Early years education and care should be a universal right, not a policy linked to workforce

While all three and four year old children are entitled to 15 hours of early childhood education and care, eligible working families are entitled to an additional 15 hours - 30 hours in total. The problem is that only 20 per cent of working families on low incomes (in the bottom third of earnings) benefit from this entitlement. This contrasts with 70 per cent of families in the top half of earnings.

Arguably, this funding inequity results in a topsy turvy policy outcome. Numerous studies, both within the UK and internationally, point to the potential of high-quality early childhood education and care in mitigating educational and social inequalities. 

Yet, as the A Fair Start? report rightly points out, the current policy serves to exacerbate these inequalities by providing the children of more economically advantaged families greater access to the early childhood system in the two years before school.

At the heart of the policy problem is the tension between competing policy objectives: whether the care and education system for very young children should be primarily about parents’ (especially mothers’) access to paid employment; or whether it should be primarily about the care and education of young children.

Many of us would argue that the answer to this question should be ‘both’. However, in a political and economic environment where resources are constrained, funding inevitably favours one side over the other. In this case, supporting the workforce participation of parents is the overriding policy objective when it comes to the care and education of three-and four-year-old children.

The end result is that the more advantaged families reap the most benefit. This is a misdirection of funds. A child-focused system would follow the weight of evidence, which clearly establishes the positive impact of high-quality early childhood education and care, especially for children who experience impediments to their learning and development.

As the first formal setting that many children experience outside the home, the nursery is a place for friendship and community for both adults and children as well as being a site for young children’s exploration and learning. In the nursery, children have the opportunity to practice and develop the skills that put them in good stead for later success at school as well as life in the community.

In programmes staffed by trained and qualified early childhood practitioners, children cultivate their dispositions for learning and enquiry, to play and discover, and to get along with others. For children in need of additional support, the nursery can be a site for early intervention, capitalising on our knowledge that earlier interventions are the most effective in mitigating adverse impacts and have a greater cumulative positive impact.

The first Starting Strong report of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (2006) described a good early childhood system as one where children are ‘learning to be, learning to do, learning to learn and learning to live together’. Further, it argued that countries ought to ‘aspire to early childhood education and care systems that support broad learning, participation and democracy’.

This encourages us to consider early childhood education and care as a right for children, in the same way we consider access to school education as being a right. When constructed as a right, a universal system is built, and all children and families are guaranteed access. And, as the A Fair Start? report so cogently points out, when access to early childhood education and care is conceptualised as a universal entitlement, children have the opportunity to learn together across class and social divides, and benefits flow to our communities more generally.

Professor Frances Press is head of school for childhood, youth and education studies at Manchester Metropolitan University