THE horrific case of Vincent Chan, the north London nursery worker who this week admitted sexually abusing toddlers and hoarding 25,000 indecent images, has rightly shaken the country.
Chan was not a rogue babysitter or an unregulated childminder. He worked at a respected £2,000-a-month nursery. He passed his enhanced vetting. He was subject to all the ‘industry-leading’ safeguarding checks we trust to keep children safe. And yet for years he abused children in a setting parents had every reason to believe was secure.
Cases like this are mercifully rare. But they expose something deeper than one predator slipping through the net: the growing tension between society’s push for institutional childcare and the limits of what those institutions can ever guarantee. Because while the state urges parents to hand over their children earlier and for longer, the Chan case reminds us of a truth we seem increasingly unwilling to confront: no system, however regulated, inspected or well-funded, can replicate the vigilance and intimacy of parental care.
For many families, childcare is not a choice but a financial necessity. Decades of rising housing costs, wage stagnation and the expectation of dual-income households mean few can afford for one parent to stay at home. Instead of addressing these pressures, governments have tried to make childcare easier to access, not by supporting parents directly, but by subsidising the transfer of children from the home into state or commercial settings.
Nursery hours are extended. Breakfast clubs are expanded. Campaigns encourage parents back to work as soon as possible. The message is increasingly explicit: caring for your own child is less desirable, less productive, even less honourable, than returning to the workplace. The Department for Education’s recent advert promoting ‘free’ breakfast clubs, marketed as giving parents extra ‘me time’, was not just ill-judged. It revealed a deeper mindset: that time with one’s own children is a chore, and outsourcing parenting is progress. Public backlash forced the Government to withdraw the advert. But the sentiment behind it, that parenting is a barrier to economic participation, remains entrenched in policy.
Increasingly, across all political parties, there has been a move for the first years of life to be a phase to be ‘covered’ by childcare. Yet the first years of a child’s life are foundational for emotional security and brain development.
Children thrive on consistent, loving relationships, something nurseries, however well-run, cannot fully replicate. Staff turnover, shift patterns and group settings make the deep, uninterrupted attachment that parents provide impossible. Yet our policies encourage children as young as nine months into institutions for ten hours a day.
Yet while this shift in policy towards institutional childcare has grown, the lack of concern for the safeguards for children attending these settings is stark.
The Chan case was extraordinary, but not unimaginable. High-quality childcare cannot erase the reality that children are in the care of adults who are not their family. No amount of paperwork, training or trust replaces the instinctive vigilance of a committed parent or grandparent.
Indeed, Chan passed all the checks. He worked for a reputable chain. He filmed his crimes on nursery-issued devices. He was caught only because a colleague noticed non-sexual videos that raised concerns. If this can happen in a top-tier nursery, what about the countless settings with fewer resources and thinner staffing?
This alone should spark a national conversation about whether mandatory CCTV in childcare settings is now morally necessary. If we expect surveillance in factories, warehouses and fast-food kitchens, why not in institutions caring for society’s youngest children? Privacy concerns are real, but the stakes are far higher here.
Contrast the lack of concern for the safeguards of children in childcare institutions with the glaring contradiction in how we support children who cannot stay with their parents but could stay with other family members. Kinship carers, grandparents, aunts, uncles and close family friends, care for more than 130,000 children in England, saving the taxpayer billions. They keep children in familiar, loving environments where outcomes are far better than state care. Yet while foster carers receive comprehensive financial support, kinship carers often receive nothing. The implicit message is that state-organised care is valued; family care is not.
Meanwhile, children in state care experience consistently worse outcomes: lower educational achievement, higher rates of mental illness, and greater risk of homelessness or offending. If institutional care were truly superior, these statistics would not be so depressingly stable.
Perhaps the most damaging shift is cultural. Society increasingly treats parenting as an economic inconvenience. We celebrate ‘productive’ parents who outsource care and return to work, while those who choose to raise their children full-time are often seen as old-fashioned or lacking ambition.
The Government will fund childcare for others to raise your children but not you. Tax breaks for at-home parents are dismissed as regressive, even though they simply create genuine choice. As a result, for many families, there is no choice at all.
Chan’s crimes also force us to confront an uncomfortable question: should the care of infants and toddlers be run for profit? Many nurseries are run with compassion and professionalism. But the business model inevitably pushes providers to reduce staffing levels, hire less-experienced workers, and expand capacity to remain viable. Childcare becomes a commodity. Children become units. Staff become overheads.
This is not a criticism of individual nurseries: it is a structural problem. Profit is not evil, but it sits uneasily alongside the vulnerability of the children involved. If we insist that the market must deliver childcare, we should not be surprised when cost-saving becomes a priority, even in settings that aim for high standards.
At the very least, we must ask whether certain functions, like safeguarding audits, staffing ratios and CCTV, should be mandated nationally rather than left to commercial discretion.
If we truly want what is best for children, we should start by valuing the people who love them most and introduce four key policies.
Support parents who want to stay at home.
Tax breaks or direct payments would give families real choice instead of pushing them into institutional care by default.
Fund kinship carers properly.
They provide continuity, stability and better outcomes — yet are financially penalised for it.
Promote flexible working for care, not just for productivity.
Flexibility should allow parents to spend more time with children, not simply more time on the job.
Strengthen safeguarding — and consider mandatory CCTV.
Families must be able to trust that childcare settings are as safe as possible.
Vincent Chan’s crimes were monstrous. But they reveal a wider flaw in our thinking: that childcare can be industrialised, delegated and systematised without cost.
The truth is simpler. Children need parents. Families matter. Institutional care has limits and risks that policy-makers prefer to ignore. If the Chan case prompts a rethink of how we value parenting, how we structure childcare, and how we protect the most vulnerable members of society, then something good may yet come from this horror. But only if we stop pretending that the state, or the market, can love a child like a parent can.
