Fifteen years ago the National Children’s Bureau concluded that “the achievement of a truly comprehensive system of pre-school provision able to meet the varied needs of our under fives” was not going to be easy. It acknowledged that: “The challenge of changing attitudes and well-established practices and of relinquishing jealously-guarded areas of control represents a discomforting, threatening, process for those concerned.”

The NCB had studied four combined nursery centres which were radical attempts to provide integrated day care and education for children aged 0-5, to meet their real needs and those of their families. But they found that the centres, set up by education and social service departments, highlighted rather than resolved the contradictory attitudes and approaches of the two departments towards the under-fives.

In the 15 years since this pioneering research has anything changed?

In one way it has. In the late 1970s many early years professionals believed that it was wrong for mothers of young children to work. Now their right to work has been recognised, and the indications are that if suitable child care were available, the numbers would be still higher than the current 52 per cent.

There have also been two major pieces of legislation, the Children Act and the Education Reform Act. The Children Act requires authorities to review and regulate services to children under eight, but limits the public provision of child care to “children in need”. Essentially the Act reinforces the conservative view of child care as a welfare function separate from education.

The Education Reform Act does not mention under fives and in devolving decision-making power to local schools, makes it more difficult to plan for a co-ordinated or integrated early years service.These two reforms have made it harder to promote integration of services.

So, it is not surprising that nursery education is still only available for 28 per cent of children, and 88 per cent of it is still part-time - this saves money, but does not address any of the care issues.

The number of state-funded day nursery places, available for 1 per cent of children, has declined by 15 per cent and the social work day-care system has increasingly become a ghetto for disturbed and distraught children. The only increase has been in the private sector where the number of places has more than quadrupled. Such nurseries do offer full day care, sometimes with a teaching component, but only to those that can afford them.

Some 20 local authorities now claim to run a co-ordinated or integrated service for under fives, bringing education and care under one administrative roof. In almost all cases this has been a political rather than a professional initiative. The degree to which administrative reform has actually taken place varies considerably. Strathclyde, the first authority to try to integrate services (see below right), transferred responsibility for all under-fives services to the education department.

Other authorities have transferred some but not all social service provision; or have transferred administration, but retained rights of access and referral for places. Still others merely have joint working parties, or co-ordinating posts. Although nursery schools can be co-opted into an early years system, it is very difficult to incorporate nursery classes or reception classes which take four-year-olds, because they are part of self-governing schools, and locked into the formal education system.

But administrative reform does not guarantee change Many hurdles remain, apart from restrictive legislation and gross under-funding.

The main obstacle concerns the different training, pay and conditions of work of teachers in education and nursery nurses in day care. Day-care staff, most of whom hold the NNEB, (two-year post-16 vocational training) work a 3738-hour week and a 48-week year, conditions far less favourable than those of teachers. A teacher’s starting salary is above what many nursery nurses can ever hope to earn. Putting the two kinds of staff together in an integrated setting almost always leads to friction.

Different solutions have been tried. Strathclyde developed an integrated scale for its pilot “community nursery” programme, whereby all staff were appointed on the same conditions of service, but were graded according to qualifications, skills and experience. Some nurseries were run by non-teachers, which was bitterly resented by teachers. The Islington integration model, developed for Margaret McMillan nursery (see below left), was firmly teacher based, retained teachers’ conditions and pay, and nursery nurses were relegated to relatively junior positions - causing a three-month nursery worker strike.

One way to resolve this tension would be to develop an integrated training course as an alternative to both teacher training and nursery nurse training. A few universities now do this - in particular Manchester Metropolitan University. But even although the course is of degree status, it does not meet teacher accreditation requirements, which are subject based. And if a higher level of training becomes accepted, what happens to all those NNEB workers? Should they be required to retrain?

Even if such courses were accredited, staff trained in “educare”, and professional barriers abolished, there remains the problem of pay. In order to meet parents’ and children’s needs, “educare” teachers would have to work longer hours, or do shifts. And to pay on a pro-rata basis for the hours worked in an integrated setting would make educare nursery teachers the most expensive of all teachers to employ.

Costs in an integrated setting also present problems. Nursery education is traditionally free but day care is not. Different models of integration have adopted different solutions, but all have made some charge to parents for the service.

The Labour party task force on early childhood, announced this week, has a brief to come up with an integrated system, and is tackling some of these near-irreconcilable problems. Any Government serious about integration will have to revise the legislation, review training and pump money into the cash-starved system. But other than that - in itself a giant leap forward - there is no obvious solution about what services to develop.

There are wonderful examples of innovation, here and abroad. But given the complexity and diversity within the UK, and the difficulties of arriving at a consensus between all the pre-school protagonists, perhaps the way forward would be to specify a framework of expenditure, a level of service and a proportion of workers with educare qualifications, but leave it up to local authorities to decide what models, public, voluntary or private, they wish to support.

We could, of course, go on as we are, but, as the NCB said in 1981, there are better things to hope for.

Helen Penn was previously assistant director of education in Strathclyde and is now senior research fellow at the Institute of Education.