How to fix a major problem facing early childhood services around the world is the subject of a new report from UNESCO, called Caring and Learning Together - A cross-national report on integrating early childhood care and education in education. The problem is the split in services between a 'childcare' sector located in the welfare system and an 'early education' sector located in education.
The split, a legacy of how early childhood services were first developed in the 19th century, has produced a long list of differences between the two sectors, with bad results for children, parents and workers. It includes inequalities (in education and pay between teachers and childcare workers; in what parents pay for services; in gaining access to provision); divisiveness (some services for children of working parents, some for 'children in need', others providing education for over-threes); and discontinuities, as children have to switch between sectors.
The split encourages compartmentalised thinking and provision. It weakens the early childhood field overall, leaving it more open to 'schoolification', as the often conservative and narrowly focused school system pushes down on early childhood. The thread running through is a bad deal for under-threes and those who work with them.
The dysfunctional nature of the split in early childhood has been long recognised, and led to various responses. Some countries (such as Ireland and South Korea) have tried co-ordinating bodies and various forms of cross-sectoral co-operation, but to limited effect; the basic problem remains with unchanged borders. Some local authorities (examples include Strathclyde in Scotland, Reggio Emilia in Italy and Ghent in Belgium) have taken the initiative to unify responsibility in one (usually education) department, but again with only partial success; local authorities lack powers to deal with key issues such as funding and workforce.
Since the late 1980s, a third option has emerged, which attempts to go to the heart of the matter: integrating all early childhood services into the education system. A number of countries around the world have embarked on this process, including Iceland, New Zealand, Vietnam, Spain, Botswana, Brazil, Slovenia, Sweden, England, Jamaica, Scotland, Zambia and Norway.
BELIEFS IN COMMON
The new UNESCO report focuses on this option and looks at why countries go down this road, how the process is undertaken, how far integration has gone, and with what consequences. It does this by comparing five national cases, with at least ten years' experience of integration: Brazil, Jamaica, New Zealand, Slovenia and Sweden, as well as one local authority, Ghent, which has gone it alone.
For each case, a report has been commissioned from local experts. These are very different experiences, not least in their starting points. At one extreme is a poorer country like Jamaica which has started way back, moving a very split and under-resourced system into education. At the other is a relatively rich country like Sweden, which fully integrated its early childhood services some years ago, but in the 1990s moved responsibility for them from the welfare to the education sector.
What all these have in common, making reform possible, has been a strong belief that integration in education was the right thing to do, and a strong body of support for the move.
Brazil, for example, shaking off military dictatorship in the 1980s, set about creating a new democratic constitution, with widespread social participation. In the process, strong support emerged for recognising children's rights (Brazil was the first country to recognise these rights in a constitution), with education from birth as one of these new explicit rights.
In New Zealand, fuelled by inequalities between the childcare and kindergarten sectors and a united body of opinion (including a strong voice from women), a series of working groups and national forums developed proposals for reform, which influenced a political party just as it came to power.
WHAT IS INTEGRATION?
But what exactly does 'integration' mean? There are two parts: conceptual and structural integration. The former means thinking differently about early childhood, getting beyond the childcare/education dualism. In Sweden they talk about 'a pedagogical approach, where care, nurturing and learning form a coherent whole' (the words of the pre-school curriculum). In New Zealand, they have adopted a concept of what might be termed education in its broadest sense, with education 'understood as a broad, holistic concept, concerned with all aspects of well-being and development'. More to the point, people don't just say the words, they act on them, the concepts providing a firm foundation for structural changes.
The structural part of integration covers seven dimensions: administration, regulation, curriculum, access, funding, provision and workforce. This multi-dimensionality means it is snot a matter of being integrated or not integrated, but of how far along the integration continuum a country has travelled.
Jamaica, for instance, is just starting, and integration has not got much beyond administration and regulation. Sweden and Slovenia have gone the whole way, to the point you can no longer see where the split once was. They have managed both to re-think and re-form early childhood.
Evaluating the consequences of the integration process is difficult, with only Sweden having undertaken an overall evaluation. The report concludes that 'generally, the consequences of integration in education have been positive, especially for children under three years and for the workforce in their services.' So, four of our five countries now have 0-5 curricula, and four out of five now have a 0-5 profession.
Access has increased, but how far this is down to reform is hard to judge. Levels of provision in early childhood services are increasing in most countries, so how to judge whether integration in education has made a difference? In Sweden, though, there is a clear result. Since the transfer of early childhood services to education, all children are now entitled to a service from 12 months old, and the costs to parents have been sharply reduced. The results have been striking, with previous inequalities in access (rural/urban, ethnic groups and social class) greatly narrowed. Integration in education has led to a more inclusive service.
WORRIES AND HOPES
The most striking improvements are reported from New Zealand, a country whose diversity of services and providers is familiar to us in the UK. Anne Meade and Val Podmore, the authors of the national report, are unequivocal: 'If childcare administration had not been moved to education, many subsequent policies of significant benefit to infants, toddlers and young children would probably have applied only to children and services under the auspices of education.'
These policies include an innovative curriculum, improved and equitable funding, a large improvement in the education of the whole workforce, the beginnings of pay parity with school teachers, and assessments that are 'credit based, not deficit focused'.
Integration of early childhood in education raises worries about schoolification, and raises hopes of a more dialogic relationship with the school system. Neither is much in evidence. Only Sweden mentions some signs of schoolification. But on the other hand, there is little evidence of enhanced influence for early childhood pedagogy on compulsory schooling and the development of what OECD's Starting Strong reports term 'a strong and equal partnership'. Perhaps the biggest challenge facing early childhood, integrated or not, is to develop such a partnership with the school system.
PROGRESS IN THE UK
What does this report mean for the UK? England and Scotland are among the countries that have started the 'integration in education' process, but (as argued in 'Five steps to better provision', Analysis, Nursery World, 4 February 2010) that process has stalled. Structural integration now covers administration, curriculum and regulation, but not the really hard bits: funding, access, provision and workforce.
Nor have we really got beyond 'childcare' and 'education'. A rhetoric that says they are inseparable is not backed by how we talk, think and act. We retain clearly defined 'childcare' and school-based 'education' sectors, the former a private parental responsibility, the latter a public good and entitlement. Children's centres give a glimpse of how a fully integrated system might look, but have become in practice just another addition to a confused and compartmentalised system, not the basis of a national and fully integrated early childhood service provided as a public responsibility for all children and families.
We have a long way to go before we achieve caring and learning together - but there is no reason not to restart our journey and this time, complete it.
Peter Moss is Professor of Early Childhood Provision at the Institute of Education, University of London
MORE INFORMATION
Caring and Learning Together - A cross-national report on integrating early childhood care and education in education by Yoshie Kaga, John Bennett and Peter Moss, available at www.unesco.org/en/early-childhood/publications