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Educators’ perceptions of Australia’s early childhood education and care quality assurance rating system
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Educators’ perceptions of Australia’s early childhood education and care quality assurance rating system

Alicia Phillips and Marianne Fenech
European Early Childhood Education Research Journal , Vol.31(6), pp.988-1000
2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/1350293X.2023.2211758

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8 Times Cited - Web of Science

UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

This output has contributed to the advancement of the following goals:

#4 Quality Education

Source: InCites

Abstract

Early Childhood Education regulation quality early childhood policy quality assurance quality assessment
High-quality early childhood education and care is of critical importance to children’s optimal development and wellbeing, and to a nation’s social and economic capital. Consequently, assessing and monitoring quality through regulatory mechanisms has become increasingly significant across the world. Yet, literature pertaining to the impact of regulatory and quality assurance systems is contentious, and there is a paucity of research that has investigated educators’ perceptions of the use and effectiveness of such systems. This article presents findings from a doctoral study that was the first to investigate educators’ perceptions of the Australian quality assessment and rating process. Ball’s theorisation of ‘policy as discourse’, ‘policy as text’ and ‘policy as effects’ provided a conceptual lens to consider the discursive influence of the assessment and rating process on educators’ practice, the limitations of how quality is conceptualised and assessed, and how educators can ‘play the game’ to attain high-quality ratings.

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