It is strange how quickly truths become established. It is now almost boring to point out that the life chances of a child are more influenced by their early years than their later years. Recent theories in neurobiology suggest that synapse activity in the brain is at its fastest between birth and the age of three.
Policy can help this process, but the benefits start to fade as the child gets older. It thus follows that policy directed at this point in the life cycle is likely to have a greater effect. If one assumes, as social democrats do, that the most flagrant waste of potential occurs amongst the least well off, then it follows that early years policy will be extremely progressive.
So it’s easy, then? Greater provision of early years care and children’s support, building on and rapidly extending the Sure Start programme, is an obvious next step and it’s all as good as done. Well, not quite. It is very easy to say that this matters. It is now possible to demonstrate that it is true. It isn’t that difficult to say what policy should be adopted to solve the problem. It is, however, extremely tricky to manage that process politically within the limited span of a single government, for two reasons.
First, partly because of the professional pride that is already beginning to mobilise in response to the government’s green paper, Every Child Matters. The green paper proposes a drastic integration of the children’s workforce. The failure to share information plagues public services. Locating professions together is one response but integrating them completely, where there is no good reason for separation, is a better option. This will involve collapsing some of the boundaries between professions and the left needs to be careful to keep the public interest in mind rather than the sectional professional interest.
Second, there is the perennial problem of cost. Price Waterhouse Coopers recently estimated that the cost of universal childcare provision (and early years policy will be a lot more than just that) would be £2.7 billion per annum, or 2p on the basic rate of income tax. At a time when the budgets for current promises to health and education will be hard-pressed, this is hardly likely.
The cost could be reduced by targeting provision on the least well off. This would reduce the bill but it causes other problems. Take-up of targeted benefits rarely rises above 70 percent and it is difficult to sell a reform to the country that benefits only a fraction of it. This dilemma is always at the heart of progressive social policy, especially so in this case, as even targeted childcare will be very expensive. This is a serious problem and we need to turn from rhetorical acclamation of the benefits of early years policy to hard considerations of its costs.
The second option is the reorganisation of budgets. This always sounds like the last resort of the desperate politician. When all the ideas have run out, have an efficiency review. Actually, there is a great deal that can be cut out of central bureaucracies, as Peter Gershon’s review of Whitehall is currently demonstrating, much to the chagrin of the public sector unions.
There is an even more radical reorganisation to be done. If we are convinced that early years counts so much, why do we spend so little on it compared to the budgets for the teenage years and beyond? The pattern of public spending does not match the fashionable rhetoric. The really tough thinking will be to work out, not which really good things we would like to add to spending, but which moderately good things we are happy to exclude. Once upon a time ‘tough choices’ was the cliché of the day. This is one such choice.