Nursery World - Thank you, dear ministers, for politically uniting our sector

Richard House traces the roots of the new 'Too Much Too Soon' campaign

The 'Too Much Too Soon' campaign has its roots in the early campaigning work of Open EYE, and with tongue partially in cheek, I must thank ministers for doing something that Open EYE's concerted campaigning never achieved - uniting the sector against policies that can only do harm to the developmental trajectories and learning dispositions of England's young children.

Long-in-the-tooth early childhood campaigners were almost certainly feeling a warm glow of satisfaction as events unfolded at the end of last week. The Daily Telegraph press open letter titled ‘The Government should stop intervening in early education, of which I was just one of around 130 signatories, went viral last Thursday, as the airwaves were awash with reports and phone-ins on a scale that rivalled the first (and not unrelated) ‘toxic childhood’ open letter that Sue Palmer and I launched exactly seven years ago in September 2006, and which we wrote about in Nursery World at the time.

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