George Bernard Shaw made no bones about the merits of schooling: it was, he felt, a way for parents to offload the care of their children onto other people, and he was right. The rich do this systematically, of course, in delegating their children to boarding schools, but for the rest of us, Ed Miliband’s plan to extend childcare provision by obliging primary schools to take in our children from eight in the morning to six in the evening will have a good deal of appeal. At least for parents it will; if I were a teacher, I’d take a dim view of having babysitting added to my other duties.
But as Ed says, ‘…the cost of a nursery place is now the highest in history, at more than £100 a week to cover part-time hours. And average costs for a full-time place are now rising up to £200 or even more.’ The ‘even more’ bit is applicable to London.
The Tories’ answer to the problem is to liberalise the provision of child-minding (for those without an East European au pair), to allow a minder to have as many as half a dozen two year olds in their care and reduce costs that way. (Has any minister ever tried to supervise a children’s party featuring two year olds? All by themselves? Really?)
Nick Clegg saw that one off. His own approach is summed up thus: ‘I will relentlessly champion and pursue policies that deliver that – like 15 hours a week of free childcare for every three and four year old and tax-free childcare for working families.’ I like that ‘relentlessly’; don’t you?
My take on all this is mildly biased by my own situation. My children are being raised by their parents, with me working away from home for at least three days a week. My husband, by contrast, grew up in the former Yugoslavia, in which children from twelve months could be offloaded to a state nursery to enable their mothers to work, as his did. To this day, former Communist states have rather high expectations in the way of childcare. I’m not saying that either option is perfect – mindful of the late Doris Lessing’s view that ‘there is no boredom like that of an intelligent woman with a very small child’ (though it must be said that DL once told my former director of studies: ‘I am not a feminist’) – but of the two, I think I prefer our situation, though I’d have been very up for my children to be minded by their grandparents. (As matters stand they have the next best thing: a grandmotherly neighbour downstairs from East Germany.)
The fantasy option would be for parents to have some sort of choice in the matter. At present, all the available policies from the major parties point in just one direction: viz, the Cherie Blair view that anyone minding their own child is a drain on the state rather than an asset to it. Every policy option is in the direction of enabling parents to pay someone else to mind their children or requiring schools to do it. To these possibilities – and the school-as-babysitter suggestion is undeniably attractive – perhaps we could add another: paying parents to make their own choices. A transferable tax allowance for married couples would help out the ones left minding the children at home (at least, those that are married, which is fine by me). Universal child benefit, by definition, doesn’t discriminate between one model of child-rearing and another. Certainly it helped before George Osborne took mine away. Beast.
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