Our early years work

This three-year programme aims to strengthen and deepen child and community-centred early years practice across Scotland, based on the foundational principles of Friedrich Froebel.

Our vision is of a world where children’s integrity, interdependence and creativity are recognised and cultivated as an indispensable life force in all human societies. Specifically, we want to see children – supported by skilful childhood practitioners – widely and confidently sharing their co-created knowledge, ideas and practices – to inspire and enhance social justice, in harmony with the natural world. 

We want to spark a long-term, national learning journey – spearheaded by ELC practitioners-as-researchers and change makers – that will bring the inexhaustible value of Froebelian ideas into mainstream policy and practice for the twenty-first century. Our hope is that within five years Scotland will be recognised as a beacon of childhood practice at the heart of an international community of Froebelians.

Froebelian Futures is a partnership with Cowgate Under 5s and the University of Edinburgh.

Programme Director and Co-Director:

• Dr Lynn McNair
• Simon Bateson

Other University of Edinburgh members are:

• Luke Addison
• Catriona Gill
• Dr Kristina Konstantoni
• Dr Marlies Kustatscher
• Dr Maggie Morrison
• ProfessorJohn Ravenscroft
• Jane Whinnet

Visit the Froebelian Futures website  

A project exploring the potential of Froebelian principles in new environments, like play cafés, to provide opportunities for high-quality learning and education in informal settings.

Despite emerging research and evidence that focuses on public spaces as informal learning sites, there is still a gap in our understanding of how very young children experience public or semi-public play and social spaces like play cafés and other types of community and business family spaces. There is also an evident need to incorporate young children’s perspectives in the design of play and social spaces.

This project builds on the work of two successfully funded projects:

1. that explored young children’s everyday lives and the realisation of their rights in times of crisis in Greece
2. that explored family and staff experiences of play cafés in Scotland and Germany

This project responded to priorities identified by children (0-8) and their families linked to:

• inequalities that children faced accessing and playing in public spaces, like community and business cafes
• the lack of high-quality play spaces for children and social spaces for families in informal public learning environments

Building on the second project, which mainly focused on parent and staff perspectives, this project focuses on young children’s experiences and perspectives of play café spaces and includes a larger number of diverse families and staff.  The project also includes the perspectives of children and families that may also face barriers in accessing public play spaces. 

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This international project (Scotland and Greece) investigates in more depth the current opportunities that children have to play in community and business play spaces and children’s families’, practitioners’ and staff experiences of these play spaces and their underlying principles and philosophies. The project explores the potential of Froebelian principles for new environments like play cafés and provides opportunities for high-quality learning and education in informal settings. It works with children, families and practitioners to co-design what Froebelian play cafés may look like in two contexts: Scotland and Greece, in order to respond to the diverse needs of each country and to support children’s play expressively and creatively. This project addresses a significant gap in our understanding of children’s experiences of emerging play spaces in informal learning environments beyond the early learning and childcare institution.

Play cafés could be innovative, informal, high-quality and accessible learning, play and social environments for all children and families. Play cafés could provide further spaces for community engagement, research, training/sharing of knowledge, co-working, collaborations and co-production with children, practitioners, other childhood professionals and students. Play cafés could also be life-affirming spaces and spaces for intergenerational and intersectional activism.

Learn more about the project in our briefing:

• Download the Play Café Project Briefing

We undertook research in a Froebelian early years setting, over 11 months, with 36 children aged between 2 and 5 years. Our findings challenge the assumption, in much of the literature on child-led research, that adults need to transmit their knowledge of research methods to children. Instead, a 'slow pedagogy' can build on children’s own knowledge, collectively, with time to come to research understandings. We found that child-led research is feasible with young children, but the research process can include or exclude certain forms of children’s communication, making some children more ‘competent’ to undertake research than others.

Read the article

Participating researchers

• Professor Kay Tisdall
• Dr Kristina Konstantoni (Co-I)
• Dr Lynn McNair (Co-I)
• Professor John Ravenscroft (Co-I)
• Dr Marlies Kustatscher (Co-I)
• Dr Debi Fry (Co-I)

with partners from:

• Brazil
• Eswatini
• South Africa
• Palestine

The project

This is an international research project which aims to identify and develop safe, inclusive participative pedagogy that can be implemented in fragile contexts and is sustainable for governments, communities and families. The project is undertaken with partners in Brazil, Eswatini, Palestine, South Africa and Scotland using a mixed-method approach. This includes:

• qualitative community case studies in each country
• policy and systems analysis at country and community levels
• developing the economic case for safe inclusive pedagogy

Community engagement and participation underpin the project, where children and their families play an integral role and there is a strong focus on knowledge exchange and collaborative learning.

SIPP project website

This project created a radical new public space which inclusively combined play, seminars, workshops and community development through a week-long pop-up play café festival. The work built on previously funded research projects linked to young children’s rights and play café spaces in Greece, Scotland and Germany, and a previous one-day pop-up play café (Fire Starter Festival). Interfacing research findings, knowledge exchange and community engagement, the project co-produced a new multimodal resource to provoke and develop new ideas and audiences, linked long-term to the establishment of a multi-partnership research-policy-practice early years centre.

This was a community engagement event which also included research to explore children and families’ experiences and perspectives about play café . A growing number of community and business play spaces seek to provide ‘child-friendly’ spaces. To what extent are these adult designed spaces relevant for young children and their families, and constitute environments that promote children’s rights and high quality education and learning?

Watch the video ​​​​​

This projects highlights an action research project that sparked transformation regarding how early years practitioners documented children’s learning.  The knowledge gained from this small action research project took place in one Scottish early years setting. The study was stimulated by the early years practitioners of the setting, who strongly opposed the ‘reductionist’ formal ‘tick-box’ assessments produced by their local authority. These types of didactic formal assessments suggest that pedagogy is underpinned by a desire to tame, predict, prepare, supervise and evaluate learning.

Authors:

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  Kay Tisdall

• John Davis
• Deborah Fry
• Kristina Konstantoni
• Marlies Kustatscher
• Catherine Maternowska
• Laura Weiner

The book provides an advanced, accessible text for childhood studies, introducing key ideas from agency to intersectionality to children's rights. Addressing children and young people under the age of 18, the book combines concepts from seminal texts with challenging, critical views and alternatives, to stimulate readers to develop their own analysis and apply the results to their own interests. It reveals how childhood studies draws on a rich and diverse range of perspectives from child development, educational studies, history, human rights, media studies, philosophy, public health, race and ethnicity studies, to social anthropology.

Learn more about the book

Explore the book's online resources