Introduction

The focus of this chapter is on a particular group of employees who have long been central to the welfare state in the UK, childcare workers. Childcare, at least as organised in and across the public sector, is a highly visible element of welfare provision (even if childcare labour itself has for a long time been largely invisible). In part this chapter, and the research that has driven it, is concerned to illuminate an area of welfare work that has tended to be neglected across much of the literature in social policy, industrial relations and the sociology of work more generally. There are, of course, significant exceptions to this and we will call on some of the insightful work that has been undertaken in this field as the chapter unfolds.

There are other important reasons for choosing to focus on nursery nurses. One of the key arguments that will be developed is that while the welfare labour of childcare workers, now termed by government the ‘early years workforce’, has frequently been overlooked, it has come increasingly to be regarded as an important factor enabling the ‘modernisation’ of the UK welfare state (Kessler et al, 2006, p 673). This has occurred primarily as a result of the government's re-focus on childcare across a range of welfare policies, for instance the New Deal for employment and Sure Start, among others. It is also, as with workers in some other welfare sectors (see Davies, 2003, on health workers, for example), a labour force that the government is determined to remake in its own mould.

While many childcare workers, and in particular nursery nurses, have long struggled to combat the widely held view that they ‘simply look after children’ – performing a ‘natural’/private role in the public sphere – many of them are now discovering that they are increasingly centre-stage in relation to a range of important social policy objectives and in recent legislation such as the 2006 Childcare Act for England and Wales (see, in addition, the National Childcare Strategy, 1998: DfEE, 1998; the Scottish Childcare Strategy, 1998: Scottish Office, 1998; see also Wincott, 2005). This new legislation and other childcare policies bear the hallmarks of New Labour policy making, in particular in the emphasis that is given to the issue of parental choice and the provision of ‘high-quality’ services (which, for the government, requires a more highly skilled and ‘professional’ workforce).