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Dear Sir,
We are grateful for the opportunity of replying to the recent Review* of our Research Report on day nursery care to the Department of Health and Social Security. While Michael Rustin in many ways appeared to find the Report valuable e.g. “insightful and informative”, “valuable changes”, “useful implications”, “account fundamentally right”, at the same time he makes a number of criticisms of the Report which badly misrepresent the focus of the research, the stance and professional views of the authors and the research methodology. He also omits to discuss the recommendations concerning the development of day nurseries as therapeutic and educational institutions. We wish to take up some of Rustin's comments in detail.
Rustin writes: “They hypothesize that children in the care of such a nursery (where the project was based) will be unlikely to develop satisfactorily, and may well deteriorate, and seek to test this view” (p. 90). We actually did not set out to do this (although a minor focus of the Report provides some additional evidence that this is the case1). The main thrust of the action research was not to prove day nurseries put at risk the psychological and social development of children, particularly the under 3′s. This was assumed as a starting point on the basis of research2 for the D.H.S.S. carried out by a Tavistock team led by Isabel Menzies in . The main thrust of the action research was, given this, to see how far it was possible to go in improving the level of care in an ordinary local authority day nursery (within the limitations of the system and resources available).
On the basis of this research, and the earlier Tavistock research, we are