Gordon Brown's promise to fund 1,000 Children's Centres has to be the most exciting policy for the early years announced by any Government. But do you ever get the feeling that for all the money the Government has put into the early years, things haven't got much better?
In 1997, the New Labour Government inherited a shattered system of public sector education and daycare for children under five. Six years later, the Daycare Trust concludes that the public sector has 'reduced dramatically' in the last decade.1
There is little enough to be nostalgic about in the pre-1997 history of nursery education. There had been decades of low investment from the 1960s onwards. Nursery schools and day nurseries once had state-of-the-art buildings. By the 1990s, many were starting to crumble away with leaky roofs and rotten window frames. The authorities had under- stood the need to put up the buildings. But they seemed to have neglected the fact that they would need maintaining.
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