Childcare has moved from the margins to the mainstream in the past ten years and is one of the big domestic issues in the run-up to the forthcoming general election.
We've all played a role in making that happen. Childcare is now seen as 'everybody's business' - key to ending child poverty, promoting child development, improving life chances, tackling inequalities and promoting work-life balance. The media have played a big role in generating interest among politicians, reflecting the concerns and pressures experienced by families all over the country. Parent power is just starting to make itself felt.
Daycare Trust has helped bring all that together into a powerful force for change by highlighting problems and proposing solutions, using international comparisons to show what's possible and building a wide-ranging coalition in support of universal childcare. But we wouldn't have made so much progress, we wouldn't have a ten-year strategy, without ministers like Margaret Hodge and Patricia Hewitt driving the childcare and family-friendly agenda forward in Government.
We will need to maintain the momentum after the election to ensure that interest doesn't wane and, crucially, to ensure that universal childcare becomes a reality for all children and families.
Past and future
'Forward, not back' may be the Labour party's theme for the forthcoming election. But after more than eight years at Daycare Trust, first in charge of media and campaigns and then since 2000 as director, I can't resist the invitation both to review the past and to look forward.
It's a good time to do so as the dust settles after the launch of the Government's ten-year strategy and a whirlwind of change. While the future may look daunting, it's important to remember how much has changed since the national childcare strategy was launched in 1998. So, here are my 'top five' for childcare past and childcare future.
Looking back
1 Crucially, childcare is now right up the political agenda. It's no longer viewed as a private concern but as a public issue. And it's not just the Government that sees better childcare as a priority. All the main parties have developed childcare policies, and that political debate is critical to keeping childcare up the agenda.
2 Linked to this interest is the increasingly widespread recognition that quality early education and care have great benefits for children and can significantly improve children's life chances. The political debate has shifted from childcare being a key tool for delivering 'welfare to work', to childcare being key for promoting child development and building a better future for the whole country.
3 We have seen a huge increase in the number of childcare places since 1997, when there was just one registered place for every nine children under the age of eight. Now there is one place for every four children. We have free part-time places for all three- and four-year-olds, and a massive growth in the number of nurseries and out-of-school clubs, with childcare the second fastest growing sector in the economy. This necessary focus on quantity is now shifting to quality and sustainability.
4 Of course, this growth wouldn't have happened without a substantial increase in public funding. Demand from parents has driven the expansion, but the pace of change has been fuelled by the nursery education grant, the childcare tax credit, the New Opportunities Fund and the Neighbourhood Nurseries Initiative.
5 For those of us campaigning for childcare for all, the key turning point has been the publication in December of the Government's ten-year strategy for childcare. This reflects how far and how quickly we have come in the past five years - from a time when, as campaigners, we hailed a small improvement in the childcare tax credit, to an unprecedented long-term commitment to creating universal childcare.
Looking forward
The ten-year strategy sets out a framework for achieving universal childcare. But looking forward, I believe we need to address some key issues if we are to ensure the strategy's success.
1 Despite the growth in childcare since 1997, the socio-economic profile of families using childcare has not substantially changed. If we are to make affordable quality childcare a reality for all families, particularly low-income families, then we need a better understanding of the childcare market and a more rigorous analysis of the market failures. We need to be clear what is preventing many families from accessing childcare and what needs to be done to give them real choices.
2 On the other side of the affordability equation, it's clear that quality childcare doesn't come cheap. The key to quality is, of course, a well-trained, well-rewarded workforce. For too long childcare workers have subsidised the cost of childcare in this country. I look forward to the Government's forthcoming workforce strategy to see how it addresses raising the pay and status of childcare workers. This will be crucial to reducing the turnover of staff, enabling the workforce to grow and develop their careers in childcare.
3 Local authorities have been given the lead in delivering the ten-year strategy. Key to making that work will be the new duty on local government to secure adequate affordable quality childcare in their area. That duty has to embrace meaningful engagement with parents and families, as well as effective partnership with the private and voluntary sectors.
There are plenty of opportunities for the private and voluntary sectors to get involved in the roll-out of children's centres and extended schools. It will be interesting to see how the new target for private and voluntary sector involvement works in practice. We will need to support local authorities and build capacity in local government to deliver this big agenda.
4 Flexibility will become more and more important in the future. Parents want flexible childcare provision and, just as importantly, they want employers to be flexible. Government can set the framework, but childcare providers and employers need to respond.
5 None of the above - quality, affordability, sustainability, flexibility - can be achieved without proper long-term funding. The ten-year strategy opens the door to further discussion about funding.
In the lead-up to the 2006 spending review, I believe there should be a review of the financing of childcare, and not just about how much funding is made available but also how funding is allocated. We need an open and honest debate about supply-side versus demand-side funding, and we need to learn from other countries. No other country that has achieved universal childcare, or something close to it, has done so through a heavy reliance on demand-side funding.
Two final comments. It's important we keep our arguments and solutions simple. We must keep parents, the public and the media on our side if we are to win further investment in childcare.
Above all, childcare is a people business. Without all the people who work wonders for children day in, day out across the country, none of our ambitions are possible. I am grateful to the many wonderful people, nationally and locally, whom I have had the pleasure to meet while doing one of the best jobs going at Daycare Trust.
Stephen Burke is currently director of Daycare Trust and on 29 March he becomes chief executive of Counsel and Care, campaigning for better services for older people.
