Children’s rights and the draft Strategic Plan for Early Learning: Where are the children?

This article reviews the draft Strategic Plan for Early Learning 2019–2029 against the New Zealand Government’s obligations to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Using discourse analysis, the authors identify explicit and implicit references to protection, provision, and participation rights within the document. The analysis shows that the Government has prioritised protection and provision rights, even though the vision for early childhood education offered within the plan directly refers to all children having the “right to enjoy the good life as New Zealanders”, which requires acknowledgement of children’s participation rights. The authors suggest this imbalance between protection, provision, and participation rights can be corrected by directly referring to children’s agency within the draft Strategic Plan’s vision statement and then establishing the implications for the plan’s goals.