Paul Lindley: Time for a National Children’s Service

Childcare policy announcements in England tend to follow a pattern. An eye-catching pledge is made. The offer looks good. Parents begin to plan their families’ lives. Then they find out they can't get what’s been promised.  

After warnings from the National Audit Office, parents currently have every reason to wonder if they’ll get to benefit from the Government’s policy of extended free childcare.  And every reason to question whether the 85,000 places for children needed by September will really exist. 

Governments depend on hard-pressed nurseries and carers facing rising costs to deliver these hours of free care. There’s every chance parents try to access free local childcare and find it simply isn't available, or is complex and confusing to secure.

When Rishi Sunak was recently asked a clear question on a local radio interview – could he guarantee every parent who needed a place would get one? –he couldn’t give a clear answer.

That gap - between what's promised and what’s on offer - is more than disappointing. It can breed cynicism in politics and disillusionment in national services. 

Readers of Nursery World will be familiar with the story. Governments make lots of plans and have lots of failures. It happens. But in other areas of Government policy, the state can, and does, make guarantees.  

If you have a child in the UK, that child will have a school to go to. It’s guaranteed. The school might not have enough money or struggle with large class sizes, however.

It’s strange then, that in early years care, ifs and maybes are tolerated. Stranger still, when you know that this is where public spending has the greatest impact – on children, and for society at large.

Nobel-prize winning economist James Heckman has shown that investment in early years development programmes yield a 13 per cent annualised return, while research from the UK has shown that every £1 spent on early years interventions is worth £7 spent on secondary education interventions. 

What could change? The Labour Party has commissioned a review of the system, led by Sir David Bell, former chief inspector for Ofsted. Labour has also committed to ‘break down the barriers to opportunity’ as a key promise to voters. 

Either way, one simple reform would make a sweeping difference.  

What if a government simply made sure it could answer “yes” to that local radio question: will every parent who needs a place be guaranteed one? What if giving and living up to that guarantee became a central, binding, absolute goal of government? Children should be no more likely to be refused free early years care than a school place.  

To put the promise in a press release tomorrow without future planning would achieve nothing, except to further erode trust in public statements, servants and institutions.

To deliver on the promise would demand a huge focus on recruitment and retention, skills and training, and of course funding. Most importantly it would require far greater coordination of our fragmented childcare sector to make sure the pledge was delivered universally, nationwide.

It would demand ministerial – prime ministerial – attention. It would demand time and planning. But it could happen.  It has happened for the school, health, court, fire, policing, pension and defence provision.  Why not for our youngest children and their families?  

Such a guarantee could form part of a new social contract with families – and a core pledge within a new National Children’s Service: something which I called for in my recent book, Raising the Nation.

This Service would coordinate the work of siloed Government departments to support our children, across every aspect of their development, wellbeing, welfare and right to equal opportunity.  The first pledge within this overarching guarantee, should be in offering world class, universal, easily accessible early years development and childcare opportunities.  

An optimistic demand? Perhaps. But it’s one more of us should make. You can tell what a government values by what it delivers. Any politician will tell you children matter. It’s time for us all to prove we believe it and demand it. It's time to make priorities.  It’s time for a National Children’s Service.

Paul Lindley is an entrepreneur, children’s campaigner and author. He founded the organic baby food brand Ella’s Kitchen and currently sits on the board of Sesame Workshop, creators of Sesame Street.