Attitudes and the early years workforce

Our motivation in putting out a call for papers for this special issue came from working with colleagues from UK, Italy and Hungary on a small research project involving our own higher education institutions, in which we compared staff and students’ perceptions of the attitudes needed to work with young children (Georgeson et al. Citation2015; Campbell Barr, Georgeson, and Varga, Citation forthcoming). This project had been prompted by an interest in the role of workforce development and the European Reference Framework on Key Competences for Lifelong Learning, which defines competences as ‘a combination of knowledge, skills and attitudes appropriate to the context’ (European Commission Citation2007, 3). These three aspects of competences are also well established in the research literature on teacher education (for example Collinson, Killeavy, and Stephenson Citation1999; Darling-Hammond Citation2005). They appear under headings such as content knowledge, pedagogical skill and appropriate dispositions and attitudes, and frequently form the basis of teachers’ professional standards and associated qualifications.