Is this the year we finally come to understand the importance of our children’s early years?

15 minute read

If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that society doesn’t function without childcare.

Whether you were a parent trying to work from home, a child missing your friends, a boss with a stressed and distracted workforce, or the Prime Minister’s special advisor whose supposed only hope for childcare was located at the opposite end of the country; your abiding memory will be that it was tough… on everybody.

Here at Playhood, one idea that pulled us through the more difficult parenting moments was that pressing pause on our hectic urban lifestyles - and the collective intake of breath that followed - might, just might, create an awakening. As Eckhart Tolle commented at the height of the crisis: Humans won’t change unless we are faced with obstacles and adversity.

So would the enormous challenges we were facing personally, nationally and even globally, make us question the way we live? Again and again our conversations circled back to the same ideological topics: What is the future of work? Is the commute over forever? What will be the consequences for our cities and our social lives? And, as parents and childcare providers, what will this mean for our children’s early years?

Ask any parent about their experience of lockdown and you’ll get a version of the same answer - extreme highs mixed with extreme lows. There were good bits; halcyon days filled with family time, golden moments of bonding, new depths of understanding and influence, a chance to notice, observe and delight in each microscopic milestone. And those are the bits we hold dear and attempt to capture and relive.

Then there were the awful bits - always pulled in two directions and surviving on 5 hours sleep to make it work, forced to choose income over play, all the TV and worrying about how much your stress was bypassing your perma-breezy veneer and seeping into your toddler's consciousness. The hard days were like nothing many of us have ever experienced before, or wish to again.

Not only do we all now have recent and raw first-hand experience of the link between quality childcare and our mental well-being - not to mention the stability of our economy - there’s a new clarity about the talent it takes to educate and activate young children. Just as we can't imagine how stressful and exhausting hosting a child’s birthday party is until we try it (if you know, you know), cultivating interest and developing young minds can seem on the surface like it's a cinch. You’ve done the research, you have the will, the imagination and the creativity and maybe you even have the time. So why does it land so heavily on your self esteem each time an activity doesn't go as you expected?

Playhood’s Montessori stance on lockdown teaching was to forget it. Bake, garden, clean. Draw your toddler into everyday activities. But whether you went the less structured route or not, most parents we spoke to quickly realised a lack of two key ingredients: experience and patience. Many of us had no idea what happened at our children’s nurseries and how we might learn from it. And your patience kept disappearing into the bedroom to take a call from one of its clients.

Maybe a positive outcome, now that we understand the truly vocational nature of the job, alongside how much we rely on childcare to keep our families healthy, our minds present, and our economies pumping, might be a real conversation about the value we place on early years education. Perhaps we could discuss how unequal and puzzling the London system is when all we’re after is quality and affordable care and the silent burdens we bear, sometimes consciously and sometimes less so, in order to keep showing up at the office by 9am, rested (laughable) and ready to take the day on.

As every parent knows, there is an invisible load you carry for the first few weeks and months that you leave your child to go to work. Depositing your child in the safest place you’ve found that allows you to get there on time feels… well, bad. If we’re lucky, we live near an established nursery; one with a garden, a talented and communicative manager who knows how to train and motivate staff (so they stay longer than two months) and one that’s conveniently located near our tube stop. A highly-qualified and passionate team are the backbone to our children's success.

So that's if we get lucky. But after nearly 5 months of real flexible working, even those of us with jammy postcodes and partners and workplaces that make it possible to pick-up and drop-off during office hours - a luxury to many - are suddenly feeling less lucky. What we’ve been through feels big and we’re left with a shift in personal values that makes us reassess the arbitrary nature of the structures we’re giving our blood, sweat and tears to. Did I really used to commute two hours every day to sit in an office and not speak to anyone? Considering the cost, what does our childcare setting give us? How will I feel as I step back into the office? And, where am I going to get the energy to rebuild my business from the brink?

In London, we’re more reliant on paid-for care than anyone else in the country. We’re transient; many of us move here for work, away from our extended families, our villages. Studies show 12% of families in London rely on informal childcare, mostly provided by grandparents, compared to 46% in the North East. This means for many of us, paid caregivers have just as much, if not more weekly contact with our children than we do and that makes them incredibly influential...suddenly a nursery feels far more than just a safe place to leave our children so we can work. How do we feel about this? The truth is ‘uneasy’. But we barely have time to gather our thoughts on the issue before that time in our life is over. Until now maybe.

In the UK, we have vastly undervalued the role that early years educators, nursery workers and childminders play. Despite lockdown doing a wonderful job of unifying our understanding that early years education is skilled, and despite the science which tells us that these early years are the most important to development, there are structural issues that block our attempts to bring it more central.

The distinction between childcare and early years education is important here. There has been a longstanding policy divide between early years education and childcare, with government approaches and funding sources differing depending on which camp the provider sits in. ‘Childcare’ offers longer hours for our youngest children, catering for working parents. It is usually delivered by private nurseries, followed in dwindling numbers by childminders (London’s seen a 30% fall between 2009-18) working from their homes. ‘Early years education’ is focused on preparing children aged between three and five years old for school and this includes pre-schools which operate school hours. Of course there are hybrids, like Playhood.

The historical gap between ‘care’ and ‘education’, the feminisation of childcare work, and the privatisation of the sector have contributed to a workforce that has less status than the rest of the educational sector. In private nurseries few qualifications are needed, pay is low and teacher turnover can be astonishingly high as skilled educators continue to leave the profession for less stressful and physically demanding jobs that pay more. In 2018, only 25.1% of childcare workers held a degree. By contrast, 92.8% of teachers and 37.1% of all female workers did.

But the perception of the two as different not only impacts our expectations and the way they are funded, it also contradicts our very understanding of childhood development.

The science of learning tells us that all learning is relationship based. Likewise, all development is relationship based. Whether we are talking about feeling supported, challenged, or feeling a sense of belonging, all these mindsets are fundamental prerequisites to learning. They are the precious gifts we get when we are cared for, but we are only able to unwrap them alongside a caregiver with whom we have a trusting bond and attachment. Which means that all good teachers are carers, and all good carers are teachers. Whether your child is with a £40/day childminder or in a £150/day swanky nursery that teaches Mandarin on the side, both are being OFSTED inspected on their delivery of the EYFS. And, at both, your child is being cared for.

We aren’t convinced that there should be a distinction between the two at all. Progress often starts with science, but we recognise it takes something more to nudge the evidence into everyday living and reap the rewards. The research that talks to the importance of early years education and care is not new. We have known for decades that experiences during this time shape the brain, creating the security and predispositions to learn. Although academic excellence isn’t what drives our Montessori setting, it’s eye-opening to read that the biggest indicator of how well a child will do in their GCSEs is the progress that child has made by age 5. The first 1000 days really do make all the difference, an old idea fuelling Matt Hancock’s recent policy.

Another important aspect of brain development is memory. With the connection of synapses comes the development of memory, and with memory, many of a child’s developmental milestones, including the uniquely human trait of language. Neuroscience tells us that each new word that a child learns helps to strengthen the architecture of the brain. And as that architecture is strengthened, a child’s capacity for new words grows, which is why supporting early language development in children is such a key focus in early years.

Of course, a child’s genes are significant to their potential, but their experiences and the environment support what is an interactive process. A strong relationship with a parent or teacher gives a young child the confidence to explore the world and in turn become resilient. Precisely the reason why many parents yearn for a deeper relationship with a consistent caregiver to enable a more joined-up approach.

As working parents, we know that our ability to be productive and successful is intertwined with our child’s happiness, which in turn hinges on the relationship they forge with their key worker. At Playhood it’s therefore obvious to us that they themselves must feel equally valued and cared for in order to show up for and care for our kids.

That’s why it seems a good time to shake things up a little, to set aside the siloed thinking of yesteryear and use this opportunity to rethink systems that no longer align to our values. Families in the UK spend one third of their income on childcare, this is compared with 9% of household income in France, 5% in Spain and 4% in Sweden. And whilst much of this can be put down to our complex, underfunded and fragmented childcare system, perhaps this is the moment - as a progressive and world-leading city - that we recognise the broader societal issues in the early years care and education sector.

Playhood isn’t a campaign body but we enthusiastically support the work of NEF, who are rethinking the childcare sector, the ongoing work of the Sutton Trust on quality and the early years workforce, campaigns like Flex Appeal, fighting for more flexibility for parents in the workplace and the lobbying by the Montessori community led by MCI. We’re also big fans of the #radical childcare systems approach and Nesta’s work on ‘parent powered’ approaches.

We are however passionate about helping families rethink their family’s early years experience in a demonstrable, grassroots way. Our triangulated model challenges the status quo by putting toddlers, talented (and treasured) teachers and, crucially, working parents at its heart. We look forward to learning and sharing as we figure things out.

There will be a short window for locking in new defaults, a short window of possibility where new ways of working might just stick. The city runs on childcare, but parents run the city. It’s time to let go of the past and step into a future that puts families and educators first. Or are we really going to wait for Gen Z to do it for us? Because that would be embarrassing.

Karen Partridge founded Playhood and is mum to a two year old.

Jen Barratt supports Playhood with content and is mum to a five and two year old.

Follow us on Insta @playhoodclub

karen partridgeSeptember 18, 2020