2 - Who and what are nurseries for?

Summary

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.