A better education

Great media prominence is being given to the Government's early childhood policy, with Penelope Leach's and Oxford University's recent research finding that, all other factors being equal, young children will develop most healthily when raised in a stable, unhurried way by their own parents in a loving family environment (News, 6 October). Critics of the fashionable policy of driving mothers back into the workforce at any cost have argued for years that there is a direct causal relationship between the Government's early education policies and the behavioural and social malaise that is rapidly becoming the norm in today's schooling system.