Teaching and learning: what matters for intervention

New learning is crucial for child development. Research in the last century has identified several sub-skills that must come together for the remarkable growth in skills seen during the early years. This research has provided two important insights about child development – a variety of basic processes underpin children’s learning and these bases of learning, while universal, are influenced by the learning context. The study of contexts has spanned multiple levels from home environments and teaching practices to the culture of communities and government policies related to early childhood care and education. More recently, the social, health and educational disruption during the COVID-19 pandemic has emerged as another powerful contextual factor that has deeply impacted learning. In this editorial, I consider five premises to draw attention to the essential core of intervention – the assumption that there will be new learning among children who receive the intervention. The five premises are introduced using examples of typical learning achievements observed in the early childhood years before drawing on papers in this special issue to examine how context and learning interact, and what these might mean for new directions in early childhood intervention research