Regulating Early Years Service

Peter Baldock

• Publisher: David Fulton Publishers
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134130290
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

This work is designed for those needing to understand and comply with regulations for childhood education and care. The author relates his text to the new framework resulting from the Government's developing National Child Care Strategy. Specifically, it reflects the transfer of responsibility from social to educational services and the establishment of a new regulatory body, The Early Years Directorate, a new arm of OFSTED. Major controversial issues are elucidated and different standpoints are explained, but the book's main focus is on the need to establish a sound working relationship between the new regulatory regime, on the one hand, and proprietors, managers, practitioners and advisors on the other.

Chapter 1
The historical background

The emergence of early years services

The regulation of early years services began, in effect, a little more than half a century ago in 1948. Those services themselves are barely more than a century old. The origins of day care for young children are obscure, but lie for the most part in the 19th century and reflected and reinforced ways in which family life was changing at that time.

At an earlier stage of our society it makes little sense to speak of early years day care. In the Middle Ages children of all social groups spent most of their first few years with their parents at work and at play. To a large extent care and supervision was shared. Children were very much involved with the adult world. They probably developed their own social life, but we get very few glimpses of it. One of the most impressive is offered by Bruegel's 1560 painting of children's games in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, a picture whose fascination as a social document lies in the extent to which the games in which the children are engaged are familiar to us today. However, if children developed their own ways of playing and getting to grips with the world, few adults displayed an interest in it, except, perhaps, to regret the frivolity it appeared to entail. One example of the evident incomprehension shown by adults about the world of children is the rather ponderous way the children's street chant quoted by Jesus (in Matt. 11: 17) is translated in the King James Bible.

There is a sense in which childhood was invented in the 18th century. It was at that time that the wealthier classes began to create a protected, separate world for their own children. This pattern developed in the 19th century with the creation of the nursery in the affluent home, the invention of the pram, the design of clothing for children that differed radically from that of the adult world, the first commercially produced toys, the writing of many of the classics of children's literature and an increasing focus in the adult novel on the experience of childhood. Childhood was, of course, recognised as a specific stage (or two or three stages) of life in earlier times and there is enough evidence to dismiss any notion that affection for children and pleasure in their company were unknown before the modern era. What was missing was the idea of a specific world of childhood. That depended on the development of the nuclear family home as the standard unit in an urban setting. Certainly the Victorian nursery (or its cheap imitation - the children's bedroom in the better appointed working-class home) was only conceivable in the type of housing that became increasingly common in the modern era.

The nuclear family separated out not just the worlds of children and adults, but also the worlds of family life and work. The two developments were closely interconnected. They both unfolded over a long period of time. In the early stages of the Industrial Revolution home working remained a common feature and for better and for worse the children of the mass of the population were involved in assisting their parents in material production. This continued even with the development of large factories. These units of production were often close to the homes of the workforce and made use of the labour of men, women and children. As the ideal of the nuclear family began to take hold of all classes of society, so the campaign to protect children from employment grew and achieved increasing success in legislation and in public attitudes.

It was difficult, however, for working-class families to achieve the ideal of the mother who stayed at home, dependent on her husband's income, able to devote her time to home and family and it is a matter of guesswork how many mothers truly wanted things that way. Many working mothers must have found informal sources of care, but this would not have been possible for all. For the first time in history a widespread demand for children's day care was created.

'Minding schools' or 'baby farms' began to emerge in the cities without official encouragement. They provided a combination of day care and private fostering. We have little idea how widespread the practice was, the variety of ways in which women came to take on that role or the quality of the care offered. Baby farming came to attention mainly when something went wrong in a dramatic way - as happened when a baby-farmer was executed in 1870 for the murder of a child in her care. An official report of 1908 (cited in Jackson and Jackson 1979: 173) says of baby farms that 'They are often dirty and unsatisfactory, often conducted by women of the grossest ignorance.' This may well have been fair comment. What else might have been expected of an activity widely believed to be disreputable and totally without any form of state or voluntary organisation support? However, the comment was typical of many in both official and unofficial circles in the period before the First World War and it was part of a growing concern about the perceived evils of care of pre-school children outside the family.

It was in this contest that the possibility of regulating baby farming was first introduced. 'There is no inspection or control,' commented the officials in the 1908 report. That there might be support and development did not occur to them. Forty years before the first legislation was introduced to regulate early years services the negative tone was well to the fore. The suppression of bad practice was not to be balanced by the encouragement of good. It is important to recognise that there was nothing inevitable about this. In several countries in southern Europe where it has become increasingly difficult in recent years for young parents to rely on the older generation for domestic childcare the result has not been a demand for the regulation of a growing childminding industry, but for the creation of proper, professional services. This was, for example, one of the primary outcomes of recent research by the CIREM Foundation in Barcelona Province (Casas i Aznar et al. 1998: 143).

It was at about the same time as the 1908 report that Margaret and Rachel McMillan were developing the early forms of holiday play care and nursery schools in London. They advanced the notion that new organisational arrangements were required to give children, the children of the urban poor in particular, opportunities that might have been more informally available in an earlier age. They thought in terms of the total needs of the child and it was easier for them to think in what we would now describe as integrated terms, because the differentiation of services and approaches had not yet been institutionalised.

The work and enthusiasm of such pioneers did not prevent fragmentation. The nursery school was caught between the respectable world of education and the disreputable world of baby farming. Gradually, there was an evolution towards the nursery school or class that was an integrated part of the universal school system and the day nursery run by the Public Health Board that catered for families that were failing. In the shadow of the day nurseries there lingered a few respectable voluntary agencies engaged in organised play activities and a quite unknown number of unrespectable baby farmers or (as they were now more usually known) childminders.

The economic crisis of the 1930s and the Second World War produced new difficulties for the established ideal of the nuclear family. The recruitment of mothers into industrial production to compensate for the loss of men to the armed forces created a new demand for childcare which could not be condemned. It was, however, still viewed with concern. Childminding was one of those activities that the realistic knew had to exist but which the respectable would not wish to acknowledge publicly.

Regulation by local health authorities

The decade after the end of the Second World War saw an enormous and fundamentally popular attempt to regain what was regarded as normality in everyday life.

Wartime restrictions were lifted only cautiously. Rationing was not abandoned until the early 1950s and conscription disappeared even later. There was less caution and more energy in the efforts to ensure that 'normality' did not mean a return to the slump of the 1930s, but rather a move forward to a system in which family life could flourish. The National Health Service and the social security system are now the best known of the changes that occurred. The massive house-building programme, in which local authorities were to play the leading role, was just as important in creating the pre-conditions for 'normal' family life for many people. There was particular ideological significance in the conception of the New Towns which were built under special legislation. Their construction represented a conscious effort to replicate what was seen as the ideal model of the small town. The design of the physical environment and a number of other measures were intended to foster orientation to the locality and inter-class solidarity which the rapidly developed industrial cities of the previous century and the 'ribbon' development along major roads of the inter-war years were seen as having undermined.

It was a crucial part of the ideal that was sought that fathers were expected to provide and mothers were expected to remain at home with their young children. The liberating impact caused by the turmoil of war continued to have many effects. The ideal marriage was increasingly seen in 'companionate' rather than hierarchical terms. More women expected to work after marriage and before the birth of the first child (to help pay for a home fit for children) and to return to work once the youngest child was about to leave school. The war had also left a number of widowed mothers for whom there could only be sympathy as they sought employment. However, the key assumption remained that the mothers of young children would remain at home to provide them with care. A whole body of literature was created explaining the harmful consequences that would follow if this did not happen.

In these circumstances, even though there were many areas of production that were desperately understaffed, the arrangements for nursery care that had been built up during the war were rapidly reduced and there was suspicion and hostility towards the working mother who lacked an excuse such as widowhood. There was particular concern about the very young child. Ministry of Health Circular 221/45 argued that 'the right policy would be positively to discourage mothers of children under two from going to work'. The National Health Service Act 1946 empowered local health authorities to set up day care, but this was seen as a means of helping failing families and not as a support to the working mother.

In 1947 considerable press publicity was given to several appalling accidents involving young children that arose from fires in the homes of childminders. There is no evidence that children were at greater risk in the homes of childminders than they were in their own homes or those of grandmothers and other close relatives; open fires and free-standing oil or paraffin heaters remained common until the late 1960s when they began to be replaced by central heating. It was a symptom of the pressure in favour of 'normal' family life, however, that the deaths and serious injuries reported in the press were seen as proof that childminding should be controlled rather than as evidence of the need to make improvements in the safety of ordinary homes.

Media pressure led in 1948 to the passing of the Nurseries and Child-Minders Regulation Act, creating a system of early years regulation for the first time. The Act obliged local health authorities to keep registers of nurseries and childminders, made it an offence for people to operate such services without registration and gave health authorities the power to refuse or cancel registration where persons or premises were not considered to be 'fit'.

It was significant that responsibility for regulation was given to local health authorities rather than the children's departments that were set up by an Act passed in the same year. Concern about childminders had focused on cases of accidental death, but concern for better management of fostering had been triggered by the death of Dennis O'Neill at the hands of a foster parent in 1945. The need to address the problems indicated by that case provided much of the justification for creating the new children's departments. Placing responsibility in two separate departments institutionalised the differences in focus, with staff in health departments concentrating on the prevention of accidents and infections and staff in the children's departments concentrating more on the people who would provide foster care. Thus the fragmentation that already existed between the care and education systems was replicated within the care system. Decades later an approved foster carer with whom the local authority was prepared to have a child with serious difficulties living full time could fail to meet the safety criteria required of a childminder caring for less vulnerable children for a few hours a day.

Fragmentation was one aspect of the 1948 Act. Another was its restricted scope.

'Nurseries' were defined in such a way as to exclude services provided by the state or others for reasons of medical or social care or of education. That is to say, it was the diminishing number of independent day nurseries that were to be regulated. (Preschool playgroups were not taken into account since it was more than a decade before the first of these began to appear, mainly in the south-east of England. However, the law had been framed in such a way as to bring them within its ambit when they were first created in the early 1960s.)

'Childminders' were defined as people who received into their homes children to whom they were not related, who had not attained the age of compulsory education and who came from more than one household and also that they accepted 'reward' for this day-care service. This definition excluded a large number of childminding arrangements.

The aim of the Act was clearly to control, if not discourage, the large and ill-run 'baby farms' of popular imagination rather than to provide a regulatory framework for the day care of young children in any setting. No duty of inspection was laid upon local health authorities, but they were given significant powers to inspect where they had reason to think that unregistered care or care that had become inadequate since registration was being provided. A number of new criminal offences were created to aid them in the task of control.

The pressure that led to the creation of the 1948 Act did not continue for very long. The demand that young mothers stay at home was a popular one. The situations that led to the baby farms of Victorian England no longer existed in the same way. Hence there was little pressure on health departments to pursue the demands of the legislation rigorously. Those who applied to register were assessed and decisions were made, but there were few attempts to identify situations where illegal minding was in operation. It required another moral panic to set that in motion.

The early 1960s saw the gradual, but escalating, breakdown of many of the assumptions that had underpinned the post-war search for 'normality'. Anxiety grew over the development of a 'permissive society' characterised by a whole range of deviations, influencing and being influenced by cultural outputs in the theatre, novels, films and popular music and securing concessions in legislation on divorce and abortion in 1967.

In this context concern was expressed once again about the forms of day care being used by working mothers and attention focused on the potential for accidental harm. A report on the care of pre-school children seemed to underline the need for greater control (Yudkin 1967). A number of other changes were being considered in public health services as a holding response to demands for organisational reform in the National Health Service. As the Health Services and Public Health Bill made its way through Parliament in 1968, a section was added amending the Nurseries and Child-Minders Regulation Act. Section 60 tightened up on the process of checking on people working in day care or forming parts of childminders' households, required registration even when only one child received at least two hours' care and allowed for even stricter penalties for failure to comply with the Act. A Government Circular that followed strongly recommended the involvement of local fire services in checking on premises and that all registered services be inspected every six months. However, there was no requirement that regular inspection be instituted and many health departments (and later social services departments) chose to ignore this advice.

Section 60 extended the scope of the 1948 Act, but there was not the pressure to employ the powers it made available. After 1948 there was a lack of pressure because there was widespread support for the idea that the mother of young children should stay at home with them. After 1968 there was a lack of pressure for the reverse reason. Demand was steadily growing for day care and grew apace in the 1970s and beyond. Enforcement of the Act, especially the pro-active seeking out of illegal minders, would probably have caused more trouble than it was worth. Magistrates were reluctant to take action against day carers who had not been grossly cruel or negligent, a reluctance documented in the research by Elfer and Beasley (1991). When the new social services departments took over responsibility for the 1948 Act they inherited a legislative responsibility that seemed quite marginal.

The social services departments and the 1948 Act

The moment of transfer of responsibility for the 1948 Act to the social services departments was not an auspicious one. Within a few years of starting, the departments were in a double crisis that brought to an end the mood of celebration (among social workers at least) in which they were established. Resources became an issue. The escalating economic difficulties brought a ministerial announcement in 1976 that 'the party was over' and that automatic expansion of the departments as areas of need were identified could no longer be assumed. The other aspect of the crisis was even more fundamental. The notion of the 'problem family' that had underpinned so much of social work and the case for unified departments was disintegrating. The concept had encapsulated the idea that the inability of certain families to cope with life was a residual problem that required a mopping-up operation, now that structural social problems had found their solution in the major reforms of the Attlee Government and that the existence of such families could be explained largely in terms of individual pathology amenable to case work (Welshman 1999). Such a notion could not survive the 're-discovery of poverty' in the mid-1960s nor the self-confessed failure of researchers to match empirical evidence to operational definitions of the 'problem family' (Tonge et al. 1977). At the same time, the enquiry into the death of the child Maria Colwell began the shift of attention from the problem family and family support to the abusive family and, therefore, a more reactive service (Secretary of State for Social Services 1974). Tensions in the departments came to a head in the social workers strikes of 1978-9 and were reflected in the frantic post-strike search for a methodology or organisational model that would offer a firmer foundation for the departments. Behaviourist rather than psychoanalytic methods of individual case work, the 'systems approach', borrowed from American theorists, and more homegrown ideas of 'patch' and 'community social work' all failed to find a foothold and the departments came to rely increasingly on procedural consistency as a way of avoiding serious mistakes and the criticism that followed.

A second problem was that the senior management of the departments was often dominated by staff from the old children's departments which had had a particular prestige in social work circles. They themselves were heavily influenced by ideas first floated in the early 1950s about 'maternal deprivation' and its role in the generation of social pathology. They were often hostile to the idea that very young children should be in any kind of day care unless this were essential to support a family in crisis. Such views were reinforced by some research projects, such as Bryant et al. (1980) and barely offset by the efforts of those such as Raven (1981) who felt that sweeping generalisations were being made on the basis of too little evidence. This made them reluctant to invest in work on regulation beyond the absolute minimum of activity the law demanded and many departments were reluctant to meet even that statutory obligation to the full.

Then there were the unintended consequences of the commitment to 'generic' working shown by many of the departments in their first decade. Few of them organised their structures in relation to client groups. At the same time few organised themselves in relation to geographical areas alone. There were too many small and specialised services for that to be possible. Instead it became common for the principal organisational division in the departments to be one between field social work on the one hand and residential and day care on the other. This meant that any connection between the day nurseries the departments had also taken over from the old health authorities and those fieldworkers engag...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The historical background
• 2. The creation of the Early Years Directorate
• 3. Education, care and play
• 4. Regulation, development and quality assurance
• 5. Getting serious: aspects of quality
• 6. Does regulation work?
• 7. Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Subject index
• Author index