Critical Policy Analysis in Early Childhood Education

Louise Kay and Elizabeth Wood

Early Childhood Education (ECE) in England (and internationally) has come later to policy intensification than compulsory education, but is becoming a focus for research into the effects and impact of policies in different areas of the system. The influence of the Office for Standards in Education OfSTED in matters of curriculum, pedagogy, school, readiness, play and assessment in the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) is the focus of two research articles by Louise Kay (2018) and Elizabeth Wood (2019).

Building on her doctoral research into school readiness, Louise critically analyses the OfSTED (2017) report, Bold Beginnings, which focused on the extent to which the Reception year (age 4–5) is ‘preparing children for their years of schooling and life ahead’. Drawing on Aristotle, Louise uses a formal rhetorical structure based on three modes of persuasion — ethos, pathos, and logos. Her analysis shows that OfSTED is reinforcing the formalization of ECE and the production of controlled, compliant children who are subject to normalizing discourses. Their ‘academic success’ is defined by whether they achieve the ‘Good Level of Development’, based on the Early Learning Goals. The ‘Good Level of Development’ defines how ‘readiness’ is understood, a view that has a tendency to ignore the cultural complexities of children’s everyday lived experiences.

Continuing the theme of policy analysis, Elizabeth’s paper focuses on Teaching and Play — a balancing act’ (OfSTED, 2015), which constructs a ‘recurring myth’ that teaching and play are disconnected endeavours in ECE. Teaching and Play uses the same methods as Bold Beginnings — interviews with teachers who are deemed by OfSTED to be ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’. Both reports use similar techniques of persuasion, and rely on a circular discourse in which policy-led research and government-commissioned reports are used as the evidence base for practice. Elizabeth uses Critical Discourse Analysis for deconstructing and exposing the intentions, arguments and power effects of this policy text. CDA can identify how socially constructed systems incorporate ideas and ideologies, how these have evolved, how they are maintained, and who is being recruited into their maintenance and promulgation. The ‘critical’ element of CPA in Elizabeth’s paper is the problematisation of texts, their intentions and implications for practice, and for practitioners, families and children.

What links these two reports is OfSTED’s construction of problems of practice, based on the assumed inadequacies and misconceptions of practitioners, and the presentation of solutions based on flawed and biased ‘research’. We argue that both reports represent ‘unbalancing acts’ in the generation of policy-led evidence, and the legitimation of policy-led solutions. In light of OfSTED now being the sole arbiter of quality, we propose that these and other similar reports are intensifying the ‘push-down’ effects that constrain the spaces for professional agency and resistance, and for debate and contestation.

Kay, L. (2018) Bold Beginnings and the rhetoric of school readiness. Forum, 60: 3.

Wood, E. (2019) Unbalanced and unbalancing acts in the Early Years Foundation Stage: a critical discourse analysis of policy-led evidence on teaching and play from the office for standards in education in England (Ofsted), Education 3–13, 47:7, 784–795,

DOI:10.1080/03004279.2019.1622494

Dr Louise Kay and Professor Elizabeth Wood are based in The School of Education, The University of Sheffield.