Hardly a week goes by without Nursery World reporting on the woes afflicting ‘childcare’ in England. It’s too expensive, say many parents. It’s not well funded enough, say many providers. There are shortages of ‘childcare’ workers and it’s difficult to retain those who are in post. Nursery closures, actual or threatened, are on the up, while childminder numbers are down.
Many weeks, too, there are proposals for how to fix this or that part of the existing system. But such reformist tinkering, assuming more of the same with some tweaking, fails to acknowledge that early childhood in England is, in the words of the Nuffield Foundation, ‘a dysfunctional system in need of a radical re-think’. Rather than reformist tinkering, systemic transformation is called for.
That is the main message of a new book, written by myself and a New Zealand colleague, Linda Mitchell, Early Childhood in the Anglosphere: Systemic failings and transformative possibilities. As the title suggests, England is not alone in having a dysfunctional system. Similar problems are to be found across Anglophone countries such as Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and the United States.
What makes the system in England and other Anglophone countries so problematic and dysfunctional? In its recent report, the Nuffield Foundation highlights some problems: the system ‘is confused and fragmented. It comprises a diverse patchwork of different services and complex funding arrangements.’
Behind this confusion, fragmentation and complexity lies a fundamental split between childcare and school services, with the former now providing the majority of places mainly in nurseries. Not only does ‘childcare’ dominate provision but it also dominates the national discourse about early childhood – nearly all those reports in Nursery World are about ‘childcare’, and most of the fixes offered are couched in terms of ‘childcare’, not least ‘30 hours free childcare’. For although all early childhood services are meant to have an educational function, the focus in England is very clearly ‘childcare’ and employed parents.
SPLIT SYSTEM
The consequences of this split system, with its attendant fragmentation, are plain to see. The system is riven by inequalities and incoherence: for example, ‘childcare’ services are based on a ‘low cost’ employment model, while school services are based on a graduate teacher workforce. The system is socially divisive: as the OECD Family Database shows, childcare services for children under three years are used far more by more advantaged children with higher-income and higher-educated employed parents. The system, too, embeds an artificial distinction between ‘care’ and ‘education’, when all children need care and all children (in the words of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child) have a ‘right to education…beginning at birth’.
But the system has other deep failings. Successive governments have actively encouraged marketisation, and the competition between providers that goes with it, and privatisation. Most early childhood provision today is private provision, and most of that for profit.
Yet marketisation, and its consequences, have never been evaluated by government – though such evidence as there is from England and elsewhere, reviewed in the new book, points to it being problematic. Equally problematic is the treatment of early childhood services as businesses selling a private commodity to parent-consumers, rather than as a public resource and public good.
There’s more. The early childhood sector in England ends very early, with most children entering primary schooling at just four years old, so weakening the sector and making it highly vulnerable to what has been called ‘schoolification’. The sector, too, is subject to tight central government control and suffers from a democratic deficit. Then there is a further split in the system, creating a gap between the end of well-paid parenting leave (at just six weeks in England) and the start of a universal entitlement to early provision (three years – the current extension of ‘free childcare’ to nine-month-olds being confined to children whose parents meet certain conditions, notably being employed).
WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
How have we, in England, got into this mess with our early childhood system? Part of the answer is a lack of thought and democratic debate. Decades of post-war public neglect were ended in 1997, when early years and parenting leave finally got policy attention. But that welcome interest was not matched by critical evaluation of the existing system or of the options going forward; with the exception of Sure Start, government basically opted for more of the same – many of today’s problems go back decades. This thoughtlessness was compounded by the hold neoliberalism gained over English society from the 1980s, a hold that led marketisation and privatisation to be taken for granted and prioritised the economic rationale of ‘childcare’.
What is to be done? We agree with the recent Fawcett Society report that ‘our childcare system requires urgent transformation’. For us, this means farewell to childcare. It is time to turn away from the current split system, dominated by for-profit childcare services, and turn instead towards a fully integrated, universal and public system of early childhood education (ECE) from birth to six years. A system based on children’s rights, including education from birth, and gender equality; and recognition of ECE as a public good and an essential part of the welfare state and social infrastructure.
In practice this would mean:
- integrated access – an entitlement to services for all children (and their carers) from birth to six years, complemented by 12 months of well-paid parental leave, closing the gap
- integrated provision – multi-purpose, community services for all young children and families, for example in Children’s Centres
- integrated workforce – a graduate ECE (birth to six) profession (such as the early childhood teacher in New Zealand and Sweden) making up at least half of the workforce and having parity with school teachers
- integrated funding – services funded directly (no more subsidies to parents) and free to attend for a core period
- public provision – services provided by local authorities and non-profit organisations having agreements with these authorities.
This transformed system would bean integral part of the overall education system. But although education would be at the heart of the transformed system, it would be about far more than education. It would support parents taking well-paid parental leave in the first year after birth, through multi-purpose services such as Children’s Centres. It would also serve other purposes, including supporting employed parents through opening hours, but also meeting many further needs of parents and local communities. It would recognise the importance of care for all children and all adults, but with ‘care’ understood not as a commodity sold to some parents, but as a way of relating to each other, children and adults alike – an ethic of care.
This transformational turn means leaving behind much of what is taken for granted today. It means farewell to ‘childcare’ services, ‘childcare’ workers, ‘childcare’ costs, indeed the whole endless talk of ‘childcare’ that has failed England so badly, leading it down a cul-de-sac that has blocked progress for years. It means farewell to the ‘nursery’ as a mono-purpose form of provision. It means, too, farewell to marketisation and privatisation, incompatible with early childhood as an integral part of a public education system and committed to values of democracy, solidarity and inclusiveness.
Some for-profit ‘nurseries’ might continue, the equivalent of private schools for older children; but public funding would be confined to Children’s Centres run by public and non-profit private providers.
The Nuffield Foundation, with which this article began, has argued for a belated exercise in critical thinking: ‘Given the weight of evidence highlighting the complexities and inefficiencies of current programmes, the time is right for a wholesale evaluation of the purpose and provision of early education and care.’ At the very least, England is in urgent need of that evaluation, conducted as an open and democratic exercise; hopefully, that would lead to the sort of transformatory conclusions I have suggested above. Years of reformist tinkering have left this perilously late in the day; we cannot afford any further delay.
MORE INFORMATION
Early Childhood in the Anglosphere: Systemic failings and transformative possibilities is published by UCL Press and can be accessed free online at www.uclpress.co.uk/products/189379
The arguments in this article are more fully explored in the book Early Childhood in the Anglosphere
