Conference Agenda

This research asks: How has school readiness been discursively constructed in English early childhood education policy, and what are the effects of these constructions on children and teachers? More specifically, it examines the Good Level of Development (GLD) which is the assessment mechanism through which school readiness is measured in England, and how functions as a neoliberal technology of governance that shapes pedagogical practice, constructs particular subjectivities of children and teachers, and perpetuates educational inequalities.

While this question focuses on England, it holds critical importance for European and international early childhood education. England represents an extreme case of neoliberal, outcome-driven reform in Early Childhood Education (ECE), making it a crucial site for understanding how global policy trends toward standardisation and accountability manifest in specific national contexts. As school readiness discourse circulates internationally through organisations like the OECD and World Bank, and as European nations increasingly adopt measurement-focused approaches to early years provision, examining England's construction provides insights into the material consequences of these policy directions. Understanding how one system has operationalised school readiness through performative technologies offers other contexts the opportunity to resist, reshape, or critically evaluate similar pressures.

The research employs two interconnected theoretical frameworks. First, Bacchi's "What's the Problem Represented to be?" (WPR) approach provides an analytical method for examining how policy constructs particular problems and their solutions. The WPR addresses the following research questions:

• How did 'school readiness' come to be seen as a 'problem' for the government?
• How has school readiness in England’s ECE policy been constructed as a governing practice?
• What are the effects of this construction of school readiness?
• Can school readiness be constructed in a different way?

Second, Foucauldian concepts of governmentality illuminate how school readiness operates as a technique of power. Governmentality refers to the "conduct of conduct" - the rationalities and technologies through which populations are governed, often through mechanisms that appear technical or neutral. The GLD functions as precisely such a technology: it appears as an objective assessment tool while shaping teacher decision- making, normalising particular pedagogical approaches, and producing hierarchies among children. Through performativity pressures, teachers are governed at a distance, their professional judgment focused on the achievement of measurable outcomes. Children are assessed through predetermined developmental benchmarks that decontextualise their diverse experiences.

This Foucauldian lens has relevance for European and international audiences because neoliberal governmentality operates transnationally. The rationalities underlying England's reforms are that education should serve economic productivity, and that quality can be measured through standardised outcomes. Similar approaches circulate globally and appear in varied forms across different policy contexts. By making visible the governmental logic of England's approach, this research contributes to broader international debates about what ECE is for, who benefits from constructions of quality and readiness, and how resistance to reductive assessment regimes might be mounted.

Finally, the paper draws on international examples transition models including New Zealand's Te Whāriki framework, demonstrating that other constructions exist and function successfully. These alternatives provide empirical evidence that England's pathway is a choice with consequences, not a necessary response to universal challenges in ECE.

Objectives

The everyday work of principals and other school leaders is often challenged by a multitude of factors (Mintrop, 2016; Wise, 2015), which can refer to the leaders themselves (e.g., their knowledge and experience, motivation, availability of time), organizational and infrastructural aspects of the school, and the students. Such challenges appear to be especially present in schools facing adversity (Patterson & Kelleher, 2005), and they have rapidly increased during the pandemic (Brown et al., 2023; Harris & Jones, 2022), when all of the above-mentioned factors were joined by problems of distance schooling and related increases in learning gaps of students (Authors, 2023). For instance, the average percentage of children unable to read or understand simple texts increased from an already alarming 53% pre-pandemic to up to 70% post-pandemic in low and middle income countries (UNICEF, 2022), and even in richer countries with comparably well-equipped schools and excellent access to internet and digital learning, an average learning loss of up to 40% occurred regarding basic reading, spelling and math for 8 to year olds (Engzell et al., 2021). However, at the same time, research showed that access to adaptive learning occasions can mitigate such negative effects (e.g., Meeter, 2021).

This has resulted in a remarkable number of support programs for schools worldwide (e.g., OECD, 2022). In this paper, we will report on a support initiative for primary schools in Germany, which we started in 2021 with the main aim of helping children to catch up with their learning gaps and, as a consequence, to off-load school leaders and teachers during their daily work. In short, the still ongoing initiative shows that participating children and schools highly benefit from additional support, but that this is bound to certain requirements on the side of the schools’ infrastructure, their internal and external communication, and leaders’ perceived load during the implementation of the support program.

Theoretical Framework

Young children starting school are often excited and enthusiastic about all the new things they are going to learn. Sooner or later, however, they start facing the challenges of education, and these challenges have become dramatically obvious during the pandemic. The “nearly insurmountable education loss” (UNICEF, 2022) has shown to be especially crucial for children with learning difficulties and for those connected to lower SES (e.g., OECD, 2020). On the other hand, access to adaptive learning occasions appears to mitigate these negative effects (Meeter, 2021).

Offering such additional learning occasions can be seen as one way to contribute to school improvement. However, school improvement tasks are often perceived as particularly challenging by principals, as opposed to other leadership tasks. The reasons for this are manifold, including a lack of time and personnel resources (Brauckmann & Herrmann, 2013), the difficulty of the task itself (Schwanenberg et al., 2018), or the simultaneity of many different tasks (Dadaczynski, 2024). One crucial aspect for support programs to be successfully implemented would thus be that they really facilitate school improvement efforts rather than being an additional burden for principals and other leaders (see also motivational cost; Brockbank & Feldon, 2024). In this regard, besides the actual learning gains children can achieve with a support program, it might be insightful to assess leaders’ perception and the cognitive load (cf. Cognitive Load Theory; Sweller et al., 2011) they experience during the implementation of such a program. Both will be in the focus of our presentation.

The Finnish comprehensive school system has traditionally been perceived as embodying egalitarian ideals. However, the selection and grouping of students into selective classes introduce inequalities among teaching groups (Berisha & Seppänen 2017; Pasu 2025; Kosunen et al. 2016). Finnish national education policy requires municipalities to assign students to a school located near their home. In the largest cities, however, students may instead apply to a selective class with special emphasis, such as in music, sports, or art. Students can apply for selective classes within or outside their primary school catchment area. Entry to these classes usually requires passing aptitude tests (solely in a certain school subject), which, in practice, require an active commitment to and ability to pay for a hobby that supports the emphasis subject (Berisha & Seppänen 2017; Pasu 2025). Selective classes, like general classes, follow the national curriculum, but selective classes offer a few additional weekly hours of teaching in the emphasis subject than the national curriculum directs.

Selective classes are mainly attended by a socially advantaged group of students — mostly white middle‑class — (Luoma & Peltola 2024; Oittinen 2025) and typically show higher collective academic achievement compared to general classes (Koivuhovi, Vainikainen & Kalalahti 2022). Research evidence shows that grouping of students into selective and general classes creates social boundaries and hierarchies between students in daily life (Oittinen 2025; Peltola 2021). Furthermore, teachers speak about students in selective and general classes in contrasting ways and manage classroom behavior differently in everyday school life (Luoma & Peltola 2024).

In this study, we explore the aftermath of a reform in a city in Southern Finland, where the city as the provider of education wanted to lower the social hierarchies within schools between selective and general classes by abolishing selective classes. From August 2023, emphasized teaching was no longer provided in separate selective classes in lower secondary schools except for one selective class in one school. After the reform, all students chose one of four emphasis paths (1. art and creativity, 2. sport and wellbeing, 3. languages and influencing and, 4. science and technology) that direct their elective subjects (e.g. physical education, handicrafts, foreign languages, music). In this article, we compare the experiences and views of students studying in the same city under the old emphasis model (with selective and general classes), the new emphasis model (without selective classes in emphasis paths) and the mixed emphasis model (with selective classes and emphasis paths).

When investigating the three versions of grouping the students and the experiences of the young people, we apply the concept of institutional habitus developed from Pierre Bourdieu's (e.g. 1984; Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992) concept of habitus. Institutional habitus refers to how school communities “collectively, think, perceive and have an impact on their students” (Tarabini, Curran & Fontdevila 2017, 1179). School communities can shape students’ habitus through institutional practices and shared perceptions (Burke, Emmerich & Ingram 2013; Huilla 2022). The aim of this study is to examine how the institutional habitus of a school is constructed when the principles of grouping practices are being reshaped.

In the context of three distinct emphasis models, and based on student interviews, we ask 1) What expectations do the staff have towards different school classes according to students? 2) How do students describe social hierarchies, distinctions, and perceptions of different school classes and their students? By analyzing students’ interpretations and experiences within various emphasis models during a period of reform, this research contributes to the broader debate on attainment or ability grouping (e.g. Becker et al. 2012; McGillicuddy & Devine 2018) and educational inequalities in urban schools.

What happens when education, an institution meant to protect childhood, becomes one of the very forces pushing children deeper into labour? In this article, whilst we explore this question through understanding the care gaps produced by an education system, we also try to change the idealised notions of childhood in precarious contexts. Drawing on social reproduction theory, the paper explores how children’s labour, care responsibilities, and schooling are structured by wider political and economic conditions. In this research, we consider social reproduction as daily and generational reproduction (Federici, 2020) and argue that the ways in which children are involved in both productive and social reproduction labour cannot be thought of independent of the temporality of the economic vulnerabilities and education systems in which they are brought in. Focusing on the rural livelihoods of seasonal agricultural workers in Turkey, we showcase that children’s dynamic roles in sustaining household life and enabling adults’ participation in waged labour must be understood within broader economic structures that reproduce precarity. Rather than treating children’s work as culturally expected or morally driven, we situate it within interconnected processes including labour mobility, state withdrawal from childcare provision, and the structural inflexibility of schooling. Here, we do not argue that children’s re/productive labour is culturally normative in the Turkish context; rather, we suggest that it must be understood in relation to families’ limited access to childcare provision. When formal supports are absent or inaccessible, families depend on children’s labour to secure their daily and generational social reproduction, and we showcase this contextualised, mobile, precarious form of social reproduction carried by children. In doing so, we do not rely on Western conceptions of childhood as a protected, labour-free stage and argue that children’s contributions emerge within a political economy marked by precarity, mobility, and state withdrawal. The labour children perform both in waged economy and household is a mobile infrastructure of social reproduction that travels with families as they move in search of seasonal income. This labour is embodied, affective, and relational, meaning children carry younger siblings, carry water, carry domestic routines, and carry unstable futures, and the temporality of agricultural work.

Children’s labour and intergenerational responsibilities form part of a collective commitment to sustaining life under conditions of structural inequality in the Global South (Nieuwenhuys, 2020). The research in children’s geographies (Wells, 2024; Abebe, 2007) has documented diverse childhoods in non-Western contexts, showing that children routinely participate in caregiving, household maintenance, subsistence activities, and community life to support local moral economies and survival strategies; and have pushed the boundaries of thinking about why children’s labour should be understood in relation to the commodification of care work and the broader dynamics of social reproduction. Our study extends this debate through a critical inquiry of how, in the context of seasonal agricultural work in Turkey, children’s practices of care and labour are shaped by household needs along with the failures and inflexibilities of educational infrastructures. For us, this ultimately changes the way childhood is seen as a universal category but as a relational and situated experience mediated by mobility, precarious work, and the uneven distribution of state support.

Therefore, in our analysis, we move beyond simply documenting children’s socially reproductive labour to show why it is structurally necessary arguing that children’s work emerges from the intersecting pressures of precarious seasonal migration, state withdrawal from childcare, disrupted schooling, and the temporal demands of agricultural labour. Thus, we argue that the forms of care and labour undertaken by children in Turkey’s seasonal agricultural migrant families are structurally produced by conditions of austerity, precarity, and the limited reach of education and welfare infrastructures.