Written by two leading international experts, Early Childhood in the Anglosphere offers a unique comparison of early childhood education and care services, and parenting leave, across seven high-income Anglophone countries. Peter Moss and Linda Mitchell explore what these systems have in common, including the dominance of ‘childcare’ services, widespread privatisation and marketisation, and weak parenting leave. They highlight the substantial failings of these systems, and the causes and consequences of these failings. But this book is ultimately about hope, about how these failings might be made good through major changes. In other words, it is about transformation: why transformation is both necessary and possible at this particular time, what transformation might look like, and how it might happen. Part of that transformation concerns the need for new policies and structures, but even more it is about how the Anglosphere thinks about early childhood. The authors call for turning away from conceptualising early childhood services as `childcare’ and marketised businesses selling commodities to parent-consumers; and for reconceptualising them as education imbued with an ethics of care, a public good available as a right to all children and families, and complemented by well-paid, individual entitlements to parenting leave. Using examples from the Anglosphere and beyond, and in a context of converging crises, the book argues that transformation of thinking, policies and structures is desirable and doable.
Praise for Early Childhood in the Anglosphere
‘This book is a useful contribution to the field because of its attention to detail. We know already the main arguments that it makes, but in engaging with the richness of this book – its philosophical clarity, and its detailed analysis of early childhood across time and place – we can start to feel the possibilities for transformation in the system.’
British Journal of Educational Studies
Table of Content
About the authors
List of tables
Acknowledgements
1 The Anglosphere in a time of crises
2 Early childhood systems in the Anglosphere: seven national summaries
3 Early childhood systems in the Anglosphere: similar features, similar failings
4 The Anglosphere model: looking for causes
5 Early childhood systems beyond the Anglosphere: two different models
6 Trying for transformative change: England
7 Trying for transformative change: Aotearoa New Zealand
8 Transforming early childhood in the Anglosphere
References
Index
About the author
Linda Mitchell is Professor of Early Childhood Education in the Division of Education, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand. Her current research is in early childhood education policy; teachers’ work; refugee and immigrant families in early childhood education; and democracy in education. She is working with Timorese collaborators to support play-based pedagogy in preschools in Timor Leste. She has a Leverhulme grant for a visiting professorship to Manchester Metropolitan University in 2021 and 2022 where she will facilitate a robust theorisation of democratic education and its practices that will be applicable to all education settings from birth through lifelong learning.
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