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57
to the desirability of the mother's looking after her child up to this age,
and more than that, the undesirability on health grounds of congregating
children up to this age in nurseries.
While it is accepted as a generalisation that the child's place is with
its mother at home, this must be subject to the qualification of that being
a good home. At one time the limitation was primarily because of the
inefficiency of the mother. To-day, though, it is more the result of
difficulty of accommodation. So frequently applications are received
from mothers for their children to be admitted to the nurseries because
of the unsatisfactoriness of the home conditions. Most often the story
is that the family are sub-tenants, and quite apart from the limited
accommodation available to them, coupled with an inaccessibility to
the garden, there is the added necessity for the child to be quiet.
Such mothers have said that they are willing to go out to work, not because
they need to, but merely to enable them to qualify for the admission of
the child where it can lead a normal life, free from the curbs imposed by
the family's living in overcrowded conditions. For a large number of
such children, of course, admission to the nursery school is as satisfactory
a solution as admission to a nursery.
The failure of a nursery school to meet the needs of the mother going
out to work as much as does a day nursery is partly because the nursery
school does not admit children under the age of two years, but also because
of its more limited hours of opening. The deficiency is not merely a
matter of the reduced number of hours that the school is open each day,
but also that it closes during the times of ordinary school holidays. If
though, it is accepted that for the child of over two the nursery school is
a preferable establishment to the day nursery, it should not be a matter
of great difficulty to arrange for the hours it is open, not necessarily by
any means to be fully staffed all the time as it is not all mothers who
need their children in the longer periods, to be such as would meet the
needs of the mothers. It is an anomaly that the mothers who need to
work pay more for their children to be cared for at the nurseries than
those who do not have to work, but who elect to have their children
cared for at the nursery schools. If the difficulty of the hours of opening
could be got over, then it might be hoped that the child of under two, whose
mother was obliged to go out to work, could be accepted at a residential
nursery.
The nurseries were erected and equipped during the war, so neither
premises nor equipment are up to what before the war would have been
considered a desirable standard. When it was decided that the day
nurseries should continue as part of the Council's welfare services for as
long as there was the demand for the admission of children under two
years of age who could not be accepted at a nursery school, it was decided
to improve the premises, more especially to try to remedy the cold, damp
conditions of some of the rooms, to provide each nursery with some of the
larger items so desirable, but not obtainable during the war, and to
provide more in the way of toys. The approval of the Ministry was
sought, but at the end of the year the sanction to proceed had not been
obtained.