'I’d like to find out more about what we can actually do after this degree because I’m not 100% sure’: Exploring Emergent and Divergent Aspirations of Early Childhood Undergraduates

Mackenzie, Lee (2025) 'I’d like to find out more about what we can actually do after this degree because I’m not 100% sure’: Exploring Emergent and Divergent Aspirations of Early Childhood Undergraduates. Early Years: an international research journal. ISSN 0957-5146

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Abstract

The Early Childhood (EC) sector in the UK is facing a recruitment and retention crisis and fewer people are opting to study this subject at university. Exploring the aspirations of EC university students and the factors shaping them is therefore important for understanding what attracts people to careers in this sector, enabling course tutors to cultivate these aspirations. Sixty-four EC students at an English university participated in this qualitative research. Data were generated using a pedagogical task to elicit participants’ aspirations followed by focus group discussions to explore them further. The analysis revealed that participants have academic, professional, and personal aspirations. Many of these aspirations were found to be either emergent or divergent. The former theme suggests that EC students’ aspirations are still developing and may lack specificity while the latter suggests they may be in conflict with the aspirations that family, society and the government ascribe to them.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information and Comments:	© 2025 The Author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Faculty / Department:	Faculty of Education and Social Sciences > School of Education
Depositing User:	Lee Mackenzie
Date Deposited:	05 Sep 2025 13:42
Last Modified:	15 Sep 2025 15:04
URI:	https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/4749

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