Some things change quietly, hardly acknowledged in the nation’s self-image, but there has been a mighty revolution for young children. Since 1945, the welfare state was always called “cradle to grave”, but the cradle had been missing. Now, in the last decade, childcare has been building into a new universal welfare service.

It is still only a half-realised revolution, not universal yet and with a way to go. But what a change from a decade ago when childcare was something families did. Mothers could juggle work and toddlers as best they could, but it wasn’t the state’s problem. Nurseries, after-school clubs and holiday play schemes were not yet on the political horizon.

In the late 1990s, during the last couple of Conservative years, a half-hearted voucher scheme allowing some families to buy nursery places from private providers stalled. The private nursery business was already growing but the vouchers didn’t offer enough subsidy for most women to buy a place, and certainly not enough to encourage the setting up of new private nurseries in the poorer areas that needed them most. Other than this half-attempted scheme, the state had nothing much to do with childcare, neither funding nor providing it, or contracting others to provide it. There were a few local-authority-provided crèches but places were mainly reserved for extreme hardship. There was no national nursery education programme to speak of. School began at the age of five and families were on their own until then.

The full size and scope of what became Labour’s childcare strategy was not spelled out in its 1997 manifesto. What was promised was a nursery place for two-and-a-half hours a day for every four-year-old, with the ambition to stretch that to include three-year-olds later. There would be pilots for “early excellence centres”, offering both care and education in a few poor areas. These were indeed excellent but modest proposals, compared with the ambitious strategy that developed later.  Perhaps it is because of the strategy’s modest beginnings that Labour has never succeeded in impressing the electorate with its early-years revolution. Somehow, the under-fives still haven’t entered the political bloodstream; they’re still not a major issue of rivalry between the parties.

The good news
What has happened gradually since 1997? Let’s start with all the good news. Every three and four-year-old now has a guaranteed three hours a day of nursery schooling. That might be in a nursery school or in a childcare setting, and children must all be offered their three hours, taught by properly qualified nursery teachers, for free. This was not designed to help with childcare: after all, 9am-12pm is no use to a working parent. It was to make sure all children were ready for school at five; used to playing and sharing, listening to books, drawing, talking  and ready to start out on the long education road.

Before this provision, there was a startling difference between the middle-class children who did attend nurseries and playgroups, and the rest who were deeply disadvantaged when they reached the reception class at primary school already developmentally behind.

Now virtually all three and four-year-old children take up their nursery places, and primary schools say they notice the marked change in their intake.

Childcare tax credits are the other great improvement. Any working parent with a household income of less than about £50,000 qualifies for credits to help with childcare costs. These are tapered according to income, but the lowest paid can get credits worth 80% of the childcare costs. That has made a crucial difference to many mothers’ ability to go out to work. It is one key factor in Labour’s success in getting 56% of single mothers into work, though the government is unlikely to reach its target of getting 70% into jobs by 2010, for reasons we’ll come to.

Sure Start success
Most imaginative and optimistic of all has been Labour’s Sure Start programme, now rolling out to 3,500 Sure Start children’s centres, all to be in place by 2010. Currently, 2,500 are already open, many in beautiful new purpose-designed buildings, others in buildings attached to primary schools. The best-financed and equipped centres offer everything a family with young children needs, even from before birth, with antenatal classes, midwives and health visitors for babies.

There are parent and toddler groups, and cafés where parents can meet, usually run by the mothers. There are drop-in gym classes, as well as music and messy play for small children. Here parents can access whatever local childcare, child minders and nurseries are available in the area. There are child therapists, and speech and language therapists for children who need professional help.