Norma Rudolph

Conditions in homes, schools and communities must be conducive for children’s growth, learning and development. However, in the context of AIDS and persistent inequality in South Africa, deep crisis affects all aspects of children’s lives and creates barriers to meaningful access to education. This calls for concerted action from a wide range of role-players, both within and outside of schools. In response to the crisis, the Caring Schools Project of the Children’s Institute is developing a capacity-building approach to mobilise partnerships that can support child well-being and improve meaningful access to education. The Champion for Children’s Handbook: How to build a caring school community was developed with the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union, working in four school communities in the Free State and Western Cape. Save the Children UK and the Catholic Institute of Education are key partners currently using the approach in Limpopo and the Free State. The term ‘school com...

The COVID-19 pandemic exposes uncertainty, instability and glaring inequality that requires urgent global policy decisions. Historically, bureaucrats regard uncertainty as the enemy and look for tested solutions (Stevens, 2011). In contrast, Fielding & Moss (2010) acknowledge an uncertain future and encourage shifting policy making towards the search for possibilities instead of replicating singular solutions. Escobar (2020) advocates for pluriversal politics, with many possibilities created through collective decision-making by autonomous interlinked networks. In this paper, I combine autoethnography with policy analysis drawing on my own experience in South African early childhood policy making. I argue for a fresh decolonial debate about early childhood policy to replace dominant imported evidence-based narratives. I pay attention to power relations and examine, not only the content of evidence, but who has authority to speak (Mignolo, 2007). I introduce the bottom-up appreciativ...

There is a global agreement on the benefits of early childhood education, including poverty alleviation, and a growing consensus around mobilising resources for early childhood services based on needs established on data (Britto et al. 2018). However, the way ‘data’ and ‘evidence’ are constructed and the kind of data practices that are used warrants closer attention. While centralised population-based data are necessary for general planning, allocation of resources and identifying areas needing policy input, exclusive reliance on this kind of data-driven policy and decisionmaking can risk depoliticising early childhood policy (Dahlberg & Moss 2005; Morabito, Vandenbroeck & Roose 2013) and silencing broad, continuous and necessary debates about early childhood services. More specifically, it leaves little space for discussions regarding notions and values underpinning early childhood provision, such as the competing understandings of childhood and society promoted by diverse communit...

Following calls for diverse and contextual perspectives of the rich lives of young children, their families and communities from/in the Global South, this paper presents critical reflections emerging from a three-year (2016-2019) communitybased Integrated Approach to Early Childhood Development (ECD) project implemented in the rural Eastern Cape Province, South Africa. It explores the critical relationship established between a range of stakeholders involved in this project as reflected on by two community activists working together in the area of early childhood in the province for thirty years. This article highlights the importance of situating any community development initiative aimed at addressing early childhood provision in marginalised communities within a social justice framework. This includes identifying constraints inherent in unequal relations of power that risk undermining solidarity and agency for community stakeholders. It foregrounds accountability measures that em...

Policy for young children in South Africa is now receiving high-level government support through the ANC’s renewed commitment to redress poverty and inequity and creating ‘a better life for all’ as promised before the 1994 election. In this article, I explore the power relations, knowledge hierarchies and discourses of childhood, family and society in National Curriculum Framework (NCF) as it relates to children’s everyday contexts. I throw light on how the curriculum’s discourses relate to the diverse South African settings, child rearing practices and world-views, and how they interact with normative discourses of South African policy and global early childhood frameworks. The NCF acknowledges indigenous and local knowledges and suggests that the content should be adapted to local contexts. I argue that the good intentions of these documents to address inequities are undermined by the uncritical acceptance of global taken-for-granted discourses, such as narrow notions of evidence,...