This article troubles the established discourse of free choice and free play in early childhood education, and develops post-structural approaches to theorising children's agency in the context of institutional and relational power structures. It is widely accepted that planning a curriculum based on children's needs, interests and patterns of learning promotes agency, self-regulation and control. However, contemporary research extends this discourse through critical examination of child-centred and developmental perspectives, and by theorising children's agency as a means of enacting power relationships in play. Using naturalistic, interpretive methods for documenting children's choices of play activities, this small-scale study focuses on 10 children in an Early Years Foundation Stage setting in England. Combining contemporary sociocultural and post-structural theories, the findings indicate that children's choices are situated within shifting power structures and relationships, involving conflict, negotiation, resistance and subversion. These activities create opportunities for exercising and affirming group and individual agency. The study raises critical questions about how children make and manage their choices, and examines the implications for policy and practice in light of restrictive curriculum frameworks.

The aim of the study reported in this paper was to identify the value that makerspaces can have in early childhood education (ECE). Drawing on data from research on makerspaces in four early childhood settings in a northern city in England, part of an international project on makerspaces in the early years (“Makerspaces in the Early Years: Enhancing Digital Literacy and Creativity” or MakEY), we identify three key principles that are integral to this provision: maker agency, maker funds of knowledge, and postdigital maker play. The paper identifies that makerspaces lead to the development of skills and knowledge that will become increasingly important in societies that are becoming highly technologized.

This paper discusses characteristics of converged play for early childhood education. The characteristics were derived from a four-year study of teachers’ interpretation and use of ‘web-mapping’ as an explicit conceptual tool, designed to mediate teaching practices and learning outcomes according to a definition of pedagogy as the relationship between teaching and learning. Three characteristics of converged play were identified via detailed analysis of ten core converged play ‘episodes’ drawn from teacher exemplar cases. The characteristics were ‘multi-modal’, ‘global-local’, and ‘traditional-digital’. The characteristics of converged play presented can help teachers understand teaching and learning in the digital age, providing a starting point for an early childhood pedagogy in which children and teachers can engage in well-established opportunities for play-based learning alongside multi-modal, global-local, and traditional-digital activities in early childhood education and care settings.

This article focuses on the national policy framework for early childhood education (birth to 5 years) in England – the Early Years Foundation Stage, specifically the use of child development theories as the underpinning knowledge base for practice. The aim is to understand what constructions of learning and development are foregrounded in policy, and their implications for curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. Critical Discourse Analysis methods are used to expose learning and development as messy constructs, and to propose three arguments. First, the evidence base for the Early Years Foundation Stage relies on selective appropriation of child development theories, and findings from government-funded research. These sustain normative discourses, reflecting a Piagetian ontology of ‘development leads learning’, through which children become ‘knowable’ and ‘measurable’. Second, the Early Years Foundation Stage shifts from developmental processes to learning outcomes as the basis for constructing curriculum, assessment of children’s outcomes and school readiness. Third, the Early Years Foundation Stage constitutes a discursive regime, which influences how practitioners must fulfil performance criteria that serve multiple purposes of assessing outcomes, evaluating standards and defining ‘quality’. From a critical perspective, this analysis questions the efficacy of the Early Years Foundation Stage in addressing the problems of equity and inclusion in diverse societies. The Early Years Foundation Stage exemplifies the policy technologies that can be discerned in international contexts, through which specific forms of curriculum coherence and control are produced. An alternative ‘learning leading development’ onto-epistemology is proposed, which offers potential for challenging the (il)logic of the Early Years Foundation Stage.

International research promotes the value of play for children’s learning and development. However, in early childhood education the development of national policy frameworks highlights a tension, and possible contradiction, between play for its own sake, and educational play. This paper explores these two positions, drawing on contemporary socio-cultural theories. Freely chosen play reflects children’s choices, interests and inquiries, and is understood as complex socio-cultural activity. Educational play focuses on curriculum goals and outcomes, and requires early childhood educators to plan for play in ways that direct children’s learning towards those goals. Recent research on children’s interests and inquiries offers solutions for pedagogical approaches that connect the curriculum as lived experiences, and curriculum as planned experiences, both of which reflect children’s cultural repertoires and peer cultures.

This paper presents a critical analysis of a report by the Office for Standards in Education in England based on a survey of practitioners’ perspectives of play, focusing on children age 2–5 years in the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS). The report, ‘Teaching and play in the early years – a balancing act? A good practice survey to explore perceptions of teaching and play in the early years’ www.gov.uk/government/organisations/Ofsted addressed the ‘recurring myth’ that teaching and play are disconnected endeavours. Critical discourse and critical policy analysis are used to interrogate this report alongside interrelated texts, the socio-political context of production, the methods used to define policy versions of ‘good practice’ in play, and the resulting power effects within early childhood education (ECE). It is argued that this report exemplifies how the remit of Ofsted has extended to provide policy-led evidence that is based on the construction of ‘problems’ of practice, and the proposed solutions. The Ofsted version of teaching and play relies on circular discourses that reinforce the government’s standards and accountability agendas. This analysis reveals the extension from Ofsted’s remit of inspection, to a mandate for defining ‘quality’ and ‘good’ practice. These actions, relationships and processes constitute the ‘meaning-laden architectures’ [Fairclough, N., P. Graham, J. Lemke, and R. Wodak. 2004. “Introduction.” Critical Discourse Studies 1: 1–7] that connect discourse and power. Using the metaphor of a kaleidoscope, it is proposed that ‘Teaching and Play’, and related reports, represent unbalanced and unbalancing acts in which policy-led evidence, based on flawed and biased ‘research’, exerts power effects for children, families and practitioners.