History: Fully Funded PhD Studentship in Early education, education, education: childcare in the policy and imagination of New Labour’s England, 1994-2003 (RS852)

Funding providers: The National Archives

Subject areas: History

Project start date: 1 October 2025

Supervisors: Dr Sarah Crook and Dr Jessamy Carlson

Aligned programme of study: History PhD

Mode of study: Full or Part-Time study is possible

Project description:

Swansea University and The National Archives are pleased to announce the availability of a fully funded Collaborative doctoral studentship from October 2025, under the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Collaborative Doctoral Partnership scheme.  

This studentship explores the policies and practice of childcare as envisaged by New Labour between 1994 and the early 2000s. The student will use recently opened material held at The National Archives to investigate the politics of childcare, and to consider the ways that it intersected with, and was informed by, governmental interest in poverty, the family, work, and social mobility during this era of contemporary British history. The project will be particularly appealing to students with an interest in the politics of the late-1990s and early 2000s, and students with an interest in the social history of gender and the family in the period. The student will be supported to undertake original oral history interviews with policy makers and childcare professionals alongside archival research, and will receive training to develop these skills.   

It will be jointly supervised by Dr Sarah Crook and Dr Jessamy Carlson. The student will be expected to engage with the research environment of both Swansea University and The National Archives, although there is no residency requirement around proximity to Swansea University. The student will be encouraged to undertake training in oral history methodologies, as well as to undertake training in other approaches as necessary. The student will also be supported to present their work at relevant conferences and seminars.  

The studentship can be studied either full or part-time. 

The majority of the early archival research will be based at TNA at Kew. The supervisory team will support online meetings as the student progresses, so student is not expected to reside near to Swansea University in order to undertake the studentship. 

The student will become part of the wider group of CDP funded students across the UK, with access to events and training delivered in partnership with a range of cultural heritage institutions. 

Project Overview  

High-quality, reliable, and affordable childcare has significant benefits for parents and for children. But ask any working parent about their experiences of finding a nursery and they’ll talk about waiting lists, precariousness, and prohibitive costs. It is thus unsurprising – given its connections to parents’ work and to child outcomes – that childcare is seen as an urgent problem in contemporary Britain. But the issue is far from new. As this project explores, the issue of childcare was grappled with by the last UK Labour government, which saw early years provision as vital to tackling deprivation and disadvantage, and as such their ‘most ambitious social policy ever’.  

But why, given this intense interest in children and their care around the millennium, has childcare provision been such a sticky enduring problem? It is timely to look back at other moments of crisis and possibility, and to interrogate the social and history of care for society’s youngest members. This project, therefore, assesses the imagination and policy around early years care at the start of the New Labour project. 

The aims of the project are three-fold: 

1. To critically assess childcare and early years’ policies in the imagination and political agenda of New Labour;
2. To understand how early years care interacted with other political priorities and with intersecting conversations around gender, work, race, the family, mobility and deprivation, and to consider how these shaped provision;
3. To contribute to social and political histories of this era by inserting children and their care as a major analytical lens.

Research questions include: 

1.  What role did childcare play in the development of the New Labour agenda, 1994-2003?
2.  How did early years care interact with coterminous or competing political priorities, and what was the effect of these interactions for providers?
3. How are conventional ideas about the policy history of the late twentieth century challenged if we centre children and their care?

For more details please see here: https://www.swansea.ac.uk/postgraduate/scholarships/research/history-national-archives-phd-2025-rs852.php