The Story of Childhood (15 page)

The café sells Slush Puppies. Allana's mouth is turning purple. Sienna has dropped a piece of ice on her trousers. A little girl walks past, crying torrentially, and they both turn from their drinks to observe her with interest. Their mini chocolate biscuits are melted and stuck together. Allana pushes the packet at Gloria. ‘You have them, Mum.'

The man came to attend to the silverfish this morning. They went up to Botley last night and spent a lot of pennies on presents for Sienna's third birthday. Gloria has to borrow for things like that – sometimes from her mum and sometimes from the Provident, who come round to the door; you pay them back weekly.

The girls are both tired now and it's not a struggle to persuade them that it's time to go. Sienna says she wants to walk. Allana gets in the pushchair, but the moment her sister sees her there she changes her mind and demands her rightful place. Now Allana wants to be carried.

As she grudgingly walks back up to the bus-stop, Allana is again seeking foliage. She picks up a huge, brown, leathery horse-chestnut leaf. It's as big as her face. She finds a lavender bush and picks some scented stems. She gives one to Sienna and one to Gloria.

Summer ends. On the first day of school after the holidays, the class is truncated. The majority of the children have moved up a year and are starting Reception today, while the new nursery intake has yet to arrive. Allana walks with her nanna along the road towards the sprawl of low school buildings, fiddling with a heavy ring on the hand she is holding. She finds her name peg for her pink hat, and strolls out into the playground once nanna makes it clear she isn't staying.

So Allana begins a new term – without Kayleigh. It's hard to know if she's missing her, or whether her absence will make a difference to her talking. Everyone is feeling funny today, missing home, remembering playmates and where the toys are kept. The nursery assistants are unobtrusively alert to the tension under the sunny sky.

Allana is playing with Mr Toad, a wrinkled, unpretty creature who will be her constant companion this afternoon. She
discusses his movements on the climbing-frame. ‘He climb up. He slide down. He go under.' Sometimes she looks around to check whether anyone else is listening to her, but mostly she aspires to conduct herself unwitnessed. She shows no interest in the other children, who are mainly competing with each other for grown-ups' attention, sometimes with tears and sometimes with tantrums. Allana prefers to be away from adult eyes.

She commandeers a bike with a long wooden trailer and trundles over to her favourite part of the playground, an avenue of thick bushes that connects with an unlandscaped area beyond. ‘Go in the bushes!' she calls excitedly. ‘There aren't monsters. My mum gone in there.' She pauses to savour the isolation before peddling round to the other side of the tarmacked cycling area. ‘Monsters in there,' she reveals, pointing to the primary-school building. ‘He say “I'm gon' eat you”.'

Indoors, the classroom is quiet, and empty but for one boy who would like somebody to read him a story. Allana walks round to the seating area, which contains a small sofa and a big bucket of toys. She removes the toys one by one, naming them as they come: the dinosaur is a monster, the bear a teddy, the dolly a little baby. ‘Sienna, Sienna,' she croons as she pauses to cradle it for a moment.

By the door, the assistants have set up a table with pink play dough. It's home-made and sticky, leaving a wormy residue on people's palms. Allana takes a lump. ‘I break it!' she challenges. ‘I roll it.' She presses Mr Toad's limbs into it. ‘Him very naughty.' Allana has taken her neatly rolled sausage and torn it to bits. ‘Him very, very naughty. Him allowed to do it again?' The other children round the table don't care if she's ruining her dough. Lack of censure can frustrate her as much as its imposition. She seems to have
difficulty distinguishing between the intrinsically bad and what is merely self-defeating. ‘See him do it again! Him sad, him sad.'

Now it's fruit time. Everyone goes outside and sits on squares of carpet on the almost-too-damp grass. There are plates of chopped apple and banana and cups for milk. The assistant suggests they count the number of adults and the number of children. A little boy is squirming, worried about his plastic comb, which doesn't fit in his pocket when he is sitting down. The plate is passed from hand to hand nearly flat, and only a few slices of fruit fall on to the grass, when one girl is distracted by a fly.

Allana has chosen an orange cup for her milk. Would she like a little bit more? She nods and nods, but Miss puts her hand to her ear with an encouraging face until a small ‘please' emerges. By the third refill, she says ‘yes, please' without prompting. The other children are talking about what they'll be when they grow up, but Allana isn't paying attention. Sometimes it seems that it is the communal expectation of speech rather than the act itself that bothers her most. In the next playground, the Reception class comes out. Some of them approach the fence and call over to their friends in nursery. Someone calls for Allana but she doesn't go to them. It's not Kayleigh.

At the end of the day, one of the nursery assistants bets that they've all forgotten how to tidy up. There are new green drawers to put the toys away in. Allana goes to the table of bricks and sweeps some off into the box on the floor. They make a mighty clatter and she turns around to check, unsure that something so noisy can be approved of. It is. She repeats the motion carefully, over and over, until all the bricks are cleared away. Her sticker says: ‘I tidied up.'

Mrs Harrison just about has time to read a story. It's
called ‘My First Day at Nursery', because it's their first day back after the holidays. Allana sits cross-legged with the other children. She looks carefully at the book being held up, though she doesn't call out the answers to the teacher's questions with the rest of the class. When asked directly, she says her favourite colour is purple.

They sing ‘Old MacDonald Had A Farm', and for each verse a different child is invited to choose an animal. Allana picks a cow and, even though someone picked that only two verses ago, Mrs Harrison says it's OK. She asks Allana if she knows what noise cows make, but she doesn't want to say. The first day without Kayleigh, her personal spokesperson, is nearly over. Halfway through the verse, Allana begins to sing along. They finish with ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star'.

Although they're separated at school, Kayleigh still comes round to play. Next weekend, the atmosphere is hot and high in Allana's room. Her visitor is cooking in the plastic microwave. She's making cake and hot chocolate, actually. You've got to be very careful with it, actually. Kayleigh bosses Allana briskly, while bringing out foodstuffs for an imaginary guest: ‘Don't draw on the walls, actually, your mum's already told you.'

Gloria and Kayleigh's mum have been friends for years. Hardly any of the mothers they know with young children are out at work. Gloria would like to get another job eventually, but she knows that for now Sienna won't be left. Gloria hasn't had any trouble herself, but a friend of hers with young children was told that if she didn't get back to work they'd stop her payments. She lasted two days in her new job.

It has been suggested that the government only started to take an interest in child care when it surmised that one way
to tackle this country's appalling levels of child poverty was to get poor mothers into the workplace. But ‘welfare to work' has its limits: more than half of children living in poverty already have a parent in employment. This is also a question of culture. The upper and middle classes have historically paid other people to look after their children to an extent that is anathema to a working-class – and particularly ethnic minority – mother. (More often because of structural imperatives rather than personal choice, child care in the UK remains a woman's province, though this is slowly changing.)

It can seem that policy is based on the assumption that all mothers are desperate to return to work. This presents another culture clash. Gloria is not a middle-class professional anxious to get back to the well-paid job which fulfils her sense of self beyond the home. Once she has paid for child care, returning to work in a college kitchen will barely offer more financial incentive than the benefits that keep her on the poverty line. And she certainly wouldn't have the time to take Allana and Sienna to Snakes and Ladders any more.

The motivations behind the government's ambitious ten-year child care strategy – which aims to provide free nurseries in every community and will compel local authorities to provide care for children up to the age of fourteen – remain ambiguous. It would seem that the emphasis has lately shifted from getting mothers back to work to the impact of early-years intervention on child development.

So what kind of children do the government want adults to raise, and what kind of parents are deemed unable to do it by themselves? A belief in the possibilities of nurture is far from progressive if it is applied only in order to populate the workforce of the future. Granted, a happy, resilient
child will probably go on to enjoy a fulfilling working life as an adult. But that's not all that a life is for.

I remember at a Daycare Trust conference in London the look of blank incomprehension on the face of a Swedish delegate who was asked about the ‘later social benefits' of her country's much-vaunted approach to preschool child care. As she struggled to answer, the Chair stepped in. Perhaps, he suggested, she found the question difficult because she wasn't beholden to the Anglo-American obsession with outcomes. Eventually the delegate offered: ‘We don't regard preschool as preparation for school or work, but as a place to have a happy childhood.'

Similar to the Swedish approach is that of the Italian city of Reggio Emilia, home to a body of pedagogical theory and practice that is admired throughout the world. In 1964, the influential educationalist Loris Malaguzzi founded a network of municipal early childhood centres for children aged from a few months to six years old. (Britain is one of the few European countries where children start school as young as four.) Parents and other members of the local community actively support these municipal centres. Malaguzzi's approach has been described as no less than part of a civil strategy to win back society for children.

Malaguzzi's vision of the child was capacious and optimistic: ‘A gifted child for whom we need a gifted teacher.' He rejected the narrative of schooling transforming children into adults, and believed that children were active constructors of their own learning. Malaguzzi saw teaching as a democratic process – rather than making children fit for school he wanted to make schools fit for children – but found that too often a child's potential was ‘cut into pieces' by the conformity of educational expectation.

Peter Moss and Pat Petrie of London's Institute of
Education point out that Reggio's philosophy was embedded in a particular political context. They note its origins in postwar Italy, quoting an interview with the mayor of Reggio in the 1960s in which he described how the Fascist experience had taught the community that people who conformed and obeyed were dangerous, and that ‘in building a new society it was imperative to safeguard and communicate that lesson and nurture … a vision of children who can think and act for themselves.'

Centres like those in Reggio require enormous financial and human capital, as well as a local community and a political administration that is willing to sustain them. But, celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Reggio's children's services, Harvard professor of education Howard Gardner suggested another reason why this model had not been replicated throughout the world. There are almost anarchic overtones to Malaguzzi's insistence that children can be guides in the teaching process, he wrote. It was a threatening vision: ‘It means that you abandon an approach to life that is purely instrumental, purely financial … in favour of one that recognises the rights of children and the obligations of humanity.'

Nevertheless, elements of the Reggio approach are being integrated by some practitioners of early-years schooling in this country. But if child care is genuinely to centre around children – rather than the employability of their parents – and all children rather than those whose carers are deemed feckless, then much has to change. This country would do well to adopt the Scandinavian model of early-years provision, where child-caring has genuine professional status, with meticulous training and high pay.

Embracing the culture of the pedagogue is one thing. But unpaid child care has an even lower status than the paid kind. And meanwhile, new research is showing that one-to-one care
for very young children is a central determinant in raising happy, secure, resilient children.

In 2003 and 2004, two large and significant longitudinal studies both reported that high levels of nursery care, particularly for the under-twos, led to an increase in emotional insecurity. In the United States, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, which had been following more than one thousand children since 1991, concluded: ‘The more time children spend in child care from birth to age four and a half, the more adults tended to rate them as less likely to get along with others, as more assertive, as disobedient and as aggressive.'

A year later, a UK study – the Effective Provision of Preschool Education project (EPPE) – noted the benefits of early-years education for three- and four-year-olds, finding that nursery care advanced children's cognitive and social skills, especially in those from deprived backgrounds. However, it warned that ‘high levels of group care before the age of three (and particularly before the age of two) were associated with higher levels of antisocial behaviour at age three'.

Then, in 2005, Penelope Leach presented the initial findings of her Families, Children and Child Care (FCCC) study, a five-year follow-up of 1,200 families in north London and Oxfordshire. She found that, at eighteen months, the development of children cared for by their mothers was better than the development of children who had received any other type of child care, including those looked after by nannies or grandparents.