Early years isn’t a charity

You know, it has been said that if you stand in the same place for long enough, everything just comes around again. I feel rather like this after more than 30 years of working with children.

There have been a number of different reports and reviews over the past few months about children’s social care; the Sutton Trust and even the outgoing report from the children’s commissioner. They all point to the same thing: a long-term lack of adequate funding for children, especially in early years and early intervention.

I have seen the dismantling of the school system under a previous government in the 1980s, and things feel similar in the present day. An approach based upon business principles that ignores the impact of a market system, applied to social responsibility. It didn’t work then and I don’t see it working now. Value is often defined in terms of profit or savings (or could this be ‘outcomes’) at the expense of wellbeing. The cacophony of information about the poor state of our health, both physical and mental, is plain to see on the mainstream documentaries, as we bulk-eat ready meals and spend our lives literally worrying ourselves sick about social media presence. In a time when everyone needs funding, only the most extreme cases are liable to receive it. To be honest, it feels a bit gloomy.

Now this won’t come as a surprise to anyone working with children under the age of five, especially those in areas of overcrowding, poor housing and poverty, but it begs the question, what can be done about it? When services have been left so insufficient that even the Royal family are beginning to notice (the Duchess of Cambridge) then perhaps the situation really is serious. The report from her newly formed Royal Foundation – Centre for Early Childhood (RFCfEC) highlights the current woeful state of early intervention and to a degree monetises it. I fear that rather than being a true picture, it simply skims the surface of the more systemic issues. There are many families whose struggle to keep their head above water does not make it into the data because they are ‘managing’.

I support any intervention that raises the profile of the early years as a transformative stage, but there is an element here that sees early intervention as ‘charity’ rather than investment or a responsibility that should be prioritised from tax revenue.

There is little to disagree with in the RFCfEC report, but what is not clear is who is going to pay for it. I hope Boris and Kier bother to read it, because without a long-term cross-party commitment, I don’t feel overly optimistic its laudable aims will be more than a glossy brochure.