Opinion: To the point - Stuck on Victorian values

I have just finished writing a chapter on the UK for a book (Childcare and pre-school development in Europe: Institutional Perspectives, ed. by Kirsten Scheiwe and Harry Willekens, published by Palgrave Macmillan spring 2008) comparing European pre-school institutions since the 19th century. Despite the flurry of activity by the present Government, I am always surprised at how little has changed. English education has always had a preoccupation with regulating children, keeping them off the streets in case they cause trouble, drilling them in the three R's, and making sure they look neat and wash behind the ears. David Cameron's recent education proposals might have been taken straight from a Victorian pamphlet.

Social class is another example. Until the 1950s, working-class and middle-class families rarely mixed. Recent research by Carol Vincent and her team at the London University Institute of Education suggests that the effect of childcare tax credits and requiring parents to buy childcare in the private market has been to re-introduce a similar kind of social segregation. Middle-class parents use up-end private nursery care; working-class parents in the same neighbourhoods make very different arrangements.

The emphasis on voluntary provision is also nothing new. I have a book called Nurses for the Needy from the end of the 19th century. It describes a home-visiting programme 'supplying the missing link between the comfortable classes and those who lack all comforts ... helping our poor to help each other'. The nature of the support and the advice being given is not so very different from today. There are equally moralistic views about what the poor should be doing to better themselves and stop being poor!

We could provide a universal early education and care system, free at the point of use for all children. But somehow we've never grasped the nettle.

Helen Penn is professor of early childhood studies at the University of East London.