In this chapter, we analyse ‘child-centredness’ as a concept and address the question: does child-centredness equate with more power for children? We offer an analysis of this question by focusing on social and professional trends, variously referred to as child-focused, child-friendly and child intensive. These are all part of the trend we identify as ‘child-centredness’ – reflecting the emphasis on late twentieth-century ideas around repositioning children more centrally within relations, networks, media, policy and practice. One area where the idea of child-centredness is apparent is within school settings, where it is understood as an ideology, a pedagogy and a powerful form of professional practice (Langford, 2010). Using case studies from primary school contexts in different countries, we analyse some of the different ways in which child-centredness is applied and practised and the implications this has for power and power relations within schools and in the home. In the previous chapter, we argued that the children's rights agenda has led to a trend towards strengthening children's voices. While schools increasingly include children's voice in their daily work, the way this is sought and executed is often based on adult modes of communication and thus works to reinforce existing power relations. Child-centredness generates new ways of regulating children at a distance and as such has little to do with children having more power. As with children's rights in the previous chapter, child-centredness furthermore favours particular groups of children, making child-centredness unequal in its process and potentially also in its outcomes.

Child-Centred Pedagogy

The theoretical and philosophical basis of child-centredness draws on the work of developmental psychologists such as Jean Piaget and the early twentieth-century educational philosopher John Dewey. Piaget emphasised the need to nurture and shape children's capacities as they learn to develop (Piaget, 1932; Burman, 2007). He furthermore focused on play as a way in which teachers are able to apply elaborately constructed measures of a child's development in the classroom (Walkerdine, 1984). In line with this, nursery and early-years teachers in the Global North often focus on children's developmental capacities, by setting them play-based activities.