Leader of the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg today attacked the Government for failing to tackle inequality in childcare and early years education. In a speech to the 4Children conference in central London, Nick called for the nation’s childcare strategy to be focused on quality and equality of access. He also criticised the Government for failing to plan for the effect on education of large numbers of extra pupils who do not speak English as a first language, calling for a greater emphasis on developing good English skills in the pre-school years.

The full text of the speech is below (check against delivery):

Thank you for inviting me to speak to you today.

I was asked to talk about building opportunities for children.

I’ve always thought that building opportunities should be what government is all about.

It’s certainly what a Liberal Democrat government would be about.

And it’s why I am determined to put education at the heart of everything my party stands for.

The sad truth is that, in Britain today, opportunity is in short supply for too many children.

A child’s chances in life are more determined by his parents’ income than anywhere else in the developed world. Social mobility is grinding to a halt. Inequality is rising.

A poor, bright child will be overtaken at school by a richer, but less bright child by the age of just seven.

And family background doesn’t just determine a child’s success in life - it even affects the number of years he’s likely to live.

I bet there’s no-one in this room who thinks that’s fair, who thinks that’s right.

But the question for all of us is: how can we change it?

How can we build a fairer Britain in which every child can make the most of their unique talents and abilities?

How can we build a Britain of opportunities for everyone?

I want to talk today about the early years.

As everyone here knows, the first few years of a child’s life determine a huge amount about their future chances in life.

So that’s where I want to start.

I’ll be giving a series of speeches in the next couple of months setting out my vision for improving our education system - for children and adults of all ages.

But today I will be focusing on the support and opportunities government should be delivering for families and for children in the pre-school years.

It is absolutely vital that our approach is not prescriptive. Because every family is different.
And it is clear that when services are designed to make life easy for government, or local councils, instead of families, far too many people fall through the gaps.

The services we offer must be built for real people who struggle with real, everyday challenges like balancing work and home life, health problems, or relationship difficulties.

Because there is no one-size-fits-all life.

So support - from maternity pay through to childcare subsidies - must be structured to give as much flexibility as possible to families.

By allowing families to get the support they want, instead of requiring them to fit in with someone else’s system, we will be able to reach out to the most disadvantaged families, who just don’t get the support they need at the moment. And so help the children who need help the most.

It starts at birth. I want to extend maternity, and paternity leave, and explore ways to make it interchangeable between parents.

It’s totally out of step with modern parenting to say that fathers only want or need two weeks with newborn children. That`s not what I wanted when my children were born. In fact, as they turned from babies into toddlers I wanted to spend more, not less, time with them.

And every mother should feel able to stay at home with her baby for the first nine months, at least.

Too many mothers find it impossible to live on statutory maternity pay - and go back to work reluctantly just to make ends meet.

The Liberal Democrats are committed to boosting maternity pay with a "Maternity Income Guarantee", equivalent to the full time minimum wage.

We’re looking at how long we can afford to sustain that level of support - but it will be for a minimum of nine months.

The laudable ambition to increase the number of people working should not blind us to the fact that very small children are usually best cared for by a parent at home.

And that many parents - mums and dads - actively want to take time out from work to care for their children, and they shouldn’t be punished for it.

There is more to life than work: family is what motivates most people and we should celebrate that, not undermine it.

So flexible working should be extended to all parents, with strong tribunals to make it work.

And we must look to Europe for ideas about how can we make all kinds of family leave more flexible.

I welcome what the government’s achieved so far, but all kinds of family leave are still far too inflexible.

In Greece you get two hours a day off for the first 12 months, and can group that up into whole weeks, whole months, or whatever suits - all at full pay.

In Sweden, you can reduce working hours by up to a quarter until the child is 8 - and parcel it up to take, for example, summer holidays off.

British families and British businesses alike would benefit from this more flexible approach - not just immediately after birth, but in those crucial early years of a child`s life too.

The next step is childcare, and pre-school education.

Availability has expanded massively over the last 10 years, and the government has delivered a lot.

But we aren’t doing anywhere near enough in these earliest years to root out inequality.

Sure Start isn’t reaching the people who need it most.

Free nursery places aren’t free at all for many parents.

And workless families are struggling to access good-quality childcare.

I believe we need to refocus our childcare strategy as a nation.

And the focus should be on quality, and on equality of access.

At the moment, the government provides the most financial support to working families on modest incomes - and the least to non-working families on the lowest incomes.

That’s because of the assumption that childcare is just about having someone to look after a child - just the basics, making sure they get fed and don’t hurt themselves.

So if there’s a parent who isn’t working, there’s no need for separate child care.

But quality childcare is about far more than just looking after a child.

It’s about physical, intellectual and social development. It’s about using play and interaction to develop skills and understanding.

Which is why all the evidence shows that good quality childcare - especially at the optimum level of 20 hours a week - can do an enormous amount to improve a child’s chances at school, and then in life.

What’s wrong with the current system is that the most disadvantaged children are the ones who need this pre-school boost the most.

But they’re the ones shut out because their parents, if they don`t work, get precious little help with child care.

The free nursery places scheme simply isn’t working in many areas to deliver the promised free places.

The subsidy just isn’t enough to provide quality care without strings attached - like requiring parents to sign up for additional hours.

So the government’s priority shouldn’t be extending the free entitlement to fifteen hours - with all the costs that will entail.

That money should go to making the 12 and a half hour entitlement really work on the ground, so every child can get their free place even if their parents can’t afford extra hours.

And only then should be pursue the drive towards the target of 20 hours of care free.

The Government`s insistence on linking the provision of subsidised childcare to whether a parent is working or not must be changed.

Money must also be invested in driving up quality.

Too many early years teachers and carers are under qualified.

And that could lead to serious problems from September when the Early Years Foundation Stage of the curriculum is introduced.

I want to put more resources into the transformation fund to improve their training so they really can help children to develop.

And we must make sure this money actually gets spent on training.

The Government set aside £250m - but in the first 15 months of the scheme only £37m was spent.

I want to tackle the complex rules, to make it easier to apply for the money. And work with providers to make sure people are getting the time off for training.

But driving up quality will not, on its own, tackle the unfairness in the system.

Because children from workless families are likely still to be excluded.

That’s why the proposals launched by a Conservative spokesperson on behalf of Policy Exchange would take us in exactly the wrong direction.

They propose giving all families £50-£60 a week per child, from birth to 3 years old to help pay for childcare - even informal childcare that doesn’t do anything to boost learning and opportunity.

And they want to find the money in part by scrapping the childcare element of the working tax credit and from Sure Start maternity grants - money that currently goes to the poorest working families.

This is categorically not the way to help children who are currently condemned to a life of educational failure and poverty. It will do nothing for them.

Instead of abolishing the childcare tax credit, we should be targeting extra money so that children in workless families can have the opportunity to attend a good nursery school for up to four hours each day.

We must invest all the resources we can find to boost vital early years support to the children who need it the most..

The Liberal Democrats are committed to ensuring that all children living in poor, workless households are able to benefit from a high quality, part-time pre-school education.

One way to ensure this is to extend the childcare tax credit to workless families.

It just isn’t right that these most disadvantaged children - who all the studies show stand to gain the most from pre-school - are eligible for less  financial assistance than all other families in the country, including the wealthiest who can get a tax rebate on their childcare costs of around £2,500 per year.

Supporting these children is one of my top priorities.

And we’d find the money by removing people on above average incomes from means tested tax credits altogether.

Moving money from subsidies for the well-off to support the poorest - instead of the other way around.

Unfortunately, lowering the barriers to accessing pre-school education is not enough.

We all know that one of the key reasons Sure Start isn’t reaching the most vulnerable families is because they are hard to find, and often hard to persuade.

So outreach programmes are absolutely vital to bringing people in, and so helping to counter disadvantage in the long term.

We must improve provision and access for disabled children, and those with special educational needs.

All the evidence shows that early identification of learning difficulties is absolutely vital in helping children to do well at school, and later on.

And we must also reach out to communities where English isn’t spoken at home.

It’s children who haven’t got a good grasp of English when they start primary school who often struggle the most.

We must acknowledge that rising migration is putting pressure on some schools at all levels.

12% of pupils now have English as an additional language - up 60% since 1997.

That’s nearly 800,000 children.

And some estimates suggest as many as a fifth of new primary entrants don’t have English as a first language.

First language English speakers are now a minority in about 1,300 schools.

The pressures tend to be concentrated in particular areas - like Newham, in London, where 9 out of 10 schools have English as a minority first language.

And many of them do extremely well, delivering excellent results.

But the latest wave of migration has brought large numbers - of Eastern Europeans in particular - to parts of the country that have little experience of dealing with speakers of other languages in schools.

Even a few children in a class can be a real challenge for a teacher used to strong English language skills.

Especially if children are arriving in the middle of a school year - and in unpredictable numbers.

I’ve lost count of the number of head teachers - Primary teachers in particular - who’ve told me that their biggest challenge these days is coping with the huge number of languages now spoken at their school.

Now, I believe speaking two - or more - languages is a great opportunity for a child. It is an enriching experience.

My mother is Dutch, and I was brought up bilingually.

My wife is Spanish, so my family has two languages at home as well - English and Spanish.

But it’s a daunting challenge for children if little English is spoken at home before they start at school. Refugee children struggle even more as they try to cope with the psychological trauma of fleeing conflict or persecution as well as dealing with a totally new linguistic environment from scratch.

It’s a huge challenge for teachers, too, who often find it hard to structure their teaching around children with such varied English skills, especially if there are many different languages in the classroom.

And it’s a challenge for native English speakers, as well - because their learning suffers too when a class can’t move forward together, learn together, and share experiences fully.

We need to spread best practice from places like Newham, where diverse languages are a part of everyday life, to other parts of the country where these are new challenges.

But in the longer term, I want us to do all we can to solve these problems right at the start.

My party will never support those who believe we should pull up the drawbridge and close our borders to immigration.

The problems stem from our failure to plan for population changes - not from the presence of migrants themselves, the vast majority of whom are keen to play a full and productive role in British society. Better planning is the key way to ensure that immigration works for everyone in every community.

So I want to make sure every effort is made to get good English skills in the pre-school years so all pupils can start on an even footing from day one in nursery school.

Work by the Daycare trust has shown that BME parents identified ‘playbuses’ that go out to the community, and less structured forms of childcare such as ‘mother and toddler groups’ as the most effective mechanisms to help them make that first step into childcare.

So local communities should do more to make those sort of schemes happen.

We must make sure information given to mothers whose English is poor is translated so they know what services they can access for their children.

But once children are in the care environment, there must be a real insistence on promoting English language skills, not simply on exploring language diversity.

Even in areas where native English speakers are in a minority.

In the context of mother and baby groups, promoting English speaking can help mothers develop their language skills too.

We need to find a balance between accommodating people’s different languages and strengthening everyone’s English skills.

Because a common language is the most basic glue which binds us together as a nation. Without a common language it`s impossible to create a common, shared identity.

Speech and language issues are important for all children - estimates suggest as many as 50% of children start school without the speaking and listening skills they need to thrive.

So supporting language skills will be a key plank of our ongoing work in the further development of our childcare strategy.

Education has got to be right at the heart of any attempt to make Britain a fairer place, where people have opportunities to succeed no matter what their background.

And the early years are the foundation stone for a good education, which is the foundation stone for a good society.

By targeting money and support at the children who need it most.

By making sure staff are well-trained and experienced.

And by helping families of all backgrounds to strengthen their language skills.

Opportunity for all children. Flexibility for all families. The right support for teachers and schools. And a common language for all. These are the simple building blocks to give our children, all our children, an equal head start in life.