Conceptualising the early childhood pedagogue: Policy approaches and issues of professionalism

Infant and toddler educare: A challenge to neoliberalism

“…Ignoring the balance of elements making up the combination can lead to an unintended outcome and this is what appears to have happened in the United Kingdom and in parts of Europe. There, the combining of care and education led to a perception that education has overshadowed care to the disadvantage of the early childhood sector (Bennett 2003;Oberhuemer 2005;Williamson & Morgan 2009). In other words, there is evidence that education is commonly perceived as more important than care, whilst many early childhood professionals would prefer that these elements were either equal or that care was positioned as more important; positions evident in the data from this study:…”

Dealing with uncertainty: challenges and possibilities for the early childhood profession

“…It seems to be generally recognised, today, that the workforce is central for achieving the ambitious policy goals of increasing both quantity and quality of provision. Recent research supports this notion (Dalli, 2003(Dalli, , 2005Mac Naughton, 2005;Oberhuemer, 2005;Siraj-Blatchford, Sylva, & Muttock, 2002) and along with policies to increase "quality", many countries have been introducing policies that aim at "professionalising" the workforce in recent years. In England, for example, the extensive Every Child Matters strategy (Department for Education and Skills, 2004) links explicitly to a Children's Workforce Strategy (Department for Education and Skills, 2005) that aims at building a "world-class workforce for children and young people" (ibid).…”

Rethinking Professionalism in Early Childhood: Untested Feasibilities and Critical Ecologies

“…Internationally, influential discourses, both scholarly and political, link ambitious goals to workforce requirements. Despite huge differences between countries' approaches to early childhood institutions, and to qualifications and roles of staff (Oberhuemer, 2005), there appears to be a broad consensus that the workforce is central to achieving the ambitious policy goals, for example, of increasing both quantity and quality of provision (Siraj-Blatchford et al, 2002;Dalli, 2003;MacNaughton, 2005;Oberhuemer, 2005; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2006). In these discourses, the workforce and its members are regularly referred to as something that has to be professionalised, not least in order to be able to cope with the increasing challenges of the work (Organisation for Economic Co-operation andDevelopment, 2001, 2006).…”