We write as activists, advocates and historians about the ongoing impact of strike action taken by nursery workers 40 years ago and the way activism can nourish the profession. Despite the strike’s success, its history has received little attention until now, when it is being documented and shared as part of a community heritage project coproduced by early childhood education and care (ECEC) workers, students and parents/carers. In this final blog post for this special issue, we reflect on how lessons of successful activism can be learned by today’s activists to inspire them to advocate for nursery workers, children and families.

In 1984, workers in the London Borough of Islington’s council-run nurseries, some of the lowest-paid employees in the council, went on strike for three and a half months. Islington had elected a left-wing Labour administration in 1982, which promised to invest in the nurseries. By 1984, the promised improvements had not materialised and when nursery workers’ concerns were dismissed by councillors, they were spurred to go on indefinite strike. The strikers demanded better conditions for themselves and the children in their care. Their demand for sufficient workers in ratio to each child, ‘one to four and not one more’, resonates with contemporary concern that the relaxed ratios in operation since September 2023 will undermine children’s care.

During 14 weeks of strike action, the nursery workers picketed daily and hundreds demonstrated in their support. Parents and children occupied the town hall overnight and other National Association of Local Government Officers (NALGO) members and community nurseries went on strike in solidarity. The strike ended with an agreed ratio of 4.5 children to one adult, alongside other concessions.

The experience of the strike and the activism it involved was transformative for many who participated. Julia Manning-Morton, one of the strikers, said:

It opened up possibilities in our lives … most importantly, we found a voice and a determination and commitment to stand up for ourselves, children and families. In so doing, we challenged the accepted view of childcare practitioners and presented the possibility of being both professional carers and activists, and that standing up and being an advocate is, in fact, an important part of being professional.

This is reflected in the work of Mitchell et al. (2022) who call for activist ECEC professionals to name oppressive structures and practices as well as taking action to disrupt and transform them.

Revisiting the strike highlights its relevance for today’s ECEC system, which has changed dramatically since 1984. Now, privately owned nurseries provide for-profit childcare, with a growing number owned by investment firms (Penn, 2024). The resulting marketisation of childcare continues to muffle the voices of practitioners, children and families (Roberts-Holmes & Moss, 2021). As the locus of power in the sector has become more atomised in terms of employers, the political focus on ECEC has centralised, making the sector a political football in a very different landscape to the 1980s.

‘The resulting marketisation of childcare continues to muffle the voices of practitioners, children and families.’

However, similarities remain: the system is still fragmented; private nurseries largely rely on a low-paid and non-unionised, mostly female, workforce; and ratios of staff to children have increased. There remains an endemic divide and status hierarchy between care and education in England (Manning-Morton, 2006, 2024).

Bringing the history of the strike, and other histories of activism in ECEC, to the surface reveals a legacy, part of which can be found in the attitudes and actions of those whose professional lives were shaped by the experience of direct action. It might be difficult to imagine a large group of nursery workers taking similar action now, in the context of a highly influential non-unionised, predominantly private sector, but the similarities in the situations faced by ECEC workers and the children they care for, suggests that revisiting the history of the strike has important implications. Linking knowledge of transformative collective action in the past to contemporary struggles could inspire and empower early years professional activists today, building a generative network between the present and the past.

References

Manning-Morton, J. (2006). The personal is professional: Professionalism and the birth to threes practitioner. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 7(1), 42–52. https://doi.org/10.2304/ciec.2006.7.1.42

Manning-Morton, J. (2024). From birth to three: An early years educator’s handbook. Routledge.

Mitchell, L., Vandenbroeck, M., & Lehrer, J. (2022). Resisting the alienation of the workforce. In M. Vandenbroeck, J. Lehrer, & L. Mitchell (Eds.), The decommodification of early childhood education and care: Resisting neoliberalism (pp. 147–213). Routledge.

Penn, H. (2024). Who needs nurseries? We do! Policy Press.

Roberts-Holmes, G., & Moss, P. (2021). Neoliberalism and early childhood markets, imaginaries and governance. Routledge.