Nursery education in the UK has gone from state-funded service to lucrative private enterprise.
Childcare features prominently in both major parties’ plans for work and personal finance. Keir Starmer wants to make early-years provision as universal as possible while the Conservatives claim they’re already transforming childcare and increasing funding to both boost children’s development and get mothers back to work.
Labour’s pledge is to boost the number of available nursery places in England by 100,000, by using empty classrooms in existing primary schools. These will reportedly be run by the schools themselves, or local private providers as opposed to the government investing in state-run children’s centres with properly qualified and remunerated staff.
What Rishi Sunak’s government has been working on, already, is a multiphase plan to secure 30 hours of free childcare for preschool children of working parents by September 2025. This has also relied heavily on the private sector. Staffing problems (acute shortages and low qualifications) have led the government to expand its apprenticeship schemes, delivered mostly by private companies. So far, however there has been poor up-take and a 50% drop-out rate for those who sign up as apprentices.
Want more election coverage from The Conversation’s academic experts? Over the coming weeks, we’ll bring you informed analysis of developments in the campaign and we’ll fact check the claims being made.
Sign up for our weekly election newsletter, delivered every Friday throughout the campaign and beyond.
Since the 1990s, under New Labour, childcare has been increasingly privatised. Because of government subsidies to the sector, under the successive Conservative governments since 2010, the most successful businesses became investment vehicles. The impact for families and staff both has been disastrous.
British state-funded nursery education dates back to the 1920s. To begin with provision was free, delivered by highly trained teachers, and situated in generous premises with outside space and equipment. But it was limited.
Although originally intended for working families, by the 1950s, because of prevailing views about mother’s domestic roles, it was mostly offered on a part-time basis, two to three hours per day. In the 1970s and 1980s, women began campaigning for the right to be more than housewives. This included access to childcare and nursery education.
Many innovative local authorities, most notably the Greater London Council, supported community nurseries to fill the gaps. Several hundred such community nurseries were set up, mainly in urban areas. They were small-scale projects, often run collectively. And they established innovative and democratic ways of working.
In 1997, Tony Blair’s New Labour government accepted that women had a right to work and that the workforce needed women’s labour. It launched a variety of initiatives concerning young children, to mixed reviews. Sure Start, the most overhyped of these initiatives, focused mostly on family support and mother’s wellbeing.
Read more: How England's scrapped Sure Start centres boosted the health and education of disadvantaged children
However, the programme distracted attention away from childcare for working parents. The Children’s Centres programme was Labour’s most innovative. Most often based within existing high quality, free-standing nursery schools, these expanded childcare provision, within the existing state sector. These offered full-time places to children under three, as well as to children of nursery age. In the last 14 years many of these integrated children’s centres have been closed, but a few still remain, albeit struggling to survive.
The Labour government under the aegis of the (then) Department of Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform rather than the Department of Education saw private nurseries as thriving small business enterprises and also wanted to coordinate their activities with the state sector. Private childcare by then appeared to be a cheap and flexible option, much cheaper than anything the state could provide.
It was assumed supply and demand were sufficiently responsive to ensure that childcare needs were met wherever they arose. Under Gordon Brown as chancellor of the exchequer, the Childcare Act 2006 was passed which stipulated that local authorities had a new duty to secure sufficient childcare provision to meet the needs of families. Councils were expected to do this through the market, that is, in concert with the private, voluntary and independent sectors, as opposed to providing it themselves.
Private nurseries expanded rapidly as a result. Small-scale business enterprises began to buy up what remained of local authority daycare provision and council-funded community nurseries.
Read more: Why the UK childcare system is at breaking point
Subsequent governments from 2010 continued to focus on private provision. Eligibility criteria for private childcare places were expanded and funding streams identified. The growth of private provision was exponential.
Ferocious acquisitions and mergers consolidated the biggest nursery firms and created large companies funded through debt and managed through offshore accounting. Currently, like many other privatised industries, there are patterns of excessive profits, large bonuses for senior company staff, and payouts to shareholders, whilst the service itself is squeezed as much as possible.
The regulatory body, Ofsted, which monitors standards in schools, is ill-equipped to deal with the private nursery sector. It has no remit to explore value for money: it does not ask about ownership and it cannot raise any financial questions.
Ofsted also only inspects once every six years and, in terms of child wellbeing, the standards against which it assesses establishments are very low. It does not even include a mandatory requirement for outside space for nurseries even in urban areas.
It is clear, however, that these childcare policies have had disastrous results. The poorest families or those with children with special needs have been excluded from private childcare nurseries.
Further, staffing has plummeted: people in the sector are badly paid and poorly qualified. Unsurprisingly, there are chronic staff shortages. Appalling adult-child ratios have been reportedly linked to several child deaths.
A 2021 report from Unicef ranking rich countries in terms of childcare provision put the UK almost at the bottom. The quality of British provision was regarded as so poor that it could not even be given a rating.
Labour’s proposals for school-based childcare are important but so far we have only the barest bones. They will require major additional commitments to train, recruit and pay staff. Better regulation is crucial to stop big private nursery providers making excessive profits.
I was part of a team of researchwers at UCL which investogated the growth of the private sector. I have been working with the On-the-Record oral history group to c ompile records on the cpmmunity nursery mov ement in the 1970s and 1980s.
