Over the past ten years or so there has been a revolution in the way that children under three have been cared for in the UK. This trend of providing nursery care for young children is evident in most industrialised countries, and indeed all over the world. It is prompted by two main factors: increased numbers of women in the workforce, and a new emphasis on the importance of the first three years as a basis for learning.
More mothers of young children are working, and the type of work they do and their expectations of work are changing. Work-life balance has become an important issue.
Partly, this is because of an emphasis on equal opportunities at work, an emphasis underwritten by all kinds of international agreements: women cannot be discriminated against on the basis of their gender; they have as much entitlement to work as men.
Childcare is essential to enable mothers of young children to work. So, increasingly, lack of childcare is seen as discriminatory; it is something employers must address if they are to recruit and retain staff. An example of a well-known employer in this country that has adopted a comprehensive childcare strategy is the National Health Service.
Discrimination apart, another argument for encouraging mothers of young children to work is that it is very expensive for the Government to pay benefits to mothers, especially single mothers, who are not working.
If mothers who would otherwise be on benefits can be encouraged to work, their participation in the workforce might be doubly beneficial. It would lift them out of poverty and aid the Exchequer. So, the Government is helping women back into work by offering them tax credits towards childcare. The fatal flaw in this approach is low pay.
Frequently, the work that women on benefit would be able to secure would not pay enough (and in any case may require unsocial hours, such as in supermarkets or catering): the wages would not cover housing costs or other allowances. By going to work, a woman might be poorer rather than better off.
This is confirmed on the one hand by an analysis of take-up of tax credits - almost entirely claimed by middle-income rather than low-income women - and by studies suggesting that even where childcare is available, the take-up is low by mothers on income support, especially in London where housing costs are so high.
Hot topic
These arguments about equal opportunities and income support assume childcare for children under three is unproblematic and can be generated without too much difficulty in the private sector - again a fallacy, since private investment in childcare in poorer areas is rare. Hence the Government's new emphasis on children's centres, whereby local authorities commission centres in poor areas, with capital and revenue support to investors.
Procurement is now a hot topic in local authorities. How do you ensure that private or any other investors in children's centres give value for money? This kind of question is dogging all private finance initiatives in health and education.
There is a further set of arguments that run alongside women's rights, which have led to a very different approach in providing for young children. From this point of view, the child's first three years of life are the most important in laying the foundations of learning, and the quality of care a child receives in those years may critically affect future learning.
Anxiety about this issue has led the Government to try to extend the curriculum downwards for under-threes, but in a sense, these arguments are exaggerated, and have been fuelled by over-enthusiastic interpretation of brain studies.
The evidence about early learning is more ambiguous, and many factors affect later outcomes. Living in poverty, at least in a rich country like the UK or USA, is especially damaging to future prospects, and income redistribution might be at least as important for young children's future as early reading schemes.
The Government's biggest programme for children under three has been Sure Start. This was a 3 billion programme targeted at poor areas. It was an explicit attempt to redress the inequality of the Thatcher years, which left almost a third of children living in poverty, but was a cheaper and more politically acceptable alternative to income redistribution or progressive taxation.
As recently as April this year, Prime Minister Tony Blair made a speech describing Sure Start as a triumph of Government policy.
The big idea was that in run-down areas you could change expectations, attitudes and aspirations of mothers when children were very young, and the changes would endure throughout a lifetime, both for mothers and for their children. Persuade the professionals who supported young children to work together more effectively, and change would be more effective. Let mothers set their own agendas, and they would become empowered and able to do more for themselves and their children.
The recent evaluation of Sure Start suggests that it has been an ineffective programme and has made little or no difference to children or their mothers, which in turn has led to some critical comments about what was being evaluated and why.
Social experiment
People deeply committed to the kind of social experiment that Sure Start represents are understandably reluctant to admit that the policy might have been mistaken. But the Government at one level is committed to what it calls 'evidence-based policy'. It claims to rely on rigorous research evidence, carefully marshalled, as a basis for informed policy-making. So what does the evidence actually suggest about Sure Start?
Sure Start had grandiose, but vague, policy aims to reduce poverty. These were not approached in any systematic way, and did not really relate either to the issues of women's equality or children's early learning.
Given the plethora of 'local initiatives', how is it possible to tell which activities made a difference, and under what circumstances? How or why should baby massage, or a boat trip down the River Thames, for instance, make a mother less inclined to accept her poverty and more likely to work, or a child more likely to perform better in school standard assessment tests? Local evaluations were a mixed bag, but there are certainly some horror stories among them. A colleague of mine was contracted by his local Sure Start to run a ten-session goal-setting, life-coaching programme, and to write it up afterwards.
Sure Start was responsible for identifying participants and making the practical arrangements: hiring premises, organising childcare and so on.
There were changes of staff on the Sure Start programme, so in the ten weeks he dealt with at least three different people. The venue was changed mid-session, because of misbooking. Sure Start aimed for ten to 15 participants, but just four women showed up regularly, and even they missed some of the sessions. It is difficult to know how the children who attended the creche benefited.
Although each of the four women who finished the sessions made heart-warming comments about it, none of them are in work or other training. My colleague's time, and the other associated costs, came to approximately 5,000, in other words over 1,000 per participant.
The UK Government has tried to address the admittedly difficult issue of children under three and work-life balance, but it has done it in a confused and contradictory way.
In its childcare strategy, it has viewed young children as appendages, so that childcare has been primarily an accommodation issue - somewhere for the children to go while their mothers work.
The policy targeted especially at poor families, Sure Start, stressed the importance of supporting mothers and changing their attitudes, but this has not seen the well-being of young children as an independent, or even a central, issue.
The under-threes curriculum is a quality assurance measure, trying to make sure that at least some attention is paid to current thinking on young children. But given the revolution that has taken place, with more young children than ever before in nursery care, why are we not thinking afresh about what they might need or want or enjoy? Do we really believe they are people?
Helen Penn is Professor of Early Childhood at the University of East London. This is a shortened version of a talk that was given in Paris to 'Education International', the International Federation of Teacher's Organisations, on 22 May 2006
