The paper entitled, ‘I feel like the Wicked Witch’: Identifying tensions between school readiness policy and teacher beliefs, knowledge and practice in Early Childhood Education was published in 2024 in the British Educational Research Journal. The paper addresses the tensions between teachers’ professional beliefs and knowledge, and the school readiness agenda in the Reception classroom in England. Using cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), contradictions are identified as a way of illuminating these policy-practice tensions.
The editors say: ‘This paper is theoretically and methodologically strong and interesting. It has a good potential to have an impact on policy/practice in early childhood education.’
Read the paper on the British Educational Research Association (.
