Let’s invest more in childcare, without losing sight of the aims of early years provision
Investment in childcare promises to feminise the welfare state and industrial policy. But this welcome development needs to coincide with a wider consideration of work and parenthood
At long last, the state of childcare provision in the UK is becoming a major political issue. The Guardian reported recently that the Department for Education has proposed an extension of the current policy in England of 30-hours-a-week free childcare entitlement for three and four year-olds, to all children aged over nine months. The Treasury is unlikely to agree in full, but some expansion of provision is probably on the horizon, responding to Labour’s (tentative) plan to import Estonia’s system of guaranteed, state-run care from the end of parental leave until primary school begins.
This shift is long overdue. Given the UK’s work-first approach to welfare, arguably it is odd that it has taken this long. But I think we need also to take a breath, and think about the outcomes we want childcare provision to deliver – enabling employment is not the only priority. Reflecting on the reasons we have been so slow to confront patchy and unaffordable provision might help us to arrive at a more comprehensive plan for supporting quality childcare.
High costs
More often than not, the debate about childcare in recent years has focused on whether provision is available and affordable, with a particular focus on the ability of parents to move into work, or increase their hours in existing employment. Financial support for childcare costs is seen as inadequate, or poorly designed, making things particularly difficult for people on very low incomes.
It is of course true that costs are extraordinarily high – seemingly the highest in the OECD (depending on exactly how costs are calculated relative to income). Costs are expected to rise by around 8% in the year ahead, or around £1,000 on the typical nursery bill. It is also undoubtedly the case that subsidies are inadequate, even chaotic. Nurseries do not receive from government the actual costs of offering ‘free’ hours, and there is a gap for parents of children aged under three, most of whom receive no support.
Some low-income families are able to access 15 free hours per week for two year-olds, but often face high up-front costs before subsidies become available, and Universal Credit withdrawal in combination with higher childcare costs means that by moving into work or increasing hours, the policy leaves many worse off financially.
Low quality
The debate has focused less on the quality of childcare: high costs do not necessarily lead to high standards. Staff are under-paid and insecure. Low morale and high turnover are seemingly endemic problems, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Any parent with a child at nursery (myself included) knows how remarkably talented and dedicated childcare workers are – but will in all likelihood have also felt the despair of witnessing many of the best staff leave the sector (for lower-skilled, but better-paid, jobs). The government’s 2022 proposal – which it may or may not have forgotten about – to cut staff-to-child ratios would have further undermined standards, with hardly any impact on costs for parents.
The fact that many providers are struggling financially due to inadequate funding is part of the quality shortfall. But so is an extractive, profit-driven business model among many providers. This leaves disadvantaged areas even worse off, as providers eschew communities whose residents are less able to afford rising fees. According to a recent Bloomberg report, privately-owned nurseries in the UK ‘are changing hands at an increasingly rapid rate, and change of ownership often means higher prices and more instability’.
The 15-hours policy was partly about encouraging the highest quality providers to open facilities in poorer areas, but the subsidy level is far too low to produce any such impact. NESTA reported recently that due to low take-up and poor attendance, the policy has had no impact on closing the gap in early years attainment between children from disadvantaged and more affluent families.
Productivity puzzles
One of the curiosities of this issue is that, insofar as it has been assessed, government subsidies for childcare costs appear to have a limited impact on productivity – despite the fact that the case for further support often rests upon the impediment to employment of inadequate childcare.
This is partly about the kind of jobs which people on low-incomes – who have the most difficulty finding suitable childcare – are likely to move into. A higher employment rate does not lead to higher productivity across the economy, and indeed can have the opposite impact if the supply of cheap labour disincentivises capital investment by firms.
It is also partly about the fact that cost-benefit analyses tend to be narrowly conceived, assessing the impact of the 15- or 30-hours subsidy policies (or slight adjustments) on local labour markets, and accordingly finding no evidence of a transformative impact. A more holistic, but harder to model, approach to providing adequate childcare is likely to increase productivity as well as employment, by allowing parents to access a greater range of employment opportunities (see this paper by economist Jerome De Henau for a version of this kind of analysis).
The politics of reproduction
Why has it taken so long for childcare to receive serious attention from UK policy-makers? Why are we so reluctant to really even investigate the problem of poor childcare provision – let alone devise the solutions required?
A work-first approach to welfare (which has long been the norm in the UK, but has intensified since the financial crisis) might suggest removing supply-side barriers to labour market entry would be a fairly typical UK government policy. This objective has of course underpinned the 15- and 30-hours policies.
But the imperative of encouraging people into work has always existed in tandem with the need to inhibit empowerment through work. This helps to explain the focus of UK employment policy on job-search services (and benefit sanctions) ahead of vocational training. Similarly, if more affordable and available childcare allows parents to be choosier about the kind of work they are able to take on, it could jeopardise an economic model which is rather good at delivering high employment but low wages, and high profitability but low growth.
Furthermore, we should not confuse the objective of supporting parents into work with supporting people to become parents in the first place. Increasingly, parenthood is a hostile environment in the UK, especially for the poor, with the populist right never tiring of telling people not to have children that they cannot afford, reflected in dehumanising policies such as Universal Credit’s two-child limit.
In short, we want the poor to work, but if childcare is a barrier, the answer is not to provide better childcare for those who need it most. Instead, the poor should have fewer children. Capital, after all, has always been bad at securing its own interest in the reproduction of low-paid labour – consistently favouring workers’ submissiveness over their subsistence.
The patriarchy
As such, the costs of reproduction are allocated to the family sphere – predominantly women – sparing both the public sector and private employers. A feminist reading of our neglect of childcare would of course emphasise the cultural as well as class relations context. It is simplistic to suggest that there is a capitalist elite expertly assessing how to provide just enough childcare support while avoiding the risk of over-empowering workers – these guys are really not that smart. The state of childcare in the UK is not a delicate balance, rather a mess of contradictory impulses, with patriarchal norms impeding the development of an approach economically advantageous to both capital and labour.
Women with children may be encouraged to work, but they are not systematically supported to work through the alleviation of childcare burdens. We lack the epistemological tools necessary to even try to understand this burden (not least because it usually appears to have been chosen rather than structurally imposed).
This critique has found some space in mainstream public debates recently, for instance through concern about the additional ‘mental load’ faced by mothers. The responsibility women are expected to take on for children – even when they are being cared for by other women performing waged labour – holds back women’s careers, and therefore economic growth, in ways that are unlikely to ever be seen by conventional economic analysis.
Let parents be parents
The Confederation of British Industry (CBI) has demanded that childcare provision be extended, in order to ensure parents are more available for work. The current government are likely to comply, to some extent – and the next government almost certainly will. Labour’s plan for an expansion of state-run childcare, with subsidies for most children up to primary school age, is a big step in the right direction.
This shift can be justified as a supply-side employment support measure (which is largely how the CBI is thinking about it). But it also signals an expansion – indeed feminisation – of the welfare state, both through more financial support to cover the uninsurable ‘risk’ of how parenthood affects participation in the economy, and through the partial integration of childcare provision within the public sector.
IPPR has adopted the welfarist framing of a ‘childcare guarantee’ to advocate for an expansion of support for childcare costs. The plan offers a mix of expansion of the 15- and 30-hour policies for all parents (including offering providers the actual costs of free provision) and means-tested support for additional hours. IPPR expects a childcare guarantee to provide a net benefit to the Exchequer of almost £8 billion, as increased investment leads to higher tax revenues and lower Universal Credit expenditure as parents are more able to work. But we should be sceptical that a welfare entitlement rooted in an enhanced system of financial incentives is a panacea. As Kayley Hignell of Citizens Advice argues (regarding welfare policy in general):
[P]olicy is still rooted in the outdated notion that the way people make decisions is mainly driven by narrow financial incentives, and nothing else. Years of reform have focused too much on financial incentives, carrots and sticks — at the expense of developing our understanding of the variety of wider factors that contribute to people’s rational choices and actions. Who gets to decide what “rational” even means? One person’s priority is another person’s irrelevance.
This is not to suggest the childcare guarantee should not be pursued. The focus on the childcare sector from an industrial policy perspective (also advocated by the TUC) – signalling perhaps the feminisation of industrial strategy – is also welcome. The sector needs to innovate to meet rising demand – and it can help to create more stable and rewarding professional careers for its highly-trained workers in the process.
There are, however, risks involved in investing in childcare provision which have not yet been fully acknowledged. As noted above, the debate continues to focus on issues around availability and affordability, marginalising concerns about the quality of provision. This problem is part of a wider neglect of what early years provision is for. It is for parents, and for the economy. But it should also be for children.
Few parents want their children to be cared for by strangers – no matter how qualified, no matter how caring – for ten hours a day, five days a week. Even if we could drastically increase the quality of childcare provision, is there any evidence that it would be the best way to support the development and well-being of our children? I can say with complete certainty that my children have gained a great deal from attending nursery. But I am also certain that increasing the hours and days they spent at nursery would have been detrimental, if this had come at the expense of time with their parents.
One slightly eyebrow-raising element of Labour’s wider plan for children and education is a commitment to wraparound care from 8am to 6pm at all primary schools (this is also included in IPPR’s childcare guarantee; by far its most expensive single item). I want these services to be available and affordable for all, and the party stresses they would focus on enabling children to socialise and discover new activities in the wake of pandemic-related constraints. But I do not think we should want every child to be using them every day, simply to facilitate their parents’ jobs. We need to be mindful of the possibility that parents and children simply might not want to access all of the childcare provision that a future government might make available. And that should be okay.
Investment in early years provision, in particular, has to be driven primarily by the benefits to children, rather than to the labour market. There is of course something inherently progressive about helping mothers to enjoy the same economic freedoms that traditionally have been available only to fathers. But as well as allowing mums to live like dads, we should perhaps be doing the opposite too: expecting (and supporting) men to take on more of the ‘women’s work’ of child-rearing.
Recent developments around shared parental leave represent small but useful steps in this regard. But we need to go much further. The benefit system should be empowering parents to work both more and less, depending on the needs of their children. Employers need to do a lot more to build family-friendly workplaces (my own sector has been unforgivably slow on this stuff).
Above all, we need a major expansion of parental rights, perhaps by connecting the experience of parenthood to the development of ideas such as the four-day week and universal basic income.
And we should of course be thinking about parenthood in the broadest possible terms as we bestow and enhance these rights: familial relationships come in all shapes and sizes. (Please forgive the heteronormative shorthand used throughout this post.)
It is worth noting finally that, in her brief time as Prime Minister, Liz Truss had suggested that parents receive directly the subsidies that nurseries currently receive on their behalf. She suggested for instance that it could be used to fund childcare provided by grandparents. Whisper it, but beneath all the noise and nastiness, Truss’s idea might have contained a kernel of wisdom.
Further consumerisation of childcare services must of course be resisted - there is no evidence that it would lead to higher quality. But parents do need a voice in how childcare provision is organised. And the logical conclusion of Truss’s plan might have been that parents were able to pay themselves to provide childcare. This could be achieved by, for instance, additional child benefit payments for parents who do not take up the free hours (equivalent to, say, half the cost of the subsidy).
This, admittedly, would hardly solve the myriad problems outlined in this post. But we should recognise that none of the solutions now being discussed will achieve this alone.