More great childcare? No thank you!

Peter Moss

For the last 3 years Ive been working on a very special project: editing a book of
selected writings and speeches by Loris Malaguzzi1. Malaguzzi is one of the leading
figures in education in the last half century and a key player in the creation of the
world-famous early childhood education in the Italian city of Reggio Emilia. Following
his life and the evolution of his thinking and practice from 1945 to 1993 has been
fascinating and inspirational. But it has also confirmed a lesson that I have drawn
from studying other world-class early childhood systems, not just in local authorities
like Reggio but in countries like Sweden and Denmark. That lesson is simple and
clear: if you want to build a good early childhood system universal, affordable,
integrated, well-staffed and innovative then base it on education: in short, create a
system of early childhood education.

Of course this raises questions to be discussed and settled. What, for example, do
we mean by education? For Malaguzzi, education was a holistic process,
concerned with the overall development and well-being of the child, and the
construction of identity, culture and knowledge. Moreover, education need not be
the only goal of the system. It can assume many other purposes, such as the
promotion of democracy and solidarity, the support of parents and communities, and
the fostering of relationships between children, parents and local communities. But
education in its broadest sense is at the systems heart, and education supplies
the ethos and conditions for the service.

Why education at the heart of the service? Why the importance attached to
educations ethos and principles? Because education is primarily concerned with the
rights and potentialities of all children. Because education has become established in

1
Loris Malaguzzi and the Schools of Reggio Emilia: A selection of his writings and speeches 1945-
1993 will be published in March by Routledge. For more details go to
https://www.routledge.com/products/9781138019829

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our collective consciousness as a universal entitlement for children. Because
education is assumed to be affordable, often free of charge at the time of use.
Because education is understood to require a well-qualified and properly paid
workforce. And because education should provide the basis for a strong and equal
partnership between early childhood services and compulsory schooling.

Of course this advocacy of education as the basis for an early childhood system
does not deny the possibility of attendant dangers. Not least, a process of what has
been termed schoolification, where early childhood simply becomes the hand-
maiden of compulsory education, reduced to readying young children for the next
stage on an educational conveyor belt; and, in the process, experiencing (in the
words of the OECD Starting Strong report) downward pressure to adopt the
content and methods of the primary school, with a detrimental effect on young
childrens learning. That is a very real danger, though not inevitable; other
relationships between early childhood and compulsory education are possible, as
Ive written about previously2.

Another danger is that an early childhood service based on education becomes

narrowly focused, not only on a restricted idea of education, but unable to open itself
up to other projects and possibilities or to open itself out to the wider world,
becoming confined instead to what goes on in the classroom, unconcerned with the
wider conditions and needs of the families and communities it serves. A narrowly
conceived education service may, for example, pay no attention to the conditions
and needs of working parents, providing school hours that bear little relation to
working hours, forcing parents into making contorted and costly arrangements to
bridge the resultant care gaps.

Malaguzzi recognised the need to pay attention to parents employment in Reggios

schools for young children. In a speech in 1975, he says:

2
See my article Future Meeting Places, in Early years Educator, August 2013, available at
http://www.magonlinelibrary.com/doi/abs/10.12968/eyed.2011.13.1.16

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 With regard to opening hours in the scuola maternal [schools for 3 to 6-year-
olds], our feeling is hours should be based on the principle that schools are
offered as a social service for families as well as being tools for childrens
education. The time children spend in school must therefore be assessed in
relation to real family situations. Generally it is true that long and
undifferentiated school hours conflict with childrens need for other situations
and experiences (in the family, in the neighbourhood etc.). However it is also
true that the reality of a working family is determined by the working hours of
mothers and fathers and the practical impossibility of guaranteeing real family
relations outside school hours.

In the light of these considerations we feel obliged to say schools must adapt
to factory hours, progressively opening up to workers children with improved
responses to family needs, while maintaining as far as possible the
opportunity for parents to collect children at different times.

So while he saw tensions and contradictions in aligning school days with working
days, he recognised the need to adapt. He understood that schools had to take
account of the world outside and of the lives of parents they needed to incorporate
what today is called childcare for working parents.

But while he acknowledged the need for childcare for working parents, Malaguzzi
put it in its rightful place: not at the centre of the Reggio project, but as something
that the core educational project in Reggio needed to take account of in its
organisation. While care, again understood in its broadest sense as the showing of
love and the bestowing of sensitive attention, was something owed to all children,
whatever the employment status of their parents.

Go to the exemplary early childhood services of Denmark and Sweden, and I think
you will find the same approach. Education in its broadest sense (pedagogy is the
term in Denmark) is at the heart of these systems, whilst the organisation of services
takes account of the fact that most parents in these countries are employed, with
opening hours of services and working hours of parents in substantial (if not perfect)
alignment. Childcare for working parents is a necessary condition but not in truth

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a very interesting one, an issue of organisation, not of pedagogical purpose and
content, one of the many things that a good early childhood system and service
does.

Why do I make so much of this not very interesting (though important) subject
childcare for working parents? Because the UK seems to have forgotten, or
perhaps has never fully learnt, the lesson of Reggio Emilia, Denmark and Sweden. It
has never managed to fully bridge the education/care divide, to build a fully
integrated, education-based service universal, affordable, well-staffed and able to
treat childcare for working parents as a necessary but essentially secondary
purpose. We have not, it seems, managed to get beyond childcare, to a broad
concept of a multi-purpose early childhood education service. And rather than
moving in that direction, we seem to be going backwards.

In the last two years, we have become ever more obsessed with childcare. The
English government has produced More great childcare, More affordable childcare,
a Childcare Bill, and an entitlement to 30 hours free childcare for 3 and 4-year-olds
whose parents are employed. Politicians from all parties constantly go on about the
need for more, better and affordable childcare. The English think tank Policy
Exchange has given us Quality Childcare, and the Family and Childcare Trust the
London Childcare Report; and, not to be undone, a Scottish Commission on
Childcare Reform have recently delivered themselves of Meeting Scotlands
Childcare Challenge. Last but not least, a House of Lords Select Committee have
come up with an Affordable Childcare report.

The sum total of all this effort and work is endless fiddling around with the existing
system, a constant re-arranging of the deckchairs, a non-stop deepening of the hole
we have got into and avoiding the heavy lifting of thinking about what sort of
system we need for all our children and families or engaging with the rich experience
of places like Reggio Emilia, Denmark or Sweden. As Childrens Centres wither and
childcare dominates the airwaves, we move away from any hope of an integrated,
inclusive and universal system, clinging to all the chronic faults of the dysfunctional
system that has evolved down the years its fragmentation, its inequalities, its
divisiveness, its dependence on a low paid, low qualified workforce, its inability to

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conceptualise a holistic and multi-purpose approach to early childhood services. Like
Groundhog Day, we seem to keep coming back to where we started, unable to break
free from the gravitational pull of childcare, incapable of imagining a new start and a
new direction.

That new direction might be an early childhood education system offered as a

universal entitlement to all children over 12 months; based on a comprehensive
network of Childrens Centres providing early childhood education, and much else
besides, to their local catchment areas; working together, and with their local
authorities, in mutual collaboration; tax-funded and either free or charging a capped
maximum fee for parents needing longer hours than the basic free entitlement;
staffed by graduate early years teachers, enjoying parity of qualification, pay and
status with other teachers; taking children up to 6 years of age, before moving on to
extended schools Childrens Centres for older children. No markets, no
competition for customers, no businesses selling childcare, no complex and
expensive funding system, no childcare workers existing on minimum wage, no
entry to primary school at the age of 4. Instead, as with Reggio Emilias municipal
schools, a public education strongly connected to both community and local
authority, based on Childrens Centres functioning (in Malaguzzis words) as living
centres of open and democratic culture, enriched and informed by social
encounters.

One of the inspirational features of Malaguzzis work was the sense of hope that he
and his fellow workers possessed. Towards the end of his life, he looked back to the
period after the end of the Second World War and 20 years of fascism, when he was
in his mid-twenties, and remembered that

these were times when everything seemed possibletimes when it seemed

everything was possible. At that time, after the war, after the grief, and after
the ruins, there was a very strange phenomenon, impetuous and strong, it
made possible a great longing, great fervour and great excitement. It was the
ridiculous capacity of being able to think anything, and to think that anything
could be physically realised.

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Today we live (or many of us do) amidst affluence, peace and order yet we no
longer feel that everything seems possible. Instead we suffer the dictatorship of no
alternative, directed us to shuffling deckchairs and digging ever deeper holes, unable
to conceive or hope for alternatives, having to put up with the impoverished thinking
and language of childcare. Malaguzzi offers us other thinking and language, richer
and more hopeful, with the prospect of a democratic and emancipatory education: in
short, a provocation to think differently and to believe in the world again.