All the papers in this issue of the International Journal of Early Years Education are, quite naturally, focused on the education of young children – this is not surprising, given the purpose and name of the journal. There is a further commonality, however, which is not apparent until one reads the papers carefully. This is that all the papers have as their focus the role played by sensitively managed interactions in increasing the quality of early years education. Interactions between children and children, between adults and children, and among adults both within and beyond the preschool boundaries are all implicated in the general search for quality.
The paper by Liu‐Yan and Pan‐Yuejuan deals with development and validation of an Environmental Rating Scale for Kindergartens and highlights the technical problems of developing a scale that reflects the quality of the interactions embedded in a young child’s environment. Theoretical arguments over the nature of quality notwithstanding, there is an urgent need for objective scales that give managers a way of quantifying the complexity of a quality environment for young children. Yan’s paper is a practical contribution to the field, and also gives some fascinating insights into the variation in quality from one Chinese region to the next.
The paper by Hui Li and Margaret Ngai Chung Wong explores the quality standards set by government for preschools in Hong Kong – a country where a ‘Cinderella service’ characterised by private settings, parental pressure, and low levels of teacher qualification has predominated in the early years sector. The paper documents research into government use of a framework of performance indicators to steer the preschool sector away from the didactic mode common to traditional Chinese education, and back to a learner‐focused pedagogy. The data show how long it can take for practitioners to respond adequately to such a framework, and the importance of good relationships among adults for taking ownership of new ideas and developing professional competence.
Marit Hopperstad presents an interesting perspective on children’s drawings. In her paper she shows us how children help each other to create meaning using drawings and conversation interwoven together. Her contribution is a novel coding scheme in which she takes Norwegian children’s drawing activity and their related conversations as a connected unit for her analysis. Hopperstad’s method of analysing the social dynamics of group drawing captures some of the children’s meanings that are lost when we regard their drawings as a static objects. Her paper shows the range of social functions that children’s drawing‐related conversations achieve and also suggests ways in which group drawing activity might be managed to maximise learning for all children.
The paper by Annette Sandberg and Tuula Vuorinen looks at how relationships among adults contribute to the quality of preschool environments – specifically, the cooperation that develops in good circumstances between parents and preschool staff. They find that in Swedish preschools there is a great deal of variation in the forms of co‐operation to which parents best respond. Their paper highlights the difficulty that parents have in engaging with formal systems of representation. The authors suggest that preschool staff have an intuitive understanding of the parents using their service, and that this resource within the staff should be used to choose the forms of parent‐staff co‐operation that are most likely to succeed.
Marie Tejero Hughes and Diana Martinez Valle‐Riestra also consider the relationship between adults working in early years settings – specifically, the relationship between teachers in US preschools and paraprofessionals working alongside them in the classroom, dealing with children with disabilities. Their findings show that the two groups they studied regarded themselves and each other as members of a common educational team, and that levels of co‐operation were generally high. They conclude that paraprofessionals have become key players in the delivery of education in the US, and that high levels of professional development are required for paraprofessionals if they are to continue as equal team members.
Each of these papers makes a contribution to an Early Years literature that values empirical validation, but that searches for a sensitive quantification of that which matters most to young children’s education. Early Years practitioners are well aware of how important the ‘soft’ aspects of the environment are to a child – those aspects related to styles of management and interaction that are dynamic, fluid, and that can fluctuate rapidly. Early Years researchers are equally well aware of how difficult it is to quantify precisely those least visible aspects of the environment that are most important to young children’s well being. It is to the credit of the researchers represented in this journal that they achieve such high standards of conceptual and empirical analysis in areas of Early Years Education services that are so important and yet so difficult to describe and research well.