New Zealand participation rates for under-3-year-olds in ECE services continue to show the biggest growth rates across the 0–5-year-old age range. Yet policy provisions to safeguard high-quality experiences in their early years settings continue to lag behind research-based indicators of high-quality provision for this age group. This article traces the ...

In Europe and the UK there is lively debate about when children should start school and what kinds of curriculum and pedagogical approaches are most effective in the early years. Caroline Sharp of the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) considers some of the most recent research evidence and draws ...

Effective professional development can provide strategies, tools and resources that motivate teachers to make changes for the benefit of children’s and teachers’ learning. This article considers a model of professional development based on distributed leadership. Characteristics that teachers found valuable in enabling them to practise distributed leadership, and the impact on their teaching ...

It was her own three-year stint as head of The University of Auckland’s School of Education that really sparked Viviane Robinson’s interest in leadership. “That sort of experiential, gut-level feeling for it gave me a much stronger sense that there was more to be said about what leadership involved.” Professor ...

The introduction this year of the draft key competencies (paralleling the five strands of Te Whāriki) brings an exciting new development to the early childhood as well as the primary and secondary sectors. This article discusses learning dispositions and their relation to the key competencies, and suggests three ways ...