It is becoming increasingly accepted that early years’ provision and education are the foundation for development and learning throughout life. The top-level authorities in all European countries have issued official guidelines to ensure that Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) settings have an intentional educational component (European Commission/EACEA/Eurydice, 2019), which is aimed at and involving children, but also their families (European Commission, 2019). The Covid-19 pandemic has compromised the right to personal and social development (art. 29, CRC, 1989) for many children. The halt imposed by the pandemic and the consequent socio-economic problems affected a situation that is already critical as far as the challenge of “an inclusive and equitable quality education” is concerned, especially for early childhood (SDG 4, UN, 2015). As a result of the health emergency, a majority of countries announced the temporary closure of schools and childcare services, impacting more than 91% of students worldwide (UN, 2020a). The drastic limitations in access to essential educational services and fundamental rights affect all age groups and all social classes, but in particular minors who are already in conditions of social, economic and cultural disadvantage (UN, 2020b). The “digital divide” (Van Lancker & Parolin, 2020) of many families and the lack of alternative responses to ordinary school ends up increasing the vulnerability and invisibility of many children (and their families), depriving them not only of the right to education, but also “of orientations and value perspectives” (Milani, 2020, p. 449), essential for the development of a critical consciousness (Freire, 1976) and at the basis of the fundamental rights of citizenship (Moss, 2019). In Italy, where the rates of material and educational poverty of minors were among the highest in Europe (Openpolis, 2019), the effects of the economic crisis and the limitation of formal and informal educational opportunities pose an alert. It is estimated that child poverty could rise rapidly from 12 to 20%, leading millions of children to educational poverty (Save the Children, 2020a) and increasing the level of educational inequality. For many families, the cultural means available to guarantee an adequate path of educational accompaniment for their children have ceased to exist or have been considerably reduced. Especially for mothers, the lack of access to territorial educational services, the lockdown and the consequent reorganization of work have increased the difficulty of reconciling work and parenting (Save the Children, 2020b), making the mother-child relationship problematic and compromising the possibility of a quality education (Peeters, Sharmahd, & Budginaite, 2017; Sansavini, Trombini & Guarini, 2020).
This contribution will focus on the perspectives of both mothers and educators in informal educational services 0-6. They are, in fact, less considered in the emergency period by welfare measures and policies and less investigated by literature in Italy. The aim is to understand how the educational change imposed by the pandemic is perceived by those who attend these spaces, and to analyze the educational issues that are essential to build a qualitative inclusive educational project. We will consider how it is possible today to redefine education and care services for children as places of real social and educational inclusion.
Starting from a wider research project that is taking place in the informal educational services 0-6 of Save the children in Turin (Italy), this paper provides a critical discourse analysis on children’s rights at the time of Covid-19, investigating these aspects:
1) How have mothers and educators perceived the suspension of educational services during the lockdown?
2) According to them, what are the most critical pedagogical themes that have emerged?
3) Which pedagogical proposals can be built together to make 0-6 services inclusive, equitable and qualitative?