ABSTRACT
Over the past five years, I have carried out two sets of interviews with Early Years Professionals we have trained, some in the autumn of 2008, nearly two years into the New Labour EYPS programme, and some in the spring of 2012, four months after the commencement of the Coalition Government EYPS programme. The views that they expressed were quite surprisingly similar across the two time periods, and all were broadly positive about their ability to contribute a valuable set of skills to the society that they inhabited. The ideas outlined by the 2008 interviewees made such a deep impression upon me that when Wendy Holland and I were asked to write a chapter on the future of EYPS in the period between the New Labour and Coalition programmes (at a time of concern that EYPS may be lost to deep cuts in public funding) I tried to do justice to such conversations by writing the following:
It is very easy to make a quick saving on early years when national resources are stretched by leaving families in difficulty to fend for themselves, but several years hence, even greater expenditure is needed to deal with the problems that condemning small children to poverty, poor parenting and broken communities create . . . If we can show children that their community cares for them, then they will be far more likely to grow up to care for their community; to truly embrace David Cameron’s concept of ‘the Big Society’. The EYP role has been designed to sit at the hub of such communities, and as such, we would urge those with the power to allocate funds to keep faith with the project, particularly within disadvantaged areas, allowing EYPs to blossom into the pivotal task that awaits them in the troubled local communities of post-Thatcherist, post-credit crunch Britain.
