Social Justice, Children's Needs and Rights: An Approach to Planning

Commonly, planning for children involves comparing what they know against a curriculum or learning framework which identifies what they should know. Early childhood educators are then expected to create learning opportunities to help fill the gap between these two extremes. In this paper I argue that such an approach does not honour the requirements outlined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, particularly in relation to respecting children's agency. Rather, in this approach adults possess and enact power over children: adults make the decisions about what children should know and what and how they will be taught. I propose an alternative framing of planning. The focus of the planning becomes what early childhood educators need to do to ensure children's rights are met rather than on what children need to learn to meet the requirements of the relevant curriculum or learning framework.