The changing roles of early childhood care and education in Aotearoa New Zealand: A shifting policy landscape

Abstract

This article examines the strengthening policy impetus in Aotearoa New Zealand towards bringing children, families and teachers into conformity with a view of children as commodities and the role of early childhood care and education as preparation for school, the workforce and market-oriented social futures. Through critically examining government website activity and key policy documents, we argue that the new norms and accountabilities introduced in recent policies, foster an instrumentalist approach to children and families, impacting on early childhood care and education in narrowing and damaging ways. We call for local and international re-examining of the place, purpose and principles of early childhood care and education.

Introduction

This article explores the ways in which narrow economically driven agendas have come to dominate early childhood care and education (ECCE) policy, despite the aspirations of openness and plurality in the early childhood curriculum, Te Whāriki (Ministry of Education (MOE), 1993, 1996), despite a strong early childhood sector commitment to treating care and education as inseparable and despite a tradition of viewing the early childhood years as a time of life rather than mere preparation for life. As a bicultural curriculum, Te Whāriki incorporates strongly alternative indigenous Maori pedagogies, which have implications for everyone involved in ECCE; the Maori dimensions add weight to understandings of diversity, interconnectedness and spirituality for the benefit of all New Zealanders.

Using Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notion of assemblage as a way of focusing on the agglomerative effects of intermixes of local and international, regulatory, economic and political, technological and physiological forces, we look to investigate how the coming together of different forces has contributed to the field of ECCE becoming a site of intensifying compliance and control. Drawing on methods derived from critical discourse analysis we examine shifts occurring at a national level in key policy documents relating to ECCE, beginning with the development of the national curriculum, Te Whāriki (MOE, 1996), 20 years ago. We also examine the more recent ECCE-related website activity of central government agencies, particularly the Ministries of Education, Health and Social Development.

Trends identified in these policies include the turning away from a tradition of care in ECCE that has focussed on the wellbeing of the whole child. This trend runs alongside a turning towards increasingly narrow and assessment-focussed understandings of learning that are symptomatic of the wider national and international educational landscape. Very young children are increasingly described and positioned primarily as individual learners, while parents’ relationships with their children are increasingly framed as ‘all about’ children’s learning, school success and ongoing employability.

The introduction of policy measures to increase the participation in ECCE programmes of targeted groups deemed to be vulnerable and at risk of not fitting into the workforce is a particular concern. Groups labelled as vulnerable and targeted for remediation as part of a set of welfare reform policies include Māori and Pasefika and low income and welfare beneficiary families. ECCE is positioned as a means of countering long-term welfare dependency through remediation and reducing costs to the state.

The way in which educational goals in Aotearoa New Zealand are increasingly driven by narrow economic imperatives, such as employability, is also consistent with international trends towards framing early childhood education (ECE) as human capital investment (Lingard, 2010; Moss, 2013). ECCE services, children and parents are increasingly subject to new norms and accountabilities reflecting this economically driven agenda. We call for a closer and more critical examination of the effects of such developments and of the place, purpose and principles of ECCE in and beyond Aotearoa New Zealand.

Conceptual framework

Inspired by the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and Nancy (2000), we question the increasing prevalence of a reductionist, future-focussed, outcomes-driven view of children as economic units, a preoccupation with what the child is to become rather than what the child is. From such a perspective, childhood is always viewed as a preparatory stage. We are not arguing that attention should not be paid to children’s futures as learners but that this should not be at the expense of a focus on the whole child: mind, body and spirit (MOE, 1996), or on children’s ‘here and now’ wellbeing. While recognising Deleuze and Guattari’s point that as human beings we are always and continuously becoming, we also emphasise the need to focus on children as present day beings, not only future becomings. Becoming entails being (Nancy, 2000; Prout, 2005; Uprichard, 2007).

We draw on the Deleuzo–Guattarian (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) concept of assemblage as a useful tool for understanding how entities such as ECCE services are produced by constantly changing flows of forces and phenomena. Viewing ECCE services (and all entities and networks) as assemblages – as we do in this article – recognises them as products of processes that include material and biological as well as social and political forces. Assemblages focus on the multiple and the heterogeneous, a focus Deleuze and Guattari depict with the conjunction ‘and … and … and …’ (p. 24). Prout (2005), for example, refers to the Child–ICT (information and communication technology) assemblage as an illustration of the ways in which borrowings from the non-human world, such as ICT, create new combinations and can extend children’s capacities and open up new powers and possibilities. In contrast, this article highlights the way in which improved technologies of data management are being deployed to bring children, families and ECCE services in to conformity with new globally referenced norms and investment-focussed accountabilities. Thus, ICT is seen to function in significantly different ways, depending on the assemblage within which it operates. Or as Prout puts it: what an ICT ‘is’ shifts according to the assemblage within which it performs (p. 121). Viewing ECCE services (or other entities or networks, such as government ministries or childhood) as assemblages, enables a focus on the shifting intermix of forces and phenomena that shape and influence components such as learning and development, curriculum and assessment.

These concepts fit with growing bodies of work that draw attention to the way we exist integrally with the world, in reciprocally and actively interconnecting and transformative processes of living, becoming and just being (Alaimo and Hekman, 2008; Barad, 2007; Latour, 2005).

Methodology

We came to writing this article with common interests in understanding the complexities of early childhood pedagogy and a shared dismay with the increasingly economistic and school-oriented direction of ECE policies. In looking for updates around curriculum, assessment and pedagogy, we first turned to the MOE’s early childhood website. We noted emerging tensions and contradictions between old and new curriculum and assessment policy initiatives, and an increasingly narrow shifting of focus towards school preparation, in particular towards recently introduced school-based National Standards exclusively focussed on benchmarking skills in literacy and numeracy (MOE, 2012a, 2012b, 2012c).

These initial findings prompted us to undertake a closer more systematic analysis of the MOE website. As co-researchers we worked together – and separately – reflexively interrogating and cross-checking our understandings and other possible interpretations of the ‘official’ texts on our screens. In our analyses of the website, we borrowed strategies from critical discourse analysis (Gee, 2011), which examines what is being sanctioned in relation to governing power relations. In particular, we paid attention to changes in terminology that, as Haraway (2008) points out, ‘can signal important mutations in the character of relationships – commercially, epistemologically, emotionally and politically’ (p. 135).

This examination took place in three phases, reflecting the journey of this article from a more pedagogical focus in the initial iteration as a conference presentation (November 2012) to a publication in 2013 with a stronger policy focus (Alcock and Haggerty, 2013). This article picks up on issues relating to the ‘schoolification’ of ECE, touched on in 2013, as well as on issues concerning the positioning of parents in recent government-initiated ECE participation initiatives and accountability measures. We continue our examination of key policy documents, particularly web-based material. We explore the architectural structuring of the MOE site and the hierarchies within this as well as headings, key words and phrases looking at what is and is not emphasised. We have continued to look for shifts in key discourses including changing terminology to do with: curriculum, assessment, learning outcomes, development and care, as well as at more recently emerging discourses to do with vulnerability and early childhood participation. We examine the ways in which government policies frame parenting as work, in particular how parenting and participation in ECCE programmes are being positioned as central to preparing children for future success in school. This process has included further investigating the interconnections with two other government websites that have major responsibilities relating to the care and education of young children and associated family matters, the Ministry of Health (MOH) and the Ministry of Social Development (MSD).

A significant methodological challenge in using websites involves having to re-analyse texts which are in a process of continual change as they are updated. ‘Updates’ come and go and material sometimes disappears ‘without trace’. Tracking of shifts and changes therefore required printing out and screen shots of relevant material while investigating. In this way, we continued to systematically track key links to ECE and ECCE on these websites.

This article presents our analyses of the MOE website and its interconnections with the two other Ministry websites (MOH and MSD), between 2012 and 2014. We start with looking at recent developments around parent involvement and participation in ECCE, including the participation programme and advice to parents on the MOE website (MOE, 2013, 2014c). In order to analyse patterns over time, we compare the early childhood draft and final versions of curriculum: Te Whāriki (MOE 1993, 1996) – the first concrete iterations of government introduced ECCE curriculum discourse in Aotearoa New Zealand. We look at the accompanying assessment resources ‘Kei Tua o te Pae, assessment for learning: early childhood exemplars’ – the assessment arm of Te Whāriki (MOE, 2004–2009) and the Māori assessment exemplars: ‘Te Whatu Pōkeka’ – a parallel resource developed for the assessment of Māori children in Māori early childhood settings (MOE, 2009).

Shifts in curriculum and assessment in Aotearoa New Zealand

Te Whāriki is widely acclaimed as an open and inclusive framework; this is reflected in both its metaphorical title of curriculum as weaving, and in its definition of curriculum as ‘… the sum total of the experiences, activities, and events, whether direct or indirect, which occur within an environment designed to foster children’s learning and development’ (MOE, 1996: 10). This inclusivity is also strongly reflected in the way the curriculum document itself is made up of two curriculum frameworks: one, the ‘mainstream’ curriculum; the other, a parallel, alternative Māori-developed curriculum for use in Māori immersion centres. The title metaphor ‘Te Whāriki’ – gifted by one of the architects of the Maori curriculum, Tamati Reedy – played a central role in framing curriculum as potentially involving multiple contributors and multiple possibilities, rather than as a single blueprint. The weft and warp of the woven curriculum mat were envisaged by the curriculum developers as metaphorically containing and reflecting the diversity of early childhood families and communities by providing space ‘for all to stand’: each early childhood centre is expected to weave their own curriculum mat creating their own patterns from features and contexts unique to their children and their community (Carr and May, 2000: 59).

The notion of curriculum as having different local manifestations is further supported by ‘Family and Community’ being one of the four core Te Whāriki principles (MOE, 1996). This strong positioning of family and community adds to a view of Te Whāriki as providing a platform, a mat ‘for all’ and was a feature welcomed by many in the ECCE sector as supporting families and communities to have more say in the nature of the curriculum of their early childhood service. For example, the document describes families and communities as ‘an integral part of the early childhood curriculum’ (p. 14) and states that ‘families should be part of the assessment and evaluation of the curriculum as well as of children’s learning and development’ (p. 30). However, such a focus on family involvement also entails risks around how and who sets the terms of parent involvement, and can be seen as opening the way to compelling all parents to be involved in curriculum almost as a condition of participation.

Current advice offered to parents on the MOE website focuses solely on learning. Under the heading ‘supporting your young child’s early learning’, parents are directed towards viewing their young children as ‘readers, writers and mathematicians’. A substantial section titled ‘moving on to school’ gives further advice on ‘encouraging’ children to be ready for school, by offering suggestions such as engaging them in sitting still for short periods of time and learning to ‘wait for things’ (MOE, 2014c).

Efforts to bring a more intent ‘learning’ focus to the early childhood years and to bring the ECE curriculum more in line with the school sector are not new. This is exemplified in subtle differences between the draft version of Te Whāriki (1993) and the final official version of 1996 (MOE, 1993, 1996). While the draft Te Whāriki, before officialdom tamed it, referred to children as people, as infants, toddlers and young children, the later MOE-edited version refers to children as ‘learners’. Both the child’s family and the early childhood setting became categorised as ‘learning environments’ (MOE, 1996, p. 19).

Other editorial changes made by the MOE concerned bringing the early childhood curriculum into closer alignment with school curriculum and a discourse of learning outcomes. The emphasis shifted between the documents from viewing ECCE and school curricula as ‘together’ part of broader life-long learning (MOE, 1993: 120), towards positioning the ECCE curriculum as ‘a foundation’ that during the school years children ‘are able to be build on’ (MOE, 1996: 93). An entire section titled ‘The special nature of the early childhood curriculum’ disappeared between the draft and final versions. This deleted section, referred to ‘differences of emphasis between the school curriculum and the early childhood curriculum’; it set out to identify what was seen to be ‘distinctively appropriate to early childhood education’ (p. 126) pointing out that the ECCE curriculum ‘emphasises the intertwining of provisions for care and education, and … interweaves all aspects of children’s learning and development’ (p. 126).

As our previous 2013 article noted, while the draft document refers to ‘learning opportunities’ which offer ‘more than one possible strategy or outcome’ and include ‘expressive and creative activities (those which do not have a defined outcome)’ (MOE, 1993: 117), the final document referred to predetermined ‘learning outcomes’ (Alcock and Haggerty, 2013). Rather than highlighting the place of opportunities that do not predetermine outcomes – as part of the plurality of learning – the final document offers a closer specification of the ideal child as ECE product – framed as 118 learning outcomes.

To summarise, policy efforts to ‘schoolify’ ECCE services have history. This is reflected in the changes made between the draft and the final versions of Te Whāriki (MOE, 1993, 1996). These changes were made in spite of a sector tradition of resisting the ‘schoolification’ of ECCE, illustrated in the avoidance of the term ‘preschool’ (May, 2011), and despite an extensive and unprecedented sector consultation process covering almost 3 years that had endorsed the draft document. Since then, efforts to position ECCE more strongly as preparation for school (and the economic world of work) have intensified, through successive waves of assessment and other policies, as our analyses of government websites show, and as we discuss in the following sections.

Assessment and the early childhood–education assemblage

Clicking on the heading ‘Assessment for learning’ in the early childhood ‘Curriculum and Learning’ section of the MOE website leads to three subsections: two sets of early childhood assessment resources (English and Māori) and a section titled ‘Learning outcomes’.

The English early childhood assessment resource: Kei Tua o te Pae (KTOTP), comprises a set of 20 booklets and 177 exemplars developed over a 9-year period, beginning in 2000 (MOE, 2004–2009). These were to provide examples of assessment practices that would maintain continuity with Te Whāriki (MOE, 1996). The exemplars themselves are described as ‘… examples of assessments that make visible learning that is valued so that the learning community (children, families, whānau, teachers, and others) can foster ongoing and diverse learning pathways’ (Book 1, p. 3; authors’ emphasis).

In similar vein, Te Whatu Pōkeka (the Māori assessment resource) also emphasises the importance of maintaining continuity with Te Whāriki, in particular the affirmation of an identifiable Māori curriculum that protects Māori language and pedagogies (MOE, 2009). As Rameka (2007) puts it, Te Whatu Pōkeka was to provide an assessment approach that acknowledges and values Māori children’s cultural capital. Thus, in this resource and its 12 exemplars, interconnectedness and interdependence are positioned as central to children’s relationships with themselves, other people, their ancestral lineage and the world. Importance is placed on the past, and on holding the past together with the present and future. The assessment focus is on children ‘being Māori’ and ‘being themselves’, including prioritising such dimensions as children’s potential and power, spirituality and life force, rather than preparing them for school or narrowing in on standards-based literacy and numeracy outcomes.

However, while the developers of these two sets of assessment resources met with some success in their efforts to promote pedagogical openness, we see the overall effects as mixed. In our view, the early childhood exemplars have become caught up in a reductive and increasingly relentless focus on assessment and learning within ECCE services (Buchanan, 2011), and are at risk of being further subsumed by the wider framing of assessment as accountability, and a discourse of narrowing learning outcomes.

Of particular concern is the effect of positioning early childhood assessment on the MOE website, as if paving the way for recently introduced National Standards, which focus on literacy and numeracy skills as ‘all-important’ for school learning. The only pathway from the MOE ‘learning outcomes’ for ECE on the ‘assessment for learning’ webpages is the path to school prominently displayed as a diagram illustrating links from Te Whāriki to the New Zealand school curriculum (MOE, 2007). Such an emphasis on school would be less concerning if the school curriculum also emphasised diverse learning pathways as well as a broad vision of learning for living in the present as well as the future. However, the New Zealand school curriculum (MOE, 2007) can itself be seen as becoming more narrowly academic through being recently partnered with National Standards which focus solely on literacy and numeracy. National Standards are used to measure individual children’s (and schools’) academic performance.

The reference to ‘National Standards and ECE’ as a recently added section under early childhood ‘curriculum and learning’ reinforces the impression that ECCE is becoming increasingly narrowed preparation for National Standards–focussed school learning. This is further reinforced by a subsequent reference to what we would argue are manufactured continuities between the multiple literacies advocated in KTOTP and the narrow National Standards focus on numeracy and literacy in ECE as preparation for school learning.

The ways in which curriculum and assessment documents are positioned within these key framing sections on the MOE website give the impression that their key purpose is to pave the way for National Standards. The narrowly focussed links between assessment and National Standards concentrated solely on literacy and numeracy skills as curriculum, are at odds with the open and inclusive Te Whāriki definition of curriculum. Such an emphasis also serves to obscure and dismiss the many possible diverse learning pathways fore-grounded in the rationale for developing the early childhood assessment exemplars: KTOTP (MOE, 2004–2009, Book 1, p. 3) (our emphasis) and the multidimensionality advocated in Te Whatu Pōkeka (MOE, 2009).

Another measure we view as serving to strengthen the positioning of National Standards is the recent introduction of the Early Learning Information (ELI) system in 2013, with each child being allocated a unique National Student Number (NSN). The benefits of introducing the ELI system identified on the MOE website are ‘to provide an indication on what type of services are most effective for which groups of children’ and to track links between ECCE participation and educational achievement ‘over time and across different institutions’, to be used by parents to enable them to become ‘better informed’ about which ECCE services to enrol their children in (MOE, 2014b).

Such a mechanism clearly provides for closer governmental monitoring of the performance of ECCE services, children, parents and families. In addition, it is our contention that encouraging the comparison of early childhood centres based on children’s later academic achievement – in the first instance, school sector National Standards – effectively positions these as the de facto measure of the performance and ‘quality’ of an early childhood service.

The introduction of such a data collection system fits with global trends and the emergence of what has been referred to as ‘education by numbers’ (Mansell, 2007), and ‘governing through data’ (Lingard, 2010: 135). Greater technological affordances for data management can be seen as interconnecting with and helping to fuel growing international preoccupations with measuring educational outcomes and intensifying the drive towards making global as well as within-nation comparisons (Lingard, 2010). From an assemblage point of view, with such technologies ‘on board’, the early childhood–education assemblage is positioned to be more readily networked with global market priorities.

The early childhood–education assemble: Dis/re/placing development and care

Closer critical scrutiny of what is displaced by the concentrated future-focussed emphasis on the child as learner reveals further significant shifts in priorities. For example, the words ‘development’ and ‘care’ – traditionally associated with the phrases ‘early childhood care and education’ (ECCE), and ‘learning and development’ – are notably absent in the ‘Curriculum and learning’ sections of the MOE webpages. Also notable is that it is just these elements that were identified in the original draft curriculum guidelines as key manifestations of ‘differences in emphasis between the school curriculum and the early childhood curriculum’ (MOE, 1993: 129).

The broader phrase ‘development and learning’ has been replaced with singular ‘learning’ in the official discourse of MOE publications. In our view, the loss here – from an assemblage point of view – concerns seeing children, as complex, developing, growing human beings, constantly becoming, rather than simply as ‘learners’. We suggest there is value in the term ‘development’ as a conceptualisation of the life course as a phenomena; ‘development’ retains a focus on the physical and biological as well as the social and cultural. In arguing for reclaiming development, we are not denying justifiable critique of normative stage theory; however, we suggest that development can also be understood as relational, complex, non-linear and as a way of reintegrating living, changing, material bodies with thinking, feeling, social selves.

Further evidence of a deepening split between development and learning can be found on the MOE website on the ‘ECE Lead’ page in the drop-down menu under ‘Useful links’, where ‘development’ appears only as part of ‘B4 School Check’, via hyperlink to the MOH – the administrators of this ‘health and development’ initiative. In effect, this ‘places’ physical (bodies) and development with the MOH, while learning (heads) remain the province of the MOE. Thus, ‘development’ has been split-off from learning and repositioned with health, from integrated mind–bodies to split-off physical bodies. Also notable is the way the singular reference to development on these website pages is coupled with the reference to school readiness in ‘B4 School Check’, and by implication the role of ECCE in preparing children for school. Furthermore, the function of the B4 School Check is described as follows: ‘to identify and address any health, behavioural, social, or developmental concerns which could affect a child’s ability to get the most benefit from school, such as a hearing problem or communication difficulty’ (MOH, 2013).

Care joins ‘development’ as another of the elements seemingly edged out of the ways in which early childhood pedagogy is framed on the MOE website. While Te Whāriki refers to ECCE, and to care and education as ‘inseparable’ (MOE, 1996: 18), the MOE website and more recent MOE documents refer simply to ECE. Internationally, Campbell-Barr and Nygard (2014) point to connections between the positioning of education ahead of care in early childhood and the dominance of human capital theory as privileging cognition over care. One of the examples they give is the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) keenness to place education ahead of care in shifting from the acronym ECCE to ECEC (early childhood education and care).

In the New Zealand context, responsibility for ‘care’ seems to have shifted to the MSD – today’s equivalent of the Department of Social Welfare from whence ‘care’ came when, in 1986, responsibility for ECCE centres was moved to the Department of Education – today’s MOE. It was a move heralded as joining care with education (May, 2011). Despite the explicit emphasis in Te Whāriki on children’s holistic learning and development, wellbeing and sense of belonging, the care–education split appears to have resurfaced.

Emerging discourses of vulnerability and remediation: The new care–early childhood assemblage

Under the auspices of the MSD, ‘care’ has made the further shift of becoming part of a discourse of vulnerability. This is evidenced on the MSD website; click on ‘About MSD’ on the front page of the website to be informed that ‘the care and protection of vulnerable children …’ is a major responsibility for MSD (2013a). The word ‘vulnerable’ crops up repeatedly on the website in relation to children, ECE and ECEC dependency, welfare, parents, families and communities (MSD, 2013b).

Hyperlinks connect the three Ministries, MOE, MSD and MOH, in a nexus of ‘supporting vulnerable children’ policies with MSD having the leading responsibility for meeting policy results. Under the government agenda of ‘delivering better public services’, ‘The Ministry of Education is the lead agency on boosting skills and employment’, working ‘… with the Ministry of Social Development to support vulnerable children’ (MOE, 2013).

Within this discourse of vulnerability, the MSD, MOE and MOH interconnections and references to ECE centre on economic imperatives as part of a wider welfare reform programme aimed at reducing welfare dependency (MSD, 2014) and boosting targeted participation in ECCE programmes of key groups: Maori, Pasifika and low-income families. These are groups deemed to be at greatest risk of school-work failure (MOE, 2014a).

A further level of targeting and compliance has been imposed on welfare beneficiary families through the recent introduction of the ECE ‘social obligation’ reform, as part of the Social Security (Benefit Categories and Work Focus) Amendment Act (2013). Under this ‘social obligation’, beneficiary families with a child(ren) between 3 and 5 years of age must enrol them in MSD-approved ECCE programmes for a minimum of 20 hours per week while the parent(s) fulfil their work obligations.

Additionally, if a person who is already on a benefit has another child, a further ‘change in obligations’ occurs when this youngest child turns 1. A beneficiary whose next youngest child is under 5 is required ‘to take all practical steps to prepare for work’; a beneficiary whose next youngest child is between 5 and 13 is required ‘to actively seek part-time work of at least 15 hours a week and accept any suitable job’; and a beneficiary whose child is 14 or older is required ‘to actively seek full-time work of at least 30 hours a week’ (MSD, 2014). Hence, the ECCE attendance become compulsory not only for the 3- to 5-year-old children of beneficiaries but potentially for their 1-year-old babies.

Sanctions for parents who fail to comply by ensuring their children are enrolled and attending an MSD-approved ECE institution include having their benefits reduced and cut. This policy introduces a significant and iniquitous encroachment on the domain of the family in Aotearoa New Zealand – one it seems impossible to imagine wider, more advantaged sections of the public tolerating. Similar measures that effectively lower the age of compulsory educational attendance for those groups targeted as vulnerable have been identified internationally, also fitting with similar globally referenced economistic agendas (Vandenbroeck et al., 2010).

In summary, ECCE seems to have become stretched across different government departments with development seen as the responsibility of the MOH, care reconceptualised as vulnerability under the auspices of MSD and with the scope of MOE’s responsibilities for ECE pedagogy becoming narrowly academic. Rather than helping to achieve the often-professed aim of integrating care and education in ECCE services, the stretching of ECCE across already siloed government departments seems to be leading to further siloing and narrowing of the different dimensions of ECCE: care, development and learning.

The ways in which ECCE has been stretched across these government departments also involves new norms and accountabilities for parents. In the reframing of family participation and of ECCE, the role of parents becomes one of preparing their children for academic success in an increasingly demanding and competitive school system (and global market), at earlier and earlier ages (Ang, 2014). As Jones (2005) puts it, through such policy shifts ‘the young child becomes the salvation of society and parents become pivotal in ensuring the young child is up to the task’ (cited in Osgood et.al., 2013: 209).

Within this climate of new norms and accountabilities, parental and family social responsibilities have become strongly oriented towards ensuring that ‘at-risk’ ‘vulnerable’ children become more effectively functioning and less costly citizens. This shift is most obvious with the introduction of forms of governance such as the ‘social obligation’ reforms targeted at beneficiary families. The introduction of such confining mechanisms of accountability is also consistent with international trends towards ‘elevated issues of parental responsibility or obligation while eroding parental rights’ (Muncie (2006) cited in Holt and Kelly, 2014: 4).

Conclusion

This article voices our concerns about several recent policy developments in the early childhood sector in Aotearoa New Zealand and the new norms and accountabilities they introduce for children, parents and ECCE services. We highlight a number of local traditions of value in ECCE that are at risk if the narrow economic imperatives underpinning these developments nationally and internationally (Lingard, 2010) continue to drive education policy.

While not wanting to valorise local and homegrown initiatives, such as the Te Whāriki draft (MOE, 1993) and Te Whatu Pōkeka (MOE, 2009), we argue for the importance of local initiatives that are responsive to their particular contexts, and that have an openness ‘towards considering heterogeneity’ (Duhn, 2006: 168).

As a useful starting point, we call for ECCE services to take account of the complex nature of growth and development – mind and body and spirit – and an ontology that takes interconnection and interdependence as its starting point, including an ethic of care of self and other (‘human’ and ‘non human’).

We advocate a re-visioning of the purpose of education, focusing on children’s lives and childhoods as lived now, rather than education as solely a preparation for economic futures.