4, 7, 9, 20, 25, 27, 30–32, 38–41, 44, 45, 47, 49–57, 66,

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68–86, 92–104, 110, 112, 113, 115, 116, 118 R reconceptualise, reconceptualising, 117 regulations, 7, 16, 26, 30, 31, 39, 40, 77, 110, 112 S school, schooling, 1, 2, 6, 14–19, 21, 27, 45, 46, 49, 50, 52, 54, 66, 72–74, 76, 77, 84, 92, 98, 100, 112, 113, 117 schoolification, 100 schoolified, 72, 77, 92, 97, 101, 118 standardise, 94, 114 subjection, 113, 114 subsidy, subsidies, 6, 27–31, 54, 69, 72, 73, 99 U United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), 8, 75, 76, 97 W welfare, 14, 15, 19–21, 23, 26, 27, 41, 43, 51, 81, 93, 96 workforce, 18, 23–27, 29, 41, 48, 51–53, 57, 66, 68, 69, 74, 81, 94, 99–102, 113 World Bank Group (WBG), 75, 76, 85