The Quality of Inclusion in Danish Preschools

ECER 2018 Bolzano - The European Conference on Educational Research. Oplæg: The Quality of Inclusion in Danish PreschoolsAbstract:The consequences of living in poverty or in a family with unskilled parents are not equalized by the educational system, not even in Denmark, despite its so-called welfare state and offering equal opportunities for education. About 20% of Danish children are at risk of falling behind. A mobility study comparing Denmark and the US showed as an unexpected side-effect that: “while there were major differences in income mobility owed to the larger redistribution of income in Denmark, there was no significant difference in education mobility between Denmark and the United States”. “If your father is unskilled, the probability in both Denmark and the United States that you achieve higher education is about 20 percent” (Landersø & Heckman, 2016). Creating equality through education has not yielded the intended effects. In Denmark and in the Nordic countries, inequality in education seems to be greater and more persistent than economic inequality, and it seems as if not all children are given the same opportunities in life.The aim of this study was to investigate quality in Danish preschools and to establish whether disadvantaged children benefit from high-quality preschool attendance in an inclusive perspective? The conceptual framework of the research project rests on bio-eco-systems theory (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006). In total, this theory includes quality of orientation, structure, process (measured with the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale, third edition (ECERS-3, Harms et al, 2015) and family and network – with a specific focus on children with special needs/disadvantaged children. Quality aspects were analysed by exploring four dimensions of pedagogical quality, as proposed by Swedish researcher Sonja Sheridan (Sheridan, 2007; 2009). In this paper, the concept of quality represented in the ECERS-3, is compared with the Danish curriculum and discussed from an inclusive perspective based on the inclusion matrix (Naesby & Qvortrup, 2014).