LAST week I did something I very much regret. In a moment of weakness, I decided to take my bored four-year-old to his council-run nursery in Glasgow for the first time since Unison’s all-out strike began 12 weeks ago. This was an act of moral cowardice, because, like most other parents, I have seen first-hand the effort nursery nurses put into their work and support them in their pay claim.
On this particular morning, however, the prospect of wheeling a supermarket trolley down the aisles with a baby seat balanced on top and a child swinging perilously off the end addled my judgment and I took up the nursery’s offer of two-and-a-half ho
urs a week for every three and four-year-old.
I thought the fact there was no picket line to cross would make it easy to give my conscience a day off, but in fact, the guilt set in the moment I set foot over the threshold. The usual hustle and bustle had been replaced by an eerie hush. The three children who had turned up had been given the run of the place, but - deprived of their usual friends - were playing quietly on their own.
The subdued atmosphere served as a stark reminder of how much is usually going on. Gone are the days when nursery meant simply playing with Lego and finger-painting. Now the children get to cook, sing, draw, use computers and run around outside looking at ants with a magnifying glass.
The emphasis is very much on education, with those in their pre-school year learning important skills such as colour recognition, matching, as well as the alphabet and counting up to 10.
They are taught everything from how to hold a pencil properly to the cultural importance of festivals such as St Andrew’s Day and the Chinese New Year.
Nursery nurses have to follow a curriculum and produce written assessments of the children they care for. As a result, they are often the first to pick up on developmental and behavioural difficulties that may signal conditions such as Asperger’s Syndrome.
It is surely not unreasonable that such wide-ranging responsibilities, common to all nursery nurses, should be recognised with a decent wage.
Despite the strength of their claim, the strike - ongoing in 11 out of 32 local authorities - has been relegated to the inside pages of most newspapers and overshadowed by the rail workers and the firefighters.
Can you imagine the furore if any other service paid for with our council tax was not delivered for three months: if our bins were not being emptied or our sports centres were closed down? But hey, it’s only the future of our children that’s at stake - so no one bats an eyelid.
It took the antics of Scottish Socialist Carolyn Leckie - who last week became the first MSP to be thrown out of Parliament when she tried to raise a point of order on the dispute - to put the issue back in the public eye, and then it was for all the wrong reasons.
When the strike has been reported, the emphasis has been on the impact it has had on working mothers and those who struggle with a squad of under-fives full-time. But the real damage has been inflicted on the youngsters themselves.
By the age of four, children crave structure. They need constant stimulation and thrive on the company of others the same age. With the best will in the world, there is only so much baking of fairy cakes and planting of seeds you can do in your own home. My son is bored and listless. The novelty of being able to spend so much time with me wore off weeks ago and it is now difficult to interest him in doing anything other than watching the television.
Yet he’s one of the lucky ones. He has another year of nursery to go, another year to hone his social skills. There are many others who will start primary school in August without ever having learned how to sit still for more than 10 minutes at a time.
All the nursery nurses I have spoken to are deeply concerned about the impact their action is having on these pre-schoolers. They continue their dispute not because they are particularly militant, but because they have been offered less than their counterparts in other local authority areas.
Nursery nurses in Glasgow, for example, expect to be paid at least as much as those in East Dunbartonshire, and when you think about what their respective jobs entail that’s hardly surprising.
East Dunbartonshire, after all, encompasses areas such as Milngavie and Bearsden, where the majority of the children will be financially secure and well supported. The most serious problem workers there are likely to encounter is trying to stop parents parking their 4x4s on the yellow zigzags outside the school.
Many nursery nurses in Glasgow, on the other hand, are dealing with severe social deprivation. Their charges include the progeny of drug addicts; their duties include giving evidence in child abuse cases.
While other local authorities seem close to settlement, the dispute in Glasgow appears to have stalled. According to some, the city council is dragging its heels. No doubt it is worried it will have to raise council tax even higher to fund whatever deal is eventually struck.
Such fears are understandable. What is less so is the First Minister’s reluctance to intervene and knock heads together.
Education was supposed to be New Labour’s No 1 priority, while the provision of nursery places for all three-year-olds in Scotland was a central plank of the party’s policy in Scotland.
Yet when the strike made this service impossible to deliver, Jack McConnell effectively washed his hands of the whole affair. Worse than that, he actively inflamed the situation by blaming the "macho men" on both sides for the impasse, a criticism that diminished women twice: firstly because it trivialised the very genuine plight of female workers being forced to live on substandard incomes, and secondly because it implied they lacked any control over their own destinies.
Last week’s announcement that teachers - some of whom work in the nurseries involved - are to get 10% over four years in the first pay negotiations since the McCrone agreement must have seemed like yet another slap in the face.
When the First Minister finally sets a national review of pay and conditions in motion, he needs to ask himself what he really wants from pre-schools: are they to be glorified crèches or the all-important first step on a ladder of lifelong learning?
If it is the latter, then nursery nurses must be trained and treated as professionals with a pay structure to match. He is always telling us that our children are our future; perhaps it is about time he started investing in them.
