The ‘problem’ of school transition and its ‘scientific’ solution: Re‐examining ECE policy through the ethics of care

Abstract In early childhood education (ECE) policy research, school transition is commonly regarded as a background for school readiness or a stable object of policy intervention, without being sufficiently associated with the ethics of care. In this article, we examine ECE policies in China and discuss how the transition from early childhood education to primary school is discursively produced as a governable ‘problem’ that entails a ‘scientific’ solution in the name of care. By adopting the ‘What is the problem represented to be?’ (WPR) approach as analytical framework, our study covers policy documents across national, provincial, prefectural and county levels. Instead of asking what should be done, we interrogate what made it possible for transition to become something that required specific action. The findings reveal that transition was framed in ECE policies as the problem of schoolification, which was regarded as a developmentally ‘inappropriate’ practice and that ‘science’ was introduced as an unquestionable ‘solution’. The prescribed ‘solution’ of ‘scientific transition’ was normalised through self‐referential policy discourse within a hierarchical administrative structure, foregrounding the need to demonstrate bureaucratic performance. As teachers and parents were subject to increasingly rigid governance, care was reduced to an object for regulation, leaving children's situated needs unattended. This study has implications for ECE policy research by highlighting the need to examine how policy discourse may serve to expand or foreclose the possibility of relational caring in ECE contexts.