The representation of the national quality framework in the australian print media: silences and slants in the mediatisation of early childhood education policy

ABSTRACT

While research investigating the mediatisation of education policy has primarily been undertaken in school contexts, this paper reports on a study conducted in the context of early childhood education. The paper examines how a major policy in early childhood education in Australia – the National Quality Framework – has been mediatised in selected newspapers. Drawing on Foucauldian, critical discourse analysis and mediatisation theorising, we utilised the corpus linguistic tools of WordSmith Tools 6.0 to inform content analyses of 121 articles from two major media corporations, News Corp and Fairfax. Our findings highlight the utility of treating our data as two distinct corpora, with each corporation found to have utilised discursive technologies to proffer competing positionings of the Framework. The contested nature of the Framework – generally purported in Fairfax to be a tool that supports quality early education, as opposed to News Corp’s framing of the policy as one that inhibits affordable childcare – poses implications for which advocacy groups are regarded by the media as having authority and thus likely to influence policy through the reporting of their voices. Implications for newspaper media as a discursive influence on parents’ childcare decision-making are also considered.

KEYWORDS:

• Early childhood education
• policy
• child care
• media
• wordsmith tools

Acknowledgments

The study reported in this paper has been funded by the Australian Research Council (Linkage grant LP130100129) and undertaken with financial and in-kind support from KU Children’s Services and Goodstart Early Learning. We also wish to acknowledge the invaluable research assistance provided by Susan Maidment and Suzanne Egan.

We are also indebted to the reviewers of an earlier draft of this paper for their detailed and constructive feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In this paper we use the term ‘early childhood education’ (ECE) to refer to the provision of formal, prior-to-school early education in Australia that is provided by services (long day care services and preschools/kindergartens) that employ four-year university qualified early childhood teachers. We distinguish ECE from ‘childcare’. Historically, long day care services have been referred to as childcare, and the term continues to be used by media and in some government policy today to refer to formal care that supports workforce participation.

2. Source: http://www.auditedmedia.org.au/. No figures were available for the Brisbane Times as it is an online newspaper.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [Linkage grant / LP130100129]; The research was also supported financially and in-kind by KU Children’s Services and Goodstart Early Learning.

Notes on contributors

Marianne Fenech

Marianne Fenech is a Senior Lecturer in early childhood education at the Sydney School of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney. Her teaching and research adopt critical approaches to early childhood policy, quality, and leadership practice. Marianne is lead chief investigator on the 2014–2017 ARC Linkage study What’s best for my child? Parents’ perspectives of childcare quality and early learning as contributors to childcare choice.

David P. Wilkins

David P. Wilkins is a research fellow in linguistics at the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (Australian National University). He is an anthropological linguist who uses multiple methods to explore the relationship between language use, society, culture and cognition.