The ten-year childcare strategy may have thudded on to the desks of early years and childcare practitioners as the festive season got underway. But this particular package - crammed as it is with ambitious pledges to transform the landscape of the sector - will take longer than your average Christmas fare to digest.
The broadly-welcomed proposals include an expansion of free nursery education, an apparent reorientation to concentrate on the sustainability of existing nursery places, rather than creating new ones, an acceleration of the process of integration through the children's centres programme, and workforce reform.
But significantly, two leading practitioners have said it would be necessary to 'unpick' some of the language in the strategy to establish exactly what the Government means. The devil, as the well-worn cliche goes, will be in the detail - or the lack of it.
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