Childcare, Choice and Social Class

1
Childcare, Choice and Social Class

• Carol Vincent, Stephen Ball and Annette Braun
• Centre for Critical Education Policy Studies
  Institute of Education
• University of East London
• December 15th 2008

2
Outline

• The research projects
• Choice and class
• The market in childcare
• Choosing childcare
• - the practicalities
• - relationships with carers
• - choosing safety/choosing intimacy
• - segregation
• Some concluding thoughts

3
The working class research project (2005-7)

• 70 families in London 36 in Battersea, 34 in
  Stoke Newington
• 28 have African/Caribbean origins, 29 white
  UK/white other,
• 8 Asian subcontinent
• 30 are lone mothers
• Ages range from 16-40. 8 are young mothers
• 40 live in council/HA accommodation, 13 live
  with family
• Diverse educational qualifications 22 have
  either no
• qualifications or O levels/GCSE, 14 have FE
  qualifications,
• 8 have degrees (obtained through
  non-traditional routes)
• 28 women dont work outside the home, 18 work
  f/time,
• 17 work p/time, 7 are students.
• 28 families have children in full time
  childcare

4
The middle class project(2001-4)

• Located in Battersea and Stoke Newington, London
• Service class families
• 57 mothers, 14 fathers, from 59 families
• A highly educated group (e.g 46 of mothers
  having post graduate qualifications)
• Mostly white (except 3)
• Mostly in heterosexual partnerships (except 1)
• Mostly owner occupiers, no-one in public sector
  housing

5
Choice

• Since the status quo is inequitable there is
  every reason to believe that extending choice to
  everyone should produce greater equity.
• Michael Barber
• New York Times 13th January 2006

6
Researching choice

• Most of the research is around choice of
  primary/secondary school (see e.g. Ball 2003)
• Key role of mothers and the importance of the
  affective but in other respects choice-making
  is the site of significant class differences
• Middle class parents are understood to be in
  possession of the skills, resources and
  inclination with which to choose a school
• Anxiety and strategy
• Amongst working class families attachment to
  local, familiar, communal. Importance of the
  practical.
• These priorities are not represented well, if at
  all, within choice policies, which privilege the
  logics of individualised families and the
  maximisation of their self-interest.

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Choice and childcare

• Marked increase in provision under New Labour.
• Childcare redefined as public, not private, issue
• Mixed economy of provision
• A peculiar and impossible market?

8
The morality of childcare choice

• Duncan and colleagues believing people make
  decisions around childcare and paid work in an
  individualistic and impersonal fashion is a
  rationality mistake (Duncan et al 2003,
  Carling et al 2002)
• Parental decisions around childcare are a complex
  mixture of practical and moral concerns, social
  relations are as least as important as economic
  relations.
• People do not act in an individualistic
  economically rational way. Rather they take such
  decisions with reference to moral and socially
  negotiated views about what behaviour is right
  and proper, and this varies between particular
  social groups, neighbourhoods and welfare states
  (Duncan et al 2004 p.256).

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Making a continual enterprise of ourselves
(Gordon 1991)

• I was just getting over the childbirth thing and
  venturing out of the house and people said, so,
  what schools? And I just thought, but shes a
  little baby, but you have to put them down. I
  sort of got panicky, then I researched it. I
  brought the books, The Top 500 Schools and you
  just read, and obviously area, and you just try
  and dwindle it downso I was ringing round when
  daughter was five months old for an
  independent school at 4, and then I worked
  backwards.What I did was speak to the admission
  secretary and said which nursery school do you
  find that seems to have a similar way of
  teaching?, and they give you a list. They cant
  recommend, all they can say is statistically
  speaking we get 6 from childs current nursery
  school and 5 from competitor nursery
  (Suzannah, white with partner, Stoke Newington
  (SN), participant in middle class project)

10
Choice and class

• Suzannahs choice making should not be seen as
  normative
• The practices and meanings of choice are subject
  to significant social, cultural and economic
  variations in terms of what, how, and why people
  choose, and who gets their choices.
• For the working class respondents an alternative
  set of priorities, involving attachments to local
  and communal, are in play.

11
Choosing childcare

• A peculiar market
• Silences and absences relationships with carers
• Markets differently position different
  respondents
• Cost and practicalities
• Choosing safety?
• - Avoidance of unknown carers
• Importance of family
• Choosing intimacy?
• - Home based care
• - Choosing similarity, choosing difference

12
A peculiar market?

• Services required are complex and unusual
  safety, happiness, love
• Infused with emotions positivity, ambivalences,
  compromises and anxieties
• Supply-side led market consumer voice?
• Highly gendered market workers are poorly paid
  and many with low level of qualifications
• Highly segmented and diverse market leading to
  social segregation?
• Parts of the market position parents as
  employers, usually with their own homes as the
  workplace

13
Silences and absences 1

• Consumers have inadequate supplies of information
  about services, especially since their concerns
  are not primarily about pedagogy or child staff
  ratios, but about whether carers will
  sufficiently care for and care about their child
  (Moss 2008).

14
Silences and absences 2

• Both working and middle class mothers had
  difficulty in establishing relationship with
  carers in which they felt they could speak freely
• Friendly, but superficial relationships. Parents
  uncertain as to their claims on carers time.
• Parental priority is to preserve untroubled
  relationships for childs sake
• Co-ordinated care (Uttal 1996), i.e. care that
  arises from practice underpinned by shared
  parent-carer values was difficult to find
• Absence of a vocabulary of care in parent-carer
  relationships.

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The only thing is that theyre putting babies
out in the garden even on a windy day, and I mean
a moderately chilly day. Because I did question
them. Several times Ive questioned it . They
said oh its nice fresh airAnd I think its
something theyve been doing maybe for years and
they are just going to do it anyway, whatever I
say (Tomi, Battersea (B)., participant in working
class project) Judy describes how both her
nanny and her childminder were very much in
control of the care relationship. and I think
one of the problems, the downside of
childminder was that she was one of these very
my way goes people . So nanny took us on
and very much took us on and, again, slightly in
control. I have to say, she, again, even
though shes a nanny, she was quite a, you know,
she ran her show (Judy, SN. Participant in middle
class project)
16
Sometimes I think Oh gosh theyre probably
wanting rid of me? because I spend like ten
minutes or so when I pick her up just talking to
them. .I mean..they dont tend to say anything
like Oh well, Alanis, youve been here for ten
minutes now, its time for you to go, but
sometimes you do feel like, I think Ive been
here a bit too long now (Alanis, B. participant
in working class project)
Judy (SN) moves a child from one nursery to
another (very expensive) one, when the first
became chaotic . So, then we walked down the
road to private nursery and went in and said,
can we look round?
17
Silences and absences 3

• Middle class parents more able to exit
  unsuitable care situations
• Mother-care relationship one of opposing and
  rival standpoints, with the possibility of
  fracture and dissension
• Tensions arise because relationship is both a
  financial and emotional exchange

18
Silences and absences 4 At home carers

• Tension most marked in family relationships with
  individual carers.
• Class-based, emotion-based and exchange based
  tensions.
• Choosing similarity, choosing difference

19
Making a choice

• Markets present differently to differently
  positioned respondents. Respondents in the two
  projects had access to very different circuits
  of provision
• First project a complex and dynamic market, with
  informed and active consumers. Providers included
  day nurseries, nursery schools and nursery
  classes in both the private and state sectors,
  childminders and nannies.
• Second project the childcare market as
  experienced by working class parents was far more
  uniform in terms of provision, and low key in
  terms of consumer activity. Mostly state /
  voluntary sector daycare provision, little
  contact with private providers (1 exception)
• Broader range of pedagogies apparent in the
  private nurseries visited for the middle class
  project

20
Making the choice

• Details of making choices were superficially
  similar for both groups
• The middle class respondents often visited four
  or five providers, and in the process, sometimes
  changed their minds about which type of provider
  childminder, nanny or nursery they wanted
• The working class parents were constrained in
  their choice by cost and by practicalities.
  Mostly they visited just one or two nurseries,
  often not doing so before they were offered a
  place.

21
Costs

• Daycare Trust 2008 Childcare Costs survey
• the typical cost of a full-time nursery place
  for a child under two is 159 a week in England,
  over 8000 a year, a rise of nearly 5 per cent on
  last year.
• In London the cost of a nursery place is much
  higher - typically 200 a week.
• Financial resources varied amongst middle class
  sample full time live-out nannies, as well as
  cheaper, but fragile, patchworks of care
• Working class respondents in paid employment
  heavily dependent on childcare element of WTC

22
Cost and exit

• Mother Private nursery was two hundred and
  ninety-five pounds. And the price list said two
  hundred and ninety-five pounds and I actually
  phoned them up and said, Is that a week or a
  month? and they said, Well, its a week as
  if I was off another planet. So, yeah
• Father interrupting Gold star tuition
  apparently.
• Mother Because thats another thing, current
  nursery is one of the cheapest nurseries around
  (167 pw).
• (Isabel and Mike, white UK parents, Battersea,
  participants in working class project)

23
Choosing safety

• When I got the list of childminders and looking
  through it, Im thinking, you know, because I
  didnt know if I could trust them, I didnt know
  ifYou know I was frightened for him to go to
  somebody and you know, you hear all the stories
  about shaking babies and things like that
  There was one on the list she was a friend of a
  friend that I work with and I knew of herbut she
  didnt have any placesSo thats when I had to
  consider people I didnt know (Claire, black lone
  mother, SN, participant in working class project)

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Choosing safety 2

• You dont know who these people are
  childminders. But nurseries and that employ
  people, and they have safety checks on those
  people so I feel its not exactly a total
  stranger because theyre checked out before they
  are employed and they have references and that
  sort of thing. So in that way I would trust them
  (Andrea, B., white young lone mother, participant
  in working class project)
• Im not hot on childminders. None of my kids
  went to childminders, they all went to my mums
  or nurseryYou see the nursery workers, theyre
  trained, theyve got qualifications, theyre
  always someone supervising on what they are
  doing. They cant be supervised in the home.My
  mum would have been fine. Only my mum.. (Jill,
  SN, black lone mother, participant in working
  class project).

25
Choosing intimacy?

• I didnt like the idea of warehousing.I think
  warehousing a lot of babies together in a room
  didnt really seem particularly healthy to me. I
  dont think from a social point of view it was a
  particularly natural state of affairs having 12
  babies in a room with 4 adultsToo many people,
  too many babiesThat doesnt seem to me to be a
  particularly natural way for small children to be
  raisedTheres a lot less chance of a child
  being battered in a nursery but I thought there
  was quite a high chance of them not getting what
  I would think of as appropriate love and
  attentionYou do need another mummy while you are
  at work
• (Isobel, B. white, participant in middle class
  project)

26
Choosing intimacy?

• I just thought pre-children, a nursery its
  there, its easy, its cheap, to be honest. That
  was the main presumption. And round here there
  just arent very many childminders, or theyre
  very difficult to find. So, that wasnt really on
  the, the list at all. It was private day nursery
  chain which we chose. And it just, when it came
  to it, she just didnt settle at all. And I
  didnt really like it. The, I think it was when
  I looked at it as a non-parent- when I looked at
  it as a parent I felt very differently about
  and she was quite young, she was five months
  and I just felt it wasnt actually right for
  there to be this number of, sort of, little
  babies in this room and, you know, not really
  enjoying it at all. And certainly my older one,
  she just would not- she really disliked it, she
  screamed as soon as she went in, sort of thing.
  So, we just decided after two days it wasnt
  gonna work. And thank goodness for that
  (Kathryn, B. white, with partner, participant in
  middle class project)

27
Trusting the grey market

• I put an ad out in Church Street. I just put an
  ad up laughing. I just leafleted kind of round
  the local area. I just thought Id see if
  anything came my way and it was an incredible
  response. Really, really quick response. We
  got about 12 people really quickly ringing up, of
  whom Id say 7 or 8 were completely barking.
  And then carer was the first one I actually met
  and I just really liked her, and really trusted
  her instinctively and then I phoned up the people
  she was working for, she was already working for
  someone else, looking after 2 boys. . She was
  a student, she wanted cash. Its all been done
  on trust and it has worked. (Anna, SN, white,
  with partner, participant on the middle class
  project).

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Lack of trust

• Im the mum, I dont leave her. Anyway shes at
  the clingy stage, first it was me actually
  feeling clingy and then it started to rub off
  on her..I am going to try and leave her with
  friend from group, but when I leave her, I keep
  checking on her. I have left her in the Sure
  Start crèche about two or three times which was
  OK, but I kept checking on her to make sure there
  wasnt anything going on that I didnt want. Like
  people leaving her with small things about that
  she might pick up, or giving her food when I
  dont want her to be fed, or when shes standing
  because they might think shes OK and then she
  might fall. Just feeling protective (Laura, B.,
  young white, at home lone mother, participant in
  working class project)

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Policy implications Segregation

• In the current mixed economy of childcare
  provision, working class and middle class
  families use different circuits of provision.
• It is clear from interviews with parents in both
  research projects, that the possibilities of who
  their children are, their subjectivities and
  individualities - how their days are structured,
  their activities, for example - who they mix
  with, who cares for them, what they learn (in the
  broadest social sense), and who they might become
  are, for these very young children, shaped by the
  nuances and detail of their parents classed
  locations and practices.

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Policy implications Class and choice

• Choices are framed by norms, of community and
  religion and family, webs of social relationships
  continue to be of importance when seeking to do
  the right thing for children, where doing the
  right thing is located in concrete circumstances
  and social contexts
• Thus, choice is not as purely individualised and
  rational as is often presented in policy
• Middle class families likely to have have
  plentiful and relevant resources of capital,
  which give them a degree of freedom to choose a
  logic of choice.
• Working class families have much less
  flexibility. In using all day, full-time daycare
  (28/70) in order to allow themselves to engage in
  paid work, are working class mothers at risk of
  being labeled bad mothers for not spending time
  with their children?
• Implications for providers
• The apparently low status of childminders
• Relationships between parents and carers