Renewed Hopes and Lost Opportunities: early childhood in the early years of the Labour Government

ABSTRACT

The first 2 years of the Labour government have seen unparalleled attention and resources devoted to early childhood services. However, behind the current flurry of activity, a larger opportunity may be slipping away: the opportunity to transform a neglected and incoherent confusion of services into an integrated and coherent early years service. Rather than thinking the unthinkable, government seems to have settled for a process of reform, opting for more and better of the same. Transformation required six major issues to be fully addressed: what constitutes early childhood: administrative integration; staffing; funding; the type of early childhood services that the UK needs; and identifying critical questions about early childhood and the purposes of early childhood services. So far, however, they have not been. Having waited years for change, it would have been better to have waited a bit longer for a White Paper setting out the vision of a transformed early childhood service and the steps needed to achieve that vision over the next 5 to 10 years