The impact of the Covid‐19 global health pandemic in early childhood education within four countries

Abstract

The recent COVID-19 global health pandemic has negatively affected political and economic development in communities around the world. This paper shares the lessons from our multi-county project UKRI GCRF “Safe, Inclusive Participative Pedagogy: Improving Early Childhood Education in Fragile Contexts” on how children in communities in Brazil, Eswatini, South Africa and Scotland have experienced the effects of the pandemic. This paper benefits from having the co-authors from various countries, bringing their own located knowledge to considerations of children’s rights and early childhood education in the wake of the pandemic. The authors discuss different perspectives on children’s human rights within historical, social and cultural contexts, by doing so we will discuss how the global pandemic has placed a spotlight on the previous inequalities within early years education and how the disparity of those with capital (economic and social) have led to an even greater disproportion of children needing health and educational support.

Rights

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction of the work without further permission provided the original author(s) and source are credited.

Cite as

Downloadable citations

Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.17645/si.v10i2.5009

Repository URI

https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/66e5b926-32ef-47ac-85e8-7cc13431824c