Introduction

The Nordic countries are renowned for high levels of both equality and tax-funded social service provision. Equality and services are linked by the roles that extensive provision of services plays in enabling women's labour market participation and in ensuring that the capacity to pay does not determine access to services. The connection between institutional structures and equality achievements led Jorma Sipilä to argue in the mid-1990s that social care services are the key to the Scandinavian welfare model. Although Sipilä's argument has since been challenged (see, for example, Rauch, 2007), any reassessment of the Nordic welfare model would not be comprehensive without some analysis of social services.

This chapter examines the place of childcare in the Nordic welfare model since the 1990s. We recognise that a more encompassing assessment of social services as a system would include care of older people and those with disabilities, and would reveal complex patterns of differential development between care fields (Anttonen et al, 2003; Rauch, 2007). However, as such a comprehensive analysis is beyond the scope of this chapter, we focus on change in the organisation and distribution of childcare and related measures in the four largest Nordic countries. We also use data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) to compare the Nordic situation to developments in other European countries with different family policy systems. Our aims are to understand whether and, if so, how policy-induced shifts in the boundaries between the state, market and family have affected social groups differently and to assess the equality achievements and challenges of the Nordic model from a comparative perspective.

Childcare and equality: making the links

Tax-funded services certainly lie at the centre of the Nordic response to family needs for support in caring for children, as Sipilä suggests. However, in Nordic countries and elsewhere, other policy measures also contribute to meeting care needs. The scale, design and mix of these other measures, along with childcare services, together determine the overall equality outcomes of family policies. In addition to services, which provide directly for care needs, governments use one or more of the following measures to make provision for care: monetary benefits, employment-related benefits and incentives for employment creation or market provision (Daly, 2002). This chapter focuses on two of these measures: services and financial benefits (specifically, care allowances).

Introduction

Comparative welfare research now acknowledges that social services, as well as social security systems, define welfare states (Bambra, 2005; Jensen, 2008). In the child welfare field, cross-national studies offer critical insight into the goals, priorities and logic of welfare systems; differences in institutional structures and boundaries; and differences in the roles and characteristics of professionals, managers and service users in contemporary welfare states (Hearn et al, 2004; Hetherington, 2005). Interview methodologies enrich these approaches, linking stakeholder preoccupations and perspectives to cross-national analyses of system priorities and design (Hetherington, 2005).

This chapter draws on interview data from three study countries to map the strategic challenges confronting child welfare systems and to explore differences in the responses of these systems to the common challenges. Data were collected in Australia, England and Sweden as part of a bigger project seeking to understand the links between the characteristics of the workforce in child welfare services and the quality of service outcomes. The premises of the broader study were as follows. First, social services such as child welfare are primarily constituted by interpersonal interaction. Second, and following from the first, the characteristics of the workforce and the organisational contexts that shape and constrain their practice will be critical determinants of the quality of services for users. The three countries were chosen because two – England and Australia – have historically shared a common approach to child protection, focusing on targeted intervention to prevent abuse and neglect in an otherwise weakly developed system of public supports for parents and children characteristic of liberal welfare states. In both countries, however, there has been much reform activity in the child welfare sector in recent years, with many initiatives aimed at early intervention and gesturing towards more universal support for families. The third – Sweden – offers a useful contrast because child welfare services are embedded in a more universalistic system of support for parents and children, characteristic of social democratic welfare states.

The findings contribute to understanding the difficulties facing child welfare systems of different types – and give some insight into why reform is hard to achieve. Interviews with participants in child welfare systems (in this chapter, senior and local managers and policy workers, as well as researchers) provide some insight into the day-to-day experience of structural features of those systems.