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Dear Editor,
I am pleased to have been given the opportunity to reply to the review by Asha Phillips of my Video Series “Enriching Day Care”.
The provision of day care for young children is at last being addressed in contemporary economic and political debate, the hidden agenda of which is the value of women and children in society. This issue is not only of importance in this country, but particularly at the moment in Eastern Europe where extremely well-resourced day care is threatened.
I regret therefore that the reviewer seems to have missed the main aim of my videos, which is to try to discuss the question of quality in day care - a part of the debate that gets left out in endless discussions focussing on who should pay and where it should be located. Quality care should enable a real attachment to be made between a child and its carer, though the quality of that relationship varies in different settings, and this has implications for a child's development.
Her conclusion that the three videos should be re-edited into one (presumably “of broadcast quality”) shows her lack of understanding of both the conditions under which the videos were made, and of their different purposes - which, it is true, are not stated overtly.
Firstly, they were never intended to be for a TV audience. Hugo Young's recent article in the Guardian (“Shooting the Truth”, 15th