About the Budget

Feminism, work, and childcare

Last Wednesday, we learned that there is apparently going to be an investment of £4 billion in the early years sector. The government has given an indication of what that will mean for working parents: 15 free hours for children ages 2, 30 hours for 3- and 4-year-olds (we already have this) by April 2024. From September 2025 15 free hours will be extended to cover all children of working parents from 9 months to age 2, and 30 hours for all age 3-4.

This is, or at least looks, historic. There has never been any universal free entitlement to childcare in Great Britain, or something even close. The British welfare state has always made a clear distinction between the education and the care of children: the first was for the state, the latter was for the family, usually, women. In its earliest days, the welfare state created policies to support women in staying at home to care for children, family allowance, to begin with, and latterly, statutory maternity pay.

Childcare has never before been part of the apparatus of the state. In the late 1980s and 1990s, patchy attempts were made to increase early years provision, this was focused on the ‘preschool’ age: 3- and 4-year-olds, whose attendance at nursery schools or preschools could be thought of as educative rather than as care. The distinction was carefully maintained by the Thatcher and Major conservative governments, who used resurgent ideas about maternal attachment to bolster their support for ‘traditional’ (read, patriarchal) family values.  Early years care was explicitly designed to do something the mother couldn’t (specialist early years education) and not to replicate something that she could (care work) in order for her to work elsewhere.

Blair, with his ‘most feminist government in history’ pledged to reform childcare, but he remained reluctant to parse the education/ care distinction. The eradication of child poverty and inequality between children entering schools was the centre of the new Labour early years plan: the main purpose of the early years sector was not to enable women into work, but to close the gaps between rich and poor children by ensuring that the most deprived had access to high quality care. Flagship Sure Start centres embodied this. In Britain’s ‘most deprived’ areas, Sure Start centres had a duty to provide free and accessible preschool care. In more affluent areas, Sure Start centres could provide information hubs, and playtime classes, which parents and children attended together. The work of educating children – in all but the cases of the very deprived – was separated out from the kind of care that would have enabled their parents to work.

sure start in in heyday, before the conservatives took power

Running parallel to Sure Start and child poverty initiatives, was a system of tax credits, first piloted by John Major. This refunded working parents some of the tax they paid to be spend on childcare. But, where Sure Start centres were directly funded by local authorities, tax credits were to enable parents to spend on a (largely private, for profit) childcare industry.

In 2010, the Liberal Democrat Manifesto included free, funded childcare places of up to 30 hours for children aged month onward. This was one of the few bits of the manifesto which made it in to Downing Street in coalition, though watered down. From September 2010, 3- and 4-year-olds were entitled to 15 hours of funded care. In 2017, this was increased to 30 hours. This funded care had two conditions: first, it needed to be educative rather than caring, hence the age of 3 at which a child is considered ‘pre-school’ (and, often, stops needing nappy changes and naps). Second, that this educative care enabled work on the part of the parents: at least 16 hours per week.

There was, a legacy of Labour’s anti child poverty initiative, a parallel strand in government care policy: children whose families receive universal credit, or who are in the care system, receive 15 hours of free care from age 2, and 30 from age 3 also. But, because childcare was mostly but contracted out to private providers, it have tended to cluster in areas where profit can be high. Affluent areas. So, childcare for deprived children might be ‘free’, but it remains difficult to access. It is not universal.

When the budget was announced, I was drinking tea with a friend I made when our first babies were born. We have 4 under 4s between us, the youngest of which is 14 months. We both work more than 16 hours a week. This January, our two eldest children qualified for the ‘30 free hours’. Our youngest children do not yet. So, when we read those 15 hours for 2-year-olds would come into effect in April 2024, we pulled up our calendars and worked out that, at most, we’d get an ‘extra term’ of 15 ‘free’ hours before our youngest children turned 3. I thought about the 6 months before my eldest’s ‘free hours’ arrived, when we paid £1200+ for 3 days of childcare for two children and, with all our relative comfort, just about squeaked by. I’m glad no one else will have to do that: that is insane. Had these changes been announced 3 years earlier, they would have benefited me, and my friend, hugely.

For a day or so, some women like us celebrated. ‘Working’ women, living in areas with (relatively) good access to childcare.  Jolie Brearley, CEO of feminist campaigning organisation Pregnant Then Screwed, drank G&Ts with the Conservative Education Minister. Free childcare was painted as a great feminist victory.

But I’m not so sure. This policy depends on the undervaluing of care work, and women’s work. First, and as many people have now pointed out, it will obliterate the early years sector. To provide ‘free’ hours, the government currently pays £4.57 per child over the age of 3 (and some change, depending on where their birthday falls relative to the start of the next academic term) to accredited childcare providers. This is not how much it costs to look after a three-year-old. Childcare providers typically supplement this provision at a loss by provision for their younger children charged at cost. If younger children are also being paid for by the ‘free hours’ scheme, care settings will be making a loss on every child.

The way that early years care functions is kind of a dream for a neoliberal austerity government. It never needed to be privatised because it was never public. Early years care was never provided amongst the apparatus of the welfare state, and so when in 2016 the ‘30 free hours for working parents’ was introduced, the government set an amount that they believed childcare was worth per hour and attached this to each child. Their parents, then, must navigate a scarcity economy in order to use the free hours - signing children up for nursery schools when they are tiny babies or, in some parts of the country, in utero. For many, the age three places never materialised because they had not been able to ‘reserve’ their child’s spot by paying the full cost of nursery to send them before three. So far, the government has washed its hands of this mess by funding the child, regulating the sector via OFSTED, but leaving all of the problems of managing and resourcing to individual early years settings. In early years care, I think, we see the future of many of the services that the ‘welfare state’ provides - privatising with regulation and (underfunding) subsidies which casts people as consumers and absolves the government of its responsibilities. (Think, academy schools, and the slow creep of Richard Branson’s Virgin into the NHS.)

The government’s childcare policy is already failing. Childcare settings have been closing, either because they cannot make ends meet, or they cannot recruit staff. The government’s proposed free hours will only make both problems worse. The Institute of Fiscal Studies points out that, at present, 50% of children in the childcare system are paid for with ‘free hours’. By 2027, it will be 70%. Childcare settings will no longer be able to subsidise the free places for older children through provision for younger children. The government’s proposal for overcoming this is that they relax adult: child ratios. While being unsafe for children, this is also going to be incredibly difficult for staff, already underpaid, already leaving in droves. As Edie Miller said, this is a policy for a childcare sector in its death throes: metabolising the last resources it has left before it inevitably grinds to a halt.

This government do not care about children. In fact, I think they might hate them. But conservative anti-natalism isn’t what I’m writing about here. Instead, I want to write about what this policy will do not for but to women. This policy is about getting women back into work while their children are young, something that feminist childcare lobbies like Pregnant Then Screwed have painted as an unequivocal victory. It is not. First, this is not about helping women work on equal terms to men. Work that is 15 hours a week, term time only - that’s part time, flexible, quite likely zero hours work. Part time workers and flexible workers are already likely to be discriminated against and underpaid. This policy frees up women to work in poor conditions.

But more, worse, this policy’s under-reported twin (not spoken aloud in the Budget last week) is one which forces parents of young children into paid work. From the time that their children are aged three, single parents on universal credit will have to be available for work for 30 hours per week (the current requirement is 16 hours, which is also the amount of hours that any parent needs to be working in order to claim 30 hours free care). This change is being brought in this year ahead of any changes to childcare entitlement or, indeed, improvements in its availability. Because the current childcare system is private and for profit, vast ‘childcare deserts’ already exist in deprived areas across the country. But no matter to the government. This policy is about creating ‘workers’ - workers which Britain would have had had it not been for Brexit, and the waiting times in the NHS placing millions on sick leave while they await treatment. My prediction is that, as ‘free hours’ are extended to younger children, so too will their parents be sanctioned for not working.

To make this policy of universal work work, of course, the government is dependant on further depressing the working conditions are pay in a feminised sector in which 30% already live below the poverty line: early years professionals. As middle class ‘professional’ women were drinking G&T toasts or pulling up their calendars over cups of tea the early years sector was shouting to be heard, this will destroy us.

Lauren Berlant writes about the fantasy of a white, liberal feminism that does no harm. I can advance myself in a man’s world by leveraging my own proximity to capitalism and power, and when I do so that is good for all women. I shatter the glass ceiling. I show what is possible. It’s a seductive fantasy, certainly. What is good for you personally also undermines the structures that hold others back. But it’s still a fantasy.

This policy is not about the advancement of women, but their exploitation. It is one that push many women into financially undervalued care work - for that is what women’s part time, flexible work is most likely to be - while completely discounting the value of the care work that parents, usually mothers, already do. It says that the only kind of work that counts is one that has been assigned a monetary value. The arduous, often delightful, sometimes grinding, always challenging, work of raising children - either your own or, as an early years professional, someone else’s - has no, or very little, value. This policy, in my view, actively undermines the victory that intersectional feminists should be fighting for: not seeking to free ourselves from care work, but to insist on its value and its equal distribution.

After my friend and I finished our tea, put away our phone calendars, and pushed a buggy round the park, I started to get an icy feeling in my stomach. I wondered if it was a pang I sometimes get, a feeling that I had my babies at exactly the wrong moment. This happens when I recall the lockdowns and, now, calculate what we might have ’saved’ by having kids a few years later. But it wasn’t that. It was dread, partly, already the news about rising ratios was starting to break, and even Pregnant Then Screwed were warning that the ‘devil (would be) in the details.’

But it was also culpability. Guilt. Because what do we expect, when we talk about childcare always in the same breath as work. The Pregnant Then Screwed campaign, the ‘march of the mummies’, petitions I signed, focused on women’s access to paid work. It was not, it had never been, a campaign about children: they were viewed in this as an impediment to labour, to production, to profit. Feminists tried to sell childcare to the government as a ‘bargain’ - look how much earning power, labour power, you can unlock if you subsidise childcare. Sure, the devil is in the details, but maybe we were bargaining with the devil to begin with. (Like work, do you? Have all the work IN THE WORLD!)

the most millennial gif of all time??

I’m glad Pregnant Then Screwed exists. Women should absolutely have access to paid work on equal terms to men. Good, affordable, childcare is essential to this. I’m certainly not suggesting that what we’ve ended up with (potentially bad and unsustainable childcare) is something to blame on feminists alone. But I do think we need to own our part in it. Since the 1970s, mainstream feminism has not known what to do with children. It (rightly) rejected care work as inherently or necessarily feminine but focused more on gaining access to paid work with good conditions for women, rather than evaluating the value of care work. It has spoken of children as a dilemma, a problem to be solved, not as people or even as (whisper it) allies. For obvious reasons, to reject our own infantilisation, and the gendering of care work, women have pushed back against any obvious alliance with children. Because the child has been used so often and to such great effect to imprison women, of course we have sought to free ourselves, to leave the home, to be paid for visible work.

But the government’s proposals are bad for women and children: they will depress rather than raise the value of women’s work, and they will be unsafe for the very young. If we want universal, free, safe, good childcare, and if we want to be paid fairly for our work, then it’s time to rethink our strategy.

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ps. I’ve been thinking lots about women and work and care this week, and wrote about it in the university here