ABSTRACT
Early childhood education and care (ECEC) has been high on the political agenda during the twenty-first century. Although there now seems to be international agreement that investment in ECEC is important, the different approaches that countries have adopted mean that, throughout the world, children’s early education and care experiences can differ greatly. ECEC has become established in policy as advantageous for educational achievement and employment, since a ‘good start’ in early education might be a way of compensating any negative effects of children’s developmental context. Bronfenbrenner’s main concern has been how the settings surrounding the child operate and how the child is influenced by these systems. Bronfenbrenner saw children’s own individual perceptions of their environments to be more important than what might be happening in reality. Since 1997 early education has had a high priority for consecutive governments and a key objective throughout has been to develop children’s readiness for school, and so help them achieve educational success.
