When you enter a participating nursery in the UK, you may notice something a little out of the ordinary next to the finger paintings and building blocks: a little booklet that resembles a passport and belongs to a child who is still unable to tie their own shoelaces. Under OMEP UK’s Early Childhood Sustainable Citizenship Award, that passport tracks environmental and social responsibility—a topic that most adults would be reluctant to label as preschool. The plan is understated, quiet, and methodical. It is also, in a small way, one of the more deliberate methods of teaching sustainability to young children…
Author: Kelsey Myers
Kelsey Myers
Kelsey Myers is a Senior Editor at worldomep.org and a dedicated advocate for early childhood education whose work begins — and ends — with a simple belief: that the earliest years of a child's life matter more than almost anything else we can invest in. Based at a local school, Kelsey works daily alongside the children and families whose experiences inform everything she writes. She doesn't observe early education from a distance. She is inside it — in the classrooms, on the playgrounds, in the conversations between teachers and parents that shape how young children understand the world around them. That proximity gives her writing a warmth and specificity that purely policy-driven commentary rarely achieves. Through her writing at worldomep.org, Kelsey brings that same energy to readers — making the case, clearly and consistently, that early childhood education deserves far more attention than it typically receives. Kelsey shares her personal opinions on: https://x.com/Butterflyboule
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There is a specific type of institutional enduring power that is rarely acknowledged; this type is developed over decades of patient, frequently underfunded work that most people outside of a specialized field are unaware of, rather than through flashy campaigns or well-funded lobbying. In many respects, Swedish OMEP is precisely that kind of organization. Its UNESCO Prize nomination has garnered some attention lately, but its origins can be traced back to postwar Europe, when a small group of educators and social thinkers believed that young children deserved better. The World Organization for Early Childhood Education, or OMEP, was established in…
Wearing a “Save the Bees” T-shirt, James “Weston” Higginbotham left the Yamashina train station in Kyoto on the afternoon of May 29. He carried what people who knew him would later describe as his usual load: a book about butterflies tucked into his back pocket, a sense of purpose, and a love of movement. He had just gotten into a fight with his mother. He was twenty years old, a junior studying biosystems engineering at Auburn University. According to most accounts, it was a fairly typical family conflict, but within hours, no one could get in touch with him, and…
Somewhere in a Stanford lab, there’s a jar with something that looks like aged Parmesan. You can grate it. It has a salty taste. It is textured. It also tastes really good, depending on who you ask. The peculiar aspect is that it began as food waste, was given to a mold, and emerged as something a home cook might carelessly add to pasta. This is the work of Vayu Hill-Maini, whose biography alone makes the cheese seem almost predictable. He was raised in a multicultural home in Stockholm, developed a passion for cooking as a child, relocated to the…
The way British universities communicate with potential students has changed. It used to be graduate employment rates, research prestige, and rankings. These days, the University of East London offers free laptops, gym memberships, and a £1,000 package that can be used for weekly shopping and travel. The way it is framed has shifted. It’s important to pay attention to that. Here, the background is important. For the second year in a row, the number of students fell, primarily due to a 10% decline in international enrollments as a result of stricter visa regulations. In the meantime, according to the Office…
It began as a standard call. At the University of Surrey’s Manor Park Student Village in Guildford, two campus security officers were asked to move someone out of a common room shortly after eight in the morning on a Thursday. This type of work is common at universities worldwide; it is unremarkable, low-stakes, and nearly administrative. Then a crossbow was used to shoot 51-year-old campus safety officer Robert Tytler. Guildford, a university town that rarely finds itself at the center of a national news story involving medieval weapons and an attempted murder charge, experienced hours of uncertainty as a result.On…
The address that most people eventually discover is 8000 Utopia Parkway, a Queens ZIP code that doesn’t immediately point to one of the East Coast’s bigger private universities. However, St. John’s University, which was established in Brooklyn in 1870 by Vincentian priests, has quietly amassed campuses for the past 150 years, and it takes some time to fully comprehend its current state. The main campus, which occupies about 102 acres, is located in Queens’ residential neighborhood of Hillcrest. It reads like a traditional residential campus with stone buildings, residence halls, a library with over a million volumes, and athletic facilities…
The recent announcement of Deakin University’s restructuring has a detail that keeps coming up. In 2025, the university reported an operating surplus of A$56 million. Revenue increased by 10%. The earnings of international students increased by 15%. However, between those figures and the current situation, 130 to 150 staff positions are being eliminated, and over 620 workers have been informed that their positions are no longer available and that they must reapply for a smaller pool of positions. The official justification points to a “challenging operating environment.” It is more difficult to take that framing at face value because the…
It would have been reasonable to wonder how long the experiment would last when St. Columba College opened in 1997 with 207 students and a truly unique founding concept—a coeducational school jointly established by Anglican and Catholic Archbishops. After almost thirty years, the school now has about 1,450 students, a $20 million secondary building at Andrews Farm in South Australia, and two Archbishops have unveiled a commemorative plaque. It is difficult to overlook the symmetry. The new structure is large. There are twelve classrooms, outdoor learning spaces, a Wellbeing Hub, a dedicated Diverse Learning Center, and—most importantly—a specially designed dark…
You might completely miss it if you stroll down Oxford’s Merton Street on a calm morning. Unlike some of its larger neighbors, Corpus Christi College does not make a big deal out of its location between Merton and Christ Church. By Oxford standards, the entrance is modest, with a tower over the main gate and a honeyed stone facade that gives the impression that the building has existed for a longer period of time than your current concerns. It has. The college was established in 1517, making it older than Shakespeare, the Protestant Reformation, and the notion of England as…