Abstract
Between 2007 and 2013, the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) introduced major national policy reforms to improve quality in early childhood education and care (ECEC) (Brennan and Adamson, 2014). By analysing policy documents underpinning the COAG reforms for early childhood, this article contends these reforms have been so far-reaching that, conceivably, they could have a lasting impact on systems and structures designed to improve quality in ECEC and fundamentally alter the trajectory of future policies. To this extent, they could eventually prove to constitute a critical juncture (Hogan and Doyle 2009; Pierson, Politics in time: history, institutions, and social analysis, 2004) in Australian ECEC policy history. In this article, we speculate about whether history will position the COAG reforms as a critical juncture in policy or see them weakened by policy moves that erode provision of quality in ECEC. We argue that studying the potentiality of critical junctures in ECEC policy illuminates the complexity of policy production and provides insights into the nature of future policies.
Highlights
Between 2007 and 2013, the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) introduced major national policy reforms to improve quality in early childhood education and care (ECEC) (Brennan and Adamson 2014)
While the study has generated a large corpus of data, the data set utilised for the analysis reported here consists primarily of four policy documents underpinning the COAG reforms: New Directions for Early Childhood Education (Rudd and Macklin 2007a); Labor’s Plan for High Quality Child Care (Rudd and Macklin 2007b); Towards a National Quality Framework for Early Childhood Education and Care (Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations 2009) and Investing in the Early Years: A National Early Childhood Development Strategy (Council of Australian Governments 2009)
While multiple discourses exist within policy documents underpinning the reforms, our analysis identified quality in ECEC as primarily constructed through discourses of investment in stronger standards and qualified staff
Summary
Between 2007 and 2013, the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) introduced major national policy reforms to improve quality in early childhood education and care (ECEC) (Brennan and Adamson 2014). The reforms included the following: stronger standards, streamlined approaches to regulatory requirements, a new rating system to measure quality, the first national ECEC curriculum document—the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF), and strategies to develop the early childhood workforce (Council of Australian Governments 2009). In this context, the reforms aimed to improve quality by investing $77 million over four years (Rudd and Macklin 2007b). The reforms aimed to improve quality by investing $77 million over four years (Rudd and Macklin 2007b) This funding and changes to standards and
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