As Andy Burnham begins his premiership by breaking with the Thatcherist neoliberal policies of the past, he has an opportunity to redefine what government believes early childhood is for.
For too long, early years policy has treated childcare primarily as an economic tool. Success has been measured by how quickly parents can return to work, how efficiently funded hours are delivered, and how well children meet predetermined outcomes. This has shaped a system where economic priorities and measurable performance dominate.
Successive governments have promised reform, yet the underlying approach has proved remarkably persistent.
How we got here
The Conservatives expanded childcare entitlements and promoted parental choice through a mixed system of providers. Labour under Keir Starmer largely continued this approach, extending funded childcare while maintaining similar structures and accountability measures.
But there has also been a potentially significant change. Labour began rolling out Best Start Family Hubs across England, drawing on the legacy of the Sure Start programme introduced by the last Labour government. The programme aims to create up to 1,000 hubs by 2028, bringing together services for babies, children and families. Burnham has therefore inherited not only the existing childcare system but an opportunity to build something broader around it.
The core question is no longer whether – or even why – we need more childcare places. It is whether we have lost sight of what early childhood is actually for.
The current system has enabled more parents to work, which is important. But it has also created significant pressures. Providers continue to close. Recruitment and retention remain major challenges. Maintained nursery schools face uncertainty. Funding often falls short of the true cost of quality provision. Practitioners face growing administrative demands while having less time with children.
In England, childcare is largely provided by profit-based businesses. If Best Start is to represent a genuine revival of the broader ambitions associated with Sure Start, it should also provide an opportunity to reconsider what we expect our early childhood system to achieve.
What young children really need
Perhaps most concerning is that policy increasingly values what can be measured rather than what matters.
Relationships, belonging, curiosity, creativity, emotional security and joyful play are difficult to quantify, yet they are the foundations of lifelong learning. When accountability focuses narrowly on measurable outcomes, these essential aspects of childhood risk being overlooked.
This is not an argument against accountability or supporting parents into employment. Both are important. It is an argument for recognising that early childhood should not be designed solely around economic productivity.
Early childhood as public infrastructure
If Andy Burnham wants to present a different vision for the country, he should begin by recognising early childhood as essential public infrastructure.
Burnham has promised to build a “more preventative state”, investing in people’s success rather than paying for failure, and to put the care of people at the heart of government. Early childhood is an obvious place to put those principles into practice.
That means developing a long-term workforce strategy that addresses pay, professional status and career progression. It means creating sustainable funding that reflects the real costs of quality provision. It means protecting maintained nursery schools while valuing the contribution of all providers within a coherent national system.
It also means moving beyond an obsession with school readiness. Children do not thrive because they meet narrow assessment targets at the earliest possible age. They flourish through secure relationships, meaningful play, responsive adults and environments that nurture curiosity, confidence and wellbeing.
If we define success only by what can be measured at five, we risk overlooking what children need at two, three and four, when they lay the foundations for later intellectual, emotional and social functioning.
A genuinely progressive vision for early childhood would place relationships before results, pedagogy before performance measures, and children’s rights alongside economic priorities. It would recognise that play is not the opposite of learning but one of its richest forms.
It’s not ‘the economy, stupid’
During Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential campaign, strategist James Carville famously coined the phrase “the economy, stupid”. More than 30 years later, we know that caring for and educating young children cannot be reduced to economic thinking.
The challenge for Burnham is not simply to spend more money. It is to articulate a different philosophy of childhood. England does not need another government that makes incremental changes while leaving core assumptions untouched. It needs leaders prepared to ask a more fundamental question: what kind of childhood do we want to create?
Children deserve more than a system designed primarily around economic efficiency. They deserve a childhood built on joy, play, belonging and love.
If Burnham is serious about renewing both Labour and public services, early childhood offers the chance to show that policy can be driven by relationships, community and long-term social investment. Best Start provides some of the infrastructure on which that different approach could be built. The test will be what his government chooses to do with it.
That would not simply be a different education policy; it would be a sea change in the way we conceptualise early childhood care and education – and a signal that childhood is valued for its own sake, not just for its economic return.
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