We are moving to a new site at my university. There is much less room in my new office and I have had to clear out.
There was such an accumulation of stuff. All those poorly printed pre-1997 DHSS Children Act guidelines - I'll put them in the recycle sack. The EU Childcare Network booklets - well, perhaps I'll keep a couple for souvenirs.
That shelf of brightly coloured, glossy EYDCP booklets - in the skip, they're not even recyclable. Those EYDCP Excel spreadsheets with local targets sent to me by desperate chairpersons seeking advice - in the shredder.
The Childcare Strategy papers, the Centres of Early Excellence blurb, the Beacon Schools, the Neighbourhood Nursery booklets, the Single Regeneration Budget, the Education Action Zones - toss them in the skip. What about the shiny DfES conference packs, the Ofsted reports, the curriculum documents, and that other shelfload of Sure Start bumph and the Sure Start evaluations? Sorry, the skip for you too.
Should I keep any copies of those newsletters from the voluntary organisations that have had to shut up shop? The videos and CDs? The research reports? No point. The contact lists? No, everyone changes jobs at such a rate, they're useless now.
My hands have become dusty and my shoulders ache from lugging all that paper around.
It is depressing to think of all those well-meaning, but poorly thought-out Government initiatives that went nowhere. All that money, all that time and effort, all those people!
Think how much a Government that was seriously committed to publicly funding universal services to young children could have done to make childcare accessible and affordable. Instead, we have the most expensive childcare in Europe, and still staff aren't paid properly! And now the polls suggest that the chance is gone. A Conservative Government certainly won't do more and will probably do a lot less.
But it is a kind of freedom to move on. The new issues are increasingly international and environmental - it's time to stop being parochial and think about how what we do, directly or indirectly, affects the lives of young children in other, poorer countries.
Helen Penn is professor of early childhood studies at the University of East London
