Early childhood education and care traditions and policy in an expanding Europe

Europe is often characterized as being divided into four blocks of countries with their own distinct cultural, historical, political, and economic characteristics. The geopolitical diversity within the EU is also recognized in a wide variety of different traditions for ECEC and upbringing of children. Nowadays, new reforms and policy initiatives are trying to introduce common ECEC quality framework. These recent developments might produce tensions, as the ECEC traditions seem to be incompatible with the new reforms to different degrees and might either slow or accelerate the political initiatives. This article aims to illuminate how different traditions affect everyday ECEC practice with examples from Eastern and Nordic ECEC. The recent development of economics-based approaches introduction of a common ECEC quality framework are critically discussed with reference to Danish and Slovak early childhood pedagogies. The method used is a comparative case study.