Sue Owen and Marlene Karlsson tell us how the International Family Day Care Organisation (IFDCO) came to be...
By the 1980s childminding in the UK was firmly established as the largest provider of full day care for young children. It had its own professional association set up by and for childminders in 1977, local authorities were taking seriously their registration, inspection and support responsibilities, and it had even had its own BBC television series and Open University training course. However, little was known about childminding in other countries, so NCMA (National Childminding Association) staff were delighted to be approached by Swedish family day care specialist Malene Karlsson who wanted to plan a meeting of Family Day Care (FDC) organisations from around the world. We started small (but enthusiastically) with a meeting in Amsterdam in 1985 attended by a group from the USA, Britain, Sweden, Lebanon and the Netherlands. This meeting agreed that some of the aims of an international organisation should be to share information about practices across the world, to help countries to improve the professional status of FDC and to encourage more research into FDC.
From this meeting, we all went away to extend our contacts in other countries and to plan an initial conference at which we hoped to set up the organisation formally. NCMA hosted an interim meeting in London in 1986 to set up some principles for the organisation and produce an agenda for the conference which was finally held in Cardiff in October 1987.
The conference was a triumph, against all the odds, from our small start, we had 120 delegates from 13 countries who gave 20 reports on the state of FDC in their areas (the USA and Australia delegates reported from a number of different states). These reports were published and working groups were set up covering each of the essential activities for setting up an organisation. It was decided to rotate the conferences between Europe, the Americas and Asia/Pacific and by the time we met two years later in California the organisation had a formal membership structure and constitution. This was another big and buzzy conference (who wouldn’t want to go to San Francisco?).
In 1991 we met again in Sydney, Australia - on Manly Beach where conference activities included a thong (shoe) throwing contest and thong decorating activity for the gala dinner…..those Australians know how to have fun. This was the biggest conference to date with a huge number of Australian FDC providers for us all to learn from. At this conference it was decided that we would try meeting as geographical regions in order to make it easier to get together, and world conferences were to be held every three years rather than every two. The European region then enjoyed a conference in Belgium in 1990. Since then three-yearly conferences have included Sweden, Glasgow, New Zealand, United States, Ireland and now Edinburgh.
A world-wide membership structure is difficult and expensive to manage so subscriptions are no longer collected. Another issue was the problem of managing the language differences, because we wanted to be able to include FDC experiences from as many countries as possible. In Sweden in 1993 we had 23 countries represented and all bravely did their best to speak English. But despite the problems, it is wonderful that conferences are still being held thirty years after the organisation was first developed.
Sue Owen and Malene Karlsson