Early Childhood Education and Care (at Bromley College), BA Hons - 2016/17

This programme is suitable for Early Years Practitioners and others working with children (aged 0 – 8) within early years settings who hold a relevant foundation degree and wish to gain a full honours degree. Students on the BA (Hons) Early Childhood Education and Care programme will normally be following on from the Foundation Degree in Early Childhood Education and Care or another Foundation Degree with an early years focus. The Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) programme is designed to provide you with the necessary skills, knowledge and understanding for the early years workforce. The current national agenda in the early years places considerable emphasis on raising the profile and quality of work within education, health and social care. The reform of the Children’s Workforce over the past decade, has led to the need for highly qualified and motivated graduates with knowledge and understanding of the multi-disciplinary nature of working with young children and their families, as well as an appreciation of the importance of quality partnerships with parents and other agencies. This degree makes a significant contribution to meeting the demands of the sector and it will provide you with a broad in-depth, theoretical underpinning of these issues as well as providing an opportunity through options of undertaking some practical experience. Whilst studying this degree, you will engage with theory and research drawn from an interdisciplinary approach. Specifically, you may draw on the fields of education, health and welfare, sociology, psychology, geography, history, children’s rights, law and justice, political and economic science, anthropology, social policy and philosophy. You will study a degree which is embedded within a socio-cultural perspective towards children, families and their wider communities and in particular the interrelatedness of children’s development and learning as culturally, as much as biologically, determined. When you study the Early Childhood Education and Care degree, the ideas of ‘being, belonging and becoming’ are a central theme. Not only in relation to children’s holistic development and learning, but also in relation to the journey that you as a student will embark on when you start a Canterbury Christ Church University (CCCU). For example, the state of ‘being’ values your experiences, knowledge and participation as the foundation of your professional identity; the notion of ‘belonging’ supports you and your feelings of inclusion and participation at University and in the wider early years community; and finally, the notion of ‘becoming’ supports your critical engagement with diverse perspectives on children, childhood and the wider political, societal and global issues influencing the lives of children and their families.