‘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

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.