Building a competent early childhood education and care workforce in the Asia-Pacific region

Introduction

This special issue originated from a collaborative research project on developing a competent workforce for early childhood education and care (ECEC) in the Asia-Pacific region, headed by researchers from Australia, China, Japan and South Korea and funded by the National Social Science Foundation of China. It aims to discuss and share experiences in terms of enhancing the quality of the ECEC workforce within the Asia-Pacific region. More specifically, this special issue includes research articles and policy analyses based in the varying ECEC contexts of Australia, mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and South Korea, jointly contributing to addressing the emergent and shared challenges of ensuring both high-quality ECEC services and a well-qualified workforce. As a recent OECD (2019) report on Good Practice for Good Jobs in ECEC has indicated, a shortage of highly skilled and well-qualified ECEC staff is an international phenomenon. In this context, the collection of papers presented here could have vital implications for understanding ECEC workforce issues and developing a competent ECEC workforce in and beyond the Asia-Pacific region.

We use the term ECEC workforce to refer both to the staff working directly with children on an everyday basis and to those responsible for leading and managing ECEC settings. They may variously be referred to as ‘professionals’, ‘teachers’, ‘caregivers’, ‘educators’ or ‘practitioners’, depending on country-specific usage. While choosing the term ‘competent ECEC workforce’ for this issue, we are aware of the potential pitfalls of this descriptor. How competence is defined, understood, implemented and enacted may vary (Biesta 2015), with interpretations related to professional agency and/or professional performativity. We theorise competence both from a person-centred approach, being a complex and holistic concept comprising knowledge, skills, understandings, values and purposes; and in the contexts of the way ECEC is organised and co-ordinated as a ‘competent system’. At the same time, we are aware that the competence frameworks currently en vogue in teacher education may result in an increased emphasis on performance, standards, measurement and control, potentially leading to an undermining of professional autonomy.

At the intersection of family, social, education and employment policies, governments have become increasingly aware of the advantages and short- and long-term benefits of well-resourced systems of ECEC. In our view, the workforce is the core resource in these systems. Establishing strong professional relationships with children, families and the wider community depends largely on sensitive, self-critical and theoretically informed pedagogy specialists. However, despite the growing tendency of policy support for well-functioning ECEC structures, approaches towards staff professionalisation, workforce composition and workforce rewards vary greatly across regions and nations, as do public perceptions of ECEC teachers’ self-images.

Despite marked differences in population size and political histories, a common feature among the countries represented in this issue relates to the role that private for-profit provision plays in the big picture of ECEC in each nation, rendering workforce support potentially more vulnerable. Another commonality is that ECEC, in most cases, is not organised as a unitary or integrated system but maintains a split-sector approach to ‘childcare’ and ‘education’ – often making it likely that one part of the workforce is more disadvantaged than the other.

Alongside these system-related factors affecting the process of building a competent ECEC workforce, rapid changes at the macro level such as migration movements, as well as unforeseen global crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, mean that the teams working in ECEC settings are faced with intensified expectations regarding their role as pedagogy specialists. Moreover, in the current context of expansion, increased regulation, accountability pressures and monitoring and evaluating at different levels of the ECEC system (child-related assessment, setting-focused self-evaluation and external inspections), early childhood teachers are confronted with the challenge of enacting pedagogy in a sustained and relational way. Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that the early childhood workforce is a focus of interest and concern for researchers.

The articles in this issue

Thirty-two authors from the above-named countries/regions, and in three cases collaborating with colleagues in the UK or the US, have contributed with evidence-based research knowledge on multiple aspects of workforce development related to shared and differing political, social and cultural contexts.

The first three policy-related papers in this issue investigate system-level problems related to the teacher workforce. In a context of persistent staff shortages in the Asia-Pacific region, one consequence has been the emergence of an increasingly mobile ECEC workforce. For the first paper in this issue, two authors from Australia (Joce Nuttall and Sue Grieshaber), three from Singapore (Sirene Lim, Chee Wah Sum and Weipeng Yang) and four from South Korea (Eunju Yun, Jooeun Oh, Hyojin Ahn and Sujoong Kim) have teamed up for a cross-national study on diversity in the ECEC workforce in their respective countries through an analysis of the way migrant workers are conceptualised and positioned in policy documents relating to quality improvement in East Asia. It is part of a wider study to determine, for example, the kinds of professional learning opportunities needed for both migrant educators and their colleagues in the dominant society context. The three country contexts represented here vary significantly in cultural, historical and geopolitical terms. However, the relevant policy documents analysed in all three share the similarity that the concepts of culture and diversity are barely represented. Likewise, there is little acknowledgement of the quality enriching potential that the presence of migrant workers in the workforce can contribute – inevitably resulting in missed chances for enhanced learning opportunities for both children and early childhood educators.

The government of the Hong Kong Special Administration Region, where ECE settings for 3 to 6 year-olds are located entirely in the private sector, has undertaken considerable policy efforts to improve the status of ECE teachers in recent years, not least through raising qualification requirements and remuneration. This move has resulted in a surge of applications to ECE teacher education courses. The paper by Jessie Ming Sin Wong provides a critical analysis of this situation based on the perceptions of 175 candidate ECE teachers of their future profession. While they value the caring and affective skills and qualities needed to work with young children, they also see the work as stressful and involving a heavy workload. They are doubtful whether the ‘soft skills’ promoted in their professional education are likely to convince the general public – even in the potentially positive socio-political context of enhanced ECE teacher status in Hong Kong – that the professionalism of ECE teachers needs to be recognised and valued in the same way as that of primary and secondary school teachers. Among the implications suggested by the author are that a government lead is needed to promote a positive image of the ECE teacher profession.

The third paper depicts a narrative story about how the government in mainland China tried to provide universal preschool education for 3 to 6 year-olds while facing a shortage of qualified ECE staff. Beginning in 2010, when the gross enrolment rate (GER) in Chinese ECEC settings was 56.6% for 3 to 6 year-olds, a three-year action plan was progressively implemented in three phases to reform the country’s ECEC system. By 2020, the GER had reached over 85%, aligning with the average level in middle- and high-income countries. Furthermore, over 80% of the enrolled children participated in publicly subsidised programmes. Two authors from China (Xin Fan and Minyi Li) and two from Australia (Chris Nyland and Berenice Nyland) teamed up to adapt an alternative perspective from Marxist transition theory, to ask how this remarkable expansion in a decade was realised in terms of preschool workforce development, and explain the sequence of steps taken to realise these advances. The key strategy embedded in the reform process was named Crossing the River by Feeling the Stones (CRFS). This comprised identifying an overarching goal, undertaking a sequence of steps informed by experimentation, taking into account experiences on the ground and listening to stakeholders. Among the implications for policy implementation strategy, the article offers insights that may be particularly valuable for low- and middle-income nations with similar challenges.

The next four papers focus on effective practices of continuing professional development (CPD) in varying cultural-economic contexts and/or in relation to the impact of globalisation on ECEC. The concept of teacher agency has been a recurrent topic in recent literature as a powerful means of understanding how teachers might enact recommended practices in specific contexts. The fourth article, by Jie Gao, Yuwei Xu, Eleanor Kitto, Helen Bradford and Clare Brooks, explores an integrated learning approach to promoting culturally sensitive teacher agency in Chinese kindergarten teachers. The approach emphasises the socially situated nature of learning. The implications for building a competent workforce include how to support teacher agency at individual and collective levels and also how to narrow the theory-practice gap by maintaining a critical eye on structural restraints and relational resistance in culturally relevant contexts.

The fifth paper, by Kiyomi Akita, Sachiko Nozawa and Yumi Yodogawa, documents how the Early Childhood Education Quality (ECEQ) initiative supported self-organised professional development in the Japanese context. Linking well to the argumentation of the previous paper, it provides an example of enacting collective teacher agency. Self-reported data from two key stakeholders, classroom teachers and ECEQ coordinators, provide insights from a bottom-up initiative in the private sector. In contrast to CPD programmes initiated by the public sector in Japan, such autonomous self-reforming initiatives from the majority provision might particularly provoke further discussion on how to enhance professionalism in the private sector, through work-related learning that is embedded into the professional lives of ECEC educators.

Catriona Elek, Sarah Gray, Sue West and Sharon Goldfeld contribute the sixth paper with a focus on a CPD programme that supports educators working with children in socio-economically disadvantaged communities in Australia. The aim of the CPD was to improve emergent literacy-promoting practices and environments through eLearning and onsite coaching. By conducting randomised control trials that involved 223 educators from 12 ECEC centres for children aged birth to 5 years, the results have proved this relatively light-touch and inexpensive intervention to be promising and consistent as an effective coaching programme to improve ECEC educators’ practices, especially when working with infants and toddlers.

The seventh paper written by Liang Li, Marilyn Fleer and Ning Yang uses a single case of one Chinese kindergarten teacher to discuss the potential benefits of bringing an Australian play-based learning model, ‘Conceptual PlayWorld’, into kindergarten programmes in China. They adopt a cultural-historical perspective from Hedegaard’s (2008) conception of an educational experiment as an extended collaboration between teachers and researchers. This paper argues that the PlayWorld approach towards educational intervention helps to create a new kind of social and cultural situation, amplifies reflective practice and acts as an important source for sustained practice change. Formulating a cultural-historical methodology for studying CPD, this exploration contributes to the development of didactics and pedagogical research across nations.

The final article in this issue extends ECEC workforce development to online environments in the current context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Wenwei Luo, Ilene R. Berson and Michael J. Berson report on a study in mainland China about kindergarten teachers’ creation of virtual spaces to enhance home-school collaboration through a digital platform called Douyin. Based on lessons from participant teachers’ virtual home visit experiences during the pandemic confinement, this paper suggests a promising way of engaging educators and families in ECEC both during and beyond the time of the pandemic. At the same time, the authors identify concerns about ethical considerations such as young children’s privacy and safety in a digital environment.

Concluding remarks

The eight papers in this special issue provide contextually relevant reflections on how social, cultural and political contexts impact on ECEC workforce development, and on the importance of embedding those contexts in both initial and continuing professional development programmes and in support initiatives aimed at building a competent ECEC workforce. These issues may play out differently in countries/regions with centralised governance (mainland China, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan and Singapore) and federalised systems (Australia). China is the only country represented in this special issue to have set a national limit to curbing profit-making ECEC services, which are a common feature of all the ECEC systems represented. While the challenges of such privatised and marketised systems have been highlighted elsewhere (e.g. Lim and Lloyd 2019), there are nevertheless signs of increasing advocacy for teacher autonomy and agency as well as emerging demands for improved working conditions (commensurate salaries, teacher well-being). These are recurrent and common issues in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond, as is the challenge of recruiting and maintaining a high-quality workforce in the face of teacher shortages (as in China and Singapore).

Through these reflections, this special issue presents a changing ECEC workforce landscape in the Asia-Pacific region. We argue that building a competent ECEC workforce needs to go beyond a person-centred approach, integrating system-wide parameters and reimagining education and care for young children in multiple, glocalised ways.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the China National Social Science Research Fund [grant number BDA 170027].