It’s difficult to imagine a conversation about early years education that does not focus on quality, yet there is currently some murkiness about who is taking the lead nowadays. When I first started working in the early years, it was definitely local authorities that were in charge, and quality was mostly about adherence to regulations about ratios, size of rooms, number of toilets and so on. Peter Moss, the distinguished professor in early childhood provision at the UCL Institute of Education, wrote in Nurseries Nowback in 1980 that ‘council nurseries certainly offer good standards of care – most maintain high staff:child ratios and pay a lot of attention to health and hygiene’. Three decades later, owing much to the pioneering work of Professor Moss and others, that sort of wording is unimaginable.
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