Nursery World and the forerunner of Early Education were founded about the same time in the 1920s. It was not a coincidence. Many names within NW’s Editorial Board can be found as Vice Presidents and mover and shakers within Early Education. Collectively they were to form a powerful political and social reforming group and, unusually for the time, mostly they were women.
Their radicalising movement emerging from women’s contribution to the First World War and the bravery of the Suffragettes, challenged and changed Edwardian social dynamics. With enfranchisement and access to higher education, they began to draw attention to the issues faced by families and children and for the first time, early childhood education came onto the political agenda. Nearly a century later it is interesting to explore what still has resonance for us today.
The first free nursery school had opened in Salford in the 1850s and it followed the pedagogy of Robert Owen’s ‘New Institute for the Formation of Character’ opened in New Lanark in 1815. Owen’s curriculum for his two- to six-year-olds was mostly music and his main focus was on ‘dispositions to learn’ or executive function as some call it these days.
In 1870, publicly-funded education became compulsory at age five, but children as young as two were frequently admitted to primary schools. In 1873, the first publicly-funded nursery was established in Salford. It provided nursery education, baths, meals, rest, and parent education in an early form of an integrated children’s centre.
However, the dominant form of provision for most of Britain’s youngest children remained the state primary school. By 1901, nearly half of the three-year-olds in England and Wales were enrolled in primary schools, but a 1905 HMI report, delivered when most inspections were actually undertaken by HMI, strongly declared that didactic schooling was wholly inappropriate for young children and subsequently numbers of three-year-olds fell dramatically.
The propriety of having very young children enrolled in formal educational settings has thus been an ongoing theme in UK early education since its early beginnings.
Margaret McMillan
In 1913, Margaret McMillan, who figures in the beginnings of both NW and Early Education, created an open-air nursery in Deptford working to a largely Montessori pedagogy. Dr Montessori was a leading figurehead of Italian feminist emancipation, and had opened her Casa Bambino in the slums of Milan in 1907.
The Deptford centre served children ages one to six, and the open air element was seen as precaution against diphtheria and other diseases as well as an early form of outdoor curriculum. So, more than 100 years ago, for both Montessori and McMillan the poorest children’s health and development was their central concern, not merely childcare to free up parents for the job market.
During the First World War (1914-18), more than 100 public daycare centres were established to encourage women to help in the War effort and the youngest children continued to enter state primary schools. In 1918, the Fisher Act enabled local authorities for the first time to make provisions for nurseries or to assist nurseries sponsored by the voluntary sector.
For me, the primary significance of Margaret McMillan’s nursery was that it offered, for free, the very best early childhood education experiences to those most in need. In his 1926 book, On Education, especially in early childhood, Bertrand Russell, a Nobel prizewinning mathematical philosopher and - with McMillan - a member of the Nursery World/Early Education early years’ glitterati, said after a visit, ‘I believe that the children at Miss Margaret McMillan's nursery school in Deptford get something better than any children of well-to-do parents can at present obtain’.
Russell, who of course had been privately educated, warned that private and home schooling could create, ‘feelings of superiority, which are extraordinarily harmful morally’.
Like Owen, who had worked with Glasgow’s foundlings, he believed the development of habits and ‘dispositions to learn’ had life-long consequences that would be more useful than didactic instruction and preparation for schooling. Russell thought nurseries should be, ‘creating the habits which will give happiness and usefulness in later life’.
As well as an appropriate pedagogy and the importance of open access, Russell championed equality for all, the importance of early intervention and professionalism: ‘The nursery school, if it became universal, could, in one generation, remove the profound differences in education which at present divide the classes.....It is very highly skilled work’
Economic constraints
With such plaudits and such powerful backers, why didn’t free nursery education become universal? Well, the inter-war years were economically disastrous. Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail, campaigned through the lobbying group he funded, the Anti-Waste League, to slash through these social reforms, an exercise ominously close, perhaps, to our current predicament. A civil servant was appointed, called Geddes. Russell’s comment is biting: rather than fund nursery education, he says in his book: ‘when the Geddes Axe descended it was decided that it was more important to build cruisers and the Singapore Dock for the purpose of facilitating war with the Japanese.’
And, indeed, it was not until the Second World War that nursery provision for all was at last established, as women yet again in a time of necessity, moved into the factories. Except that this was not provision in the excellent tradition of nursery education but, mostly, emergency daycare. After the War years, most of these temporary ‘nurseries’ were closed and of those that remained under local authorities’ auspices, some were absorbed into their social care departments and became daycare nurseries targeted at the poor and disadvantaged; a few went to health departments and others were absorbed by local authority education departments expanding the numbers of established nursery schools.
In the best of these ‘educational’ nurseries, different in composition and pedagogy to the more commonly found nursery classes in primary schools, pedagogical practice was built significantly on the traditions that had gone before. There was very little privatised early childhood provision in the UK until the 1970s and 80s.
The traditions, knowledge base and professionalism of nursery education were further developed by several excellent centres of early years teacher education at such places as the Froebel Institute, Redlands in Bristol and Goldsmiths in London and also by the informed practical knowledge of the post-War leading figures of UK nursery education such as Susan Isaacs, Dorothy Gardner and Marianne Parry.
Knowledge about quality early years pedagogy grew and thrived. Its beacons of excellence, delivering mostly to Britain’s urban poor, changed to embrace diversity as their communities became increasing pluralised over the last 30 years.
Some of the best early childhood education practice in the world, conceptually underpinned by well-structured knowledge about early years education, is still found in the UK’s nursery schools. They are our highest achieving type of early years setting. They understand the concept of the early childhood settings as community anchors, forums for democratic encounters, sites of educational innovation and excellence, and fully embracing their partnership with parents and families.
To their credit, both Margaret Thatcher and John Major recognised and supported the idea of universal nursery provision. Yet, today, the sustainability of many of these outstanding maintained nursery schools, is threatened despite the coming together of a strong political and professional voice in their support through the All Party Parliamentary Group on Nursery Schools and Nursery Classes. No one can contest a mixed economy for the early years sector, but the opportunity to use nursery schools’ knowledge on pedagogy and community to support and develop the whole early years sector should be recognised and encouraged ensuring the education and development of children is given more weight than childcare .
Bertrand Russell suggested, philosophically,
‘There is only one road to progress, in education as in other human affairs, and that is: Science wielded by love. Without science, love is powerless; without love, science is destructive’.
‘When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That’s if you want to teach them to think.’
Now that sounds like a good nursery curriculum.
Tony Bertram is President of Early Education and Director of the Centre for Research in Early Childhood (CREC).
