Barriers of Access to Early Childhood Education and Care in a Universal Education System: A Relational Approach

In contemporary education policy, institutional early childhood education and care (ECEC) has become an important part of national education systems. Indeed, pursuing universal access to ECEC is seen as an investment in the future, particularly for children from less advantaged family backgrounds (OECD, 2024; European Commission, 2024). This has shifted the view of arranging the care and education of small children from the private sphere of the family towards the increased role of governments and educational institutions as providers of professional ECEC as the first step of the education system (Campbell-Barr & Nygård, 2014).

Regardless of the policy goals, socioeconomic and spatial disparities in accessing ECEC are widely recognised in the research literature (Baranyai, 2023; Cloney et al., 2016), including in countries with universal ECEC systems (Zachrisson et al., 2013; Petitclerc et al., 2017). Moreover, challenges that families face in accessing ECEC are not only related to the affordability of ECEC or legal entitlement, but also, for example, to the everyday logistics related to distance, transportation, and opening hours of ECEC (McLean et al., 2017), as well as the allocation practices of the ECEC spots (Vandenbroeck et al., 2008). This suggests that barriers of access to ECEC are more complex and cannot be solved only by focusing on national-level policies.

In my dissertation, I examine how barriers of access to ECEC are produced at the local level of a universal ECEC system, using the ECEC system in Finland as an example. The dissertation builds on relational approach on space and place, where access and barriers to ECEC are understood to be produced in the entanglements of socio-material relations (Massey, 2005). The data consist of interviews with municipal ECEC administrators (n=10), parent interviews (n=51), a parent survey (n=1409), and register data concerning socioeconomic structures and the level of urbanicity of the neighbourhoods.

The dissertation consists of three sub-studies. The first sub-study explores the association between the socioeconomic or urban structure of the neighbourhood and ECEC attendance at the age of four. The second sub-study examines how the key actors of the local-level ECEC institution rationalise and legitimise access to ECEC, and what kind of preconditions are constructed for access. The third sub-study focuses first on examining how the key actors of local-level ECEC institutions construct the geographic arrangement of ECEC provision, and how it is materialised in arranging ECEC in their municipality. Second, it studies how parents navigate access to ECEC in relation to the arrangement of local ECEC provision and the socio-material relations available to them.

The results of the dissertation show that barriers of access are tightly and inextricably embedded to place. Barriers of access became visible in the form of conflicts, where the idea of universal access was negotiated and re-negotiated, producing differing positions for the children and families in relation to the ECEC institution. These differing positions entail differing power relations in negotiating access to ECEC. Whereas providing access to the children of working parents was placed at the centre of the ECEC institution, the access of children whose parents are not participating in the labour market and those were not categorised as being “at risk” were positioned on the periphery.

In addition to the differing power relations concerning the positions of the families, the production of the centre and the periphery of the ECEC institution relates also to the different areas in terms of the spatial arrangement of the ECEC services. The construction of children and families in “real need” for ECEC and the rationale of arranging the local ECEC service network to maximise the utilisation rates made visible how the universalism of access to ECEC was in conflict with the economic efficiency of organising ECEC. It produced places where access to ECEC is trickier for some more than others. Considering the uneven attendance of ECEC based on the urbanicity as well as the socioeconomic structure of the neighbourhood, it raises questions related to the disparities of the availability of ECEC.

Understanding the barriers produced in socio-material relations rather than seeing them as independent entities changes the way we think about efficient policies in ensuring equal access to ECEC. The findings of this dissertation show how the nationally universal ECEC institution is not the same everywhere. Instead, it becomes challenged, transformed, and re-transformed in relation to the place, extending beyond the immediate context of the ECEC system. Therefore, I propose a concept of relational universalism to acknowledge this relationality. Relational universalism can be a useful concept in examining and explaining institutional difference as a socio-material phenomenon.