Inclusive education is widely promoted as a guiding principle for educating children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), positioning early years practitioners as key actors in recognising and responding to children’s learning and developmental differences (Florian, 2019; Nutbrown & Clough, 2021). In early childhood education and care (ECEC), however, inclusion is frequently organised through an emphasis on care and needs, sometimes at the expense of educational purpose and pedagogical intention. This tension becomes particularly visible in debates surrounding the early identification of SEND, which occupies a contested position between inclusive education and special education discourses.

There are, though, policy frameworks that commonly promote early identification as part of a graduated approach to support, emphasising ongoing observation and procedural caution in order to avoid labelling or exclusion (OECD, 2021). Scholarship has questioned the evidential basis of early intervention effects and the risks associated with medicalisation and categorisation, particularly when identification becomes a gateway to resources rather than a pedagogical process (Mintz, 2022; Slee, 2021). Within these debates, delaying identification is often framed as protective, allowing children “time to develop” before additional needs are formally recognised.

 In practice, early years practitioners are required to make judgements about children’s development while navigating institutional expectations, accountability demands, and access to specialist support (Florian, 2019; Mintz, 2022). However, comparatively little attention has been paid to how early identification is understood and enacted by practitioners themselves within inclusive classroom contexts. Rather than approaching early identification as a technical assessment procedure or a policy requirement, this paper treats it as a contested educational practice through which practitioners negotiate care, education, and professional responsibility. The analysis is guided by a key question: how do early years practitioners understand and enact early identification as part of their professional role obligations within inclusive ECEC settings?

This paper draws on a doctoral comparative study conducted in ECEC settings in China, England, and Scotland. Within the broader study, early identification emerged as a shared concern articulated by participating practitioners across all three contexts. Although early identification was embedded within distinct institutional arrangements, such as diagnostic gateways to specialist provision in China, extended procedural timelines and sensitivities around SEND categorisation in England, and needs-led approaches that reject diagnostic labels in principle in Scotland, it was repeatedly foregrounded by practitioners as a point of tension. Across contexts, practitioners described early identification as a moment where professional responsibility, access to educational support, and pedagogical purpose intersected, positioning it as a key comparative issue within the doctoral research.

The paper is informed by ethics of care, used here as an analytic framework for examining responsibility and professional judgement in institutional contexts (Tronto, 1993, 2013). Care is understood as professionalised educational care: acting to secure meaningful learning opportunities, anticipating barriers to participation, and taking responsibility for children’s longer-term educational trajectories. This perspective is complemented by Miller’s argument that moral agents always act within roles, and that obligations are mediated by institutional responsibilities and access to professional support (Miller, 2007, 2010). Within this framework, recognising a child’s needs does not automatically translate into clear or actionable obligations; rather, practitioners’ capacity to act is shaped by the institutional conditions under which early identification is organised.

This study adopts a comparative qualitative case study design. A narrative inquiry approach was used to explore how practitioners made sense of early identification and inclusion within their everyday professional practice (Clandinin & Connelly, 1997; 2000). Eleven early years practitioners working in mainstream ECEC settings promoting inclusion participated in the study across China, England, and Scotland. Data collection took place in two phases. Phase One focused on capturing practitioners’ professional trajectories and experiences of inclusive practice. Narrative interviews were conducted to explore participants’ pathways into the profession, their experiences of working in increasingly diverse classrooms, and their engagement with early identification and support processes for children with SEND. These interviews were followed by three to five days of in-situ observations in each setting, which aimed to document everyday practices, interactions, and decision-making related to children’s learning and support. Phase Two involved reflective follow-up conversations with participating practitioners. Drawing on data generated in Phase One, preliminary interpretations were shared with participants to support reflective dialogue. These conversations enabled practitioners to revisit and elaborate their understandings of early identification, professional responsibility, and inclusive practice, and to reflect on how institutional conditions shaped their practices. Narrative analysis, informed by the distinction between big and small stories, was conducted to examine practitioners’ meaning-making processes. Big stories refer to more coherent and extended narratives through which practitioners articulated their professional trajectories (Bamberg, 2012), while small stories capture fragmented, momentary, and interactionally situated accounts in everyday talk (Georgakopoulou, 2006; 2015). Understanding storytelling as situated, relational, and shaped by interactional, institutional, and cultural contexts, this analysis explored how practitioners made sense of early identification over time, while also capturing how ethical and professional dilemmas were negotiated in specific moments of practice. Thematic analysis was also conducted to identify patterns of convergence and divergence across practitioners’ narratives from the three national contexts (Braun & Clarke, 2012). These themes were then examined comparatively to explore how similar ethical and professional dilemmas related to early identification took distinct forms under different institutional arrangements.

This study contributes to ethics of care scholarship by shifting attention away from caring dispositions or moral intentions and towards the conditions under which care becomes professionally actionable. Across the three national contexts, practitioners’ narratives engage with accounts of care that conceptualise it as relational, situated, and institutionally mediated (Tronto, 1993, 2013). Practitioners recognised children’s needs and felt ethically addressed by them; however, their capacity to respond was shaped by institutional authorisations, procedural requirements, and access to specialist support. Care, therefore, was not limited by a lack of commitment or sensitivity, but by the conditions under which professional judgement could legitimately and effectively be exercised. This finding complicates explanations that locate tensions in early identification primarily in teachers’ beliefs or competencies, and instead foregrounds role-based accounts of moral obligation that emphasise how responsibility is constrained by institutional structures (Miller, 2007, 2010). Whilst this study focuses on early years practitioners working in three national contexts, its aim is not to privilege national comparison for its own sake, but to contribute to broader international conversations about inclusive education and practitioners’ professional experience. The issues examined, particularly those concerning care, responsibility, and institutional constraint, are shaped by global policy discourses around inclusion, yet are lived and negotiated within local institutional and cultural c ontexts. By foregrounding shared ethical dilemmas as they take context-specific forms, this study offers more grounded and locally responsive understandings of inclusive practice, while also enriching international dialogue on how practitioners’ ethical labour is recognised and supported within inclusive education systems.

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