Influences on Politicians' Decision Making for Early Childhood Education and Care Policy: What Do We Know? What Don't We Know?

Abstract

Politicians play a key role in determining policy content and outcomes for early childhood education and care (ECEC). As a result, the quality of formal ECEC provisions for children rests considerably on the policy decisions of politicians. Despite direct and indirect effects of politicians' policy decisions for the ECEC field, few studies explore influences on politicians' policy decisions, and fewer still pertain to ECEC. In light of the significant gap in the research investigating how and why politicians make the decisions that they do, the authors present a case for a research agenda to investigate politicians' policy decision-making processes in ECEC. A review of the literature pertaining to influences on political decision making reveals some possible influences on politicians' decision making generally, but not for ECEC policy specifically. Using the policy sphere of ECEC to illustrate the complexities of social policy development and implementation in a democratic political system, the authors put forward a conceptualisation of policy that generates a wide range of questions to inform the development of a research agenda. They conclude with a discussion of the possible implications that a research agenda investigating politicians' policy decisions in ECEC might have for the early childhood field.

Taking advantage of early childhood education and care: the priorities of low-income families in their children’s early years

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Imbalances between workforce policy and employment for early childhood graduate teachers: Complexities and considerations

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Recognising, Valuing and Celebrating Practitioner Research

“…In contrast, in early childhood contexts, practitioner research might be seen as an 'emergent' practice, and the research literature documenting its use in these settings, while growing, is relatively small. This is both perplexing, given the growth in policy attention internationally to early childhood, and the consequent need to strengthen pedagogical quality and 'grow' the profession, and unsurprising, given the often marginal status of the early childhood profession and the increasingly dominant framing of early child hood within human capital discourses (Bown et al, 2009;Moss, 2012). In this chapter, we establish the rationale for the production of this book and its contribution to understanding and exemplifying the important 1 place of practitioner research in the early childhood field.…”