Labour’s lessons in bringing up baby
minute you are born and your parents go back to work, as the Government has encouraged them to do, you are going to be ruled by the Department for Education. It is absolute madness.’
Called the Early Years Foundation Stage – an extension of the – an extension of the National Curriculum, the new rules will also lay down guidance for the social development of toddlers, say how they should learn numbers, and cover ‘knowledge and understanding of the world’.
The proposals are part of a Bill intended to make councils ensure working mothers can find all the cheap childcare they need.
But they come amid fierce argument over whether children really benefit from day care. Last month, a study led by expert Penelope Leach was the latest to show that those looked after by their mothers at home develop faster both socially and emotionally.
In the first legislation to give the State a say in the raising of children under five, local authorities will be charged with making sure working mothers can find somewhere to put their children between 8am and 6pm.
Councils will also be told to keep the cost down to a level that parents claiming tax credit benefits can afford and to ‘reduce inequalities among the youngest children’.
But the Bill provoked a new row between the Government and town halls, who said the huge costs will push up council tax. They said
MOTHERS who stay at
home to bring up their children have become a minority under Labour.
Figures last year showed 55 per cent of mothers with youngsters under five now have full or part- time jobs, compared to a third 20 years ago.
The shift into work has been encouraged by the Government.
Two years ago Patricia Hewitt, then Industry Secretary and now in charge of Health, published a policy paper criticising mothers with children under two who still stayed at home.
However, research consistently shows that children who spend long hours in daycare do less well than those who stay at home with their mothers. money offered by Whitehall to fund the new nursery and childminding places – £ 5billion a year directly paid to town halls and another big increase to the £ 16billion spent annually paying tax credits – is still too little to meet the full bills.
Alison King, of the Local Government Association, said councils would need an extra £200million a year and without it ‘the cost will be borne either by parents or council tax payers’.
And critics accused Labour of a new drive to push mothers out to work while encouraging them to let the State bring up their children. Sociologist Patricia Morgan said: ‘ This is ideologically driven. There will be massive expense, but it is only ministers who want it – most mothers do not want their young children sent to State- sponsored institutions and do not want to go out to work.’
Ministers said the new law is intended to go alongside new rights for fathers to take six months off work to be with their babies and the extension of maternity leave for mothers.
Increases in tax credit meant to pay for childcare – from £ 135 a week for one child to £175 a week – are also in the pipeline.
The Early Years Foundation Stage is intended to see young children taught the first elements of maths and language.
Details are yet to be made public, but Education Department officials said it would be developed from systems already in use.
The areas of learning will be personal and social development, communication, language and literacy, reasoning and numeracy, knowledge and understanding of the world, physical development and creative development. An Education Department spokesman said: ‘The new framework for 0- 3s will cover existing good practice of child development. It is based on commonsense ways of observing and encouraging a young child’s development through activities such as play, singing, reading stories and drawing, which takes into account their age and stage of development.
‘Practitionersˇwill then be able to observe a child’s development and discuss this with parents.’
Under the proposed new system, childcare can be provided through schools, children centres or private nurseries and childminders.
Miss Hughes said: ‘This is a radical Bill. It will address the needs of parents in the modern world with the offer of childcare.
‘We are bringing childcare to the mainstream of the services parents can expect to be available as part of the modern welfare state.’
But Miss Morgan, author of studies on the cost of childcare and its impact on children, said: ‘There is no choice for mothers – they are being pushed out to work.
‘ Two-parent families where the mother stays at home to bring up the children will gain nothing – but they will have to pay towards the huge costs of all this.’