ABSTRACT
The view has been expressed that the period between birth and age 3, in educational and care (if not health or psychological) terms, has been a ‘dark age’. Although there has been much more focus recently on very young children, Elinor Goldschmied and Sonia Jackson (2004: 1) counsel in the introduction to the second edition of their book People Under Three, in the past five years: ‘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’.
