Regulation of Early Education and Childcare :3

Regulation of Early Education and Childcare

Chapter 1: Why Regulate?

1. The Better Regulation Task Force, appointed by the Government to advise on its approach to regulation, has identified seven main policy objectives that justify regulation:

To protect and enhance the rights and liberties of all citizens;
To promote a safe and peaceful society;
To safeguard health and safety;
To protect from abuse or failures in the market economy;
To enhance the environment;
To restrain citizens from 'damaging' themselves; and
To collect taxes and ensure that they are spent in accordance with policy objectives.

2. Some of these objectives may overlap and not all will apply in every case of regulation. In relation to childcare and early education there is a clear need to protect rights and to safeguard health and safety: young children themselves are not able adequately to do so. Parents will seek to act in the best interests of their children in choosing particular sources of childcare and pre-school education but this is not enough. The operation of the market economy gives rise to a diversity of childcare and early education that makes it difficult for parents to act as 'informed customers' while care of groups of children raises health and safety issues with which parents may not be familiar from experience in the home.

3. Regulation of childcare and pre school education also ensures that taxes are spent in accordance with policy objectives. Early education is largely funded from taxation and it is right to expect that it should meet requirements and demonstrate continuous improvement over time. While many parents purchase childcare, considerable public resources will be supporting provision over future years. In addition to local authority funding, the childcare element of the new Working Families Tax Credit will support parents' use of childcare, to the tune of some £25-30 million annually in Scotland.

4. Given the vulnerability of children and the contribution that good quality childcare and early education can make to their development, we believe that regulation backed up by statute is a necessary element in ensuring satisfactory standards. This principle is generally acknowledged. That said, there may be scope in addition for adopting other approaches to ensure that satisfactory standards are met. Other approaches include voluntary self-regulation, the dissemination of knowledge and information, and economic incentives.

5. In looking at regulation of early education and childcare we have three key aims:

of ensuring children's safety:

children, and particularly young children, lack the ability adequately to ensure their own safety, even in premises designed specifically with children in mind: regulation of the type of premises within which education and childcare takes place, and of those staff responsible for its delivery, is necessary to provide reassurance that children's safety from physical and mental harm is not put at risk (although concern for physical safety should not be taken to levels where risk avoidance, such as fear for the tiniest scratch, hampers children's development);

of ensuring that children's experience in early education and childcare promotes their personal and social development as well as being enjoyable and stimulating:

risk should not be seen simply in terms of immediate adverse effects through injury or distress: the care and education of children makes a profound impact on their future development - its quality needs to be high to ensure that this impact is positive;

of ensuring that the regulatory burden is not disproportionate and that provision of similar types is subject to similar regulation:

excessively burdensome regulation does not merely affect providers, but also children and their parents by potentially denying them access to good quality care and education.

6. These aims give us two fundamental issues for attention:

what to regulate; and
how to regulate.

7. On what to regulate, the key questions are the types of provision to be covered such as

care in institutional settings such as nurseries, crèches and after school clubs;
care in domestic premises by childminders; and
care (other than by parents themselves) in the parental home by nannies and au pairs

and the age range to be covered. On how to regulate, we need to consider input standards such as staffing requirements and space ratios. But we also need to consider how far and in what ways regulation can also be based on assessment of outputs (attempting to judge the quality of the child's experience). Both have implications for the institutional framework for regulation. Throughout our examination we need also to take into account the need for proportionality, that is, having regulatory requirements which reflect the risks arising from satisfactory standards not being met.

8. Against that background, the objectives of the present paper are:

to set out how the existing system operates;
to consider whether the current scope of the regulatory system is correct as regards the types of provision which are covered by regulation and the age range of children for whom provision is regulated;
to consider how the varying approaches to registration, inspection and development of early education and childcare might be brought closer together;
to consider how the different sets of standards for public and private/voluntary provision might be harmonised so that provision of similar type is subject to the same standards; and
to gather views on these matters.