‘Investing’ in early childhood education and care in Aotearoa New Zealand: Noddings’ ethics of care and the politics of care within the Social Investment approach to governance

Abstract

This article draws from Nel Noddings’ ethics of care as a basis for analysing the political effects of the burgeoning Social Investment approach to governance in Aotearoa New Zealand. To assess the effects of the Social Investment paradigm of governance in relation to early childhood care and education, this article commences with an historical analysis of the relationships between the concepts of ‘care’ and ‘education’ through the history of Aotearoa New Zealand in relation to early childhood education and care. Following this, the burgeoning Social Investment paradigm will be charted. Then, the major principles of Noddings’ ethics of care are outlined and utilised to scrutinise current and potential effects the Social Investment paradigm will have on early childhood education and care and the discourses of ‘care’ and ‘education’. Foucauldian theories augment Noddings’ theories to highlight the bio-politics of care.

Historical underpinnings: early childhood education or early childhood education and care?

Within this section, the history of the dichotomisation of ‘education’ and ‘care’ will be outlined in order to inform analysis later in this article.

At the early stages of the development of early childhood education and care (ECEC), there was a clear discernment between the ‘care’ and ‘educational’ roles deemed acceptable for the early childhood setting to undertake. Crèches were being hailed for their role in ‘saving’ children of mothers who worked, saving ‘young children from the evils of being shut up in a room, or locked out into the streets during the working hours of mothers’ (The Evening Post, 1875). Crèches were viewed as a benefit to the children, mothers and society as a whole, undertaking a welfare role in teaching ‘children to habits of order, cleanliness, and obedience’ (The Evening Post, 1875) in the place of absent parents. Yet, support turned to opposition if such establishments were to be viewed through an educational lens, with the view ‘the care of children of tender age should be the parents’ duty’ (The Evening Post, 1887). It is crucial here to identify the correlations being drawn between ‘care’ and ‘welfare’. When parents were ‘unable’ to care for their children, these settings were supported. This welfare focus was the primary purpose of crèches and to consider such establishments as an ‘educational’ service was an anathema.

By the mid-20th century, kindergarten sought to move away from a ‘care/welfare’ role and act as complementary educators for children (and at times, parents; Auckland Star, 1945). World War II led to new thoughts and theories on child development, engendering support for the psychological improvement of children and educative potential of ECEC as a vehicle for such improvement (May, 2009). Kindergarten’s stance as ‘educators’ became more palatable as the common view held that directed education of children could lead to a better society than those which created two world wars in the last 40 years. Conversely, crèches and day nurseries were still connected to ‘caring’ for children in the place of absent parents and still considered to be a welfare undertaking. The Bailey Report (Bailey et al., 1947) would go so far as to consider this as a displacement of the maternal responsibilities, arguing ‘the whole day long programme is too long … young children spending the whole of every day from Monday to Friday in a nursery school are deprived of the vital experiences that only the normal home can provide’ (p. 11). The normalisation of maternalism (Ailwood, 2007) is accentuated and the normative view of the mother as the primary carer for the child, and the crèche or day-nursery as a displacement of this ‘normal’ relationship became ingrained. Earlier support of the welfare role of the crèche was lessened in light of the new push for an educational focus, in conjunction with normative familial relationships; displacement of the mother as the primary caregiver would not be accepted. The dominant maternal discourse rendered the crèche only suitable as a welfare service, not as an educational service (May, 2002). Consequently, crèches and day nurseries were designated the responsibility of welfare agencies and not the Department of Education, further reinforcing the correlation between ‘care’ and ‘welfare’.

However, by the 1960s, there was resistance to normative maternalism by feminist advocates who wished to negate the image of the mother as the primary caregiver, raising ‘a cascade of challenges’ (Klapper, 1971: 725) against normative notions of nuclear families. This resistance was taken up by childcare services (crèches and day nurseries) who wished to be viewed as something more than a welfare service (Davies, 1993), arguing that historical discourses which situated these forms of ECEC as a welfare service were to be reconsidered in light of the new feminist ideas around mothering, caring and responsibility for the child. Childcare would seek the same recognition as kindergarten both as an ‘educational’ setting and an indispensable service supporting families as an extension of the home. Such discursive shifts were reinforced within the 1971 Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Pre-School Education (Hill et al., 1971), colloquially known as the ‘Hill Report’ which identified that working mothers need not be deemed to be ‘unfortunates’ but may include ‘a mother with particular training or skill [who] wishes to use it in the community’ (p. 29). Furthermore, William Sutch (former Minister of Finance and at that time the permanent secretary of the Department of Industry and Commerce), speaking at the annual conference for the New Zealand Childcare Association in 1970, stated, ‘a woman should have the opportunity to work and that this opportunity should not be diminished by the inadequacies of an educational system which does not provide for the care and training of pre-school children’ (cited in Barney, 1975: 132). Sutch’s position as the Minister of Finance, speaking on ECEC provision, heralds the beginning of the economic consideration of ECEC, and the repositioning of the ‘care versus education’ debate in relation to the interconnections between ECEC and economic productivity in society.

These discursive shifts became pertinent within 1980s, when in July 1986, the provision of ECEC was transferred from the Department of Social Welfare to the New Zealand Ministry of Education (Moss, 1998; New Zealand Department of Education, 1988). The government was focussed on a productive economy, and feminist concerns for the mother’s right to choose to work were co-opted by governmental priorities to involve more women in the workforce (Stover, 2013). Childcare became more desirable to a government focussed on involving all members of society to contribute to economic growth. By 1989, the term ‘ECEC’ was being more commonly used to depict the role of the entire early childhood community (Podmore, 1989) signalling the beginnings of an alignment of ideologies in the early childhood field. This alignment was enriched by the first Aotearoa New Zealand early childhood curriculum Te Whāriki: He whāriki mātauranga mō ngā mokopuna o Aotearoa: Early childhood curriculum (New Zealand Ministry of Education, 1996) further aligning ‘care’ and ‘education’ through the partnership between New Zealand European and Māori philosophical perspectives of early education (Mutch, 2001). The promotion of te Ao Māori (Māori worldview) which refused such delineation between care and education reconceptualised this debate (Pihama, 1993).

The fifth Labour government of 1999–2008 instigated significant changes to ECEC. The education/care dichotomy appeared to be further reduced as pay parity between primary and early childhood teachers was attained, and those with education qualifications were no longer designated education and care ‘workers’, but rather ‘teachers’ (Dalli, 2010). However, the election of the fifth National government from 2008 to 2017 reignited this dichotomy with the promotion of the term ‘Early Childhood Education’ (omitting ‘care’) within policies, coupled with the reduction of professional requirements and funding for ECEC settings. This dichotomy is further invoked through the present promotion of the Social Investment paradigm of governance for welfare services and will be explored critically within the next section.

Social Investment and governance of ECEC

The effects of neoliberal reforms of the 1980s within many countries worldwide had significant impacts on social welfare policies and the direction for governmental involvement within social services. While it appeared that these reforms could result in positive impacts for the ECEC sector, questions have been raised about how this ‘repackaging’ has effectively been a means through which the government could bind these settings ‘into a national manifestation of the will to measure education’ (Gibbons, 2013: 504). This section will extend this argument to raise questions on whether Social Investment repackaging is also seeking to bind early childhood into a ‘manifestation’ of the will to measure ‘care’, as the Social Investment paradigm invokes new relationships between ‘education’, social welfare, and ‘care’ within ECEC services and wider society.

The Social Investment paradigm is concerned with the direction of social policy, with a specific emphasis on active Social Investment (Green-Pedersen et al., 2001). While this social policy direction is not a movement away neoliberalism – and importantly maintains promotion of the market as central to economic and social policies – there is a re-conception of the value such centrality has for those at the lower end of the economic scale. Social Investment is viewed as a means through which social structures can be set up as preparation rather than reparation, to ‘invest’ in capabilities across the life span and to ‘respond to the new risks of a competitive knowledge economy’ (Hemerijck, 2015: 242). In this assessment, the classical neoliberal worldview of welfare as ‘inherently wasteful or as a drag on economic growth’ (Adamson and Brennan, 2014: 49) is challenged due to the repositioning of the ‘poor child’ as a site for social welfare ‘investment’ and subsequent ‘return’. This is not to say that Social Investment strategies are solely for the ‘poor’, as middle-class families are seen as those equally targeted (Jenson, 2010); however, the perceived ‘benefits’ for the child, the family and the community through this form of targeted social spending are viewed to have the most overall ‘returns’ when applied to those considered to be the most ‘at risk’.

Within a recent lecture series on Social Investment, the Right Honourable Bill English (prior to his appointment as Prime Minister, during his tenure as Minister of Finance) explains social investment as

… a more rigorous and evidence-based feedback loop linking service delivery to a better understanding of people’s needs and indicators of the effectiveness of social services … Interventions that aren’t delivering measurable improvements will trigger a ‘please explain’. (English, 2015)

Within Aotearoa New Zealand, the Social Investment paradigm is identified as the primary approach being undertaken by the government to improve the lives of individuals for the betterment of society as a whole (New Zealand Institute of Economic Research, 2016).

However, the Social Investment paradigm is conceived as a ‘quasi-concept’ due to the ways in which Social Investment ideas can be claimed by multiple groups and read in differing ways (Jenson, 2010), projecting a ‘normative ideal’ of children as the markers of a prosperous future (Jenson, 2010; Lister, 2004) and evaluating the child in light of their ‘future potential’, considering ECEC as a space for educational investment and welfare investment in order to improve skills, productivity, prosperity and societal cohesion. The relationships between ‘care’ and ‘education’ within ECEC need to be reconsidered in light of these new developments and the governmental positioning of ECEC to perform within the economic market.

As demonstrated through the historical analysis, welfare in ECEC is more closely related to an understanding of the site as a place for ‘care’ – care for children in the place of their ‘absent’ parents. There are echoes of this historical understanding within Social Investment policy, as ECEC is being utilised to enact one of the main principles within the Social Investment paradigm: to disrupt intergenerational cycles of social dependency (Jenson, 2010). English (2015) states,

… around 6 per cent of children still spend their whole childhood in benefit-dependent households. This matters because data shows that these children are at very high risk of not achieving at school, become dependent on a benefit themselves and spend time in prison.

Governmental strategies to increase participation levels in ECEC to 98% involvement of children before they reach school are connected to these Social Investment principles. Within the Social Investment paradigm, the ‘absent’ parent is the one who is sending the ‘wrong message’ to their child about social productivity. Children are sent to ECEC as an interruption from ‘socially dependant’ parents. These interpretations of the functions of ECEC are also heavily informed by the promotion of the economic discourse, counting the cost of each of these ‘future social dependants’. This is illustrated by English (2015) who states, ‘each of these children will cost taxpayers an average of $320,000 by the time they are 35, and some will cost more than a million dollars … there are big costs for taxpayers’.

Nel Noddings’ ethics of care

It is to the ‘ethics of care’ to which this article now turns in order to frame an understanding of the current climate as (always) informed by historical underpinnings. The theoretical construction of the ‘ethics of care’ by Nel Noddings will be used both as a lens and a compass to comprehend our current situation, and to set a course to redirect our trajectories to reconsider ‘care’ within ECEC.

The caring relationship

For Noddings (2013), the act of caring is one of attention and/or engrossment. Noddings (2010) describes attention/engrossment as terms used to ‘capture both the receptive attention required and the “feeling with” that accompanies such attention’ (p. 8). Noddings argues that the significance of engrossment/attention is that it is an opening to the other, a vulnerability to the affective impact of the object of attention. Noddings (1996) asserts that within the act of caring, the carer will ‘at least momentarily, [be] engrossed in the other’s plans, pains, and hopes’ (p. 161). Those who have written on Nodding’s concept of care argue that the concept of attention is not a surface involvement with others, ‘for caring to take place, we must also be effectively involved in their lives’ (White, 2012: 68). However, due to the misunderstandings generated from the word ‘engrossment’, which was mistakenly interpreted as ‘infatuation’ by readers, Noddings chose to revert back to the term ‘attention’ in her later writings (Noddings, 2010). Yet despite revising the book Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Noddings, 2013), and altering the word ‘feminine’ to ‘relational’ within the title, Noddings keeps the term ‘engrossment’ within the main text. Consequently, these terms may be used interchangeably throughout this document.

According to Noddings (2013), previous assessments of the role of caring within relationships were too concerned with problems relating to the intensity of caring or the designation of the relationships. Noddings (2013) moves beyond these as distinguishing characteristics arguing that this ‘obscure(s) the fundamental truth. At bottom, all caring involves engrossment’ (p. 17). Noddings theorises engrossment as an act which is grounded in the relationality of caring; the act of caring is a shared act, one that is between the carer and the cared for. In order to ground the caring relationship within the real and immediate, Noddings theorises that the caring relationship must be contributed to appropriately by both parties within the relationship. Noddings (2013) argues,

Caring is largely reactive and responsive. Perhaps it is even better characterized as receptive. The one-caring is sufficiently engrossed in the other to listen to him and to take pleasure or pain in what he accounts … the one cared for sees the concern, delight or interest in the eyes of the one caring and feels her warmth in both verbal and body language. (p. 19)

Without both parties contributing, the relationship is not one that can be considered to be caring.

The caring relationship, Social Investment and bio-politics

Noddings’ ethics of care is primarily concerned with the caring relationship between ‘the one caring’ and ‘the cared for’. The following section seeks to connect Noddingsian theory to these discursive fields and to highlight the potential tensions from the current social/political climate in Aotearoa New Zealand. In order to do so, the caring relationship will be applied, casting the government as ‘the one caring’ and the educator/children as ‘the one cared for’, to accentuate the importance of the role the government is undertaking in redirecting social policy towards a Social Investment paradigm and the potential effects of this redirection. Additionally, the bio-politics (Foucault, 2008) of these emerging ideas will be critically analysed in order to ascertain how people are being governed and (re)conceived.

The deliberate omission of the term ‘care’ (as stated earlier, in Aotearoa New Zealand the common moniker is Early Childhood Education) highlights the troubled past with the term ‘care’ and its connections with ‘welfare’. The discourse of ‘care’ and its subsequent omission implies a contemporary societal convention. Discourses are interpreted as truth or common sense; discourses impact on people’s behaviours, reinforcing cultural dogmas (Foucault, 1971). However, considering the existing absence of the term ‘care’, it is important to highlight that according to Foucault, discourse is ‘really no more than the repressive presence of what it does not say; and this “not-said” is a hollow that undermines from within all that is said’ (Foucault, 2002: 28). Hence, it is not only that which is said but that which is silenced which must be given due attention.

The dynamics of power/knowledge (Foucault, 1980) need to be brought to attention in the silencing of the discourse of ‘care’ within ‘ECE’ through governmental policy documents (National Party of New Zealand, 2014a, 2014b). These actions denote power relationships between the politicians who are setting the policies and the teachers who are regulated to enact them. The construction of the teacher and their relationship to the policy makers are ‘part of a broader drive to position policymaking as a technocratic exercise, to be undertaken by an elite band of experts who are immune to the influence of politics and ideology’ (Morris, 2016: 9, cited in Moss et al., 2016: 346). This form of governmentality within early childhood education seeks to reduce the interpretive act of teaching to a set of mechanistic technical practices which can be easily externally monitored, and self-regulated and self-monitored against a set of ‘desired practices – the aforementioned “will to measure education” (Gibbons, 2013: 504), combined with the “will to measure care”’.

The belief in the ‘market economy’, in which early childhood education in Aotearoa New Zealand is situated, defines and reifies consumer desire and demand. Within present-day neoliberalist discourses of ECEC, ‘learnification’ (Biesta, 2012, 2013) has become the dominant objective. Haggerty and Alcock (2016) attribute these shifts to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) usage of the term ‘Early Childhood Care and Education’ (ECCE) to ECEC, a move that pushes the ‘connections between the positioning of education ahead of care in early childhood and the dominance of human capital theory as privileging cognition over care’ (p. 143). The anticipated benefits of repositioning early childhood into the (now) Ministry of Education has invoked complicated power relationships between ‘care’, ‘education’ and the bio-politics of governance (Foucault, 1980, 2008) The Ministry of Education’s rebranding of ‘Early Childhood Education’ as ‘Early Learning’ further pushes the ‘learnification’ envelope (New Zealand Ministry of Education, 2017) and reified through varying ‘learning programmes’ by conglomerate providers of ECEC (BestStart, 2017; Kindercare, 2017) seeking to obtain their ‘market share’. Education and knowledge invoke and imply one another within the discourses of the ‘knowledge economy’ (Roberts, 2004) in which knowledge is a form of intellectual capital (Roberts and Peters, 2008). ‘Learnification’ supplants notions of care in favour of specific measurable outcomes; there is no room in such measurement for the messy particulars of the caring relationship between the educator and the child within the ECEC space.

The precedence placed on measurable outcomes is extended within the present Social Investment paradigm, where human capital is of prime concern, particularly for children considered to be ‘at risk’ who are reconceived as ‘a loss of human potential’ (English, 2015). Within the Social Investment paradigm, investment into childhood experience is to be perceived as ‘quantifiable’ in relation to potential future economic benefits. According to this form of governance, the smallest minutia of the development of children ‘can be analysed in terms of investment, capital costs, and profit – both economic and psychological profit – on the capital invested’ (Foucault, 2008: 244). As illustrated earlier, ‘interventions that aren’t delivering measurable improvements will trigger a “please explain”’ (English, 2015). This promotion of the child as a being of ‘future potential capital’ creates tensions between the consideration of the present child and their ‘more desired’ future. Decisions are made in consideration of this ‘future potential adult’ which affect not only the child’s current experiences but the opportunities made available for their future. These decisions limit the value placed on the child’s current voice, as this voice becomes displaced in favour of value invested into the child’s ‘future self’, subjugating the child in veneration of the adult they will become. In this way, children are positioned between two debts. These debts are micro and macroeconomic – national and familial – with multidirectional effects, as children are positioned not only between the (financial and affective) debts to and of their parents paying for their child’s ‘education’ but also between national and international development promoting their status as the investments into the future (Burman, 2010: 34). Raising a further question: Do we wish to position those we care about within this relationship of expectation and debt? Is this not further problematic for those who are positioned as ‘future liabilities’?

Questions must be levelled back at the government regarding the effects of positioning children as beings of future human capital. In casting the state as ‘the one caring’ within the caring relationships, Noddings (2013) envisions this caring entity to reject the temptation to ‘rationalise’ other’s experiences as objective data, but rather to see and feel with the other. Within the Social Investment paradigm, those who are in need of care are analysed in order to determine which strategies are ‘most (cost) effective’. The problem is not whether these strategies work, it is when the particulars of the situation are no longer responded to, and mega-analyses become the new truth of ‘what works’. Noddings (2013) writes, ‘situations of relatedness are unique’, the necessity to respond to the particulars of each individual situation render objective ‘truths’ to be incomplete (p. 33). While English (2015) alludes to the importance of attention to the particulars, stating, ‘these families have really different and complex lives, and so need a different and more bespoke approach’, the reality is that these different and complex lives are being responded to with mega-data, not from relational understandings (New Zealand Institute of Economic Research, 2016). It is not a caring relationship when objectification and claims to knowledge are put in place of direct engagement and involvement; particularly when teachers’ understandings and experiences with families are supplanted by these procedures.

The promotion of ‘education’ over ‘education and care’ brings into question the esteem being placed on the values of te Ao Māori, through the discursive dissection of ‘education’ and ‘care’. These tensions become more problematic when attention is drawn to the strategic targeting by the National-led government to increase levels of participation within ECEC for Māori and Pasifika children (National Party of New Zealand, 2014a). English (2015) points out within his speech on Social Investment that ‘one in four and one in three for Pasifika and Māori students respectively’ are failing at school and then follows immediately with concerns about the levels of children in benefit households. The convergence of these two points raises questions when the state connects Māori and Pasifika ‘at-risk’ children and families who are positioned derogatorily as ‘beneficiaries’. The compartmentalisation of Māori and Pasifika children as those designated most ‘at risk’ enables more aggressive forms of intervention (colonisation) through the guise of early childhood education and future benefits. Involvement is positioned as ‘necessary’ in order to ensure children’s overall success, which becomes a means in which to mould future citizens. Increases to funding to improve access for families, specifically Māori and Pasifika children, who have been described as ‘disadvantaged’ (New Zealand Ministry of Education, 2002: 6) and are currently identified as the overrepresented group within those most ‘at risk’ (English, 2015) are the continuation of trends which engage in particularly pervasive in social policies surrounding Māori participation within Early Childhood Services (New Zealand Families Commission, 2007), singling out Māori children as necessitating an intervention, displacing the mother and wider whānau (Ritchie and Rau, 2009). Questions need to be raised regarding the analogies being drawn between the ‘socially dependant’ pariah parent, the positioning of ECEC as an interruption from these parents and the strategic targeting of Māori and Pasifika families to increase their participation within ECEC, without the assurance that their values around the care of their children will be upheld within this space.

The families that are intended to ‘benefit’ most from these Social Investment policies – those at the lower end of the economic scale – can raise some important questions regarding the resurgence of historical images of the ‘at-risk’ children as ‘unfortunates’ and the negative image of their families. Arguably, such compartmentalisation does not involve the necessary empathy, nor a devotion towards ‘engrossment’ ‘the one-caring’ should have of the ‘cared-for’. Despite invoking the ‘welfare’ role of the ECEC setting, the discourses of care are supplanted by ‘learning’, with the aim to improve overall economic development. Economic measurement is still of primary concern within the Social Investment paradigm. Akin to the situation in which feminist concerns which sought to promote ECEC as a means for women to be released from the home and realise equality were ‘co-opted’ (Stover, 2013) by governments seeking to promote their own economic vision of society, the Social Investment paradigm ‘co-opts’ the concerns of social justice, where there are possibilities for promoting improving the fairness in society on the grounds of social justice and ‘embracing the struggle for liberation, avoiding constructions of the Other, and aiming for just and caring communities’ (Cannella, 1997: 163). Instead, children are reanalysed through an economic lens: how much will we save by investing in children now rather than imparting welfare payments later in life? People who are most in need of reparation are recolonised as ‘recipients who will yield maximum overall returns’ due to their imposed position as individuals who are most ‘at risk’. Despite the potential for improvement, there are still grounds to question the Social Investment paradigm for the implications it holds for increased injustice, oppression and regulatory frameworks which will maintain inequitable power relations.

Conclusion

The politics of care is enmeshed in the intricate web of entanglements between individuals and the state. When historical discourses regarding the involvement of the state in ECEC are considered in conjunction with contemporary discourses of Social Investment, tensions arise. There are significant tensions relating to historical positioning of ECEC as a site for ‘care’ or ‘education’ – as a ‘welfare service’ or an ‘educational service’ – which are redefined in light of the Social Investment paradigm. Furthermore, there are tensions arising from how this dominant approach to social policies are being utilised to draw children into deeper relationships with measurement. Within the Social Investment paradigm, ECEC is again being conceptualised as a welfare space, but one that is being utilised for its educative potential.

Problems arise when, as Alcock and Haggerty (2013) demonstrate, care is displaced by the construction of the child as the learner who must be continuously assessed to ensure this ‘learning is occurring’ in order to ascertain that the investment of the state is being actualised. The displacement of the discourses of care is accompanied by movements which seek increased and ‘reductive’ forms of consideration of the individual. This measurement focus displaces and supplants other aims of education and needs redress when it becomes the primary or only vision for educational practice. Biesta (2012) argues that the promotion of ‘learnification’ discourses reduces contemplation on the crucial educational questions of content, purpose and relationships. The connection between the ethics of care as a relational approach to attention has been found to be challenged by the advent of the Social Investment paradigm with ramifications for the governance of people’s bodies and actions surrounding ECEC.

Where Noddings (2013) considers each situation to be unique, and the relational approach necessary to comprehending the particulars of each situation, the Social Investment paradigm seeks to draw children, families and ECEC into more intricate relationships of measurement and compartmentalisation. It is hoped that this article draws some attention towards the limitations of such an approach.