Nursery Education and School Welfare

Of all the areas of education none suffered more during the post-war period than nursery schooling. ¹ Whilst there were sound educational reasons for nursery schooling during the Second World War they were developed primarily to support mothers who were required to work. With the war over and the economic raison d’etre removed, although the educational justification remained, successive governments ignored the need for their further development. There were many reasons for this neglect. There was initially a view that mothers should stay at home and be with their children. Then a traditional attitude that the younger the child the less important is their education and the less well-qualified a teacher needs to be, a belief reinforced by differences in pay scales between elementary and secondary school teachers in pre-war Britain which still continues in many countries. At its crudest the suggestion is that very young children can only play whereas older pupils deal with more difficult subject matter so their teachers need to have more knowledge. The reality as any experienced teacher knows is that different, rather than lower or higher, levels of skill are needed to cope with pupils of varying ages and abilities.