Since May 1997, unparalleled attention and resources have been devoted to early childhood services. There can be no doubting these services are a priority of the Labour Government, nor the Government's determination to increase and improve provision.
However, behind the flurry of activity, a larger opportunity has been slipping away - the opportunity to transform a neglected and incoherent confusion of services into an 'integrated and coherent early years service', in the words of a pre-election Labour Party policy document.
Instead, we are settling for a process of reformation, driven not so much by concern for early childhood as an important stage of life in its own right or for young children as a social group, but by the imperatives of other major Government projects. Rather than thinking the unthinkable, the Government has opted for more and better of the same.
Troubled legacy
The early childhood services that the Labour Government inherited were in urgent need of change. A mountain of publications testified to past neglect and current inadequacies. Comparisons with other European countries showed the low levels of publicly-funded provision in Britain. But they also showed another difference, less often noticed but just as significant. In Britain, the compulsory school age is five, with many children actually starting primary school reception class earlier, before which, if they were lucky, some might have had a few terms of part-time nursery education. By contrast, the European norm has been settling at three years or more of publicly-funded nursery schooling or kindergarten prior to compulsory school at age six.
Early childhood school-based provision, in nursery or reception classes, is only one part of the split system of early childhood services in Britain, which has produced inequalities and inconsistencies in almost every way imaginable -regulation, opening hours, staffing, funding, access and so on. The other part consists of a range of daycare or childcare services, for example, nurseries, playgroups, family centres and childminders. Providing for more young children than the education system and with access overwhelmingly dependent on parents' ability to pay fees, these services have been the responsibility of social welfare. Underpinning this part of the early childhood system, a poorly trained and poorly paid workforce has subsidised the growth of childcare services for decades in the absence of public support.
Six unaddressed issues
What would have constituted a transformation to a genuinely integrated and coherent early childhood service? Certainly, great attention paid to a mass of detail. But there are at least six major issues involving concepts, principles and basic structures that also needed to be fully addressed. So far, they have not been.
First and foremost, what constitutes early childhood? The present British situation - compulsory school age of five, but most four-year-olds admitted on a voluntary basis to primary school - is not the result of a recent and principled decision. Its origins lie in long-forgotten 19th century political considerations, compounded by a subsequent desire to use surplus primary school places and, most recently, the need of schools to recruit young entrants.
The consequences have proved problematic: the possibility of some four-and five-year-olds being in inappropriate settings; discontinuity in the lives of many three-to five-year-olds, who may move from playgroup to nursery class to reception class; and, most significant yet least appreciated, a truncated and weakened early childhood system, increasingly subservient to the needs and concerns of compulsory schooling. Such considerations, with no obvious offsetting benefits such as enhanced educational attainment at older ages, have led some commentators to propose raising the compulsory school age to six.
The introduction of a Foundation Stage for three-to six-year-olds is a welcome recognition of the need to rethink, but really it is modest stuff. The opportunity has been missed to consider establishing early childhood, from birth (not three) to six years of age, as the first stage of the education system. This would involve moving compulsory school age to six, with children having the opportunity to attend early childhood services for at least three years on a full-time basis rather than the part-time shift system that has long predominated.
Currently, the Government's extension of early years education not only envisages a relatively short period of such education - two years; it also fails to question a long-standing tenet of education policy, the superiority of part-time attendance.
Re-organised in this way, early childhood might be viewed not just as a preparation for the next primary stage, but as an equal yet autonomous stage of education, with its own characteristics and intrinsic value.
I am not arguing that the early childhood stage should bear no relationship to primary schooling; I am questioning the nature of that relationship and asserting the need for it to be based on equality and mutuality.
Care and education
The second issue that needs to be addressed is that a coherent early childhood service based on recognising birth to six years as the first stage of the education system requires administrative expression, through the integration of responsibility within the education structure, both nationally and locally.
At local level, an increasing number of local authorities have integrated responsibility for early childhood services, often within education departments. At a national level, the Labour Government took the important step of transferring responsibility for daycare services from the Department of Health to the Department for Education and Employment (similar transfers occurred in Scotland and Wales). But instead of bringing daycare and school-based services for young children into one strong and integrated early childhood division from day one, responsibility was split between two parts of the DfEE - the early years division and the childcare unit.
Certainly, Government policy does emphasise the close relationship between care and education. But the underlying thinking often still appears to be compartmentalised. This is reflected not only in the continuing split of responsibility at national level, but in the continuing use of the language of childcare and the emphasis attached to a National Childcare Strategy, as well as allowing early years education and teachers in the maintained school sector to be excepted from the reforms of early years regulation and training.
These and other signs appear to add up to a decision not to make a commitment to a coherent early childhood service, which would cover all services up to compulsory schooling and be education-based but with a remit well beyond education, including care and family support.
Staff reform
The third issue is the continuing split in the administration and conceptualisation of early childhood services, which is matched by a continuing split in early childhood staffing. The work being undertaken by the QCA and NTO to develop a framework for early years qualifications and training is again essentially of a reforming nature. It rationalises the existing jumble of qualifications. It is about improving what exists, rather than rethinking. There has been no questioning of the nature of the work, and the type of worker needed, in a coherent early childhood service concerned with education, care and a wide range of other functions. What type or types of worker might be best suited to undertake this work?
The present system of staffing, unquestioningly replicated in Government documents, involves a disparate mix:
* an officer corps of teachers in nursery and reception classes, who have undertaken a four-year post-18 training to work with children from three through to primary school age, and * a large army of childcare workers (again the explicit language of Government documents), some with no basic early childhood training, others with varying types, including a two-year post-16 training covering the full early childhood age range.
But there are other possibilities, as seen in other countries. For example, there is the pedagogue, trained to work with children from birth to six (and sometimes also with older children in non-school settings), regarded as equal but different to the school teacher; or the early childhood teacher, trained to work specifically with children from birth to six within the education system. One or other of these two options has been adopted as a 'core' early childhood worker by countries which have integrated their early years services. In terms of basic training, both options assume at least three years at a post-18 level, with a focus on the whole early childhood age range.
Why has there been no serious enquiry into who the early childhood worker should be, as a necessary precursor to further discussions about training and qualifications? Perhaps, deep down, ministers realise this is a can of worms best left unopened. As already noted, current services mostly depend on a large group of poorly trained and poorly paid women 'childcare' workers. Staffing is easily the main cost in these services. Any fundamental disturbance to the current situation, such as a transformation of staff training and status and therefore of earnings, spells chaos - that is, unless it is accompanied by a rethinking of funding.
Funding decisions
This brings me to the fourth issue. The Labour Government has directed resources to the early childhood field in a number of ways, but in particular through the new childcare tax credit. But there has been no fundamental and comprehensive rethink about funding across the whole system of early childhood services. The childcare tax credit was never offered for public scrutiny as part of a wide-ranging review of funding options for achieving a coherent early childhood service, based on a well-trained and well-paid workforce.
Instead, the present plethora of funding initiatives, including the tax credit, make the inherited funding system even more complex and fragmented - while the very term 'childcare' tax relief again reflects compartmentalised thinking.
Not only were various funding options, with assessments of their implications, not set forth by the Government; there has been no discussion of the principles which might guide the choice between options and, more broadly, the distribution of costs between government, parents and employers. One consequence is that the Government uncritically espouses employer funding of childcare ('we want to encourage and enable more employers to support childcare'), rather than considering it as just one possible funding option, which is viewed by some people as problematic, and rejected by countries such as Denmark and Sweden.
Long-term planning
The fifth issue concerns the type of early childhood services that Britain needs. What currently exists, like everything else in this field, does not represent a carefully considered view of what would be best for young children and their families, their communities and society as whole. It is an accumulation of responses to past social, economic and political circumstances. Is the mix of part-time nursery classes and full-time reception classes, private nurseries and childminders, family centres and playgroups really best suited to current and future circumstances and needs?
Of course it is necessary to work in part with what already exists. However, I would argue that an early childhood policy should take a view about the direction to be followed in the long run, including what types of service might be better suited to current and future circumstances and needs. Do we have too many of some types, too little of others? Within all the rhetoric of choice and diversity, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that Britain has some notable gaps - for example, relatively few nursery schools and non-profit nurseries. Over time, how can disparities be corrected?
As it is, a strategy that emphasises partnership and early excellence centres might be avoiding making difficult decisions at a critical moment of rapid growth. The setting up of a review panel to consider just one type of pro-vision - playgroups - adds to the impression of wanting to keep the existing team happy, rather than risk unpopularity by asking if the team needs, over the long term, to be rebuilt.
Image of the child
The sixth issue is perhaps the least obvious, but the most important. The Government's approach to early childhood services illustrates our propensity as a society to want solutions, before we have asked the critical questions. Government documents are full of questions, but mostly of a technical or managerial nature - how can we best do this or do that? More fundamental and critical questions about issues of value receive little attention. Who do we understand the young child to be? What sort of early childhood worker do we want? What are the purposes of early childhood services and pedagogical work? What do we want for our children, here and now and in the future?
Government publications about early childhood say little about the critical questions outlined above. Everything is taken to be self-evident. But these publications reveal some idea of the social constructions underlying them. For example, Meeting the Childcare Challenge discusses the purposes of 'childcare' as 'better outcomes for children, including readiness to learn by the time they reach school and enjoyable developmental activities in out-of-school hours; and more parents with the chance to take up work, education or training'.
Such clues are, admittedly, a slim basis for drawing conclusions. But these sentences seem to embody an idea of the young child as an empty vessel needing to be made ready to learn and ready for school; as unrealised potential, a future resource, an adult-in-waiting; and as a supply-side obstacle to the smooth workings of the labour market, an obstacle that childcare will remove.
In doing so, they throw light on what has happened to early childhood services since May 1997. There has been no major Government project concerned with early childhood services per se, or more generally with young children as a social group, no strong agenda concerned with early childhood in its own right.
Instead, early childhood services and young children have become items on the agenda of other major Government projects, such as improving educational standards in school, and increasing labour market participation and economic competitiveness. Viewed from the perspective of these imperative projects, young children are understood primarily as dependents of their parents, in need of childcare to enable their parents to take up employment, and as people on their way to becoming school children and economically active adults.
Of course, there are many other constructions of childhood. Another one views children, including the very young, as a social group with their own rights, their own network of relationships and culture, and their own recognised place in society. Childhood is understood not as a preparatory or marginal stage, but as a social institution, important in its own right as one stage of the life course, no more nor less important than other stages.
Children are social actors, participating in determining their own lives, as well as the lives of those around them and the societies in which they live. They are active learners from birth, co-constructors of knowledge and identity in relationship with other children and adults. In short, children, including young children, have agency. This understanding finds voice in the words of Loris Malaguzzi, first head of the early childhood services in Reggio Emilia, Italy, who said, 'Our image of the child is rich in potential, strong, powerful, competent and most of all connected to adults and other children.'
I am not arguing here for one understanding over another, but pointing out that there are different possibilities, each having consequences for early childhood services. There are choices to be made, and we need to reflect upon them.
Collective reflection
For old hands in the field of early childhood, the Labour Government has brought about an unparalleled and invigorating change of climate. Various imperatives have led to a recognition of the importance of early years and a willingness to act. Yet, renewed hope mingles with an uneasy sense that an opportunity to transform early childhood services has been slipping away.
The imperatives have stimulated change, but also produced too-hurried responses. What has been missing is a process of collective reflection about early childhood, early childhood institutions, pedagogical work and early childhood workers. This process would need to be sensitive to other political projects, but should also be concerned with young children and early childhood as important in their own right.
A transformed early childhood service requires technical and structural change, going far beyond what is currently envisaged. But it also requires a willingness to recognise and engage with issues of value, purpose and understanding. Having missed the first window of opportunity for rethinking, the end of a first term in office might be a good time for the Government to take stock, think critically and chart new directions for early childhood.
* This article is based on a chapter in Taking Education Really Seriously: Three Years Hard Labour, edited by Michael Fielding and published later this year by Falmer Press. Peter Moss is professor of early childhood provision at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, Institute of Education, University of London. Recent books include Transforming Nursery Education (with Helen Penn) and Men in the Nursery (with Claire Cameron and Charlie Owen), both published by Paul Chapman Publishing, and Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care (with Gunilla Dahlberg and Alan Pence), published by Falmer Press.
