manifesto for families launched last week.
The party is also calling for a beefing up of the role of the Children's Commissioner in England to make it 'rights-based', wholly independent of Government and having the same powers as his counterparts in the rest of the UK.
Sandra Gidley, the party's spokeswoman on Women and Older People, said, 'We would offer new mothers the option of receiving a maternity income guarantee equivalent to the minimum wage of 170 a week for the six months after the birth of their first child.'
Free part-time early education for three- and four-year-olds would be extended to four hours a day for 38 weeks, with greater flexibility for parents in how they use it. Class sizes at Key Stage 1 would be cut from 30 pupils to 20 by employing an extra 20,000 teachers to ensure that all five- to seven-year-olds 'receive more individual attention for their educational and social development'. This would be funded by abolishing the Government's 'misguided' Child Trust Fund.
Promising to implement key elements of Labour's ten-year childcare strategy, the Liberal Democrats said they would create 3,500 children's centres by 2010 and all school-age children would be offered wraparound care by schools opening from 8am to 6pm.
'We would make sure that responsibility to co-ordinate this remained with LEAs, without adding to the workload of individual headteachers,' the manifesto stated. Other commitments included the creation of a 'children's profession', with a new qualification of qualified early years teacher 'at the level of current teaching qualifications', as well as a professional body for early years which could strike off the register staff who broke its code of conduct.