Family-Professional Collaboration in Early Childhood Education and Care in Ukrainian Policy

The reform of the education system has been an ongoing effort in Ukraine since its independence in 1991. In this chapter, these reforms, focused on early childhood education system and especially on family-professional collaboration (FPC) with families of children with special educational needs (SEN), are described closer. This is done to reveal how the collaboration with families of children with SEN is defined in the education policy. For this chapter, textual policy document data was used for analysis. Ukrainian policy documents guiding the education system between 1991 and 2022 were analysed with the help of systematic content analysis. The results were then divided into three main categories. These were (1) values in collaboration (2) roles in the collaboration, and (3) activities in collaboration. According to this study, there is a clear need in Ukraine to develope a deeper understanding of FPC in the policy documents.  .