Nurseries, childcare and class struggle in England

Tom Haines-Doran explains why Labour’s plans to establish 3000 school based nurseries are deeply flawed.

The Labour government has been desperately trying to promote its ‘achievements’, in the face of diabolical polling and repeated crises. If you’re wondering what these are, you can go to https://whathaskeirdone.co.uk/. Many are extremely modest, especially compared to the scale of reform needed to improve our lives. 

But the plan to deliver 3,000 school-based nurseries does catch the eye. With some initial implementation already on the ground, it promises to create 100,000 new nursery places at a total cost of £140 million. Campaigners have cautiously welcomed the proposals, because they at least begin to address some of the big problems in childcare provision.

This is not ‘austerity’ 

The early years sector – meaning childcare and education before primary school – is not suffering from ‘austerity’, at least in the commonly understood sense of being starved of public funds. Indeed, total state spending on it is now £8.7 billion a year – double the figure of two years ago, and eight times as high as it was in the early 2000s. This is in stark contrast to education and welfare budgets, which have declined or stagnated in recent years.

Subsidies mainly take the form of ‘entitlements’, essentially government-supplied vouchers which parents can use to purchase their children’s access to nurseries and childminders. Successive expansions in entitlements has meant more categories of children, by age and circumstance, are eligible to ‘free hours’. 

The expansion of entitlements has dramatically increased demand for early years services, but supply has struggled to keep up. The vast majority of new supply has been through the private nursery sector. But many private nurseries are struggling to offer good quality services for the amount of cash the entitlement system provides. 

Providers are failing to cater for an increasing number of children with special educational needs and disabilities, which requires specialist staff training and lower staff-child ratios. This is especially the case in more deprived areas. And they also face increasing costs from rises in the national minimum wage, National Insurance contributions and business rates.

Nurseries are also steadily being bought out by big private nursery groups, who siphon fees and public funding into the pockets of financial investors, and private landlords. Investors are attracted to low risk returns. In wealthier areas, nursery groups can rely on parents being able to stump up extra fees and charges (‘top-ups’) to keep investors’ income streams steady. But they are wary of more deprived areas, where parents earn less and have less secure work. These factors generate competition between providers for parents in wealthier areas, and nursery closures in other areas. This has created ‘childcare deserts’.

The great irony here is that the primary purpose of expanding entitlements has been to get parents, especially women, doing more paid work, to fill gaps in the labour market. The CBI – Britain’s employers association – has lobbied hard to increase entitlements for many years, especially following Covid-19 and Brexit and its associated politics of attacking and reducing inward migration, both of which reduced the amount of people available to work.

The CBI’s lobbying documents point to particular shortages in hospitality and retail sectors – sectors typified by low pay, poor working conditions, and part time work. However, due to the uneven distribution of provision and cost of top-ups, the greatest beneficiaries of the expansion of ‘free hours’ have been families with higher incomes. 

So the policy of entitlements does not work in the interests of capitalists looking for cheap labour, nor in the interests of women needing childcare to access, or access more, paid work, except, perhaps, in marginal cases. But it very effectively lines the pockets of international financial investors, in a process typical of the ‘financialisation’ of public and social services in recent years.

The invisible work problem

In the face of these problems, Labour’s plan to open 3,000 school-based nurseries must surely be welcomed, because it promises to begin to address some of the problems of inequality of access financialised provision generates. Using spare capacity in schools – itself a consequence of declining birth rates – promises to reduce some of the infrastructural costs facing providers, making provision more cost-effective and less risky in more deprived areas. But the plan underestimates the costs and practical considerations involved in converting classrooms to nurseries, which require very distinct facilities. 

The plan also does not deal with the main problem – an exodus of skilled and qualified staff from the sector, and difficulties recruiting new staff. There has not been an updated national workforce plan for the sector published in nearly a decade. Successive governments have believed that the early years sector, rather than government, is best placed to lead on staff recruitment and development. The government’s role has therefore been limited to using its funding powers to ‘nudge’ the industry to recruit more staff and train them better.

The fundamentally neoliberal common sense behind this approach obscures the obvious disincentive for the government to take greater political responsibility for staffing. Any successful workforce plan would require a vast increase in state expenditure. As it stands, the mixture of poor funding, relative to need, and financial extraction, means that the sector does not have the resources to attract, train and retain early years professionals.

Many of those who work in the sector are dedicated professionals, and often stick it out despite the stresses of the job, and the lack of career progression and low pay. Educating and caring for children with special educational needs and disabilities requires specialist training, but, because of staff shortages, providers are unable to release staff to undertake it, meaning that staff have to muddle through at the expense of their own wellbeing. Staff burnout leads to further staff shortages and burnout for the remaining staff. It’s a vicious cycle familiar to anyone working in primary and secondary education or healthcare.

To compound these problems, many who might like to work in the sector are effectively excluded from it. Studies have shown that many nursery managers are reluctant to hire men, because of their own prejudices or those of parents. Early years work involves intimate care – changing nappies and the like. The idea that men are inherently more of a threat to children in these circumstances is not supported by evidence. Rather than focusing on gender, abuse of children is much more appropriately addressed by maintaining adequate safeguarding measures – something made more difficult by high staff turnover and a lack of financial resources. There is also a distinct lack of racial diversity in the workforce. Yet, research shows that more diverse early years workforces improve outcomes for children.

Nurseries on the front line

What could all this mean for a resurgent left that is beginning to challenge Labour’s hegemony, but in the context of a new and vicious right? 

The Green Party and leading figures in Your Party, such as Zarah Sultana, have made ‘universal free childcare’ a central ambition. This is an advance on the traditional neoliberal approach because it breaks the link between paid employment and eligibility. It also suggests that entitlements would extend beyond the current limit of 30 hours a week, at termtime.

Universal free childcare is a good, populist meme, but much work has to be done to translate into concrete objectives. As a first move, it would be good to stop calling the service ‘childcare’, which fails to recognise the education and skills children acquire in nursery and through childminders. What we’re really talking about is ‘early childhood education and childcare’ (ECEC).

Making this move allows us to focus on the work of ECEC professionals, recognising that they are responsible not only for the important work of caring for young children, but also for their education, psychological & physical development, and socialisation. Any serious programme of the left will need to convincingly articulate how it will recruit, train and retain ECEC professionals. This is not just about pay, but also the control workers have over their working environments, the value society places in them, and the benefits this can bring to children. 

Clearly, such aspirations are incompatible with private ownership of settings. But, although working conditions and the quality and accessibility of provision is generally better in state-maintained settings, this part of the sector also requires significant investment in staff, and so state ownership is an insufficient aspiration.

Of course, real change is unlikely to come about through propagandising alone. Unfortunately, except for some workplaces in the public sector, ECEC workers are generally not unionised. Although there have been some inspiring and successful local campaigns against nursery closures, they have generally not created long-lasting and broad activist networks.

We can learn much from international experience. For example, from late 2025, all children in New Mexico, United States, now have free access to ECEC services (except, as with other public services, those excluded due to migration status). This has been a major win for the OLÉ network of ECEC workers, parents, and other community members. It represents a big expansion of provision, with immediate pay rises for staff.

The campaign bears some of the hallmarks of what Jane McAlevey described as ‘whole worker organising’. The whole worker approach recognises that workers have common interests and concerns with others outside their job, in their local communities and beyond. Uniting workers’ struggles with community campaigns can strengthen working class power and achieve material gains.

To their credit, many in the new, activist left in the Green Party, and in Your Party, understand that winning material gains does not just depend on getting people elected. Both parties are developing and discussing forms of ‘community organising’, in various ways. A focus on ECEC provision and more widely on education must surely be central to these efforts. 

How many people thinking of voting for Reform UK know that their main childcare policy is to create tax incentives to encourage parents (read: ‘mothers’) the ‘choice to stay at home’, promoting the return to traditional forms of maternal childcare within marriage? Yet state spending on ECEC is widely supported, including by less radical ‘swing voters’. The far right’s rise therefore presents huge battles to come in this area, in every community.

Every neighbourhood has nurseries and childminders. ECEC workers typically live in the community they work in, and are absolutely essential to its functioning. As the OLÉ movement, and others like it, have shown, this affords them considerable potential power. No strategy to win can succeed without considering how this potential can be realised.

Note: This article focuses on England. Scotland and Wales rely less on market-style entitlements and private provision, with stronger local authority planning and a clearer focus on the educational benefits of ECEC than labour market activation. Both the Scottish and Welsh systems face staff shortages and funding pressures, however.