Early childhood education in the age of digital platforms and Artificial Intelligence: benefits and challenges

Credit: wavebreak3 via Adobe Stock.

12 December 2024

By Guy Roberts-Holmes

Commercial early childhood education (ECE) digital platforms have expanded rapidly since the Covid-19 pandemic. Thus far, there has been a lack of critical research on their growth and consequences. The aims of this blog are, firstly, to open a critical space to think about the political economy of commercial education platforms and, secondly, to ask questions about their impacts upon the experiences of educators, families and children.

Proprietary platforms are all-in-one digital ecosystems, available as apps on phones and tablets, that for a monthly or annual rental fee offer a wide range of services and functions. They offer families a social feed of video and photo updates about their children’s day at nursery and a Facebook-style communication platform with educators. Educators are given access to an array of downloadable teaching and learning resources, assessment and progress tracking tools and professional development materials, including individualised professional coaching. Some of these tools are AI-based. For managers, platforms provide invoicing and payment and attendance, occupancy and ratio monitoring systems.

All these varied functions provide both affordances and tensions. What is clear, however, is that such platforms, individually and collectively, are entangled in the logic of the market and its neoliberal rationale. Within this, platforms can be understood ‘as the superimposition of a (private) software layer on a pre-existing apparatus of governance’.

As one example of an ECE platform, Class Dojo is the world’s largest, used in 95% of early years and primary settings in the United States as well as in a further 180 countries. It initially provides services to schools for free, but via its ClassDojo Plus premium subscription service charges parents at home (currently £63.00 per annum). It attracts tens of millions in financial investment. Another ECE platform, LoveHeart AI, has shown impressive growth since its launch in 2022 and is today used by over 40,000 educators in Australia. The Australian Childcare Alliance has partnered with LoveHeart AI to offer its members a 10% lifetime discount on the platform, while the platform also recently secured $2.3 million financial backing to further build the business. As a further example among many more, Danish owned Famly currently works with 3,500 early education settings across the UK, Germany, Scandinavia and the US; it has over 400,000 parent users and 63,000 educator users. Famly has recently secured a £14 million investment and plans to use the new funding to expand into new markets.

More research is needed to understand how ECE platforms both reinforce and intensify existing early childhood relations, structures and identities of staff, parents and children whilst at the same time disrupting and reimagining ECE in new ways. For example, for managers platforms claim to save time through the apps providing easy access to tasks such as attendance monitoring and invoicing. However, wider research on the ‘datafication’ of ECE more generally shows how easily managers are led to relentlessly monitor and respond to an ever-widening range and depth of metrics around finance, staffing and resourcing and related messaging. The same research speaks of work intensification, digital rupturing of home/work boundaries and ‘technostress’ due to the expectations of constant monitoring and surveillance. Evolving digital technology and the speed with which it delivers information exacerbates such pressures.

Meanwhile, existing studies suggest educators experience platforms and the functions they offer in contrasting and sometimes contradictory ways. Some educators experience them as appealing, efficient and providing ‘easy solutions’. Educators may have an affective attachment to particular platforms as it gives them professional confidence and saves time. Equally, educators’ ‘devotion to data’ lends itself to the now hegemonic demand to curate lives (and progress) through platforms’ social media functions with parents. Some, however, feel their professional knowledge is undermined as it becomes reshaped and reoriented towards ‘app pedagogy’. They feel the advent of platforms represents a new set of labour demands within their work. The expectation of digital documentation, ‘tracking’ and sharing adds new dimensions to educators’ already complex work.

It is reasonable to speculate that the most advanced technology provided by such platforms – AI-driven tools – will be experienced and used by educators in similarly contrasting ways. For example, LoveHeart AI automatically writes ‘learning story’ assessments of a child’s progress by drawing together the educator’s various notes and observations. This is presented as AI saving educators’ time and enhancing professionalism rather than replacing their role in children’s learning. However, Wendy Lee’s research (2024) shows that depending on how it is used, these kinds of AI support could reduce if not remove altogether the close reflection and collaboration between educators, children and parents that is central to ‘authentic reporting’ on a child’s learning and development. As Rinaldi writes, such practice requires well qualified educators with a deep commitment because ‘this is a difficult path… that takes time’. Yet, well qualified early childhood professionals, with ample time in their working day are in short supply because of the ECE workforce recruitment and retention crisis seen in many countries.

As indicated, ECE platforms offer parents a social media-style news feed with highlights from their child’s day. This affords families the opportunity to share and discuss their child’s activities with them at home. However, this Facebook-style communication also has the expectation that parents will respond with observations and messages demonstrating how they are optimising their children’s learning at home. This intensifies demands upon parents through the pressure to perform and post the ‘correct’ observations of their child’s learning at home. This constructs the ‘good parent’ who is both responsibilised and professionalised in the monitoring and surveillance of their children’s activities at home. At the same time this extends the surveillance of the child into private spaces.

We need to better understand the ways in which ECE platforms are entangled with neoliberalism and current educational policy and, in turn, early childhood inequalities. This is important because such critique may enable experimenting with alternative economic structures that ‘nurture rather than diminish collegial solidarity and possibilities of care’.