Shabby treatment

Gordon Brown's promise to fund 1,000 Children's Centres has to be the most exciting policy for the early years announced by any Government. But do you ever get the feeling that for all the money the Government has put into the early years, things haven't got much better?

In 1997, the New Labour Government inherited a shattered system of public sector education and daycare for children under five. Six years later, the Daycare Trust concludes that the public sector has 'reduced dramatically'

in the last decade.1 There is little enough to be nostalgic about in the pre-1997 history of nursery education. There had been decades of low investment from the 1960s onwards. Nursery schools and day nurseries once had state-of-the-art buildings. By the 1990s, many were starting to crumble away with leaky roofs and rotten window frames. The authorities had under- stood the need to put up the buildings. But they seemed to have neglected the fact that they would need maintaining.

The traditional system of nursery education and daycare was divisive and unfair. Nursery schools provided outstanding nursery education for those children lucky enough to live in their catchment areas. But many families could not access any kind of funded pre-school provision for their children at all.

The system was designed to give every child in nursery education the same number of hours per day, regardless of the family's circumstances or desires. Heads and staff who tried to develop new services in consultation with local families and communities found their efforts were stifled by rigid state control. Policy was determined in Whitehall. The public sector ethic, of trying to provide good services for local children and families, was snuffed out.

So in 1997, the Government addressed a public sector in sharp decline.

There were not enough education and daycare places for children under five.

Many of the schools and day nurseries were in shabby premises. Some were about to fall down. There appeared to be two choices. Central Government could spend money on building up a large, state-run system of nursery education and daycare, like Sweden's. Or it could follow the Danish model, where one third of the education and daycare centres are funded by the state but run locally and independently by non-profit-making bodies.

Unique strategy

But it chose instead to develop a strategy that is unique to England. It has put considerable amounts of public money into the private, profit-making sector. The nursery education grant has been used to subsidise all children over the age of four - and more recently over three - who are in private nurseries. This has reduced the fees paid by parents.

The long-term effect of this policy has been an unprecedented expansion of profit-making childcare businesses, propped up by Government funding.

At the same time, there has been a continuing decline in the number of state-funded nursery schools and day nurseries. Local authority subsidised provision has declined significantly in the last decade from providing around 30 per cent of childcare places to fewer than 10 per cent.2 This decline has taken place even though the Government has put significant amounts of money into state-funded provision. One of the Government's first education programmes in 1997 was the establishment of a network of Early Excellence Centres across the country. This initiative was introduced as a pilot project which would inform the future development of the sector. The result has been the development of just over 100 flagship centres, leading to an extraordinary inequality in state-funded provision. On literally the same street there can be an Early Excellence Centre that receives three times more funding than another local authority operated centre.

As a result, while there has certainly been a lot of innovation in the state sector, the sector overall has declined. The funding for places in private nurseries has created a substantial increase in the number of childcare places in the UK overall - up from 193,800 in 1997 to 383,200 this year. Families with enough money to pay for places in private nurseries have done well.

The Government has also developed the Neighbourhood Nursery Initiative, which intends to fix the shortcomings of the market by providing a three-year subsidy for creating new education and childcare places in 'disadvantaged' (ie poor) areas.

The thinking behind this is that after three years, the new nurseries will be stand-alone small businesses, able to support themselves with the fees they charge for providing. Unfortunately, there isn't an example of a poor neighbourhood anywhere in the world that can sustain an unsubsidised education and childcare business solely through fees.

The answer to these problems is not to return to the past - to the divisive, unequal, crumbling public services the Labour Government inherited in 1997. Since then, despite the limitations of its policies, the New Labour Government has encouraged innovation and piloted some good programmes. I have two suggestions for the future.

First, we need to build the public service ethic of people choosing to work with young children out of a deep sense of vocation. The business model for delivering public services is not going to work. The business plans, cashflow projections and cost-per-unit models of neighbourhood nurseries will lead inevitably to managers trying to cut costs by paying staff at the lowest possible rate.

Wider social problems

Early childhood education and care is being promoted by the Government as part of the solution to the wider social problems of inequality. But the whole system is built on deep inequalities. It would collapse tomorrow, if it were not sustained by an infantry of poorly-paid nursery nurses and assistants. These are the people who are expected to help rectify child inequality and poverty. Many are not paid enough to provide decently for their own families.

The nursery sector needs to be staffed by properly paid staff who are in the job out of a sense of vocation, and who have professional training and expertise.

Second, early childhood services should be developed for everyone. To date, initiatives have been patchy.

State subsidy has helped to create a booming childcare business sector. At the same time there has been an overall decline in local authority provision. The result is that there are many good places where the resourceful and the affluent can find high quality education and care for their children. This satisfies the individual family's pursuit of good quality services, but it does nothing to promote these as public services.

The whole point of public services is that they should be a public good, for everyone.

Speaking recently at the Pen Green Centre, the minister for children and young people, Margaret Hodge, frankly acknowledged that there are significant gaps in current policy. She praised the New Zealand government for its progress in developing a better trained and better paid workforce.

But there are no plans for our Labour Government to follow this lead. We are only promised yet another inter-departmental review of the issues.

Yet there is cause for optimism. As leader of London's Islington Council in the 1980s, Margaret Hodge started off an ambitious programme for developing a comprehensive network of local authority funded education and childcare centres. This is an enduring achievement. It required the political leadership to build public demand for good, universal services. As a minister, her ambition and determination has created, for the first time since the second world war, a realistic public debate about the merits of affordable childcare for all families. The Chancellor has made a historic pledge.

As early years professionals, we need to use this historic moment to argue for the establishment of high- quality public services for all children and their families.

Julian Grenier is head of Kate Greenaway Nursery School in Islington, London

References

1 and 2 Towards Universal Childcare: Analysing childcare in 2003 (Daycare Trust)