Children’s Right to Participation in Early Childhood Education and Care: An Analysis in Finnish Policy Documents

Finland has gone through considerable reforms in early childhood education and care in recent years, with a new Act followed by a new National Core Curriculum (2018). The reforms have implied much more emphasis on both education and children’s perspectives. Because of the changes, we are interested in what role the concept of children’s rights, and more particularly children’s right to participation, has had in this recent development. Our analysis of the recent curriculum in Finland shows three different ways of describing children’s right to participate: social, political and learning dimensions on participation. Moreover, we could see that each dimension contained two poles, oscillating between children’s autonomy and interdependence. We believe that finding new ways of describing children’s rights to participate will help professionals working within ecec to overcome the gap between theory and practice.