The government say it wants to improve early years child care. But its policies appear at odds with each other, argues Hilary Land.
Four years ago the Prime Minister wrote in the consultation paper Meeting the Childcare Challenge that good quality child care "…matters to us all. To our children who deserve the best start in life."1 By 2001 there were child care places for one in seven children under eight compared with one in nine in 1997. Employed parents using formal care now have greater financial assistance with the cost of child care through the tax credit system. There is more funding for child care for student parents. There are also area-based programmes targeted on poor children living in deprived areas where need cannot be translated into effective demand to attract private for-profit nurseries because parents are too poor.
This is a big improvement. However, there is still a long way to go before there is "good quality, affordable child care for children aged 0 to 14 in every neighbourhood". In 2001 the number of child care places grew by only 2 per cent, and levels of provision vary greatly from one part of the country to another. We could as easily talk of postcode child care as we do postcode health care.
There are several issues that the government's Childcare Commission should address. First, the main objective of child care services is unclear. Is it to enhance the development of children or is the main purpose to enable mothers to go to work?
These objectives may conflict. For example, currently the employment status of the parents is the key determinant of access to financial help with the cost of child care. Immediately a parent becomes unemployed the tax credit ceases, so if you lost your job you would lose the money for the nursery place, with the childminder or after-school scheme. This is not good for children, the parent who needs time to look for another job, the child care provider whose income will be unpredictable, or the child care staff.
Access to the special schemes in poorer areas may be free and is not linked so closely to parent's employment. These are more concerned to improve parental skills and enhance children's health and development. However, the future of these schemes is uncertain because their budgets are time-limited or contingent on raising matching funds. Even the largest programme, Sure Start, only has funding guaranteed for another three years. This is in stark contrast to the permanent expansion of part-time, pre-school education which is free, already available throughout England and Wales for all four-year-olds whose parents want it, and will be extended on the same basis to all three year olds. The additional £2bn involved comes from direct taxation.
The second issue therefore concerns the very different funding, staffing and location of the care and education of young children. The consultation paper states: "There is no sensible distinction between good early education and care: both enhance social and intellectual development in a safe and caring environment." The training, education and career opportunities for child care staff are very limited compared with teachers. Teachers are highly qualified, many to degree level, compared with half of child care workers who are unqualified. Half of those with qualifications have achieved NVQ level 3. The government aims to get all child care workers to NVQ level 2 rather than NVQ level 3. But nursery nurses' earnings are very small. Before the introduction of the minimum wage, half were earning less than half the minimum rate.
The third issue concerns the problem of the recruitment and retention of child care staff which is already impeding the growth of high-quality day care. Four out of five child care providers experience recruitment difficulties. The pool of unqualified young women, who traditionally worked in child care until they married and had children of their own, is shrinking. The government's policies are succeeding in increasing girls' ambitions to gain qualifications. Childminders who are older and have children of their own also find there are more and better paid choices open to them. The child care sector has to compete with nursing, teaching and social work. Research shows that while staff are highly committed to child care work and have high levels of job satisfaction, they worry about the difficulties of developing a career, the poor pay and how they will manage employment and caring.
An integrated early years service in which workers could move between health, social care and education would be more likely to recruit and retain staff. Currently only the Early Excellence Centres and family centres bring workers in these occupations to work closely together. None of these have permanent funding. If the service itself as well as career paths remain fragmented, its capacity to grow and the quality of care on offer will be jeopardised. Currently, turnover rates are very high: 25 per cent a year in day nurseries. Continuity of care and familiarity with the carers are crucial components of care for all children but especially for disadvantaged and vulnerable children.
Staff skills need developing to meet the needs of disabled children. Only one in 20 after-school schemes will accept such children. There are childminders and nursery nurses with the necessary training but they are rare and expensive. The Budget announcement that disabled children cared for at home by an "approved" carer will be included in the tax credit scheme in future is welcome but will parents be able to find such a carer? Career ladders for early years staff have been developed in other European Union countries based either on full integration or high levels of co-ordination between care and education. The shift of responsibility for early years services in the UK to the Department for Education and Skills is a step in the right direction but only a first step.
Let us hope the Childcare Commission advises the government to learn from the EU that good quality, universal and affordable child care requires substantial public sector investment and involvement in training - for children's sake.
1 Department for Education and Skills, Meeting the Childcare Challenge, Cm 3959, DfES, 1998. See www.dfes.gov.uk/childcare/contents.shtml
Hilary Land is professor of family policy and child welfare at the school for policy studies, University of Bristol.
Practitioners and politicians need to focus on how to
involve local people if the plethora of government initiatives are
to work, writes Gillian Pugh.
There is much talk of cross-departmental working and joined-up solutions to joined-up problems, based on the needs of children and families. Yet each government initiative has to satisfy its own public service and service delivery agreements, and on the ground there are so many initiative-related meetings that it is a wonder there is time to deliver services at all.
The challenge now is to devise an approach to planning, commissioning, delivering and funding services that is driven by the needs of children and families, and is truly joined up. So how can we reconcile a top-down "we know from the evidence what is good for you" approach, with a bottom-up one that says "in our community the main issues are lack of leisure provision and high levels of teenage pregnancy"?
A recent paper proposes a shift towards involving local people and agencies in planning, and a focus that is unequivocally on better outcomes for children.1 It starts from the premise that there should be broad agreement across government departments showing what we would expect for all our children - under six or seven broad headings such as healthy births, success at school, adequate income and so on.
The four key elements of the approach are:
- Community involvement - communities need to determine their own priorities.
- Accountability based on agreed outcomes rather than outputs - not "how many children are getting a service" (outputs) but "what results are we seeking".
- Genuine participation by individual children, young people and families in service planning and delivery.
- Innovative financial strategies - pooling resources to use funds more flexibly to recognise local priorities.
The report describes some UK approaches that are beginning to work in this way, and an outcomes approach has also underpinned the draft strategy of the children and young people's unit. But can it permeate the work on the National Service Framework for Children? And can we all - ministers, council officials, front-line workers - get off our own patch of turf and really work together, with and for children?
Gillian Pugh is chief executive, Coram Family.
1 D Utting et al, Better Results for Children and Families: Involving Communities in Planning Services Based on Outcomes, NCVCCO, 2001
