By Bronwen Cohen, Honorary Professor of Social Policy, University of Edinburgh

AT the time of devolution in 1999, Scotland committed itself to developing a system that integrated preschool services into education.

The idea, backed by a Scottish Childcare Strategy, was to encourage different agencies to work together, exploring, for example, so-called “full service schools” which would bring the patchwork of family support and after-school care into the local school setting.

This push for “joining-up” was the mantra of the late Sam Galbraith, then first Minister for Education in the new Scottish Parliament. The time was ripe for such a move. Across the UK there was the ambition to increase maternal employment and tackling child poverty. With more local authorities offering early education services than England, Scotland offered a more education-based approach to integration.

So, what happened? Sadly, the story is one of stalled integration and missed opportunities.

Together with colleagues from the University College London’s Institute of Education, we tracked the consequences of preschool services becoming part of education between 2004 and 2018. We compared Scotland’s experience with similar reforms that took place around the same time in Sweden and England.

In Scotland, unlike in England, schools continue to be the major providers of an extending entitlement for three and four-year-olds and the disadvantaged two-year-olds who qualify. An extension by 2020 to the same hours as primary schools will be universal. But, as parents know, this will still not meet the needs of those in paid employment or with other welfare needs. Only a relatively small number of council nurseries offer the extended hours required by many parents. For primary school children, we found there were even fewer out-of-school care services in 2016 than a decade earlier. Despite the enthusiasm for joining up services, the pre-1999 fault lines between early education and childcare are still there, both structurally and conceptually. Scotland seems to lacks any clear strategy to address the gap.

This contrasts in particular with Sweden, which already had well-developed integrated services, but where the move to education derived from seeing these as the initial stage of life-long learning. Since 2004, Sweden has seen a preschool curriculum framework, more whole-day schools and a universal entitlement for children over 12 months, irrespective now of parental employment status and either free or at very low cost. There is some watchfulness over potential loss of the strongly play-based curriculum but the services have enhanced status, and whole-day schools have seen the development of multi-professional teams from preschool and school-aged childcare staff and teachers.

So why the difference and does it matter?

The Scottish Government is, in our view, right to say that its lack of control of important financial and other levers – in particular tax credits – impedes its aspirations for a more ambitious Nordic system.

Reliance on tax credits to create places has weakened local authority leadership and contributed to socio-economic and geographical inequalities in services for under-threes.

It is a matter of great importance because if our goal is recognising the importance of early learning and reducing inequalities in children’s life chances, then we need to extend the universal entitlement to encompass all under-threes.

On OECD’s measures of socio-economic background, Sweden now shows no significant gaps in levels of pre-school attendance, whilst across the UK there are large and significant differences, favouring children from more advantaged backgrounds.

It may be time to transfer our attention from testing for inequalities when children start school towards realising the potential of Sam Galbraith’s joining-up measure two decades ago and developing a coherent system covering the needs of all young children and their families across the working day and year.

Further details on the study can be found at http://crfrblog.blogspot.com/