Introduction

A wide range of factors have cohered in many ‘advanced’ twenty-first century societies to assume that young children will spend at least some, or even most, of their waking hours before they begin an extended period of statutory schooling in some type of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) provision. In England, there is currently a profusion of different types of ECEC provision. This broadly falls under either ‘the maintained nursery sector’, whereby a Local Authority has control and jurisdiction over the type and quality of provision or the ‘non-maintained nursery sector’ made up of a wide range of private and voluntary providers. All types of provision are regulated by the government and overseen by the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills. This chapter also presents an overview on the key concepts discussed in this book.