Diversity Colliding with Uniformization: The Hidden Paradox in the Organisation of Inclusive Childcare in Contemporary Germany

Worldwide, childcare services have seen strong policy commitments to both develop their professional mission and respond to diverse educational needs. In Germany, this comprises a social inclusion mandate targeting disabled children and those with language problems. Regulatory frameworks seek to introduce specialised services into early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings which are expected to offer special assistance and training tailored to individual circumstances. Concomitantly, ECEC settings are pushed to find ways conducive to the building of better ‘human capital’ in order to ensure that all children leave them with a ‘standardized’ repertoire of skills (especially those expected by primary schools). Hence the institutional environment of the involved organizations contains two parallel agendas, that is, proactively accounting for diversity among their clientele and making key operations more ‘uniform’. Drawing on results from a – largely interview-based – qualitative research project involving four German childcare organizations, our paper illustrates how the latter struggle and cope with induced pressures, considering, among other things, the role of quality management systems and professional self-inspection. We show that, internally, the social inclusion mandate entails mixed feelings as related programmes are decoupled from the day-to-day and external stakeholders (e.g. parents) call for ‘results’ in terms of acquired skills. With scarce and scattered human resources, but also due to a ‘mission overload’ of contemporary ECEC settings, exclusionary dynamics emerge as a side-product of a ‘diversity-sensitive’ reorganization of the sector. As care workers are torn between incompatible missions, differentiated educational outcomes seem unavoidable, emanating from the hidden paradox of a the deliberate arrangement of specialized assistance coinciding with a movement of organizational streamlining. Solutions to this imbroglio may come from efforts to put the various institutional expectations in harmony with each other and rethink the complex goal structure imposed on the sector.