A new deal for children?: Reforming education and care in England, Scotland and Sweden, published this week, compares efforts at integration in the 1990s in the UK with Sweden, which already had well-established, publicly-funded childcare services before integration through major education reform in 1996.
The report said that in spite of advances with the national childcare strategy, decades of under-investment has meant childcare services in England and Scotland remain fragmented, expensive and bedevilled by short-term funding.
Parents in England and Scotland pay, on average, six times more for a pre-school place than their counterparts in Sweden, the report said. In Sweden, integration of services has been accomplished smoothly through the introduction of 'whole-day' schools combining education and childcare in one setting, with links between the two established under the leadership of the school principal.
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