Will the childcare I’ve found be reliable, will my child be happy, how can I afford it? Mums know the importance of good quality early years provision for their children’s development, and the Daycare Trust research highlights this, with women commenting on the benefits of improving their children’s sociability and school readiness, not to mention the enjoyment factor – it gives children a chance to have fun and make friends.
Good quality childcare isn’t cheap, but it is an investment in our future. So mothers are right to identify free provision for three and four year olds, help through tax credits, and childcare vouchers as important policies to preserve and expand. Their support for Sure Start is also striking – it’s easy to underestimate how mothers have come to assume they will be able to access good quality Sure Start programmes, to forget that only a decade ago we didn’t have it at all. Conservative policies to reduce investment in Sure Start and limit its reach to the most excluded demonstrate how little they’ve understood about the need to secure the infrastructure for early years provision that all mothers can take for granted if we’re to maintain the gains we’ve made. If they really wanted to reach the poorest families, they’d realise that Sure Start needs to be as routine and accessible as the primary school or the health centre, that cutting back a service isn’t the way to attract more families in.
But on the left we too need to be visionary and ambitious for the future of childcare, push further for the boldness and radical thinking that have propelled the remarkable progress that we’ve made so far. The twin goals of child development and facilitating parental employment must be understood as the building blocks of an enabling welfare state, but we must also attend to its role in improving the quality and enjoyment of children’s childhood in the here and now.
Labour over the past decade has done much to place childcare on the public landscape, but we need to secure it for the future, and for the benefit of every child. An election which is crucial to the future direction of our country is surely the time for a bold statement of our ambition and our vision, of working towards universal, excellent and free at point of use childcare. That would really capture mums’ imagination now.