Nursery World - Editor's view - Who's holding the baby?

It may be that by the time you read this, the Department for
Education's page on gov.uk will have been updated with full details of
the ministers' briefs and exactly where responsibility for childcare and
early years lies.

But at the time of going to press, a week and a half after the reshuffle, the responsibilities sections of Sam Gyimah and Nick Gibb's profiles lie empty.

We know from Sam Gyimah's Twitter account that he is taking on childcare and early years, but not his whole role, or whether anyone else will take part of the childcare brief.

The DfE says that this sort of lag is not significant, but it is an extraordinarily long delay in confirming ministers' roles.

There are two ways of reading this - childcare and early years is not viewed as important enough to bother saying who is in charge; or childcare will be such a vital election issue that there has been lengthy internal wrangling about who takes it on, Tory or LibDem.

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