Nursery World - Early education in Sweden

Should the former childcare minister have gone on a fact-finding mission to Sweden in his quest to lower childcare costs? No, for several reasons, says Professor Peter Moss

Will Quince joins a ‘maths lesson among the trees’ at Ur Och Skur Gronlingen Pre-School. - DfE

Nursery World recently reported a visit to Sweden by England’s then Children and Families Minister Will Quince in June. The visit was ‘part of the Government’s fact-finding mission to lower the cost of childcare’. The minister tweeted that ‘I’m determined to tackle the cost and availability of childcare for working parents, which means improving our evidence about what works from our international neighbours.’ I was left mystified.

In the first place, I couldn’t understand ‘the mission’. The cost of ‘childcare’ (and I’ll return to why I’ve put that word in inverted commas) does not need lowering. It needs raising and raising substantially to tackle the scandal of a low-paid, low-qualified and low-status workforce, overwhelmingly women, who are part of a much larger marginalised ‘care’ workforce. The question then is not how to lower ‘childcare’ costs, but how to allocate higher costs between parents and government.

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