This chapter is about ‘public provisions for children’. This term is used here to encompass a wide range of out-of-home settings where groups of children come together, from schooling, through a range of early childhood, play and out-of-school services as well as group residential settings, to lightly structured spaces for children's outdoor, unsupervised play. It excludes, for the purposes of this chapter, a wide range of provisions working with children and young people on an individual basis, such as, for example, foster care, social work and counselling.

The need to use this clumsy term arises because of the desire to question a more commonly used term: ‘children's services’. There is a dilemma about how to refer to the field to be contested – environments provided through the agency of public policy for groups of children – without using a term (‘children's services’) that, it is argued, already carries certain meanings and values. The chapter therefore uses the term ‘public provisions for children’, while recognising that in practice there can be no neutral terminology.

The chapter explores a particular social construction of public provisions for children: public provisions understood as ‘children's services’. This is treated as a dominant understanding in the UK today, producing public provisions as primarily technical and disciplinary undertakings, concerned with regulation, surveillance and normalisation, and instrumental in rationality and purpose. But the chapter also considers an other social construction with a different rationality and purpose: public provisions understood as ‘children's spaces’. It argues that the meanings we attach to public provisions for children are inextricably linked with social constructions of childhood and our image of the child, which are taken to be contestable subjects produced in the social arena rather than essential truths revealed through science. A different child comes into view with different constructions of public provisions, and so too does a different worker.

This line of exploration throws up various questions: Why does policy pay so much attention to children at certain times? Is it a case of either ‘children's services’ or ‘children's spaces’ – or is it not so clear-cut in practice? What can be expected from children's services as technologies for addressing exclusion, poverty or inequality? In providing for children, what is the place of the local and the particular, and what is the place of the national and the uniform?