Designed by committee

The Select Committee on Education and Employment held its final meeting on early years this week. It said pushing children into schooling too early, and allowing childminders to smack and smoke, were wrong.

But things are much worse than the report acknowledged. We still have not got an integrated and comprehensive approach to early years; we have a state-funded, part-time nursery education entitlement and a market-led childcare strategy. Innovative programmes such as Sure Start are expected to work miracles and cure poverty without actually changing family incomes.

We are all familiar with the results of these policy shortcomings. There is the continued rapid turnover of children between settings, sometimes four or five changes before school - a turnover which would be unacceptable at any other stage of education. There are still many different kinds of provision, inequitably staffed, funded and housed.

Maintained nursery schools, arguably the most robust and longstanding UK provision serving poor communities, are desperately trying to change and develop, but are neglected in the educational framework. The Ofsted inspection regime is fragmented and contradictory - it inspects maintained early years settings using school formulae, yet has a different one for non-maintained settings, so there is no proper basis for comparison.

There are the 40-plus pots of money for early years, almost all short-term, competitive bids. This means projects lurch from year to year, wondering how they will keep going. There are the Early Years Partnerships, whose range, variation and competency varies so much that partnership and planning are sometimes more rhetoric than reality.

Margaret Hodge is upbeat about the Government's record. True, there is more money and focus on early years initiatives. But the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has been critical of these piecemeal short-term reforms. It suggests we can do better. I hope the Select Committee will agree.

Despite bringing civil servants together at the DfEE, the muddle and contradictions continue. Child poverty is still four or five times higher than anywhere else in Europe.

Despite the rhetoric about parental involvement, it is more and more difficult to involve parents because of this turnover.

At worst some day nurseries operate without any outside space whilst at best some nursery schools can offer an acre of exciting grounds? How can wages be raised higher in the childcare sector if profits of private companies have to come first? And childcare still costs the earth.

The select committee heard from a voluntary nursery in Sheffield, whose funding crises were never-ending, and whose staff had to take wages cuts in order to survive.