A couple of Canadian friends staying with me hadn't been to England for a while and what surprised them most was the disappearance of community nurseries. Canada does not have particularly good coverage of childcare and education, but what it does still have in abundance is a thriving self-help movement. There are hundreds of community nurseries. They offer full-day childcare, set up and run and used by local people on a non-profit basis, supported in part by local authorities, which fund the centres directly so that they can provide for low-income parents and employ trained staff.
A recent survey of these nurseries suggests that on average their quality is significantly higher than in the for-profit sector. In some way over the last 20 years, the movement has generated an ethos of care and commitment and discussion that has led to good practice.
When my friends were last here, there were many community nurseries in England. Both the DHSS (before childcare was passed to education) and some councils used to support them. Now they have all but disappeared. How have we managed to stamp out these local initiatives?
EYDCPs, Centres for Early Excellence, Neighbourhood Nurseries, Sure Start, Children's Centres and all the other short-lived initiatives were based on the idea that it was important to get professionals working together for the good of children, and that the only choice parents wanted was to be able to decide where to buy childcare. Each initiative was rule-bound by targets and monitoring restrictions, and funding depended on endless rounds of applications.
The community nurseries had to keep re-labelling themselves as something else, or go under. It now seems quaint to believe parents and local people can organise for themselves without heavy professional input, or that it is straightforward to grant-aid community nurseries directly without all the paraphernalia of childcare tax credits.
What my Canadian friends see is the discouragement of self-help communal action in favour of unbridled commercialism. What an indictment of the Labour Government, if they are right.
Helen Penn is professor of early childhood studies at the University of East London.
