Background: Studies indicate that access to nature may increase general human health and wellbeing. As a learning environment, the outdoors can also positively influence children's personal and social growth, healthy development, wellbeing and learning abilities. To maximise the potential offered by outdoor learning, it is necessary to gain deeper…

Digital technologies are increasingly present in young children's lives. How can early education systems get the best out of digitalisation while minimising its risks? This is especially urgent as the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated our reliance on digital tools -- tools that enabled young children to continue learning when early education…

With the increasing acknowledgement of the benefits of early childhood education, there is a need to ask critical questions about whether ample leadership exists for guiding ambitious systemic change in the field. This review of leadership in early childhood educational contexts between 1995 and 2015 examines the epistemological assumptions…

Whereas research on children's well-being in education has largely focused on adult perspectives rather than on children's understandings, recent scholarship argues for a stronger focus on children's experience and perceptions of their own well-being. Adopting a narrative approach, this article puts children's stories centre stage as we explore a…

The first years of life lay the foundations for a child's future development and learning. Many countries have increased their financial support for provision of early childhood education and care (ECEC) over the past years. More recently, the focus of debate has been shifting from expanding access to affordable ECEC to enhancing its quality. A…

This paper presents a model of the approaches open to government to ensure that early childhood services are affordable to families. We derived the model from a comparative literature review of affordability approaches taken by government, both in Australia and internationally. The model adds significantly to the literature by proposing a means to…