Early childhood education and care in times of crisis

[Editorial - First page preview] In recent years early childhood education and care (ECEC) has moved far up in the policy agenda internationally. In the European context, this is attested by a growing number of policy initiatives promoted by the European Commission and aimed to encourage the investment in high quality and accessible ECEC provision across member states. From a European perspective, investing in accessible and high quality ECEC is seen as crucial to realise wide-ranging goals that are laid out in the Europe 2020 strategy (European Commission 2010). This states that the current economic and social crises can be overcome by elaborating and implementing policies that promote smart, sustainable and inclusive growth. In this regard, it is acknowledged that improving the quality and effectiveness of the education systems across Europe is essential to all three of these dimensions and that ECEC has an important role to play in laying the foundations for the successful lifelong learning of EU citizens as well as in fostering social cohesion (European Commission 2011). These claims are supported by a growing body of scholarly research showing that high-quality ECEC has a positive and long-lasting impact on children’s cognitive and social development and therefore can contribute significantly to improve children’s educational success as well as to reduce the achievement gap between less advantaged children and their more affluent peers (Burger 2010; Leseman 2009). The evidence produced by such a growing body of literature is acting as an important policy driver catalysing the attention of policymakers toward the importance of investing in a field – such as ECEC – that has been neglected for a long time. However, it needs to be noted that the increasing dominance of social investment paradigms – within which much outcome-focused and evidence-based research is framed – is currently generating contradictory tensions, especially in those contexts where ECEC systems were conceived within a children’s rights rationale since its inception. In such contexts, explicitly defined long-term benefits of ECEC attendance are rarely mentioned in national policy documents. This might indicate that the rationales for investing in high quality ECEC services in many EU member states are still more likely to be driven by concerns for children’s rights and social justice rather than by concerns for socioeconomic advantages. Along this line, ECEC research approaches developed in such contexts tend to focus predominantly on the analysis of educational processes from a participatory perspective rather than on the measurement of predetermined outcomes