At most academic award ceremonies, there is a part where the handshakes, applause, and pictures outside a conference room seem a bit staged. However, something slightly different appeared to be taking place when Aisling Burke stood to accept the OMEP Ireland Early Childhood Student of the Year Award at Dublin City University. The Minister of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration, and Youth, Roderic O’Gorman, was present. Furthermore, he wasn’t there out of duty. He was present because, according to the judging panel, Burke’s dissertation research, which examined how early childhood educators provide parenting support in Irish care settings, produced work “written to a very high standard ready for publication.” Judges do not use that language lightly.
It’s important to pay attention to that particular detail because it reveals what DCU and OMEP Ireland are truly attempting to accomplish with this award. Memorizing frameworks or checking assessment boxes does not earn the prize. It acknowledges graduate research that advances the field of early childhood education and care, or ECCE as it is known in Ireland, in a meaningful and practical way. It was said that Burke’s work was a novel contribution. A minister of government observed. In fields where the work is by default invisible, that rarely occurs.
The World Organization for Early Childhood Education, which has members in more than 60 nations and is represented at UNESCO and UNICEF, is linked to the OMEP Ireland Award. OMEP functions as a registered charity in Ireland with the specific goal of increasing awareness of early childhood experiences, not only because children should receive high-quality care but also because the impact of those early years can last well into adulthood. One way this mission is put into practice is through the annual award, which is given out at OMEP Ireland’s conference. It recognizes graduates who have gone beyond coursework and created something useful for the industry.
DCU contributes institutional weight to this. By most accounts, DCU’s Institute of Education is one of Ireland’s more important hubs for educational research. The university and OMEP Ireland have a serious partnership. In addition to helping students earn degrees, supervisors like Dr. Sinéad McNally are influencing the type of research that eventually shapes policy. In particular, the judges who assessed Burke’s submission praised Dr. McNally for her efforts in “nurturing and supporting” the student during a pandemic year when, it should be mentioned, early childhood settings were under exceptional stress. In a field where care is frequently viewed as soft and incidental rather than intricate and crucial, the word “nurturing” carries weight.
It’s possible that the deeper significance of the OMEP Ireland Award lies not in any single winner but in the argument it keeps making, year after year: that leadership in early childhood care looks different from leadership in most other sectors. An increasing amount of Irish research, including doctoral studies from Trinity College Dublin, indicates that the ECCE sector has had difficulty defining leadership in its own context. Things have been complicated by overlapping organizations, numerous government departments, and historically low pay. Early childhood practitioners have often found it hard to articulate their professional identity, let alone advocate for it at a policy level. In a subtle way, the OMEP Ireland Award is opposing that.
“Celebrating Leadership in Early Childhood Education and Care in Times of Crisis” is the conference theme under which Burke was awarded, and it now makes clear reference to the pandemic. However, it’s more than just a passing moment. OMEP Ireland has been addressing a structural crisis for a long time: a sector where workers are underappreciated, underfunded, and frequently unseen by the decision-makers who determine their working conditions. OMEP is not being idealistic when it bases leadership on advocacy, rights-based strategies, and what it refers to as sustainable citizenship. It’s being deliberate.
There’s a feeling, watching this unfold over the years at DCU, that the award is doing something that formal curriculum can’t always do on its own — it’s telling students that their research matters beyond the degree. That the work they do in an early childhood setting, and the thinking they do about that work, belongs in published journals, in conference rooms, in front of ministers. Whether that message reaches the broader sector in any sustained way is still unclear. But the fact that it keeps being said, and that a government minister keeps showing up to hear it, suggests the argument is landing somewhere.
