If you’ve been around university hallways lately, you’ve probably noticed that there has been a change in the field of early childhood research. There is less noise in the offices. The younger faculty members are agitated. Additionally, some of the most well-known figures in early childhood education and care are taking a different route after years of publishing, giving lectures, and moving up the academic ladder.
Some are turning to organizations like OMEP, the World Organization for Early Childhood Education, which was established in 1948 and currently operates in over 60 countries. OMEP has created something that universities, despite their endowments and rankings, seem increasingly unable to provide: a sense of purpose rooted in the lives of real children.
Perhaps academia was always going to arrive at this point. Recently, the Financial Times published an article about how university finances are failing, how pay is stagnating, and how living expenses are so high that a postdoctoral salary seems almost absurd. Hannah Voss, a researcher who left academia and was interviewed for the article, observed that many people’s experiences seemed to resonate with her own. This observation reveals more about the systemic nature of the issue than any salary data could. She made it clear that her grief wasn’t for herself but rather for those who were still inside, pursuing a sense of security that kept moving farther away.
The OMEP pull is especially intriguing because it involves more than just getting out of dangerous situations. It’s about being drawn to an urgent situation. The keynote speakers at the 76th OMEP World Assembly in Bangkok in 2024 didn’t hold back. The director of Dublin City University’s Early Childhood Research Centre, Mathias Urban, outlined the entire scope of the crisis, including the devastation caused by climate change, forced migration, poverty, and the deterioration of democracy, and he made the case that early childhood education must be reclaimed from a position of “concrete hope.” The majority of faculty meetings don’t use language like that. Additionally, it lands differently for researchers who entered this field out of a concern for children rather than a desire to oversee departmental budgets.
Speaking with people in this setting gives me the impression that the conventional academic paradigm has strayed from what initially drew many of them to early childhood scholarship. A small but significant sign of this change is the OMEP New Scholar Award, which is currently in its fourth year. It is an official declaration from a grassroots international organization that research conducted outside of academic institutions is important and will be acknowledged and supported. The award is intended for postgraduate students as well as early career researchers, who are the groups most likely to experience academic precarity. It’s still unclear if this will be sufficient to significantly alter career paths, but the message it conveys is clear.
All of this is not based on abstract data. By 2030, UNESCO projects that the world will require an additional six million early childhood educators. Just 57% of pre-primary teachers in low-income nations meet the minimal requirements. A strong political argument was made in the Santiago Consensus, which was created at the 2025 World Teachers’ Summit in Chile: without teachers working in respectable conditions, there can be no high-quality education. The document made clear that early childhood educators are now visible in these international conversations. For academics who spent years battling for a place at a policy table that hardly acknowledged the existence of their field, that recognition is crucial.
Universities are structurally unable to operate in the same ways as OMEP’s network. It links policy advocates in Bangkok with community organizers in rural South Asia, and researchers in Santiago with practitioners in Nairobi. In its recommendations for the Tashkent Declaration follow-up, the 76th Assembly called for localized approaches—that is, solutions shaped by the communities actually raising children, rather than standardized frameworks passed down from institutional heights. The idea of work that directly contributes to a community program or an international rights framework being drafted in real time can feel almost disorienting to a researcher who has spent years writing papers that are cited within a closed academic ecosystem.
There is a certain irony in all of this that is difficult to ignore. The world’s top early childhood educators are now having difficulty keeping them on staff; this isn’t because the scholars no longer believe in research, but rather that the institution isn’t the best place for it. OMEP does not provide financial stability or glitz. It appears that what it is providing is what initially attracted people to this field: kids in need of improvement and adults eager to create it.
