Assessment in early childhood education in England: Two readings, many lenses

Abstract

Early childhood education (ECE) is embedded in global education reform movements, in which international policy drivers influence national systems. The global influence of neoliberalism as a theory of governance has increased the state regulation of public services, based on new forms of accountability, inspection and quality assurance. Accordingly, the state regulation of ECE involves centrally imposed standards and goals that influence practitioners’ work, alongside measures of children’s outcomes and achievement. There are debates about practitioners’ agency and professionalism in the contexts of delivering policy priorities, and whether neoliberalism is challenging conceptions of the field and what it means to be an effective educator in these contexts (Brown, Lan, & Jeong, 2015). These discourses materially influence how practitioners and children are positioned and understood. Although there are variations in how these discourses and practices are taken up locally and regionally, there are similarities in how policies are formulated and implemented: curriculum, pedagogy and assessment are all subject to regulation within an accountability culture. Assessment of children’s learning and development is embedded in this culture as a measure of the quality of provision, and a means of being accountable to parents and caregivers, and to government inspection processes. ECE thus embodies the policy technologies that have been used in the compulsory education sector regarding curriculum content, coherence and control (Wood & Hedges, 2016). These technologies materially influence and alter the purposes of ECE (Brown et al., 2015): they construct particular ways of understanding children’s learning and development, and may limit the range of choices that practitioners can make in the contexts of practice.