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What does the government want to do for young children?

Give them a better start in life is the obvious answer. But how - and is it now chasing two different agendas which will ultimately trip each other up?

In the comprehensive spending review the government announced the setting up of children’s centres to offer a range of services for families and young children in England’s 20 most disadvantaged neighbourhoods.

Although nobody yet knows much detail about these centres, they are likely to build on local Sure Start programmes - services which are sharply focused on improving outcomes for children by supporting and improving the quality of the parental care they receive. Yet as well as continuing the work of strengthening parents’ relationships with their babies and toddlers, a key function of the new centres will be to provide day care - to enable and encourage these same parents to go out and get jobs. The new government unit overseeing the centres is to be run jointly by the Department for Education and Skills and the Department for Work and Pensions, underlining the importance of their role in the government’s welfare to work programme. The new unit brings together responsibility for early years, child care and Sure Start and its budget will rise to £1.5bn by 2005-6, funding an extra 250,000 new day care places.

There is now a large body of research showing that a child’s experiences in the first two years are crucial to its future emotional health, and many with professional and academic expertise in child development believe that one-to-one care by a consistent and committed carer, usually the mother, is the best way of providing this. The educational charity Watch (What about the Children) believes that far from investing in day care the government should be spending its money on financially supporting mothers to spend longer with their babies before returning to work. They argue that it makes more sense to pay mothers to care for their young children than to train and pay strangers to do the job for them.

Sue Clasen who chairs the charity says: "The best thing the government could do for babies is to raise the status of mothering as a job. At the moment we are trying to fit babies into an adult agenda. But they have their own agenda and until we understand their emotional needs and can satisfy them we put them at risk."

Specifically, Watch is concerned about the risks of attachment disorder - the disruption of healthy emotional development which can result when a baby is not able to bond with its caregiver. Attachment disorder has been linked to behavioural problems, attention deficit disorder and mental illness.

Clasen says: "A baby needs consistent one-to-one care. In day care the person looking after the baby is likely to keep changing. I’ve worked in a nursery myself and you can see babies looking around for a familiar face until eventually they just give up.

"We’re not saying that all babies who go into day care will develop attachment disorder but children who are not emotionally attached are at risk."

Watch has been accused of trying to make working mothers feel guilty, and of supporting a reactionary agenda of pushing women back into the home. But the charity claims it is simply putting the case for babies. "For pre-verbal children the ideal is a mother supported financially and socially and allowed to return to the workplace on a very gradual basis. An abrupt all-day separation at 18 or 29 weeks is not the right answer."

But Watch’s claims are contentious. The Daycare Trust, which lobbied for a children’s centre in every neighbourhood, quotes research which directly contradicts claims that mothers who stay at home are best for babies.¹

The impact of day care on children, it argues, depends crucially on the quality of care in the child’s home, and the quality of the day care. It agrees that young children need stable and continuous care but argues that they can cope with several carers "provided they are the same adults over time and that secure relationships with those individuals are formed". The trust cites several studies including a government evaluation of early excellence centres - a model on which children’s centres may be based - which found they enhanced children’s social, intellectual and physical development. Daycare Trust senior policy officer Megan Pacey argues that even without considering the indirect benefits to children of their parents’ employment, good day care has clear and demonstrable advantages over children’s home environments if their parents for any reason are unable to offer the care they need. And for all parents, the centres should offer a range of support services in one place, tailored to local needs and demands, including the opportunity to take a break.

Although the Daycare Trust is delighted that resources are to be made available for a network of children’s centres, Pacey is disappointed that they will, like Sure Start, be available only in selected neighbourhoods.

"The chancellor is proposing a half-way measure, but universality is key especially as two-thirds of children in poverty don’t live in the 20 most poorest neighbourhoods."

Pacey points out too that there is a huge question mark over how and by whom the new service is to be delivered. "Ninety per cent of child care currently is provided by the private sector - and that won’t work for poor families. The options seem to be either build a new public sector framework or fund the voluntary sector to do the job. Either way there are going to be serious infrastructure costs." Some people are assuming that early years partnerships will take on responsibility for commissioning the centres, but Pacey fears these are not sufficiently robust in terms of skills, clout, or statutory status and believes local government is better placed to take on the job.

Sue Owen, head of the early years and child care unit at the National Children’s Bureau, warmly welcomes the increased investment in services for young children, and especially the announcement of an integrated service for under fives.

She says: "Split budgets have been a big problem in the past. It is difficult to pull together money from different funding streams because they often don’t dovetail, so the new unit makes a lot of sense. But there is always a danger that you try to do too many things and don’t do any of them very well. The government has a lot of targets to hit, and it will be a challenge for local service planners both to hit those targets for the government and to do something meaningful for local people."

For Mary MacLeod of the National Family and Parenting Institute there is absolutely no contradiction between supporting parents to spend more time with their young children and providing child care to help them into work.

"We absolutely do need more financial support and workplace policies to enable parents to stay at home longer with young children and to return to work gradually. But we also need more child care. There has been appalling lack of child care in this country for 20 years compared with other European countries many of which have both better family allowances and parental leave, and better child care provision.

"There is research that makes it very clear that the first two years of life are vital in terms of emotional development, but poverty is much more damaging to children’s life chances than attending day care. Parents have very different needs and we need to have a lot of different ways of attacking the things that get between children and a better start in life."

¹ Quality Matters: Ensuring Childcare Benefits Children, Daycare Trust, 2001