ABSTRACT
For children in the early years, the kind of education they experience is fundamentally important because it is the opening of their identities as learners and as members of the wider society. This does not mean that every child will achieve the same as any other, but that every child has an entitlement to be valued, respected, believed in and cared for as a human being in his/her own right. Practitioners may well feel tension in the system that requires identification of negative difference to 'prove' a need for additional resources, that increasingly focuses on high stakes assessment that marginalises and often demoralises some young children, and at the same time expounds a rhetoric of inclusion and inclusive practices. Belief in young children's potential to become confident, capable learners, irrespective of difficulties they may experience, must therefore be at the heart of practice and in the hearts and minds of those practitioners.
