Towards an understanding of the political economy of earlychildhood education platforms. Pro Business or Pro Children?

There is a rapidly expanding and proliferating number of commercial early childhood platforms, competing for market share in what has become a crowded marketplace. Early childhood platforms provide a wide range of functions including an all-in-one digital ecosystem offering a learning management system; social media communication between educators, families and children; invoicing and payment; attendance monitoring; data tracking; individual profiling; documentation; pedagogic advice and even policy interpretation. Platforms are a sociocultural and ideological phenomenon that ‘can replace or profoundly disrupt educational systems’ (Cobo and Rivas) and hence their advent demands urgent critical thinking. However, within early years there is comparatively limited research of platforms' impacts upon families, educators and children. The aims of this colloquium are firstly to open a critical space to think about the political economy of commercial education platforms and secondly, to ask questions about platforms' impacts upon the neoliberal subjectivities of educators, families and children.