I am a qualified teacher and Senior fellow of the Higher Education Academy. My background has been varied ranging from providing intense family support linked to hidden harms such as drug and alcohol abuse, working and researching in early years education and teaching in Young Offenders institutions. My time in the early years was the impetus for my PhD, which focused on the concept of ‘school readiness’.  At the time of conducting my research the wider focus on school readiness was aimed at unpacking policy and notions of disadvantage, or on the views of children, parents, and practitioners in the reception year of formal education. Government expansion of free early education and care to include two-year-old children in England significantly altered the school readiness debate, posing rhetorical questions such as ‘Where is the child’s voice’ as research continually failed to attune to their lived experiences. By specifically targeting this age group in educational policy, without consultation, a perspective emerged that devalued their social capacity, autonomy, and power, positioning them as by-products within a neoliberalist agenda to maintain an ideal citizen rhetoric. My aim was addressing this gap in research by listening to two-year-old children to understand how two-year-old children experienced school readiness. My conceptual and theoretical framework drew on posthumanism and materialism enabling me to look beyond the child to consider the importance of more-than-human objects in everyday intra-actions in the classroom.  The children and objects emerged with agency, drawing attention to their activism that challenged dominant discourses and policy agendas.

My research interests have two bifurcations, both underpinned by posthuman theories. The first is linked to my PhD and discovering the importance of more-than-human matter in early education.  I am currently developing a project on the materiality of art in, and on, learning.  The second is working in various collaborations to delve into everyday concepts and how these ‘affect’ us.  

In collaboration with a Director of the International Montessori Institute at another institution we are currently conducting a policy landscape analysis and associated literature review, we aim to understand the extent of recent curricular and assessment policy interventions impacting on the Reception Year in English schools. We argue that The Reception Year (YR) is a contested and crowded space serving as the first year of formal schooling and a pre-statutory phase of education. A site of increased political intervention marked by curricular and assessment policy intensification) and increased regulation and surveillance. Drawing on theory of critical policy analysis we consider how pedagogical policy prescription has ensued in the form of Covid-19 ‘catch up’ programmes, changes to summative assessment, and a reviewed inspection framework. Such developments threaten to erode the principles of the Early Years Foundation Stage in England, the notion of the unique child and individualised learning rates. Thus, further entrenching the dominance of developmental and readiness discourses linked to neoliberalism and the ideal citizen rhetoric, influenced by global supranational organisations that support a knowledge economy that builds on Human Capital Theory. 

• National early learning and childcare providers
• International childcare providers
• Education and Learning institutions