When we think about the health and wellbeing of children, we need a model that is holistic in its conceptualisation and comprehensive in its design, to ensure we gain the best understanding of their health needs and can provide the most effective support. The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) (WHO, 2001) was developed by the WHO to provide a comprehensive and holistic framework for conceptualising health. WHO first defined health in a holistic way in 1946, regarding it as ‘the state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’ (p. 100). WHO recognised a need to develop a framework that would enable professionals, services and governments to enact that definition. The ICF is based on a biopsychosocial framework and aims to integrate the medical and social models of health. In this chapter, we provide an overview of the components of the ICF and describe educational, clinical and research applications of the framework to early years learners.

Research within Australia and around the world underscores the short- and long-term negative effects of bullying on children’s socio-emotional health and wellbeing. While there has been a significant increase in the number of studies conducted with upper primary and secondary students, comparatively fewer studies have focused on the prior-to-school and early school contexts. The few studies that have examined the effects of bullying in the early years emphasise its negative effects, with victims and bullies exhibiting psychosocial maladjustment and psychosomatic problems similar to outcomes reported in older cohorts (see Neilsen-Hewett et al., 2017). Bullying poses a significant risk to children’s socio-emotional wellbeing and mental health. A growing awareness of how bullying manifests in early peer contexts is therefore critical in the development of effective, preventative anti-bullying programs. The goal of this chapter is to provide a synthesis of this research, including an overview of the causes and correlates of bullying and its effects on children’s socio-emotional wellbeing.

Through the process of talking to one another, children become creators of their own future as they collaborate and build relationships. Talking Circles are designed to encourage children to ask questions about their lives and how they can make a difference for themselves, each other and their community. This process helps to build the resilience and leadership skills of children. These qualities are important in helping children to consider their world view and day-to-day challenges, which enables them to contribute to their own health and wellbeing.

In this chapter, we focus on a loose-parts, school-based intervention to promote playfulness. The intervention is known as the Sydney Playground Project (SPP). The SPP was developed by a multidisciplinary team, including the authors of this chapter. Key principles in the creation of the SPP were to find ways to enable children to engage in more-frequent, better-quality play, and make the intervention accessible to all children, families and educators (Bundy et al., 2011). There is also now a particular focus on children with disabilities (Bundy et al., 2015; Stillianesis et al., 2022). Goals for children with disabilities include development in areas promoted through play, yet a range of barriers often prevents this group from full participation.

Parental attitudes and support for education in the home are often posited as key factors in educational outcomes and access to higher education (Kirk et al, 2011). Moreover, since the late 1980s, there has been an increased outsourcing of educational learning to the home (Buckingham and Scanlon, 2003) and an expectation that working-class parents will take on responsibility for reversing educational inequality (Reay, 2017). International research has explored parents’ orientations to further and higher education and how the nature of parental involvement can vary significantly depending on socio-economic background (Ball et al, 2002a; Irwin and Elley, 2011 and 2012). In their research on ethnicity, social class and participation in higher education, Ball et al (2002a) found that college-educated parents are able to mobilise various forms of support and information and are directly involved in choice-making, for instance in making visits to universities and commenting on university application forms. Similarly, Crozier et al (2008) argue that parental knowledge and social networks contribute to a sense of ‘university entitlement’ among middle-class young people, which is largely absent in the case of their working-class counterparts (see also Evans, 2009). A number of studies indicate that while working-class parents value higher education and often have high expectations for their children, their efforts to support them are hampered by unfamiliarity with college requirements, concerns about affordability and limited awareness of financialaid opportunities (Ball et al, 2002a; Kirk et al, 2011). On the other hand, Irwin and Elley (2011), while acknowledging the links between social class and familial orientations to higher education, caution against overstating the internal homogeneity of middle-class and working-class experience. Studies in the US and the UK have highlighted the fact that parental orientations to education can vary within, as well as across, classes, and can change over time, in response to a number of factors (see Goldenberg, 2001; Mistry et al, 2009; Irwin and Elley, 2011 and 2012).

Bourdieu's model has been an influence on the analysis of differences in parenting styles between social classes. As sociologist and educationist, Annette Lareau (2011: 361), puts it:

The paradox of education and freedom

Paulo Freire (1972), in Cultural Action for Freedom, addresses the relationship between the oppression of the poor and the domination of power elites in society. In Freire's mind, education is freedom. Cultural Action for Freedom raises fundamental questions about the meaning of freedom and the role of education in the cultural empowerment of the silent masses of oppressed people in a divided world. Education in Freirean theory and praxis is a narrative of personal, cultural and social liberation. But there the complexity begins, as we have noted already in relation to access inequality, affirmative action and widening participation. Non-financial forms of wealth, available to the privileged affluent citizens in a meritocratic society – through unequal access to the acquisition of cultural capital and education credentials – empower individuals, define personal identity, promote self-esteem and embed in the public mind the myths of equality of opportunity and social mobility as truths. In a democracy we call it freedom.

Freedom is not available to everybody, however, at least not equally in democratic societies. In authoritarian regimes, such as present-day Afghanistan, there is little or no freedom for women, which includes the denial of education. Afghanistan is a traditional society under religious hegemony that favours gender separation at great cost to women's rights. Access to education for Afghan women is highly constrained because it potentially liberates women to be free citizens with equal rights and opportunities to their male peers. We are reminded of Freire's dictum about the importance of critical literacy as a guarantor of freedom. At the core of this political struggle about women's access to education, labour-market participation and civic activism in Afghanistan is the right to think and express an opinion of one's own, which is as important as the right to breath and food security for all people as human beings.

This chapter explores a competitive education system, where class, culture and wealth largely control access and progression on the ladder of opportunity in a meritocratic society, and asks who gets up the ladder, who is left behind and why. What are the implications for democratic and personal freedom? Is the popular belief in social mobility valid? The chapter argues three points.

Hierarchy and privilege in education: an old story in new language?

Anya Kamenetz (2022) observed: ‘For the majority of human history, most people didn't go to school. Formal education was a privilege for the Alexander the Greats of the world who could hire Aristotles as private tutors.’ Aristotle (384–322 bce) is widely regarded as one of the greatest philosophers in human history. His thinking continues to shape our social and educational world views over two millennia later. In modern society what is called ‘the invention of childhood’ has made public education at primary and secondary levels compulsory up to the mid-teens (Aries, 1973). But at least half the Western population are left behind when it comes to participation in higher education, creating a new form of stratification in society that reflects the durability of hierarchical classical social and cultural attitudes towards access to the knowledge.

Meritocracy during modernity has replaced aristocracy in the perpetuation of an elite society, creating a conflict with the core republican values of liberty, equality and solidarity, which are the foundation principles of modern democracy. Access programmes help to redress educational inequality, but they do not fundamentally change the social structure and meritocratic culture that characterises higher education in an elitist world. As one former disadvantaged student, who achieved a PhD, has asserted (The Irish Times, 18 September 2021):

Widening participation in higher education is arguably the greatest challenge facing democracy in building a ‘knowledge society’ during the 21st century. The renowned Brazilian educationist Paulo Freire explains why: ‘Education … is the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world’ (CivicEducation.org, 2021). Professor Linda Doyle (Provost, Trinity College Dublin) has stated, ‘I think access and excellence are not opposing things’ (Doyle, 2021).

The chapter begins by looking at social inequality, particularly in relation to health and wellbeing. Despite huge improvements in the available resources (think for a moment about the early childhood experiences of your grandparents or parents, who may have grown up before antibiotics were available), internationally we are seeing significant declines in population health and wellbeing, and increasingly larger gaps between the rich and the poor in countries all around the world. The chapter explores how governments are attempting to address social inequality. While early childhood educators are rarely involved at the level of policy, and although it is very important that we advocate at this level, it is necessary to understand how the policy context influences our work. The chapter concludes with practical suggestions for how early childhood educators can contribute to addressing the problem of social inequality.

This chapter explores the ways in which young children develop their self-concept in relation to their body image and discusses some of the influencing factors that condition children to perceiving favourable body images over unfavourable body images. The chapter incorporates discussions relating to ‘thinness’, and goes beyond this aspect to consider the effects of perceived anomalies and injuries on a child’s body satisfaction and positive self-concept. In addition, we discuss ways to support children in developing a positive self-concept in relation to body image, and to promote their wellbeing using the revised Belonging, Being and Becoming: The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia (V2.0) (EYLF) (Australian Government Department of Education [AGDE], 2022).

The slogan ‘Equality of Opportunity’ offers a starting point for a discussion of the asymmetrical relationship between education and social equality that has divided society and endangered democracy. It evokes a policy paradox that has created a ‘left-behind’ class; the members of which, to paraphrase Robert Putnam (2000), have been consigned to ‘bowl alone’ in the social wilderness of disadvantaged communities. The ‘left-behind’ live precarious lives located on the periphery of post-industrial society. These largely forgotten people are a universal social phenomenon across the cities of Europe and North America, as deindustrialisation hollows-out the traditional working-class in Western society. The ‘left-behind’ are problematised in the media as a marginalised group that has failed to engage constructively with economic change in a globalised world. They are in social reality victims of poverty, discrimination and social exclusion.

That is the sociological approach adopted in this book to an important and complex equality issue. It goes to the core of the cultural and economic context of social life in Western civilisation. The French public intellectual and internationally renowned sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) observed: ‘Sociologists are in a very rare position. They are unlike other intellectuals, since most of them know in general how to listen and to interpret what is said to them, to transcribe and transmit it’ (Bourdieu and Grass, 2002: 68).

The connection between democracy and education is a cornerstone of Western civilisation, as the philosopher and education reformer John Dewey (1859–1952) has pointed out, calling education ‘a necessity of life’. Dewey, in his 1916 book Democracy and Education, equated education with life itself, which is diminished by its absence. Each generation is challenged to build education anew, as if reinventing the world. It is, as Dewey (1916: 1) put it, ‘the renewal of life by transmission’. In the era of the ‘knowledge economy’, which seeks to instrumentalise higher education, Dewey's humanistic vision is challenged by neoliberalism representing a return to market values, social discredit and individual responsibility in a globalised world.

This book sets out to explore the relationship between the global and the local through the prism of educational disadvantage in territorially stigmatised communities.

This chapter focuses on how to explore opportunities to partner with families in articulating support systems for child health and wellbeing. In particular, it explores how student educators and educators can reach out to families and develop the necessary partnerships to successfully support parents in their parenting and caring roles, with the aim of positively influencing children’s family lives, health and wellbeing.

This chapter focuses on how early years educators can foster health, physical activity and wellbeing through learning in health and physical education (HPE). There are many children attending school in Australia who are educationally disadvantaged, meaning they often derive the least benefit from schooling. They may include children from high poverty contexts, migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, rural and remote learners and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children. This chapter is organised into sections that provide the background knowledge for promoting health, physical activity and wellbeing of all early years learners, paying particular attention to students with backgrounds who, for many reasons, can be described as educationally disadvantaged.

A safe environment for a child is one that provides freedom from harm and offers a strong sense of security and belonging from which to play, learn and develop. A healthy and safe environment also promotes children’s psychological wellbeing by allowing them to exercise their independence through making decisions and taking on new challenges. Educators are responsible for providing and maintaining safe environments for children in their care, including the development of strategies to prevent injury in indoor and outdoor environments. Injury prevention promotes safety, protects the child and minimises risk. Injury prevention also provides procedures to manage injuries as they occur. By protecting children from hazards, injury prevention offers children the sense of safety and security that allows them to develop to their fullest potential.

Teaching calls on educators to engage in responsive interactions and decision-making as they navigate complex and ambiguous contexts, examine deeply held beliefs and values, and integrate personal and professional knowledge. Such an undertaking requires personal integrity and continuing reflective practice. This chapter considers how mindfulness might become an integral part of reflective practice. Mindfulness can help us attend to the present moment, to the personal, emotional and interactive dimensions of our teaching, learning and leadership, and to the implications of actions for the longer term. Mindfulness can support our ability to connect with and respond to children and make a positive difference to their learning, health, and wellbeing. This chapter offers everyday resources and specific practices to support the development of mindfulness through self-study and self-reflection. Incorporating these into daily practice will assist authenticity, intentionality and agency, and facilitate meaning, wellbeing and purpose.

Along with the establishment of values and belief systems, the early years, from birth to 12 years, are increasingly recognised as the crucial time in which the foundations for life are laid, with significant consequences for educational success, resilience and future participation in society. The formative years are the years in which the capacity for carers and educators to make a difference can and does have profound effects. Carers and educators need specialist preparation because they are required to promote and teach health and wellbeing and to have the skills and knowledge to understand and manage the plethora of issues related to young children. Around the world, including in Australia, early years education is undergoing significant reform as the potential for educators to improve children’s quality of life is better understood. These reforms herald health and wellbeing as central constructs of this agenda. This chapter explores the concepts of health and wellbeing and shares some of the initiatives that have put health and wellbeing on the agenda for early years learners in contemporary times.