Equality of Opportunities, Divergent Conceptualisations and their Implications for Early Childhood Care and Education Policies CHRISTIAN MORBABITO AND MICHEL VANDENBROECK This article aims to explore the relations between equality of opportunity and early childhood. By referring to the work of contemporary philosophers, i.e. Rawls, Sen, Dworkin, Cohen and Roemer, we argue for different possible interpretations, based on political discussions, concerning how to operationalize equality of opportunities. We represent these diverging options on a continuum, ranging from Responsibility-oriented Equality of Opportunity (REOp) and Circumstances-oriented Equality of Opportunity (CEOp). We then analyse how early childhood care and education policies can be constructed in relation to these conceptualisations and argue that the CEOp is a more plausible interpretative framework to operationalize equality of opportunity in early childhood. INTRODUCTION The last three decades have been characterised by increasing socio- economic inequalities world-wide (OECD, 2011a; Ortiz and Cummins, 2011).Yet, in the same period, the interest in equality has gained momen- tum, in particular within the philosophical milieu, testified by the work of John Rawls (1999), Amartya Sen (1979, 1992, 1997, 2009), Ronald Dworkin (1981a, 1981b), Gerard Allan Cohen (1989, 2009) and John Roemer (1993, 1998, 2006, 2010). They share a conceptual rethinking of equality that embeds individual freedom and responsibility, proposing dis- tributive justice models focusing the equalisandum on ‘opportunity’, rather than on ‘outcomes’. The work of these egalitarian philosophers has sub- stantially influenced educational policies. Furthermore, scholars from other disciplines have also contributed to the discussion on how to operationalize equality of opportunity by pointing, in particular, to early childhood edu- cation as a salient equalisandum. The Economy Nobel Laureate, James Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. ••, No. ••, 2014 © 2014 The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.