Introduction

A society can be judged by its attitude to its youngest children, not only in what is said about them but how this attitude is expressed in what is offered to them as they grow up. On that criterion we have made more progress in Britain over the past five years than in the whole of the previous thirty. The landscape of early childhood services has been transformed, but the trees are still quite sparse and most of them are only saplings, vulnerable to the winds of economic downturn or the whims of politicians.