Introduction

Alan Pence is Professor, School of Child and Youth Care, University of Victoria. He is the co-author, with Gunilla Dahlberg and Peter Moss, of Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care – a volume first published in 1999 which remains germane to the issues discussed in this Commentary.

This Commentary is a Call for readers to access the articles published to date regarding the concerns raised [by the academic community concerning the International Early Learning and Well-being Study (IELS)] and to engage at local, national and international levels to help ensure that actions deemed important by a few are not allowed to be visited upon the many without an open and fully informed debate and opportunity for contestation. 

This commentary follows the recently published, Democratic accountability and contextualised systemic evaluation [3] paper.