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The education secretary has announced that "schools will be open from 8am to 6pm in a bid to help working parents". At the Labour party conference, the prime minister confirmed "wraparound care" for parents of all three to 14 year olds all year round. It sounds great: parents can leave their children in a safe environment to suit themselves.

The teaching unions have given a qualified welcome but also raised the core question of who will provide the care. They are worried that teachers will be expected to work extra hours.


I have further reservations. The initiative does not spring primarily from a desire to help children. The main purpose is the New Labour one of getting both parents or lone parents to work. In short, the economy is more important than family life.

The proposal is not new. During the second world war, the number of day nurseries with long hours and even residential nurseries multiplied so that women whose husbands were in the forces could work in factories. Thousands of women did take jobs but doubts were expressed about the effects on their children. Lady Marjory Allen, a supporter of nursery schools, worried that young children would not cope with spending a very long time away from their mothers. A famous study (D Burlingham and A Freud, Children in War-Time, 1940) emphasised that the experience could be painful for children and required very skilled staff.

Today's children will not be facing the trauma of war but even school-age children may find difficulties in being apart from their families for extended periods, not just in term time but also during the school holidays. Hopefully, the care will be of good quality, but even where it is young children are likely to spend a substantial part of the day within the confines of one institution.

Inevitably, those days will conform to a timetable and a routine. They will receive group care, not individual care. Staff, like teachers but unlike most parents, will change, depart and reappear. Obviously, children benefit from routine and group interaction, but the danger of wraparound care is that it becomes the predominant part of their life and so minimises the amount of time in which they relate with parents, play with the children next door, and just explore in their own ways and own time their home environment.

I hope that no children will be left in schools for the full 10-hour day. But some are going to be there from early morning and some until the evening.

I often meet our seven-year-old grandson from school at 3.15pm. At times, he comes out tired. Children in school care for much longer periods will be even more vulnerable to exhaustion. Before launching its scheme, the government should have researched the physical as well as the emotional effects on children.


Some parents have to work long hours to get a decent income and to pursue a career. The government has encouraged this by linking tax credits with working families. It would have been much better to have put the money into child benefit (which is also much simpler to claim) and allowed parents a real choice about how much time they have with their children.

Wraparound care is also part of another New Labour trend: centralisation. Education is controlled by central government through a standard curriculum, tests and inspections. Local health services are being absorbed into more distant and larger ones.

The latest scheme is neighbourhood centralisation. Already educational, social work and some health services are being pushed onto one campus on the unproven assumption that it makes for better communication and outcomes. Significantly, the recent report by HM Inspectorate of Education in Scotland found that community schools (those integrated with other services) have not fully lived up to expectations. wraparound care will probably be added to these super-size agencies. Simultaneously, scattered local day care and other small services will close down. The drive towards centralisation will undermine community life.

Last month, Sylvia Watson died, aged 91. She was the great children's officer of Hertfordshire and served in the children's department for the whole of its life because she was committed to children, not a career. Her department was small enough for her to know every child and every member of staff. Her strength was in making relationships. Is there a place for people like her in the new welfare empires?


Bob Holman has recently retired as community worker at a locally run project in Easterhouse, Glasgow.