A UK-US investigation of early education practitioners’ opinions about child poverty and its prioritizing within their practice: final report

Introduction In many developed societies, children in poverty make up a significant minority across education sectors estimated to be 21% of children in the UK and 22% in the USA. Globally, ECEC has been prioritized as a key policy and practice lever to remediate child poverty by reducing the ‘outcomes gap’ in children’s learning and development. Experiencing poverty has a negative effect, particularly for children in the early years range, and children in poverty are disadvantaged in their learning and development by the age of five years. An evidence base suggests quality ECEC provision can address educational and social inequality by improving outcomes for children in poverty. But what constitutes quality early learning provision and environments for children and their families experiencing poverty remains highly contested. With such a significant minority of children experiencing disadvantage, though, for ECEC provision to have 'quality' it needs to be poverty sensitive. So provision should be characterized by poverty sensitivity and it should be poverty proofed i.e. ECEC practitioners’ delivery, practice and decision making will take poverty, social disadvantage and inequality into account in their everyday provision for children from disadvantaged families. Research, hough, which has considered early education practitioners’ opinions on child poverty is rare and recent small -scale qualitative research completed by members of this research team has suggested poverty sensitivity cannot be assumed (Simpson et al,2015). The research reported here built up on this previous work to provide a broad -scale and unique exploration of ECEC practitioners’ opinions about child poverty. Within the context described above, he central aim of the research was to develop knowledge of early education practitioners’ opinions about child poverty and the extent to which they prioritize it in their practice across several geographic locations in England and the USA. The proposed research hoped to move beyond the restrictions of a country by country sui generis approach, allowing for translocal and transnational connections to be made between early education practitioners’ opinions and engagement with child poverty and its remediation. There were good reasons for choosing to focus upon England and the USA to explore these issues. Increasingly there are parallels and points of tangency between the two countries in regard to child poverty and policies to remediate its impact in early childhood. For instance, as indicated above, there are currently high levels of child poverty in the UK and the USA in comparison with other developed nations. Convergence includes prioritizing ECEC as a social mechanism to address child poverty across both countries (Nandy and Minujin 2012). In England and the USA and many other countries, a dominant neoliberal political discourse emphasizing individualism and limited state involvement pervades this prioritizing. ECEC is delivered via a mixed market model including a significant amount of private for profit provision, the costs of which are relatively high in both countries and prohibitive for low income families. Within the US this has necessitated federal and state level programmes. Across England several national schemes can also be seen to cater for those that are excluded from the ECEC market. In meeting the aim mentioned above the following objectives were achieved. The first objective was to ascertain and contrast early education practitioners’ opinions about child poverty in a selection of geographic locations across England and the USA. The second objective was then to clarify the extent to which these ECEC practitioners engage with (or not) poverty sensitivity in their practice. The third objective was, through the research, to provide a mechanism for bringing practitioners’ opinions to current policy, practice and academic debates around the role of early education in remediating child poverty. A final objective was to draw out wider implications for early education policy and practice including the possible need for poverty proofing toolkits in the early years