Rethink childcare amid pandemic

Covid-19 has posed a serious threat to England’s early childhood services, with the mainly for-profit childcare sector imperilled by the financial impact of the pandemic. But the crisis also represents an opportunity to think about what future we want for children, families and services. As author Arundhati Roy observes, previous pandemics “have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew”.

Against this backdrop, a new book, Transforming Early Childhood in England: Towards a Democratic Education, could not be more timely. With contributions from 18 academics at or associated with London’s Institute of Education, it offers a gateway between the current seriously flawed early childhood system and a reimagined future one.

The book starts by setting out the system’s deep-seated problems, many of which precede Covid-19. These include:

• A system split between childcare and education, with fragmented and divisive services.
• A low-status workforce that is overwhelmingly female, has low qualifications and scandalously low wages.
• Reliance on a competitive childcare market and private, for-profit providers.
• Entry to primary school at too young an age.
• A standardised, one-size-fits-all curriculum focused on preparing children for primary school at the expense of diversity and context.
• A culture of targets, measurement and numbers.
• Weak parenting leave and a long gap between the end of well-paid leave and the start of an entitlement to early childhood services.
• A democratic deficit, with democracy absent as a stated value, a daily practice and a means of governing.

The authors arrive at a stark conclusion: “The system of early childhood education and care in England does not work for children or parents, workers or society…nothing short of transformation is now needed to give young children the all-round upbringing they have a right to and parents the support they need to both work and care.” The “transformation” they describe is a fundamental change of structures, practices and, above all, thinking.

Proposals for transformation are on offer, based on firm foundations – research, innovative policies and practices from home and abroad, including Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal and Sweden – and children’s rights.

The report on Implementing Child Rights in Early Childhood by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child concluded that work with young children “should be socially valued and properly paid, in order to attract a highly qualified workforce, men as well as women” and that the right of the child to education begins “at birth and [is] closely linked to young children’s right to maximum development”.

Building on these foundations, the book calls for a public and fully integrated system of early childhood education, which recognises early childhood education as a common good, an essential part of the welfare state and social infrastructure, and as the first stage of the education system, with a strong and equal relationship with primary schooling that children should start at six years of age. This system should offer:

• Integrated access, with an entitlement for all children from birth to six years and their carers, together with 12 months of well-paid maternity and parental leave.
• Integrated provision in multi-purpose and community-based children’s centres, provided by local authorities and not-for-profit private organisations.
• An integrated workforce, based on a graduate early childhood worker (either a teacher or social pedagogue), accounting for at least 60 per cent of the total workforce and having parity of status, qualification and pay with school teachers.
• Integrated funding, with services funded directly (scrapping subsidies paid to parents) and free to attend for a core period.
• Integrative concept: a broad concept of education with an ethics of care.

Transformation, as the authors propose, means a system that is first and foremost educational – “early childhood education” services not “childcare” services. But saying farewell to childcare does not mean ignoring the needs of employed parents, who are catered for by generous opening hours and strong parental leave. Nor does it mean dropping “care”. We think all children (and all adults) require care; understanding care as an ethic about how children and adults should relate to each other. In short, we want to see an Early Childhood Education system with an ethic of care.

The book also pays attention to pedagogical principles, including an image of the “rich” child, with great potential and born with one hundred languages; slow knowledge, slow thinking and slow pedagogy; observation and documentation, enabling all learning to become visible and valued; assessment as a co-operative and dynamic process embedded in everyday experience; and trust in the agency, capabilities and potential of children, practitioners and parents.

The transformation that the book calls for may be utopian. However, it is a real utopia that is not only desirable, but also viable and achievable.

• Transforming Early Childhood In England: Towards a Democratic Education, edited by Claire Cameron and Peter Moss, is published by UCL Press, and can be accessed online free www.uclpress.co.uk/products/128464