Nursery World - Rise and fall of childcare ambitions

Despite certain social advancements over the past 50 years, the story of childcare in recent decades is blighted by a theme of decline

Can we learn lessons from the past? My memoir ‘Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible’: 50 years of work in childcare and education takes an overview of what has been lost and what has been gained.

Fifty years ago, there were three big issues. First, there was a view, reinforced by government policy, that a woman’s place was in the home; mothers should not be working. There was hardly any childcare, apart from childminding. There has been a sea change in attitudes towards women, partly because of feminist agitation all through the 1970s and 1980s.

Various campaigns set up community nurseries, funded by local authorities, which offered radical, visionary collective views of how children and their mothers and fathers might live and work, and how childcare workers could have solid careers. Now it is perfectly respectable for mothers to work and to seek childcare, and services have increased exponentially to meet the demand, although the vision of what might be possible in the way of good childcare has mostly faded, reduced to an Ofsted checklist.

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