Many of the issues currently being debated in nursery education were being debated 90 years ago. However, this is not the case for babies, who then had barely any presence on the public early education and childcare agenda.
Babies were certainly being cared for outside the family a hundred years ago through private arrangements. Some of that care was no doubt very good, but ‘baby farming’, collective care in appallingly neglectful and abusive circumstances, was notorious.
Pioneering educators recognised the importance of nursery education for two-year-olds upwards by the turn of the 20th century and before, but official attitude was that this was a private matter for families. At the end of the Second World War, a joint Ministries of Health and Education circular could not have been more explicit that the ‘right place for under-twos was at home with their mothers’.
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