The Government has just delivered the most definitive statement we are likely to have about childcare for some time. Its cross-cutting review of childcare, Delivering for children and families, has an introduction from Tony Blair. It is endorsed by the Department for Education and Skills, the Department for Work and Pensions, the Treasury and the Women's Equality Unit.
The review, outlining 'the Government's vision and strategy', aims to:
* develop a thriving supply of childcare to benefit all parents;
* provide financial help to lower-and middle-income parents for whom the cost of childcare is a barrier;
* transform the way services are delivered, especially for the most vulnerable; and
* change the way policy is made within the DfES, bringing together childcare, Sure Start and early years in a single interdepartmental unit.
At a local level, local authorities are being made responsible for the delivery of childcare, either with or without Early Years Development and Childcare Partnerships. The Government will significantly increase investment in childcare to make this system work.
These are ambitious aims. It is good that childcare is so firmly on the Government's agenda, and that money is being spent on it. But what does the small print look like?
Basic assumptions
Underpinning the review are several basic, but unexplored and questionable assumptions. First, the review assumes that the historical division between childcare and education is a natural fact of life. It sees early years education as a separate activity from childcare with its own agenda.
Nursery education is a free, part-time service for three-and four-year-olds overwhelmingly delivered by teachers in state schools.
Childcare is full-time or wraparound, for children aged nought to eight, and it may deliver some education, but it is not the same as nursery education and is not a state service. This fundamental and inefficient split between education and care is unknown in many other European countries, but it has been beyond the remit of the review to consider it.
The second assumption in the review is that, although part-time nursery education is free, the best way to provide childcare is through the marketplace. The review provides figures to show that access to childcare is very uneven, but instead of questioning the market model, it concludes that more investment should be put into addressing 'market failure'.
Most parents must still choose childcare and pay for it themselves, with or without subsidies, and then tack it on to whatever education they can find.
The review recommends that schools should consider childcare enterprises on their premises to make it easier for parents to do the tacking.
Childcare, especially for younger children, can swallow half the income of a two-earner family. However, in the review there is no examination of childcare costs or how they might be redistributed among parents, providers and the state. High costs are apparently another fact of life.
The question of cost is complicated by the fact that Sure Start and other programmes directed at poor parents may be provided free. Targeted services are, by definition, divisive. Is it a good idea to provide one set of services for the poor, and another for the middle classes? The review takes it for granted that it is a sensible strategy to do so. It says that 20 per cent of the most deprived wards should have 'children's centres', although the review does not explain what they are or what they might look like.
Starting strong, the recent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development review of early education and childcare in 12 countries, argued that equal access to services was not only desirable, but could only be achieved through coherent state funding. As the OECD pointed out, we have an unequal system. It looks set to continue.
Children's views
The really big hole in this review is that there is no view of children themselves or what they might want or need or even enjoy.
It tells us that, based on American research, certain kinds of educational regimes produce 'better outcomes' for children. It is doubtful whether US findings from highly targeted interventions in deprived areas can be extrapolated to the UK. But in any case, it is a peculiarly instrumental view of childcare and early education that their job is solely to produce a certain kind of child in the future.
All the work on children's rights suggests that we should be concerned with children's lives in the here and now, with ensuring their participation and pleasure as much as possible. Children receiving childcare may spend more of their waking hours outside their home than inside it. Yet there is no consideration in this review of how or why they spend their time doing what they do.
There has been much research recently into the importance of taking children's views into account, and on useful methods for doing so. To ignore children's views and feelings in a major review like this seems to me to be verging on cruelty.
Parents' lives
How does this review impact on the everyday life of parents? As a recent Women's Equality Unit conference Christine Skinner from York Univer-sity, one of the signatories of this review, presented a fascinating paper on the huge amount of time parents have to spend to make their childcare and education arrangements work.
She gave the example of a mother who worked full-time. One child went to a nursery class in the morning and a childminder for the afternoon. The other child went to school, then an out-of-school club. Such arrangements, and covering them when anything went wrong, consumed a great deal of the mother's time and energy.
Similarly, one of my colleagues with two small children has to make 12 different arrangements in the course of a week, including school, playgroup, childminders and grandparents. She keeps a chart on the kitchen door to remind her and her husband where their children will be each day.
Childcare and education exist in both these sets of arrangements, but they are also expensive and extraordinarily hard for parents to co-ordinate.
Nothing in the review is likely to make them easier.
Yet we have very different models available to us. Most European countries regard the period from nought to age six as a conceptually distinct stage of education, provided through free-standing state-funded (although not necessarily state-provided) nurseries, for which the parents make a reasonable financial contribution.
In addition many countries are paying serious attention to the 'work-life balance'. It is not only early education and childcare that matters, but how parents are enabled to balance their time between work and family.
Children themselves, their views and their participation, are considered seriously as an aspect of services.
Instead of looking to constructive European models like these, the review leans heavily on American assumptions and research, although the US arguably has the most unequal society and the worst childcare provision of any industrialised country.
We have the ghost of a European system in the UK in our nursery schools, but despite all the efforts to support, transform and develop them, their numbers are still shrinking. This is inevitable in our present system where nursery education is such a limited part-time offer, and the pressures of schooling are so intense. Yet nursery schools have the most solid tradition of free-standing, holistic provision, and the most generous space of any kind of early years service. The review ignores them.
The review, then, is a disappointment. Despite its good intentions, and some good ideas, it is a shallow piece of work, driven by an economist point of view, which accepts a competitive market model as the only viable means of progress. It judges results only in terms of presumed benefits to the wider economy, and glosses over or ignores the views of children, parents and childcare workers.
Delivering for children and families argues for some adjustments to the present system, but does not consider at all whether the present system is really the best or most workable way of delivering services.
Helen Penn is professor of early childhood studies at the University of East London
