Child Care and Work (Gallup Poll) (Hansard, 20 February 1979)

Following is the full text of my letter toWoman's Own in response to its opinion poll survey:

Deirdre Sanders
Consumer Affairs Editor
Womans Own
Kings Reach Tower
Stamford Street
London
SE1 9LS

8 January 1979

Thank you for letting me see the results of this survey, carried out on behalf of Womans Own. I promised to write to you about my initial reaction to it and to outline what the Government is already doing in the field of nursery education.

First, I thought your survey showed clearly how many women still need to work and how many others wish to do so. I was also fascinated and dismayed to see that so many fathers still have little to do with their children. Those who criticise working women spending less time with their children obviously should turn some of their attention to such men.

The main point of your work though is that there is still a great unmet need for educational and other facilities for the children of working women. We are very conscious of this and we have tried to go some way to meeting this need, as I will explain in a moment. Nevertheless, at a time of economic difficulty I think we can claim credit for having made some progress, and although we realise how much there is still to do, one of the major obstacles (not the only one) is money. The finance to provide all the facilities needed does not grow on trees—it comes in rates and taxes from the pockets of Womens Own readers and others like them.

About 17 per cent. of 3 and 4-year-olds are now in nursery schools and classes, and another 36 per cent of 4-year-olds are in primary schools early. Since 1974 more than £60 million has been made available by the Government through my Department in nursery education building programmes, and the number of children in nursery schools and classes has risen by two thirds to a little over 200,000. A further 213,000 4-year-olds were in reception classes in primary schools.

Last November we announced a major increase in the nursery programme for 1979/80 123W to bring it up to £5.9 million and the total programme for between 1979 and 1982 is £14.3 million. In the Rate Support Grant settlement for the last couple of years we have advised the local Authorities that we expected them to afford to open and run this nursery accommodation. We have told Authorities in this years (1978/79) Rate Support Grant advice that we expect the numbers in nursery classes and infant classes to continue to rise.

Money is also made available to Authorities for building and running nursery schools and classes in the Urban Aid Programme (Home Office) and in the special Partnership Programme for Inner Cities (DOE). But my second major point—apart from the fact that the money available in these ways is not as much as all of us would like—is that in all these cases all the Government can do is make money available. It is the Local Authorities alone who decide whether and how to make use of this money to provide facilities for schemes to help children of working mothers. That is the law. We advise them of course—and it is true to say that we advise that they should give priority to areas wherever the need is greatest, just as we do ourselves in making extra money available for some areas of the Inner Cities. But it is they who decide.

Recently we and the DHSS have been encouraging the Local Authorities Social Services Departments and Education Departments to work more closely together and to become more flexible. In January 1978 we published a joint Circular, in which we emphasised both these points. We provided in the Circular examples of projects already being carried out which emphasise the use of nursery teachers in a variety of Ways and premises—such as on Play Busses or working with Child Minders—we hope that the Authorities will study these ideas.

So far I have talked about small children because it is there that mothers most obviously need help. I know from your previous survey that other help is required for older children. Just as we are advising and encouraging Authorities to make more nursery space available by building or by converting empty classrooms, so too we advise them in building or converting schools to provide facilities which can be used by all the community. This kind of approach is surely needed for many groups including working mothers, but again it costs money both to build and run.

This is the direction in which we must go and we need the right framework at local as well as national level. However, even when the direction is right we need the consent of the local and national community to make the money available.

Margaret Jackson,

(Dictated by Miss Jackson and signed in her absence.)