Standards Versus Needs? Professional Conflicts in the Overburdened Field of ECEC

Within the last two decades, the field of Early Education and Care (ECEC) has not only been largely expanded in many Western European societies in staff and childcare places due to rising needs of families, but also has to meet an enlarged agenda of divergent (and partly incompatible) tasks to fulfill beyond mere care work: early education to prepare for school; social inclusion of children with special needs; co-parenting; networking with local institutions, among other tasks. Concomitantly, the service providers are struggling with a permanent lack of resources. Both trends have severe implications for the related professions (and ‚semi-professions‘), with repercussions also for the quality of services. Drawing on both an extensive scoping review and own in-depth case studies in four different regions of Germany, the paper discusses such implications and the coping strategies of organizations and staff. Our findings suggest an intensified conflict between two opposing institutional logics and knowledge-bases in ECEC: On the one hand, the dominant public discourse, following the logic of human capital production, calls for a stronger standardized early education in kindergardens to better prepare for school. On the other hand, actors in the field strive hard to defend the professional logic of a needs-based approach in ECEC. This conflict infiltrates daily practices in the sector, producing severe tensions that raise uncertainty about how to act „properly“ – thus potentially undermining professional ethos and motivation, with negative implications for the quality of services. The strategies of staff to deal with these strains are diverse, between a daily muddling through and (rather hidden) resistance practices. Management seems to apply hybrid strategies between empathetic communication and disciplining. Especially in socioeconomically disadvantaged regions, the professional logic risks to be overturned by the economic logic. This, however, may further undermine the motivation of staff working under particularly difficult conditions.