Over the past 20 or 30years goverments in many developed countries have found it prudent to invest resources in Early Child Education (ECE) largely in response to impressive claims for the benefits of ECE arising from recent research, first in the US with the longitudinal work on selected Headstart centres and more recently, the EPPI project conducted in the UK. However, the development in ECE services has taken very different paths in these countries. In part, this can be explained by the different dominant political ideologies prevailing in different countries and also by the traditional cultural influences shaping different constructions of childhood and the related pedagogical and institutional practices. Thepurpose of this lecture is to demonstrate how ideology impacts profoundly on both educational policy and practice even at the stage of young children's education particularly in terms of what we expect young children to learn and how we assess (evaluate) that learning.