To the point...

'Yes, but...' This is the prefix to any discussion about what the present Government does about children. Childhood is one of New Labour's metaphors for other stuff: moralising about marriage, law and order, and the collapse of civilisation as we know it.

Sure Start is the classic example. Was it a family services prototype allocated to the most desperate, and therefore the most deserving; a template that with more time and money might be universalised? Or was it really a law and order thing, designed to interrupt the criminal career of the feral infants born to those deemed to be crap parents in the neighbourhoods from hell?

Extended schools may be met with the same suspicion. Is this really joined-up thinking, or is it just a way to maximise resources and political capital among that massive constituency of the disappointed and disaffected: anyone who's got anything to do with children?

Scepticism thrives in the Government's own contradictions. It says it is extending public provision, while it is reluctant to commit to extending the role of the state; it is promoting universality, while offering choice to people who already have plenty.

There will be a vast increase in childcare staff, but they'll still be Cinderellas; joined-up government doesn't yet mean integrating education with care, it doesn't mean infusing schools with social services' concerns about what some children have to put up with.

The initiative announced by education secretary Charles Clarke at the beginning of September envisages schools as the hub of flexible, community childcare provision. But some schools are no more of a social hub than a bus shelter.

We should now be able to raise our glass to three decades of pressure from the women's movement, from childcare practitioners and providers, and from parents, confident that at last the Government wants to synchronise children's time with parents' time, community time and institutional time.

But it has again blocked the European directive on shorter working time.

And Labour is silent about children's time. So, this may be a means of merely masking our over-worked, underpaid work culture, and adults'

alienation from children.

But we should seize the time. Adults - parents, childcare providers, public servants, teachers, politicians, social workers, community activists - could use the context to press for a new debate about the politics of childhood, its time and its place. That should be the next Really Big Conversation.