Abstract
I first met John Bennett when he was working for UNESCO on the 2000 Education for All (EFA) initiative. This was a powerful international attempt to define education priorities for international aid giving to poor and middle-income countries for the 21st century. John lobbied for early childhood education to be included in the six EFA goals. It was in no small part due to him that this goal, expanding and improving comprehensive early childhood care and education, especially for the most vulnerable and disadvantaged children was adopted by global agencies as the first EFA goal. He also worked on the declaration of the rights of the child, as a UNESCO representative. He cared deeply about the lives young children led, and the way in which their needs and feelings were often unrecognized and overlooked by policy makers.
However, he felt a little uncomfortable with some of the condescending processes of international aid, elaborated by rich nations for the benefit of poor nations. He was also concerned to define and extend definitions of early education and care (ECEC), and to provide robust examples of how ECEC systems could be developed from the level of government, through to daily practice with children. He moved to the OECD where he led the 20 nation review on early childhood education and care. He took as a benchmark the work done by the EU Childcare Network in the 1990’s on quality targets, which tried to spell out the connections between good governance and good practice. The method of investigation adopted by the OECD was, once in country agreement had been secured, to ask the host country to provide detailed background documentation on its ECEC policies, then send in a very small enquiry team composed of established researchers and policy makers on a fact-finding visit. One of the team acted as rapporteur, and wrote up an initial report, based on the background documentation and the visits. I acted as rapporteur for Belgium (Flanders) and for Canada. The visits were a tremendous amount of work undertaken at a cracking pace, but also, with John, they were great fun. Belgium is one of the gourmet capitals of the world. There was one occasion, on a school visit, when we were invited to stay for lunch. We thought we would have a school dinner, but instead we were taken round the corner to the local restaurant, where there were place settings with seven glasses (a wine for each course), set out on a pink ruched satin tablecloth! We ended the Belgian trip so stuffed with food we could barely think. There were also memorable moments from the Canadian trip, not least the rate at which we changed time zones yet carried on with the 12–14 hour working days until we were slightly zombified. John laughed his way through it all.
Despite the distractions, the overall synthesis, Starting Strong II written by John and his colleagues, was a brilliant exposition of the issues faced by governments in developing ECEC systems. John particularly admired the Nordic countries which had worked at development of their policies and practice in a systematic way for many years, and in his view were able to offer parents true choices, as well as providing very positive and high-quality environments for children. Starting Strong is a magnificent reference point for those concerned with ECEC. The work has now been taken further with the OECD family data base, which is an outstanding online data resource for comparative work.
John went on to undertake many other commissions, for the UNICEF Innocenti centre, on Roma children, and on much else besides. He was always compassionate, always amusing, and always indignant at the possibility that children might be let down. He was a great friend, and he is sorely missed.