UK childcare policy: Navigating choices, challenges and the need for reform In this article, Prof. Dr. Ingela Naumann, University of Fribourg, explores UK childcare policy through the Nordic perspective on parental work, and the struggle to balance choices for families in the face of societal and economic constraints. In spring 2023, the government pledged to expand its UK childcare policy (currently 30 hours free childcare for three- and four-year-olds) to one- and two-year-old children. Finally! I thought, as a Swedish academic who has been researching childcare, gender equality and work/life balance issues in the UK for many years. Sure, the current funding system for UK childcare is insufficient, causing many problems in the sector; however, the fact that a Tory government acknowledged the importance of childcare services for young children was a milestone.
Die Investition in kindbezogene Sozialpolitik ist heute ein zentrales Anliegen europäischer Wohlfahrtsstaaten. Frühkindlicher Bildung und Betreuung kommt die Schlüsselrolle zu, Bildungserfolg und Elternerwerbstätigkeit zu fördern zwecks Chancengleichheit und Armutsbekämpfung. Der international verbreitete Sozialinvestitionsdiskurs lenkt leicht davon ab, dass große Unterschiede in den nationalen Systemen frühkindlicher Bildung und Betreuung bestehen, und diese unterschiedlich in die nationalen Wohlfahrtsstaatsregime eingebettet sind. Am Beispiel Schwedens, Deutschlands und Großbritanniens werden verschiedene Kinderbetreuungssysteme einer kritischen Analyse unterzogen mit Hinblick auf ihr "Sozialinvestitionspotenzial". Die Untersuchung zeigt, dass frühkindliche Bildungsangebote nicht als Allheilmittel zur Vorbeugung sozialer Ungleichheit fungieren können. Falls nicht mit weiteren, auf Gleichheit ausgerichtete Maßnahmen im Bildungs- und sozialen Sicherungsbereich kombiniert, ist zu erwarten, dass sich eine gegenteilige Wirkungslogik der Sozialinvestitionsstrategie entfaltet, die herkunftsbezogene Bildungsungleichheit noch verstärkt. (DIPF/Orig.).;;;The importance of investing in early childhood is widely acknowledged in policy circles. Particularly formal Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) is seen as key to creating equal opportunities and combating poverty by increasing educational achievement of children and supporting parental employment. This social investment perspective has in recent decades supported the rapid development and expansion of ECEC in most European countries. However, the international social investment discourse masks fundamental differences in European ECEC systems and detracts attention from the way ECEC is embedded in the wider welfare regime of a country. This paper critically examines the 'social investment potential' of ECEC systems by comparing an early social investment country, Sweden, with two 'late movers', the UK and Germany. It argues that investing in ECEC is not per se a panacea for social inclusion. To the contrary, if not combined with other, partly 'traditional' equality measures both in education and social protection, ECEC investment may have the opposite effect of increasing social inequality. (DIPF/Orig.).
Feminist welfare-state research has repeatedly pointed to the link between women's social rights and the extent to which they are freed from family obligations. Thus the availability of sufficient extra-familial child care in order to combine work and family life should be a central claim of women activists. Swedish child-care politics of the 1960s and 1970s reflects this logic well: Swedish feminists lobbied intensely for the expansion of public child care. In West Germany, however, second-wave feminists made no major demand for child-care services: German feminist politics does not fit with the assumptions about women's interests underlying most feminist research on welfare states. Rather than assuming a fixed set of women's interests, this paper argues for a dynamic and contextualizing approach to women's collective agency in modern welfare states. It is argued that national variations in feminist politics concerning women's social rights are the result of differences in women's collective identity formation and their reactions to historically specific political and discursive opportunity structures.
AbstractThis paper explores how the Protestant traditions of Calvinist Presbyterianism and Lutheranism have shaped church‐state relations differently in Scotland and Sweden, resulting in different understandings of the role of the state and civil society in public welfare. It finds that high levels of public trust in the state's authority and state intervention in Sweden can be traced back to Lutheran doctrine and institutionally close links between the Swedish Church and the state, while in Scotland trusting independent civil society and its responsibility for welfare reflects the distance of the Presbyterian Scottish Kirk from the state both in theological and institutional terms.
Governments worldwide have sought to introduce greater choice and competition as mechanisms to improve the quality of education provision and outcomes. However, there is considerable cross-national variation in education policy, particularly regarding the role of local government. To explain such differences, this article focuses on recent reforms in compulsory education in England and Sweden. It shows that although governments in both countries have advocated choice, competition and participation, education reform has led to the centralisation of school governance in England but decentralisation in Sweden. Drawing on the concept of 'scalecraft' as a specific form of 'statecraft', it argues that these differences in the rescaling of education policy reflect different conceptions of central–local relations and the role of local government. More broadly, the article shows how national governments strategically use scalar reorganisation (scalecraft) to support broader political goals (statecraft), contributing to a better understanding of the spatial dimensions of public policy reform.
