Guess which end of the scale nursery nurse and childminder are ?

BTW - the responsible thing is not to get a job if you have a young (pre-school) child, but to raise and socialise it. Back in the dark days before we were all enlightened it was done by a class of people called ‘mothers’.

Of course they can win. The thing is, if you have three different traits that make you a completely worthless employee, you don’t win much by dropping one of them.

But I have every confidence that if we started to value childcare as a career more highly, encourage continuing professional development and - crucially - raise the pay, then we’d end up with a better motivated, plain better workforce.

Absolutely - the more money you offer, the larger your pool of applicants will be, so you have a better chance of hiring some decent people.

I wonder if we’re overlooking the economic reality here, though. Decent childcare requires one carer per small number of children. You have to pay enough for childcare to pay for the carer’s salary, the employer’s share of taxes on that salary, the rent of the premises and so on.

That means that the child’s parent has to earn enough for all that, plus enough to pay his/her taxes, travel costs, extra clothing costs and so on.

Maybe we sould realy be saying “If you want decent childcare, stay at home - it’ll be cheaper.”