LAST month the Government called in the competition watchdog over its own childcare, asking the Competition and Markets Authority to investigate the hidden fees parents are charged on top of their ‘free’ hours.
You do not summon the regulator to a system that is working. But the fees are the smallest of the questions hanging over Britain’s childcare revolution. The one no minister will ask is the only one that matters: what is it doing to the children? Today the Civitas think tank puts that question at the heart of a major report – and the international evidence it gathers should stop the policy in its tracks.
Consider what we have built. Since September the state has funded babies from nine months old to spend 30 hours a week in a nursery. More than 530,000 children are now in the expanded scheme. The taxpayer hands a nursery the best part of £14,000 a year for a single under-two (£12.04 an hour across its 1,140 funded hours) and not a penny of it to the mother who would rather raise that child herself. We have decided, as a country, that the right place for a nine-month-old is a working day in institutional care – and decided it, the evidence suggests, exactly backwards.
What that evidence says is not seriously disputed. Sixty years of attachment research, from John Bowlby’s 1951 report for the World Health Organization through Mary Ainsworth’s studies and the meta-analyses since, establishes that in the first two or three years a child’s emotional foundations are laid by consistent, responsive, one-to-one care from a familiar few. Bowlby named the stretch from around six months to two or three years the sensitive period, when the pattern is set for life. The carer need not, in theory, be the mother, but it must be someone constant, attuned, and there.
That is the one thing a nursery cannot give a baby. One adult to three infants, and the staff turnover the sector runs on, means many hands but no constant pair. Richard Bowlby, the theorist’s son, put it without euphemism: a baby in daycare who cannot reach a consistent attachment figure passes its day with the need for comfort ‘chronically unterminated’.
A baby’s stress hormone, cortisol, climbs through the nursery day in the exact reverse of the healthy pattern; a 2006 meta-analysis found the effect sharpest in the under-threes. America’s National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) study, the largest of its kind, tracked more than a thousand children and found that the more hours spent in non-maternal care, the more aggression and behaviour problems they showed – a dose-response that survived every control, including the mother’s own warmth and the family’s income. Those effects, though modest, were still visible at the age of 15. Jay Belsky found 20 hours a week in the first year was enough to raise the risk of insecure attachment. Even the Government’s own Effective Provision of Pre-School Education (EPPE) study linked longer spells in day nurseries, the settings that most often take children before two, to more ‘anti-social and worried’ behaviour by the time those children reached school.
The childcare lobby has its answers ready: the effects are modest, quality is what counts, good nurseries help poorer children. Each is true as far as it goes – and each dodges the only finding that bears on a nine-month-old. In 60 years of research, no study has found that long hours of group care benefit a baby’s emotional development. The benefits the lobby parade belong to older children and to the most deprived. For an infant, the evidence runs from no benefit to modest but real harm. That is the child the state has chosen to fund into a nursery, and the younger the better.
This is not one campaigner’s hunch. The new report, Foundation for the Future, draws on an international conference Civitas ran with the European Federation of Parents and Carers at Home, and its verdict on the countries we are copying is damning. In Denmark – held up to us as a model – the government’s own study found that just 13 per cent of nurseries for children aged two and under offer good quality care, and nearly four in ten were judged insufficient. The Nobel-winning economist James Heckman, no sentimentalist, told the conference that we have learned to measure everything about a child except the thing that matters: ‘What really is missing in this literature is the value of a mother and the value of household output.’ Anne Fennell, who convened the conference, says that in years of campaigning here in the UK, at the UN and across Europe, ‘not one politician, academic or daycare lobbyist could answer the simple question: what evidence is there that these policies pushing very young children into daycare for long hours are good for the child?’
So why do it? Ministers have told us, in writing. The £9.5billion the state pours into childcare is there, in the Government’s own words, ‘to boost growth by supporting parents back into work’. Not to raise a child. Not, first of all, to help a mother who wants help. To return her to the workforce and her baby to the nursery as early as the machine can manage – nine months. The state has decided a woman is worth more to it as a unit of labour than as a mother, and it will spend billions to prove the point. This is no reproach to mothers who work; it is a reproach to a Government that pays to make sure they do.
And the family who would simply raise their own? The state can barely see it. Its tax system treats husband and wife as two strangers who share an address, and taxes the home that lives on one income more heavily than the home with two. It offers the mother who stays home none of the £14,000 it will press on a nursery for the same baby. It will pay a fortune for a child to be raised by anyone but its own family.
A nation with any confidence in its future would move heaven and earth to let a parent be present in the years that decide everything. We have done the reverse. We have built a machine that pays to take the baby out of the home, taxes the family that keeps it there, and dresses the whole thing as opportunity. It is the boldest social experiment in a generation, run on the people least able to object – and the results, when they come, will surprise no one who troubled to read the evidence first.
