Given the growing pressures on families in the context of ongoing austerity policies and the current cost-of-living crisis, as well as the immense financial pressure on early years providers, greater investment is needed from central government to enable early years settings to provide safe, supportive and sociable spaces for families with young children.
When most people think of nurseries, it’s the education and care of young children that first springs to mind. Yet, the role that these settings serve in their communities goes much wider, even more so given the closure of over 1,300 Sure Start children’s centres since 2010. This has been magnified first by the Covid-19 pandemic and now by the cost-of-living crisis, during which time nurseries have acted as vital brokers to diverse kinds of support as well as social networks. Our portrait of one nursery in London, as it and the families it served navigated the Covid-19 lockdowns, drew out the multifaceted nature of these settings’ role and why it’s time to reconceptualise how we think about them, and fund them.
The case study nursery was part of a not-for-profit organisation based in a disadvantaged London neighbourhood. In taking a detailed look at its day-to-day work, we wanted to understand how the spatial constraints produced by Covid-19 and the first England-wide lockdown (in Spring 2020) affected how nursery practitioners built relationships with parents, brokered friendships amongst parents, and facilitated access to different kinds of support for families. We saw just how broad the nursery’s role was before as well as during and after the lockdowns, and how that enabled the nursery to be of even greater support in harder times.
Through interviews with mothers, nursery practitioners and managers, we found that the nursery had long been greatly valued as social infrastructure, to use Eric Klinenberg’s term, a physical community space bringing people together and facilitating social connections.
