Childcare plan: the kids are not all right

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/29/childcare-reforms-plans-truss-editorial

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The mantra of our era is the promise to do more with less. From mandarins to middle managers, everyone who controls a budget these days faces having to make this pitch to sceptical staff. On Tuesday it was the turn of children's minister Elizabeth Truss to explain how – by rewriting some rules, and ripping up others – she could chivvy England's creaking childcare sector to provide more places. Her plans were titled More Great Childcare; but as Sure Start centres shut and childcare credits are restricted, the mood of many working parents is not so great.

A working mother, Ms Truss is at least seized by the significance of the issue. Heaven knows that a Conservative party that is 16 points behind Labour among female voters needs to wake up to it too. She made effective play with damning statistics about an average hourly wage of just £6.60 – an insult compared with teaching wages, even though the academic consensus now suggests that education during the earliest years can be of more significance than anything that happens at school. An equation littered with the terms "excessive costs", "inadequate pay" and "no more public money" is bound to be tricky to solve. Ms Truss's response is to draw abler workers into the sector before increasing their workload – by allowing them to take more children.

The kindest thing that can be said is that, in theory at least, it is not obviously daft. It is a deregulatory scheme straight out of the economics textbook. Existing rules are certainly tight – requiring, for example, one minder for every baby – and there is of course a sense in which carers taking in extra infants will be "more productive", not to mention better paid. The obvious anxiety is that where just one adult is responsible for the proposed four toddlers (or six in a nursery), the children won't get much in the way of real care; still less the elementary education which Ms Truss – in an echo of prime ministerial parlance – says will help Britain "win the global race".

The hope is that these lofty ambitions can be rescued in more crowded nurseries, through the professionalisation of early-years careers. With better training, perhaps more carers would prove able not merely to look after more children than now, but to look after them well. That, according to Ms Truss, is what already happens in many continental countries. Perhaps, although all the figures she quotes are all maximum regulated ratios; the better-funded childcare in, say, France typically operates well below these limits. Norway and New Zealand are both looking at moving in the opposite direction. And in Scandinavia more generous parental leave means that nurseries less often deal with those youngest infants – and the overwhelming practicalities that go with them. Take even three toddlers and throw in a tummy bug, and a nanny might have to change 20 nappies in a day. Education is plainly not going to get much of a look-in in these circumstances, since it is likely to be as much as she can physically do to stop the tots not being changed at any one moment from injuring themselves. Perhaps the right training might make it easier to get through such days, but it is hard to see the utility of the proposed requirement for GCSE maths. Basic trigonometry is not going to help.

The biggest danger of the lot is that quality will suffer as childcare "class sizes" rocket in places where parents have no choice but to go with the cheapest nursery, while parents in more prosperous parts of town continue to finance two-to-one or three-to-one care. A new class divide at the earliest ages is the last thing that England needs, and yet – as Ms Truss conceded yesterday – there are already signs of precisely that. The way around it is to target such subsidy as is available at those who need it most, but there are alarming signs that the coalition is about to move in the opposite direction, by downgrading means-tested help in order to fund childcare vouchers that can be showered far and wide. After all the talk about social mobility, a nursery-level course in the facts remains overdue.