A 10-year strategic plan for early childhood education introduced by the New Zealand Ministry of Education in 2002 included policies to create a teacher-led early childhood profession by 2012. This article reviews the provisions of the strategic plan and argues that it emerged from a critical ecology of the early childhood profession with a history of advocacy and strategy. The article marks out new challenges to the implementation of the strategic plan as it draws close to its end date in a changed political context and a time of economic constraint. It is argued that the challenges call for the emergence of a critical ecology of the profession that responds to the current context. (Contains 6 notes.)