A mother–child relationship is one of the strongest, closest and most powerful bonds that human beings experience. The extremely influential psychiatrist John Bowlby certainly thought motherlove was crucial to a good upbringing; he considered that experience of attachment to a mother figure was crucial to a sense of self, and that loss of a mother figure – for whatever reason, including work – was likely to lead to delinquency. His views shaped government policy in the UK for many years, and through his role at the World Health Organization (WHO), his views were exported worldwide. There are still echoes of his magnum opus ‘Child Care and the Growth of Love’ in today's WHO policy, which promotes the idea of ‘loving nurturing care’, best undertaken by a mother or mother substitute. In this scenario, the infant is the focus of continuous attention, no matter what other obligations the mother might have. WHO policy argues that this maternal care is analogous to adequate nutrition for a growing body. Without proper loving care, children are being starved of what they need to grow, and their development is thwarted. Their brains in effect become stunted.

It is mainly in Western societies that ‘loving nurturing care’ is understood to mean that children should be at the centre of their parents’ attention. This week I was in a local shop with closely packed shelves and restricted aisle space. A mother had parked her pushchair almost blocking the aisle and kept addressing her child in a loud voice about what they were doing: ‘Look what mummy's found. Some spaghetti. Are you playing with teddy? He's in a good mood today. Look, he's sitting up’ and so on. This dyadic behaviour, and exclusive chattering focus on her child, to the oblivion of everyone else around, might conceivably be called good parenting. But in other circumstances, it might be considered as downright rude. I have sat in at meetings of mothers and young children in small non-Western rural communities, where mothers very quietly and unobtrusively encouraged their children to be aware of others and not to disturb the meeting, attentiveness to and consideration of others being a highly valued and necessary skill in societies where people live closely together in communities that are closely and mutually interdependent.

Expectations about how infants and young children are cared for and nurtured, and who is best placed to bring them up, have varied enormously over time, place and class. In Chapter 6, I discuss childcare and nurseries in a much broader, European and global perspective. In the present chapter, I discuss in more detail the exceptionally muddled history of childcare and nurseries in the UK. The aims of provision for young children in the UK have continually shifted, according to the political zeitgeist, and current welfare and educational theories about what is good for young children. The types of provision have gone through various metamorphoses. As a result, the statistical evidence is not consistent, and the commentary from politicians, activists, researchers and others has varied considerably in its focus about what is happening and why. My intention here is to describe what provision has been available for working parents and their children over the last century, how this has dovetailed (or not) with other provision, and how this patchwork history has led to today's profoundly unsatisfactory situation. There are other overlapping ways of recounting this history and picking out its salient features, for instance by focusing on the welfare of children and families, or highlighting the curricular changes made to further children's intellectual development and educational attainment, or, most recently, considering longterm outputs such as children's future economic performance. Working mothers and provision for their children have not been, until relatively recently, an important or topical issue. But the quality of motherhood and mothering, and its impact on the development of young children, has always been a public issue, from the Virgin Mary onwards.

The UK has a particular history of class and empire that has shaped views about appropriate provision for young children, who should look after them and in what conditions. With the help and encouragement of Richard Aldrich, who was then Professor of History at the Institute of Education (now UCL), I’ve written about this background history at length. What follows are extracts and summaries of those papers.

Ofsted (The Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills) has also made international comparisons (see Chapter 6), and claims it has gained insights from these comparisons. In June 2023, it published a research and analysis brief entitled ‘International Perspectives on Early Years’. Drawing mainly on the Eurydice data discussed in the previous chapter, and on some of the more recent Starting Strong reports, it organized its ‘insights’ into four themes:

• • availability and access

• • workforce

• • curriculum and pedagogy

• • inspection and regulation

Ofsted discussed its opinions and strategies at a round table meeting with representatives from 13 countries: Belgium, Czechia, England, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, Scotland, Serbia and Sweden. Some of the named representatives are well-known and have a history both with the original OECD Starting Strong programme and its subsequent iterations, and the EU. The discussion was clearly very civilized and well-informed. The difficulty is that Ofsted set the agenda, and the parameters for the discussion were framed by Ofsted in the light of its present – and limited – remit as a centralized national body.

Childcare is regulated through Ofsted. This covers all provision in England, distinguished for inspection purposes into two categories: in-home and out-of-home provision. Similar bodies to Ofsted exist for Scotland and Wales. Ofsted's original remit was to oversee the standards of free public sector education, to replace local authority monitoring and inspection, which was regarded as too variable and, in some cases, too lenient. As the Labour Party started to diversify childcare provision, Ofsted subsequently took on local authority roles in relation to childcare as well, to try to maintain similar standards across the entire sector. Ofsted now includes the inspection of market-based childcare services, most of which are part-subsidized by the government. However, Ofsted still retains its separate schools remit, which covers state-based nursery education, so that the standards for nursery classes refer not to childcare, but to school education more generally. The Ofsted regulatory standards for childcare run to several handbooks, including a suite of health and safety regulations. They prescribe developmental standards, using background research papers to justify these standards.

What does a nursery place cost and who should pay for it is a question in the same category as how long is a piece of string? It is less an economic question than a social and political one. Should all children be entitled to attend nurseries? If not, which children should be prioritized, and how? Should children of working parents have priority? Who pays for a child to attend a nursery? How should childcare fees be calculated and who by? What government budget does the money for childcare come from, how should it be paid out, who devises the relevant forms and who fills them in? Whose job is it to create or run nurseries, and what is their reward (or what profits can they reasonably extract) for doing so? What counts as household income and what contribution should parents make to the costs of a nursery place? Should mothers (or fathers) be paid for better maternal/paternal leave so that there is a reduction in the need for babycare, as babies are the most expensive age group to look after, and arguably benefit most from more one-to-one care at home? What is a fair wage for those who work in the sector, and who should pay them? What should staff be expected to do to earn their wage? How should nurseries be coordinated so they can pool resources? What back-up services are needed to monitor whether policies are working, and how will they be paid for?

The problem is that, in the UK, there are no coherent answers to any of these questions, or to closely related issues regarding in-home carers such as childminders and nannies Many of these crucial questions have not even been asked, because we have such a fragmented system in the UK! But until at least some of these questions are resolved, it is a mistake to throw more money at the childcare sector. Someone must have a plan first. Otherwise, as at present, funding childcare does not enable parental choice in a free market, as the government claims. Instead, it is a wasteful process, enriching a few at the expense of many, crippling family budgets, and failing to give value for money to the taxpayer. It is an unedifying and an unequal free-for-all, in which the poorest children and families lose out.