There cannot be a parent in the land who will not be horrified by the accusations against Vanessa George, the Plymouth nursery worker who yesterday appeared in court charged with four counts of sexual assault against children and one count each of making, possessing and distributing indecent images.

For parents of pre-school children who, either by choice or necessity, both work, childcare is a major and invariably emotional issue. Nanny, childminder, nursery ... which is best? Some argue that individual, professional care is the only solution, a trained nanny with a commanding manner, a string of references and a wall full of certificates. Others prefer nurseries, wary that a one-to-one relationship might usurp their own, or simply fearful that their child is sitting inert in front of the television while the person paid to look after them texts her boyfriend. They argue that nurseries, by their very virtue as public spaces that are checked and regulated, offer a more secure and sociable environment.

The truth is that both solutions have their merits and their problems, but they also have one thing in common: at the end of the day, however friendly the person or glowing the references, you are taking a leap of faith when you leave your child in the care of relative stranger. There is always an element of risk. It may be small but it is nevertheless there. For those poor parents at Little Ted’s Nursery, the risk has become a nightmarish reality.

Whatever the outcome of the George case (and we must all hope that it turns out to be a terrible misunderstanding), the majority of childcarers are, of course, perfectly ordinary people. They might drive you mad by eating your secret stash of Kit Kats, or wearing a revolting and overpowering perfume (this happened to a friend of mine, who came home every evening to find her baby smelling strongly of a particularly obnoxious celebrity scent), or accrue parking fines without telling you. They may tut-tut if you’re three minutes late coming home, or refuse to take your child if he or she has a cold; mostly, though, they’re just good people trying to do a job – and a fiendishly difficult job at that. Dealing with the paranoia and guilt of the average working parent isn’t the easiest of tasks, and success is as much dependent on earning that parent’s trust as it is on getting little Johnny to finish his broccoli.

No, the real issue with childcare in Britain is not so much the quality of carers, but the overall culture. For despite being ahead of many other countries in terms of opportunities for working women, the myth still persists that the only sort of female who relies on childcare is the sort who lives a life of unbridled hedonism, probably in a large townhouse somewhere in Chelsea. She drives a BMW X5, spends her mornings alphabetising her collection of couture shoes and her afternoons tweaking her highlights. The only reason she requires a nanny is so that she can get her nails done in peace, before wafting off in a cloud of Chanel No 5 to dine on rare organic breeds at Daylesford Organics.

This is patently absurd. Of course those women exist; but they are the amusing exception. The idea that childcare for the under-fives is an upper-class luxury is as old-fashioned as the pre-lunch Martini.

The reality is that many women with children now work — and they all need childcare. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. And yet, culturally, we remain in denial about it. I know people who coyly refer to their Norland nannies as “babysitters”, or who apply the term “au pair” (meaning a young girl who occasionally washes up in return for board and lodging and teaching your 12-year-old to smoke cigarettes) to a full-time, fully-qualified, live-in expert with 15 years’ experience. Women with blatantly full-time jobs will refer in vague terms to “having help”, as though the armies of staff it requires to get their offspring from home to school and back again via assorted sports clubs and other edifying activities were somehow invisible, inconsequential, nonexistent. The truth is that childcare is to modern women what the Pill was to our mothers: a necessary, but not always accepted, facilitator for self-determination.

Fiscally, it is as though feminism had never happened. In Britain today, there is more of a financial incentive to have a chauffeur than to employ a nanny (a nanny’s tax and contributions have to be paid out of their employer’s net income; a driver, on the other hand, is counted as a tax-deductible business necessity). The result is that for most average people, on average incomes, the cost of legal, qualified provision is often prohibitive. And so some are forced to cut corners.

Such pressures create a fault-line in the system, opening it up to potential abuse. In nurseries, carrying out exhaustive checks is costly, both in terms of time and money (a CRB check, on which many parents rely, is not necessarily a guarantee of integrity, since all it exposes is previous convictions). The need to keep carers’ salaries as low as possible introduces an unhelpful element of short-termism. People come and go. There is no time to build trust, loyalty, experience. Inevitably, errors of judgment creep in. People are often payed cash in hand, a practice which is neither good for their own long-term prospects (no national insurance contributions means no pension) or those of their charges or, for that matter, the Inland Revenue.

It doesn’t say much for Britain as a society that the level of care provision for the under-fives (universally understood by childcare experts to be the most crucial and formative years in terms of emotional development) is a woefully inadequate mishmash of make-do-and-mend measures by parents strapped for cash and starved of choice. We need to face up to reality: women are going to work more, not less. Childcare for the under-fives will become the norm, not the exception. Independently of the outcome of the George trial, the Government needs to consider this issue carefully. Whether it be tax relief on childcare, incentives for employers to provide workplace crèches, or simply cash for grannies, one thing is certain: a sensible and workable strategy is urgently required.

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