The problem with Liz Truss’s childcare plan
Little French toddlers in orderly lines
Current Prime Minister Liz Truss held the childcare and education portfolio, in 2012-14, when she famously criticised British nurseries for their chaos, and (as was very trendy at the time) stated that British toddlers should be more like their well-ordered, well-mannered French counterparts. To achieve this, she imaged, nursery-school teachers would need to be ‘better qualified’, with qualifications more akin to school teachers, as in France. They would, as in France, implement standardised curriculum-based learning from the age of three. These better qualified teachers could, not only create more orderly toddlers, but take care of more of them. (Truss overlooked an entire category of worker in the French early education system - the vital assistants who change nappies and rock pushchairs - doing the messy and unpredictable bodily care work while the qualified teacher manages the more regimented educational activities.)
The ideological baggage that politicians bring to childcare (to childhood, in fact) makes it particularly difficult to play policy copy-cat. Liz Truss cannot arrive at something that looks like the French system of early years care in Britain, because she is using a neoliberal understanding of economics to try and replicate the outcome of France’s centuries old vision of a ‘parental welfare state’. In France, the state is positioned as the guarantor of young children’s health and education. This is the result of pro-natalist fears about the birth rate reaching back to the start of the twentieth century, a catholic veneration of large families and - Susan Pedersen argued - the weakness of the French Trade Union movement. In Britain, strong trade unions pushed against the idea of state’s financial responsibility for individual children, fearing this would undermine the ‘family wage’ paid by employers to a male employee who should, himself, support his young.
These debates about who was responsible for the very young, taking place a century ago across Europe, still show up in the way we care for children today. In France, the legacy of state responsibility reveals itself in high levels of child benefit and funding for early years care. In Britain, the idea that it is the family who is responsible primarily for the care of children has resulted in the opposite - there is no comprehensive state support for care of the under threes after a few months of (poorly paid) statutory maternity leave. In France, with universal entitlements to early years care, the entire landscape of childcare looks different. Each local authority begins its educative role in the child’s life at age three, through a maternelle that is integrated into the wider schooling system. Like school, it is free at the point of use. Before the age of three, 85% of the costs of childcare are met by the state, and most attend crèches run by the local authority. (There is also the option to use state funding towards the fees of a private nanny or in home childcare, though most opt for the municipal crèche.) [1]
What Truss appreciates about the French system is this high level of standardisation: the orderliness of the maternelle where children move from learning station to learning station, undertaking specially designed developmental activities. This level of standardisation in early years care is possible when most providers are part of the educational apparatus of the state itself. As minister for childcare in the early 2010s, Truss sought standardization through other means: through (and for) the market. Her desire for more rigorous training of professionals and a more prescriptive early years framework tallied with Truss’s supply-side economic ideology. It had a neoliberal, rather than welfarist, underpinning.
Standardisation and Deregulation
Counterintuitively, standardisation can function as a pathway to deregulation. With detailed frameworks and policies in place, who is on the ground enacting them matters less. (Think of the national curriculum in schools, which has come increasingly prescriptive at the same moment as providers of state funded schooling have been diversified - businesses, religious groups, charities, social enterprises.) For standardisation to show up as deregulation - increasing the numbers and types of childcare providers, without seeming to compromise the basic safety of children - the burden of responsibility needs to be pushed away from the government, and onto childcare providers.
What this results in is increasingly onerous self-reporting of how standardised early years frameworks are being met, and how pre-identified possible risks are being managed. Government inspection, via the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills (OFSTED), can be infrequent and rapid, carried out semi-remotely using pre-prepared paperwork. Earlier this year, I was briefly part of a parents committee to try and save a local pre-school. Instead of regular contact with local authorities, this pre-school had been left submerged in paperwork it couldn’t keep up with. The regulatory burden had been pushed from the government and onto its staff and, as they could not keep up, parents’ committee. Opened in 1969, the much-loved playgroup closed in the middle of the 2022, when demand was at a peak.
The standardization/ deregulation nexus is not the only reason that childcare providers have been closing - far from it - but it is the one that is least discussed. It’s hard to grasp at, intentionally shadowy. With standardization, the absence of the state is obscured by the presence of paper. When I spend an hour filling in a questionnaire about my baby’s developmental milestones at 12 months, it is easy to forget that I haven’t seen the health visitor who requires it since he was ten days old. The time I spent self-reporting his development has saved anyone else the labour of observing him. This is the neoliberal paradigm of ‘resposibilization’ in action, masking deregulation from above but shifting the functions of the state downwards onto the individual citizen.
Truss’s other deregulatory push a childcare minister in the early 2010s was the introduction of childminding agencies, pushing responsibility away from the state and onto private companies. Until 2014, every individual childminder (and so, anyone who looks after a child for pay for more than 2 hours a day) needed to be registered with and inspected by OFSTED. As secretary for childcare and education, Truss brought in new legislation that would inspect childminding agencies, rather than individual childminders. If a childminder is a member of a childminding agency, then the agency is responsible for ensuring their qualifications, safety and delivery of the early years framework, while the state ensures only the overall quality of the agency.
The most successful of these childminding agencies, Koru Kids - a start up by former McKinsey analyst Rachel Carrell - wants Truss to who one step further. Local authorities and OFSTED receive government funding for their work, which could be fully outsourced via contract to private agencies like hers. For-profit companies could take charge of training, regulating and inspecting childcare workers. Carrell believes that using well-designed tech to simplify the processes of registration and book-keeping, agencies can attract more than 150,000 new childminders into the business within a year. This would come a long way in alleviating the current staffing crisis in childcare: the number of registered childminders has dropped by 27% since 2015, with the sharpest fall taking place between March 2020 and today.
But, agency employment isn’t something that childminders actually want. Professional associations point out that, in a highly skilled and vocational profession (routinely devalued through underpay and though terminology like ‘baby-sitter’), individual OFSTED regulation was a mark of esteem and professionalism that childminders valued. Childminders also valued the flexibility that came with self-employment. Many were registering to generate income while caring for their own children, their career plans did not mesh with the profit-maximising approach of agencies who push long-working hours caring for more children. Eight years after the policy was introduced, there are only six childminding agencies in the UK. This detail hasn’t stopped right wing think tanks, like Bright Blue and the Institute of Economic Affairs, signalling their support for the highly profitable Koru Kids model, and seeking policies to extend its practices.
Who is the ‘worker’?
One of the most curious disappearances from political discourse in the last 15 years has been the child as the ‘worker of the future.’ The social democratic welfare state in Britain, like its counterparts across Europe, viewed the present child as a resource that secured the future of the national economy. While in France, this led to a high level of state investment in early years care. In Britain postwar social democratic state, full employment and high male wages was meant to enable the family (read, the mother) to care for a child until school age, when their education was undertaken by the state.
First wave feminism in Britain was concerned with ‘endowing’ motherhood - compensating women for the care that they provided in the home. Feminists like Eleanor Rathbone argued, with limited success, that women should receive compensation for childcare paid directly to them, rather than via the male ‘family wage’. British second wave feminism also wanted care work to be compensated, but was most concerned with ensuring women’s right to waged work outside the home. The demand for universal childcare was positioned as a necessary precondition to women realising their own potential as paid workers. (Pronatalism is not a friend of feminism, but with children in France holding an a priori claim upon the state’s care, women’s participation in the workforce has always been higher.)
This teleology - that point of childcare is to enable parents to work - has been cemented by conservative childcare policy. In 2016, the ‘30 free hours’ of care that a child receives after their third birthday[2] is dependent on the parents being in paid work. The fact of the work status of the parent determining the child’s access to care was laid bare by the pandemic, when during UK lockdowns access to childcare was only permitted to enable a parent to work (and school attendance only permitted if the parents work was considered ‘key’ to society.) This lack of access for children to wider communities of care was, in some cases, fatal and in many others, something which we are yet to fully understand the long-term ramifications of.
Like the COVID-19 pandemic, the 30 free hours entitlement has hollowed out the early years sector. The hourly rate to care for a three-year-old is set at £.4.43 by the government, which makes payments directly to the nursery school or childminder on the child’s behalf (after an almightily faffy online process for both the parents and the child’s carer). This is much lower than the actual cost of caring for a child. It has driven many childcare providers out of business. The parent worker has had to become an increasingly judicious consumer, registering children for childcare before birth, hedging bets by being on multiple waiting lists, ensuring a child’s space at a nursery age three by paying for their care there until that point. The whole system, in my view, functions as a form of hazing into the norms of scarcity-based parenting: where it falls only to the family to secure the future and education of the child.
The system of childcare benefit, which financially and structurally most advantages the worker/consumer parent, of course disadvantages the 4.3 million children in Britain living in poverty. Children in families who receive universal credit are entitled to just 15 hours of free care per week (for a small number this entitlement is extended to 2-year-olds, also.) Good childcare, which should function as a protective factor against the effects of poverty on the very young, instead exists in a mutually destructive relationship with poverty: the cost of childcare is pushing low-income families towards foodbanks and into unheated homes.
Much less spoken about is that childcare workers themselves are being impoverished by low pay in the sector. Nursery World found that 40% of early years workers make poverty wages. For all their talk of attracting more workers into the profession through streamlined online platforms, agencies like Koru Kids offer no solution to this, offering an hourly rate for carers below the London living wage. These workers, the absolute key to the sector, are the people being least talked about, obscured by a political discourse which sees childcare as connected only to the labour of ‘working parents’.
The conditions of care work
‘There is no job more important than early years care’ is the opening statement on the Early Years’ Framework – the curriculum document which every early years childcare professional must read and every setting must orientate its care towards. This reads as a taunt, when the majority of early years workers make the minimum wage.
Truss isn’t concerned about the pay of these workers. Instead, she repeats the reccomendations that two reviews of childcare practice during her tenure as childcare and education minister made: new professional pathways and qualifications that would tempt graduates into childcare would elevate standards in the sector.[3] But how does the government think it will attract more people to care and early education, when the sector can’t retain the staff it has, and when other caring and educating professions (nursing and primary teaching, for example) are also in staffing crisis due to failure to recruit. The undervaluing of care work might have made childcare, healthcare and education ‘affordable’ for an austerity government in the short term, but it is destroying caring institutions and professions we rely on for the future.
The undervaluing of care work isn’t new, of course. But it’s a problem that mainstream feminism has been slow – even relucent – to grapple with. The low cost of care work was, after all, what freed so many women from it as they entered better compensated and more public forms of work. There is no reasonable form of feminism that gains economic advancement of some women conditional upon the exploitation of others. (It is invariably other women left sweeping up the shattered glass ceiling.) As part of the absolute rejection that care work is gendered – that childcare should fall only to women – feminists must seek to raise its economic status. The poverty pay of care workers – the weaponization of love and vocation – devalues all.
The childcare crisis is not a ‘mums’ (or even ‘mummies’) issue. Any solution to the ‘childcare crisis’ which does not start with the conditions of care workers will fail. The most strongly opposed of Truss’s childcare policies is that of ‘relaxing ratios’ of children to adults in early years care, enabling five two-year-olds to be placed with a single adult. This will, she claims, drive down costs for parents. But, like the ’30 free hours’ it will do this at the expense of the availability of actual provision. For as long as the ‘needs’ of parents are pitted against the working conditions of childcare practitioners, childcare practitioners will continue their exodus from the sector to better compensated, less arduous, forms of work.
It shouldn’t be left to parents to care about childcare – and if we do, we should seek to do so in ways that facilitate broad and intersectional solidarities, not that draw attention to, and therefore naturalise, parents (and particularly mothers’) ‘vested interest’ in care. We need to decentre parents altogether in this debate. Childcare is not for parents; it is for children. Childcare is work, and the poor working conditions of early years professionals are the formative environment of the very youngest citizens. Truss’s childcare agenda harms us all.
[1] John Wadsowrth, Like an 'Uncontrolled Toddler' Elizabeth Truss Risks Causing Chaos in England's Nursery Education and Child Care Sector. FORUM, 55(3), pp. 439-446
[2] In fact, it begins the school term after the child’s first birthday, something I only learned a briefly before my eldest turned three last weekend
[3] More Great Childcare: Raising Quality and Giving Parents More Choice.' DFE-00002 2013. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/219660/More_20Great_20Childcare_20v2.pdf.);The Nutbrown Review: Foundations for Quality: The Independent Review of Early Education and Childcare Qualifications.' DFE-00068 2012. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/175463/Nutbrown-Review.pdf.)