The European Key Competences for Lifelong Learning provide a European-level reference tool for education providers to focus national- and European-level efforts to support students towards personal fulfillment, social inclusion, active citizenship and employability in a knowledge-based society. The European Lifelong Learning Programme defines competences as:  “a combination of knowledge, skills and attitudes appropriate to the context” (European Commission, 2007: 3).  The importance of practitioners’ knowledge and skills as determinants of quality has been widely acknowledged (e.g. EACEA-Eurydice, 2009; Melhuish, 2011; Vandell et al., 2010); our research project focuses instead on attitudinal competences for the particular context of early childhood practice in Hungary, United Kingdom, Japan and Italy. Higher Education (HE) institutions are involved in delivering courses to develop the early childhood practitioners of the future and research (Moyles, 2001; Fleer, 2003; Osgood, 2004; Brock, 2006) and our own experiences of collaborative ventures with international partners seemed to suggest commonalities in the sort of values and attitudes to be promoted in early childhood practitioners (see DfES, 2005 and CoRe, 2011).  This raised questions, however, about how HE institutions go about ‘promoting attitudes’  and what they can do if students’ attitudes do not match those which the training institutions identify as desirable. We have therefore been seeking to establish what the key attitudinal competences are that HE lecturers and students would advocate for early years practitioners, and whether there is commonality when looking across European countries, and beyond to Japan. There is a complex array of terminology for those undertaking early childhood courses across Europe, reflecting both the different disciplines where early childhood practitioners might find themselves working and the different disciplinary backgrounds of staff teaching them. This encourages cross-disciplinary approaches to understanding practice, and we have benefited from this in our own project.

We have identified variations in certain dispositions among students studying to enter the early childhood workforce. In particular, we have noted differences in levels of political awareness and emotional involvement and this paper will further investigate these differences in the contest of England and Hungary. We examine the historical and organisational backgrounds of the two contexts to find an answer as to why these differences might exist. Political changes have taken place in both countries in the lifetime of the body of the current student populations; Hungarian students in our study were (mainly) born after the change of the political regime (1989) and English students after the widespread changes in the education system following the Education Reform Act of 1988. Our research questions are: what might be the reasons behind political (un)awareness or emotional (un)involvement among students on early childhood courses? Is there a connection between these attitudes? We draw on different theoretical frameworks to analyse our data - learned helplessness (Hiroto & Seligman, 1975) and Social Practice theory (Holland and Lave, 2009) – using the common theme of a ‘sense of agency’ and how this relates to students’ developing professional identities.

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