Rosa Schling (UCL) - 2025-26 Students
eleanor.schling.25@ucl.ac.uk

Demanding care and meeting needs: Exploring the impact of childcare activism from 1970-2010

In the 1970s and 1980s grassroots activism around childcare grew, especially in urban, working class and ethnically diverse areas of Britain. It included campaigns for more and improved forms of childcare, workplace organising by childcare workers, and the creation of new community-based childcare projects, which often aimed to meet the needs of working class, Black and ethnic minority families. These activities were predominantly local, but there were attempts at wider coordination, through the London Nursery Campaign in the 1970s, and from 1980 the National Child Care Campaign. While this activism was a significant feature of many localities, it has not been fully documented or explored historically.

The provision of early childhood education and care has expanded dramatically in Britain since the 1970s, but access to it is unequal and it remains unaffordable to many. Childcare is primarily provided by a highly marketized, profit-driven sector that employs a largely low-paid and non-unionised workforce. Childcare is for many simultaneously essential and out of reach. This illustrates what Nancy Fraser considers to be a ‘deep seated social reproductive’ contradiction in capitalist society, which has morphed into different shapes in different historical periods. This contradiction gives rise to periodic crises and ‘boundary struggles’ that contest the borders between work and care, public and private, economy and society. It is the connection of childcare activism with this fundamental contradiction that makes it a particularly interesting, and urgent, area of study.

While historians have begun to document childcare activism, questions around its impact and trajectory remain unresolved. This research will use archival research and oral history interviews to further explore grassroots childcare activism. From this initial research, the aims, demands, ideas, practices and new forms of provision that developed from and during activism will be mapped and their trajectories followed into new contexts and spaces of power. By tracing the trajectories of these practices and ideas into new contexts and periods, this study will consider the wider consequences of childcare activism for childcare policy and provision more broadly.

Principal supervisor: Prof. Tom Woodin