Having a press tour or giving a TED Talk doesn’t give you all the power you need. It’s talked about in government advisory rooms, in the notes at the end of curriculum frameworks, and in the quiet changes that a country makes to how it treats its youngest citizens. That spot is taken by Nóirín Hayes. She has spent decades working at the point where children’s rights, developmental psychology, and early childhood education policy meet. The impact of her work is starting to reach far beyond Ireland.
As well as being a Professor Emerita at Technological University Dublin, Hayes is an Adjunct Professor at Trinity College Dublin’s School of Education. There are official credentials there, and they are important. It’s more interesting to see how she works, though. She uses what she calls a “bio-ecological framework,” which is based on the work of Urie Bronfenbrenner, a developmental theorist. On top of that, she adds a “children’s rights lens” that sees kids not just as passive recipients of education, but as active participants in their own learning. It sounds like language used in school. That a child’s family, classroom, culture, and even policy decisions made in faraway offices all shape who that child becomes is what this phrase really means in real life. And that kids should be able to have a say in the process.
Routledge published her most recent book, Early Years Practice: Getting It Right From the Start, in 2024. It is a revised and expanded edition that combines theory and practice in a way that is useful for people in classrooms as well as lecture halls. The book talks about international curriculum frameworks, such as Aistear, which is Ireland’s early childhood framework. It also does something that many other education texts don’t do: it asks readers to think instead of just giving them instructions. It’s used by teachers. It is used by practitioners. The fact that Hayes has two types of readers shows something about how he writes and thinks.
It’s possible that the U.S. is paying more attention to this work than it wants to say. For years, American policy on young children has been raging over issues like getting kids ready for school, funding for pre-K, and developmental milestones, with rarely a clear philosophical basis for the arguments. Hayes provides something unique through her writings, her podcasts with Early Childhood Ireland, and her work as a government advisor. This is a framework that connects child rights, ecological development, and real classroom practice. Building that is hard and takes time.
She also helped to create the Children’s Rights Alliance and is an Honorary Member of OMEP International, which is the world’s largest organization for early childhood education. These aren’t just ceremonial ties. They show decades of dedication to a cause that, to be honest, still doesn’t get the political attention it needs in most countries. Early childhood education is always short on money, respect, and professionals who aren’t paid enough or trained enough. That is an argument Hayes has been making for a long time. She has been making it carefully and with proof.
As her body of work grows, it seems like the conversations she’s been having in Dublin seminars and government meeting rooms are starting to reach more people. A book that they wrote together about Bronfenbrenner came out in 2023. A podcast series about the rights of children. A 2020 book about good behavior in early childhood settings that doesn’t just talk about relationships and reciprocity as nice ideas, but as building blocks. It all adds up.
It’s still not clear how much Irish ways of teaching young children will affect efforts to change things in the United States. It’s not easy to borrow policies from one country to another; what works in one ecosystem doesn’t always work well in another. But Hayes has spent her whole career developing ideas that don’t really belong to any one country. These include the idea that early childhood needs a lot of attention, that children have rights, and that good practice needs both theory and humanity. They go places.
