I think we've become too snobbish about the word 'quality'. We feel that it no longer means anything because it has too many different meanings for too many different people. We hunt in vain for a substitute that will allow us to talk fluently about the fact that we want services for young children to be as good as they can be.
We also, now, want to be able to talk about a way of working with young children that supports their learning through all the daily activities that take place in a setting. This is 'educare', a word the Government dropped because we in the early years sector didn't like the sound of it, even though it has an honourable history, being coined in the 1970s by the educationist Magda Gerber in order to describe exactly the type of integrated care and education we are striving for.
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