Editor's view - Who's holding the baby?
Monday, July 28, 2014
It may be that by the time you read this, the Department for Education's page on gov.uk will have been updated with full details of the ministers' briefs and exactly where responsibility for childcare and early years lies.
But at the time of going to press, a week and a half after the reshuffle, the responsibilities sections of Sam Gyimah and Nick Gibb's profiles lie empty.
We know from Sam Gyimah's Twitter account that he is taking on childcare and early years, but not his whole role, or whether anyone else will take part of the childcare brief.
The DfE says that this sort of lag is not significant, but it is an extraordinarily long delay in confirming ministers' roles.
There are two ways of reading this - childcare and early years is not viewed as important enough to bother saying who is in charge; or childcare will be such a vital election issue that there has been lengthy internal wrangling about who takes it on, Tory or LibDem.
Either way, there may not be much new policymaking to be done before the election, though there will be plenty of positioning and plenty of need to show that there is 'listening' to the sector.
One of the initiatives that Liz Truss barged along with despite huge opposition is childminder agencies. As our story (pages 4-5) shows, very few of the pilot agencies are sure to go ahead in September, and some are complaining about the lack of information from the government, just five weeks away from the planned starting date for agencies.
It looks as though the agency idea will limp forward, with small numbers launching, and will bring yet more fragmentation rather than clarity to the childminding sector.
