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The Irresponsible State? The Politics of Child Daycare Provision in Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Vicky Randall
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Extract

This article seeks to shed light on the scarcity of public child daycare provision in Britain. Following a brief account of the development of policy since the Second World War, it notes the institutional and discursive fragmentation of the process through which child-care policy has been resolved. However, it concentrates on the way that process has been shaped by the intersection of two variables, the type of issue constituted by child care and the British national policy-making style. It argues that public child-care provision is both a ‘redistributive’ issue, and as such particularly unappealing to recent Conservative governments, and an issue that concerns the family, invoking an ‘ideology of motherhood’. Moreover, national policy style has entailed a reluctance to intervene either in the labour market or in the ‘private’ family sphere. This combination of issue type and policy-making tradition has conspired to marginalize child care on the national policy agenda.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 25 , Issue 3 , July 1995 , pp. 327 - 348
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

1 In a generic sense child daycare just means looking after, keeping an eye on, children during the day, in whatever context. It thus includes nursery schools. However, at times in the following discussion I shall refer to child daycare, or day nurseries, as distinct from nursery education, following the existing institutional distinction in Britain.

It should also be noted that, although provision for school-age children is also an important issue, this article concentrates on provision for the under-5s.

2 See Guardian, 1 12 1993.Google Scholar

3 This has, for instance, been forcefully argued in a recent article; Edwards, Julia and McKie, Linda, ‘Equal Opportunities and Public Policy: An Agenda for Change’, Public Policy and Administration, 8 (1993), 54–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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5 There are obvious problems in interpreting responses to such surveys. To what extent do existing constraints prevent women from even contemplating paid employment? Or is it economic necessity rather than preference that makes some mothers want paid employment? Even so, such surveys have regularly shown that a majority of mothers of young children, not in paid employment, intend going back to work eventually and that a sizeable minority of these would go back sooner if convenient, affordable child care was available. There has also been some tendency for these proportions to increase over time.

6 This is discussed in Lovenduski, Joni and Randall, Vicky, Contemporary Feminist Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), chap. 8.Google Scholar

7 Thus in general the distinction between public or state and private provision is less clear-cut, with subsidized church nurseries playing a significant role for instance in Italy, Belgium, France and the Netherlands. Compulsory school age also tends to be higher, 6 in most countries and 7 in Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands.

8 The question of how Britain compares with specific other European countries, and why, is taken further in Randall, Vicky, ‘The Politics of Child Daycare: Some European Comparisons’, Swiss Yearbook of Political Science 94, 34 (Berne: Editions Paul Haupt, 1994), pp. 165–77.Google Scholar

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10 An example would be Walby, Sylvia, Theorising Patriarchy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).Google Scholar

11 This is argued at greater length in Randall, Vicky, Women and Politics, revised edn (London: Macmillan, 1987), chap. 4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Actual secondary sources for pursuing this question are few in number. There are helpful accounts of ‘war nursery’ policy in Riley, Denise, War in the Nursery (London: Virago, 1983)Google Scholar, and of the development of national policy up until the mid-1970s in Tizard, Jack, Moss, Peter and Perry, Jane, All Our Children (London: Temple Smith, 1976).Google Scholar The only extended attempt to provide a political analysis of child-care policy making is in Mary Ruggie's insightful study, The State and Working Women: A Comparative Study of Britain and Sweden (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984)Google Scholar, whose coverage does not, of course, extend over the 1980s.

13 See Hall, Catherine, ‘The Early Formation of Victorian Domestic Ideology’, in Hall, Catherine, White, Male and Middle-Class (London: Polity Press, 1990), chap. 3Google Scholar; Lewis, Jane, The Politics of Motherhood (London: Croom-Helm, 1980).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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