ABSTRACT
Early years provision in the UK is characterised by diversity both within and between the four constituent countries. In England, the introduction of funding for preschool places between 1996 and 2004 has been accompanied by a unified inspection regime and a common educational framework. All children aged 3 years and over are now entitled to government funding for some form of preschool education but this can take place in a wide variety of settings – schools, homes, village halls, purpose-built nurseries – which span public, private and voluntary sectors and include sessional and full-day care. There is a corresponding
This chapter draws on the findings of a research project conducted in a range of early years settings in England with the aim of investigating the development of ways in which children and staff build meanings together. The project was designed from a sociocultural theoretical perspective and drew on aspects of Bernstein’s theory of pedagogic discourse as tools for analysing organisational culture. It used a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses in the context of comparative case studies of four preschool settings in the West Midlands. Two of these settings could be characterised as having a hierarchical organisational style, while two had a more open, organic style of organisation. Two had explicitly educational aims while two prioritised care and social relationships. Through analysis of children’s utterances as they looked at photographs of preschool activities, the project demonstrated that different interactional micro-climates existed in the four settings and that these differences could be linked to the difference in organisation and pedagogical emphasis. In particular, the ways in which children built up meanings together differed between the settings, and the findings suggested that settings that prioritised care and socialisation fostered an interactive micro-climate which was more favourable to co-construction than those which emphasised educational outcomes.
