Childcare reforms based on outdated models, say critics

Peter Moss, professor emeritus at the Institute of Education, University of London, said the government had “lost the plot” in basing its childcare reforms on systems in countries like France and the Netherlands.

Moss made the points during a lecture on New Zealand’s childcare policies supported by charity Barnardo's, which he said were a better model for childcare reforms in the UK.

The Department for Education’s future childcare policies are based on examples from France, the Netherlands, Germany and Sweden.

Referring to France, Moss said it was “not a country that anybody in the international field would hold up as being exemplary”.

“It seems to me an example of lack of information for the government to make France, which is not at all advanced in early education, as some sort of exemplar, when countries like New Zealand or in the Nordic world have clearly got it right for some decades,” he added.

His view was supported by Anne Smith, professor in childhood studies and children’s rights from New Zealand’s Otago University, who said: “I’ve no idea why this government hasn’t looked at countries like New Zealand,” said Moss.

“This government is not sufficiently aware of the widespread debates there have been in many places over recent years around the need to move towards a fully-integrated early childhood service.

“It still thinks in old-fashioned terms of childcare and early education – one is a private market responsibility, one is a public good. We need to get beyond that as New Zealand has done to a considerable extent.”

Smith described the country’s system, which offers 20 hours of free childcare to all three- and four-year-olds. Currently, more than 75 per cent of early years professionals in New Zealand have received a minimum of three years' university education and one year of induction training.

In England, DfE data from 2011 shows only 11 per cent of daycare staff have a degree-level qualification.

In April, childcare minister Elizabeth Truss said that in comparison to French nurseries, early years settings in England were “chaotic”.