The theme of this year’s BECERA Conference is ‘Childhoods in Transition’, and the organisers ask us to ‘consider and explore some of the most critical changes and transitions within the early childhood landscape’. That landscape, I will argue, is dominated by a polycrisis, consisting of complex and interconnected crises that are far more than the sum of their parts and cumulatively pose a profound existential risk to humankind. The challenge facing early childhood education, indeed all education, is how to respond: to be (in the words of Loris Malaguzzi) dynamic, remade to be relevant to the conditions of the times, and ‘to foresee, anticipate and prepare the days of tomorrow’. Put another way, how can early childhood education contribute to future building rather than being reduced to future proofing, readying children for a predetermined and inevitable world over which neither children nor adults have agency? How can it play an active role in the transition from the old to the new and not be a passive responder?

I will argue that the old that is dying (and deeply implicated in the polycrisis) is the neoliberal order, which has had a devastating effect on society as a whole and on education, apparent in the economistic, technical and managerial approach that has dominated early childhood education. The new struggles to be born and is contested, but I will argue for a new order that foregrounds sustainability, equality, caring and democracy and that recognises education as a public good and universal right. Drawing on my previous work, I will explore what the transition to this new order might mean for early childhood education in terms of the narratives we tell, the images we create and the provisions and pedagogies we adopt, proposing that the early childhood education we want and the world we want are totally entangled. In short, early childhood education must be remade, and remake itself, to be relevant to the conditions of the times and prepare the days of tomorrow. In proposing an early childhood education that plays an active part in the transitions before us, I contest a contemporary view of education as first and foremost a passive technical practice, obsessed with methods (‘what works?’), in favour of viewing education as first and foremost an active political practice, starting from political questions about images, purposes, values and ethics

Related resources

• Ten propositions for a democratic politics of early childhood education

• Transforming the early years sector