A mother–child relationship is one of the strongest, closest and most powerful bonds that human beings experience. The extremely influential psychiatrist John Bowlby certainly thought motherlove was crucial to a good upbringing; he considered that experience of attachment to a mother figure was crucial to a sense of self, and that loss of a mother figure – for whatever reason, including work – was likely to lead to delinquency. His views shaped government policy in the UK for many years, and through his role at the World Health Organization (WHO), his views were exported worldwide. There are still echoes of his magnum opus ‘Child Care and the Growth of Love’ in today's WHO policy, which promotes the idea of ‘loving nurturing care’, best undertaken by a mother or mother substitute. In this scenario, the infant is the focus of continuous attention, no matter what other obligations the mother might have. WHO policy argues that this maternal care is analogous to adequate nutrition for a growing body. Without proper loving care, children are being starved of what they need to grow, and their development is thwarted. Their brains in effect become stunted.

It is mainly in Western societies that ‘loving nurturing care’ is understood to mean that children should be at the centre of their parents’ attention. This week I was in a local shop with closely packed shelves and restricted aisle space. A mother had parked her pushchair almost blocking the aisle and kept addressing her child in a loud voice about what they were doing: ‘Look what mummy's found. Some spaghetti. Are you playing with teddy? He's in a good mood today. Look, he's sitting up’ and so on. This dyadic behaviour, and exclusive chattering focus on her child, to the oblivion of everyone else around, might conceivably be called good parenting. But in other circumstances, it might be considered as downright rude. I have sat in at meetings of mothers and young children in small non-Western rural communities, where mothers very quietly and unobtrusively encouraged their children to be aware of others and not to disturb the meeting, attentiveness to and consideration of others being a highly valued and necessary skill in societies where people live closely together in communities that are closely and mutually interdependent.

Expectations about how infants and young children are cared for and nurtured, and who is best placed to bring them up, have varied enormously over time, place and class. In Chapter 6, I discuss childcare and nurseries in a much broader, European and global perspective. In the present chapter, I discuss in more detail the exceptionally muddled history of childcare and nurseries in the UK. The aims of provision for young children in the UK have continually shifted, according to the political zeitgeist, and current welfare and educational theories about what is good for young children. The types of provision have gone through various metamorphoses. As a result, the statistical evidence is not consistent, and the commentary from politicians, activists, researchers and others has varied considerably in its focus about what is happening and why. My intention here is to describe what provision has been available for working parents and their children over the last century, how this has dovetailed (or not) with other provision, and how this patchwork history has led to today's profoundly unsatisfactory situation. There are other overlapping ways of recounting this history and picking out its salient features, for instance by focusing on the welfare of children and families, or highlighting the curricular changes made to further children's intellectual development and educational attainment, or, most recently, considering longterm outputs such as children's future economic performance. Working mothers and provision for their children have not been, until relatively recently, an important or topical issue. But the quality of motherhood and mothering, and its impact on the development of young children, has always been a public issue, from the Virgin Mary onwards.

The UK has a particular history of class and empire that has shaped views about appropriate provision for young children, who should look after them and in what conditions. With the help and encouragement of Richard Aldrich, who was then Professor of History at the Institute of Education (now UCL), I’ve written about this background history at length. What follows are extracts and summaries of those papers.

Ofsted (The Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills) has also made international comparisons (see Chapter 6), and claims it has gained insights from these comparisons. In June 2023, it published a research and analysis brief entitled ‘International Perspectives on Early Years’. Drawing mainly on the Eurydice data discussed in the previous chapter, and on some of the more recent Starting Strong reports, it organized its ‘insights’ into four themes:

• • availability and access

• • workforce

• • curriculum and pedagogy

• • inspection and regulation

Ofsted discussed its opinions and strategies at a round table meeting with representatives from 13 countries: Belgium, Czechia, England, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, Scotland, Serbia and Sweden. Some of the named representatives are well-known and have a history both with the original OECD Starting Strong programme and its subsequent iterations, and the EU. The discussion was clearly very civilized and well-informed. The difficulty is that Ofsted set the agenda, and the parameters for the discussion were framed by Ofsted in the light of its present – and limited – remit as a centralized national body.

Childcare is regulated through Ofsted. This covers all provision in England, distinguished for inspection purposes into two categories: in-home and out-of-home provision. Similar bodies to Ofsted exist for Scotland and Wales. Ofsted's original remit was to oversee the standards of free public sector education, to replace local authority monitoring and inspection, which was regarded as too variable and, in some cases, too lenient. As the Labour Party started to diversify childcare provision, Ofsted subsequently took on local authority roles in relation to childcare as well, to try to maintain similar standards across the entire sector. Ofsted now includes the inspection of market-based childcare services, most of which are part-subsidized by the government. However, Ofsted still retains its separate schools remit, which covers state-based nursery education, so that the standards for nursery classes refer not to childcare, but to school education more generally. The Ofsted regulatory standards for childcare run to several handbooks, including a suite of health and safety regulations. They prescribe developmental standards, using background research papers to justify these standards.

What does a nursery place cost and who should pay for it is a question in the same category as how long is a piece of string? It is less an economic question than a social and political one. Should all children be entitled to attend nurseries? If not, which children should be prioritized, and how? Should children of working parents have priority? Who pays for a child to attend a nursery? How should childcare fees be calculated and who by? What government budget does the money for childcare come from, how should it be paid out, who devises the relevant forms and who fills them in? Whose job is it to create or run nurseries, and what is their reward (or what profits can they reasonably extract) for doing so? What counts as household income and what contribution should parents make to the costs of a nursery place? Should mothers (or fathers) be paid for better maternal/paternal leave so that there is a reduction in the need for babycare, as babies are the most expensive age group to look after, and arguably benefit most from more one-to-one care at home? What is a fair wage for those who work in the sector, and who should pay them? What should staff be expected to do to earn their wage? How should nurseries be coordinated so they can pool resources? What back-up services are needed to monitor whether policies are working, and how will they be paid for?

The problem is that, in the UK, there are no coherent answers to any of these questions, or to closely related issues regarding in-home carers such as childminders and nannies Many of these crucial questions have not even been asked, because we have such a fragmented system in the UK! But until at least some of these questions are resolved, it is a mistake to throw more money at the childcare sector. Someone must have a plan first. Otherwise, as at present, funding childcare does not enable parental choice in a free market, as the government claims. Instead, it is a wasteful process, enriching a few at the expense of many, crippling family budgets, and failing to give value for money to the taxpayer. It is an unedifying and an unequal free-for-all, in which the poorest children and families lose out.

How do the UK government childcare policies compare with other countries? It depends on what is compared and when the comparison was undertaken. In most countries, childcare systems are continually being reviewed in response to particular issues, for example because of the rapid rise of women in the workforce, or plummeting birth rates, or fiscal crises, or a new push for neoliberal policies favouring privatization, or the most recent research on child outcomes after the COVID-19 pandemic. There are also international bodies who are concerned with childcare – the OECD, the EU, UNICEF, the World Bank and innumerable American thinktanks.

The UK government published a review in 2013 suggesting that the UK was doing rather well on the international front: ‘The UK is either performing at the same level or higher than the other countries in the study on the structural indicators.’ The structural indicators were child–staff ratios, staff training, level of regulation and collection of data, government strategy and investment, and national preschool curriculum. It is not altogether clear how these various indicators were arrived at, but, using them, the UK performed well – although the authors acknowledge that the performance level was not reflected in the data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the most commonly used international measure of educational performance. This research was also collecting data largely pertaining to performance under the Labour government before 2010.

Whatever the reason for the contrast, the most recent and substantial international league table, from the UNICEF Innocenti Centre ‘Where do Rich Countries Stand on Childcare?’, published in 2022 and taking account of data from the COVID-19 period, puts the UK 36th out of 41 developed countries. The Innocenti Centre in Florence is UNICEF's major research centre. It has been monitoring conditions for children for many years, and its research findings are internationally respected and have wide application.

The UNICEF score is partly based on the legislation enacted in each country, and takes a much broader view of the conditions that facilitate childcare and women working. The ranking criteria are made up of four aspects: (1) maternal and parental leave arrangements, (2) access for children under 3 years old, and for children beginning education, (3) quality based on ratios and teacher qualifications, and (4) affordability for a two-earner family and for a single-parent family.

One of the best known and persuasive advocates for young children in the UK in the 20th century was Professor Jack Tizard from the Thomas Coram Research Unit, Institute of Education (now UCL) in London. In the 1970s and 1980s, in a series of influential papers and books, based on detailed epidemiological research, he argued that there are many adverse factors in the lives of young children, especially poor children, and many discontinuities as well as continuities in their developmental progress. He estimated that 1 in 6 young children would at some point need help, from minor ophthalmic conditions to severe genetic disorders. Family circumstances could change rapidly, and outcomes were often unpredictable. He argued that the best way to support young children and their families through their changing patterns of need would be to create local, state-maintained, integrated education, childcare and health provision, that was accountable to users. Such a service could pick up quickly on a wide range of disorders, make accessing specialist services much easier, and save money in the long run. He maintained that this kind of service should be available to all children. He also argued, at a Labour governmental working party, that “a service to the poor is a poor service”. Whatever their background, children should be entitled to the best the state can provide, not only for themselves but for the future of society, for all of us. Tizard argued that a supportive environment for all young families would help them resolve worries over their child's progress or enable them to access help easily and without feeling guilty about making a fuss. He challenged notions of standard norms of development and inflexible categorizations of disability.

He set up two model children's centres in London, and advised the OECD about how this kind of programme might be scaled up – a vision that also included family-friendly working hours for parents. The OECD later developed these ideas in its Starting Strong programme. This model of a local publicly funded, democratically organized, children's centre that provided local education and care within ‘pram-pushing distance’ for all children aged 0–5 years, irrespective of their circumstances, is, with variations, a familiar model in Europe.

Infants are born nearly helpless. Ideas and beliefs about how to care for them and educate them have shifted continually over time and place, and according to the wealth or poverty of the households into which they are born. The roles of mothers, fathers, families, relatives, friends, experts and hired help have been continually re-imagined, re-interpreted and reinforced. Assumptions about the caring and education of infants and young children, how they should be looked after and nourished, what they should be learning, and how their care relates to other forms of care keep changing as cultural assumptions shift.

In the UK nowadays – as in most of Europe – we rarely question the assumption that nurseries are a good solution for bringing up young children. But this is a relatively recent development. I have been a mother, an activist, a professional and an academic, and I have been involved in and written about debates regarding nurseries, childcare and early education for many years. ‘Who Needs Nurseries – We Do’, the title of this book, was a slogan for feminists in the 1970s and 1980s. Up until that point, in the UK at least, nurseries were seen as a very bad solution indeed for dependent young children. Childcare nurseries were strongly discouraged in the social services and health legislation. Public and professional opinion was influenced by the renowned child psychiatrist John Bowlby, who argued that young children needed their mothers, and their mothers needed them, and to do otherwise was to risk children turning into delinquents for lack of proper love and care (discussed in Chapter 4). Childcare nurseries barely existed.

As mothers and feminists, we argued the case for creating collective, public solutions as an antidote to isolated, nuclear families and women's dependency within them. Such solutions also seemed to be a good solution for young children, who we viewed as isolated and desperate for social interaction. Indeed, we envisaged nurseries as a local service for local people, within pram-pushing distance, a community enterprise, or (as the vocabulary has shifted) a co-production, accountable to its users and workers, proud of what it offered and keen for everyone involved to scrutinize its actions and achievements.

In this book, I have explored a distressing situation: the poor record of the UK in providing nursery places, the poor record of supporting mothers (and fathers) at work, and the poor record of providing quality experiences for the young children who do spend time in nurseries. This last chapter puts forward some suggestions for changing the situation.

Part of the explanation for these circumstances concerning nurseries is that we live in a society with growing and shattering inequalities. We live with broken, barely functioning services, with weak and ineffective regulatory bodies: from health, care and education to water, transport and energy, from the postal services to the penal services. Many of these services are now run by piratical global companies who prioritize and normalize relentless profit seeking, especially in low-wage industries, and hide from scrutiny in complex offshore accounting. We have devastating, shameful levels of child poverty for a rich society. We have a highly centralized government that has undermined local authority autonomy and starved local authorities of the money that they need to sustain local services. We live in a grossly nature-depleted environment, and, in urban areas particularly, we breathe polluted air. We persecute refugees and demonize foreigners. And because it is so difficult to do anything about these wider issues, we think small, and carve out our own small survival niches and strategies. Of course, there are many redeeming features to being in the UK, but, unless you are well-to-do, and even if you are, it is no longer a pleasant country. It does not need to be like this. There are times when the government has had more of a commitment to equality and providing decent basic services that support children and family life and has had a vision of a better and more responsible – and responsive – society.

Any arguments for better childcare unfortunately take place in this context. Local authority services do not, as in most countries that have good provision, provide the backbone of nursery places. Instead, there is a privatized, atomized, childcare ‘industry’ that originally consisted of small well-meaning entrepreneurs, struggling to compete, but that is gradually being swallowed up by relentless private equity companies, who maximize profits at the expense of staff and parents.

The previous chapter described the muddled and contradictory history of nurseries in the UK. Today, despite, or perhaps because of, this history, privatization of childcare in the UK is entrenched and unquestioned. It is accepted as a matter of fact that childcare is a business, and that, like every other business, it must make a profit to survive. This acceptance of treating children as a commodity item, which is unacceptable in most other countries, dominates provision in the UK, not only in childcare but also in a variety of other children's services, including services for children in care and children with special needs. In the UK, 70–80 per cent of childcare provision is for profit and privately provided. This is an estimate, as there are no reliable statistics about ownership. Government statistical services and Ofsted do not distinguish between different kinds of out-of-home care.

The private market itself has its own estimates of its reach and worth. Various management consultants, market analysts, property companies and others have carried out their own analyses, using their own criteria, with their results slanted towards prospective investors and bidders. This is discussed further below. However, all these analysts agree that there has been a marked trend towards consolidation. The childcare market is increasingly dominated by large financialized chains or companies. Over a 20-year period of mergers and buyouts, small ‘mom and pop’ nurseries have succumbed to buy outs.1 Many childcare places in the UK are now provided by big financialized shareholding companies, charging big fees of £2,000 a month or more, and market analysts claim that the process of acquisitions (buying out existing nurseries) is accelerating. A recent example of such consolidation is the group Family First, which, with the backing of the private equity company August Equity, expanded from four nurseries to 100 nurseries in little over a year, by buying up smaller nursery providers. Its previous, experienced, directors have left as the company ‘evolves’. Through its advertising and self-praise, it is making a bid to become ‘a new high-quality childcare provider, by empowering our managers and giving them a sense of ownership of everything that's happening within their own nursery’.

The education/care divide, as in many other areas, shapes the employment of those who work with children. In the education system, teachers are educated to degree level, and have negotiated pay and conditions, good benefits in the event of sickness or other emergencies, and regular school hours and school holidays. They may work with children aged 3–5 years, or older children, and have an informed view of the continuity of education for children, and individual children's learning progress in the short and long term. Teaching assistants or nursery nurses, qualified to the equivalent of Alevel standard (level 3 NNEB), act as assistants to the teacher in a school classroom and work under his or her direction. The age range that the assistant works with is limited to the younger children, but the hours and benefits are similar to those of a teacher, although the pay is much less. The place of work, the school, is purpose-built and of a relatively high standard, with mandatory outside space for children to play, and reasonable staff facilities. Nursery schools and classes in the education sector are also free at the point of use so the continual hassle of payment of fees does not exist.

A nursery nurse in the care sector in a private or voluntary nursery generally works with children aged 0–5 years. The pay and conditions of work will be much more variable, usually longer hours for less pay, with shorter holidays, uncertain benefits and fewer staff facilities. Places of work are likely to be more constricted – a converted building with poor facilities and no staffroom for instance. But an NNEB-qualified nursery nurse can progress to a senior position and have more responsibility than a classroom assistant and become a senior worker or a manager of a nursery. However, promotion to a senior post is also likely to involve the member of staff in management of parental payments and nursery outgoings and ongoing friction with parents about fees and charges.

Qualified workers are only a segment of those who look after children. Data from the Institute for Fiscal Studies showed that a majority of working mothers with young children under 2 years old rely on informal, home-based care rather than out-of-home care in a nursery.