In 2023, the Princess of Wales launched her Business Taskforce on Early Childhood, all part of her “life’s work” on the Early Years. The work has been insubstantial, to say the least. The purpose is less about making tangible progress benefitting children and more about giving Kate some cutesy busywork with kids. Somewhat hilariously, in the past year, Kate’s Early Years keenery had been all but abandoned in favor of Kate’s new thing, being keen about nature and making patronizing videos celebrating the seasons. Well, the nature videos landed poorly last week, so the Early Years are being dusted off in a crisis. Amazingly, the Business Taskforce on Business, Keenery and Early Years has produced some actual results. I’m being serious – against all odds, the taskforce can actually be credited with something:
Kate Middleton’s mission to elevate early childhood as a national priority is making meaningful strides — with the business world increasingly on board. Through a series of new initiatives, Princess Kate’s Royal Foundation Business Taskforce for Early Childhood has inspired major companies — from IKEA to leading banks and supermarkets — to roll out programs designed to better support parents and help children thrive.
According to the Princess of Wales’ office, LEGO has donated LEGO® Education Build Me “Emotions” sets — designed to help children identify and understand their feelings — to early years providers throughout the U.K.
IKEA has partnered with local baby banks to provide essential items to families in need and launched a product line that raised funds for the Baby Bank Alliance.
NatWest bank expanded its lending capacity for early years care settings and created tools to help nurseries operate more sustainably.
Supermarket chain Iceland has trained 30,000 staff to better support young families and collaborated with online forum Mumsnet to launch a range of toddler meals — a project that raised funds for Liverpool’s Alder Hey Hospital and encourages healthy eating.
Meanwhile, local grocery store Co-Op, inspired by Kate’s Shaping Us Framework, is now working to help parents and carers better understand and foster children’s social and emotional development.
Most of these businesses would have actually done all of these things without the Keen Business Taskforce, but I imagine it looks good at board meetings to announce that they’re working in partnership with the Princess of Wales’s Business Taskforce. The thing about Kate and her taskforce taking credit for it is that they have NEVER actually approached businesses to explicitly make these changes or donations – please, I have NEVER heard Kate state firm goals like “more donations to baby banks” or “introduce toddler-specific nutritional meals.”
Additionally, the Keen Business Taskforce is taking credit for Deloitte’s new announcement: Deloitte will now provide six months of family leave to new fathers as well as new mothers.
Photos courtesy of Cover Images.
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- Catherine, Princess of Wales hosts the inaugural meeting of her new Business Taskforce for Early Childhood at NatWest’s headquarters in the City of London where they will discuss why Early Childhood is so critical for business. Featuring: Catherine, Princess of Wales Where: London, United Kingdom When: 21 Mar 2023 Credit: PA Images/INSTARimages **NORTH AMERICA RIGHTS ONLY**
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- Catherine, Princess of Wales hosts the inaugural meeting of her new Business Taskforce for Early Childhood at NatWest’s headquarters in the City of London where they will discuss why Early Childhood is so critical for business. Featuring: Catherine, Princess of Wales Where: London, United Kingdom When: 21 Mar 2023 Credit: PA Images/INSTARimages **NORTH AMERICA RIGHTS ONLY**
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- Catherine, Princess of Wales hosts the inaugural meeting of her new Business Taskforce for Early Childhood at NatWest’s headquarters in the City of London where they will discuss why Early Childhood is so critical for business. Featuring: Catherine, Princess of Wales Where: London, United Kingdom When: 21 Mar 2023 Credit: PA Images/INSTARimages **NORTH AMERICA RIGHTS ONLY**
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- Catherine, Princess of Wales hosts the inaugural meeting of her new Business Taskforce for Early Childhood at NatWest’s headquarters in the City of London where they will discuss why Early Childhood is so critical for business. Featuring: Catherine, Princess of Wales Where: London, United Kingdom When: 21 Mar 2023 Credit: PA Images/INSTARimages **NORTH AMERICA RIGHTS ONLY**
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- Catherine, Princess of Wales hosts the inaugural meeting of her new Business Taskforce for Early Childhood at NatWest’s headquarters in the City of London where they will discuss why Early Childhood is so critical for business. Featuring: Catherine, Princess of Wales Where: London, United Kingdom When: 21 Mar 2023 Credit: PA Images/INSTARimages **NORTH AMERICA RIGHTS ONLY**
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- Catherine, Princess of Wales hosts the inaugural meeting of her new Business Taskforce for Early Childhood at NatWest’s headquarters in the City of London where they will discuss why Early Childhood is so critical for business. Featuring: NatWest chief executive officer Alison Rose (left), Catherine, Princess of Wales Where: London, United Kingdom When: 21 Mar 2023 Credit: PA Images/INSTARimages **NORTH AMERICA RIGHTS ONLY**
I assume the businesses working with this taskforce already had programs for parents, that is why they were interested in this, so they can progress their current projects. That is what the job is most of the time. Lend your name, status to the companies, charities, so they can use that while marketing their projects, products, services. I don’t know who are the people currently working on the taskforce, but I don’t see how they worked to achieve these results? It feels like companies signed up to their programs made progresses themselves and reported it to them. How is that the success of the taskforce? Did they publish something guiding the businesses about these processes? Maybe they did all the work behind the scenes. But, then they would surely make a report about their work, at least to show Kate their work, because sure sh*t Kate ain’t working on this.
I would be incredibly pissed if I was the person responsible for actually accomplishing something. Giving credit to Kate is laughable. You have to actually show up and work to reach goals.
“Has inspired” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. There’s nothing in this piece that says “worked with” or “encouraged” or “negotiated.” But, kudos to the specific corporations.
Kudos to the businesses indeed!!! She did zero heavy lifting and gets the credit?! If anything, whoever is in her taskforce are the ones who deserve credit. But seriously, what else is new?
Exactly what you said.. 👏🏼
The thing is none of the businesses seem to be referencing Kate. Lego has been donating sets since 2017 through various charities. Ikea made no mention of the royals with their initiative. NatWest Bank has been doing sustainable loans for years (without royal mention). Iceland is partnering with Mumsnet, not the RF. think this is Kate, as usual, claiming other people’s work.
Ah–ouch. If this is what the companies were doing to begin with, without the specific Early Years help K provided, then it’s just going to take a few days for that to explode in her face. It’s incredible how incompetent she is and how she feels she has the right to claim credit for other people’s work!
🤣😅😂😅 so she’s centring herself again?
Yup, it’s #Katemiddletonsuccessstory all over again!
Most of this news is good. Identifying emotions through play, ability to access funds for nursery schools and parental leave, among others, is absolutely a decent beginning and finally tangible results. I’m not going to snark on how long this took.
https://www.iceland.co.uk/frozen/frozen-ready-meals/kids-ready-meals
This I will side-eye a bit. Just about all the advice out there is to start including your kids in the cooking process at an early age and cook from scratch. The baby food industry looks a lot like those Iceland Mumsnet meals: processed and less healthy than homemade, which nutritionists are screaming about. Spaghetti, fish pie, mac&cheese, burgers, etc are all quick, easy meals and it’s healthier to make them from basic ingredients.
“has inspired” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this article. Its like last week when People talked about how kate “wowed” the attendees at the fashion award and the actual quotes were like “she knew a few things.”
all of these initiatives sound good so if the royal center for children who can’t read good or whatever has helped, then that’s good. My guess is that the people and businesses involved with the task force were already working on these initiatives and they have nothing specifically to do with the foundation but they’re still good.
So early years is back? What about the seasons? Summer is coming up. Anyways, everything mentioned sounds like good things so good for that.
Yes, what about the seasons? How will I know when summer has started if I don’t see a video where Catherine 🙄 is cavorting in Nature?
OMG the seasons! She is like a top CEO with all this stuff on her plate.
LOL!
I know! You know the summer one is going to be even more hilarious. Someone industrious out there needs to make a mishmash parody of all these videos! Or has someone done it already and I missed it?
Even better, how about if LEGO came up with something for SAD–I bet that’s rampant way far north–then Kate can claim credit for it in her winter video, if she gets around to making it.
This is nothing to do with Kate or her initiative. One of my best friends runs the organisation responsible for one of the programmes mentioned in the article (it’s a non-profit which fights for parental rights and childcare within a specific industry) and has been around for at least six years.
They have had zero contact with Kate or this Early Years yoke.
It looks like a journalist just googled for every random unrelated thing any UK company has done to support parents and/or kids lately, and is pretending it’s somehow Kate’s doing.
This sounds right to me. The companies won’t correct them because it’s good press for them.
Yup, this article is just pulling together any story that had “children” and “business” in it and stuck them together in a mishmash with Kate’s Business Taskforce nominally attached to it. And you know how I know that? Most nonprofit organizations would put out specific, tangible goals for what they want to accomplish – i.e. x amount of British companies having family support or donating to baby banks. Then, they keep tabs on how well the companies they have targeted achieve these goals, and make some big announcement or event when they do to encourage others to follow suit. That’s literally the point of having this taskforce in the first place!
You’d think, given that this is Keen’s “life work” that she would be out there in her Business Barbie cosplay shaking hands and giving out framed certificates for the companies that took a chance and did something to advance her ambitious message that the Early Years Are Important!
“There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I can lead them!” ~ attributed to A.A. Ledru-Rollin during the French Revolution
Can’t will nip over and get in front of any parade she can find, just as long as it doesn’t involve any actual work and is immediately followed by a skiing or beach holiday.
Thanks for this. I heard this quote on The West Wing.
Three cheers for parenting! So her entire initiative is to be a cheerleader. Not push the government to address the inadequacy in early childhood education funding that puts poor kids behind for the rest of their lives?
So gkad she is not focusing on her wardrobe anymore and doing something substantive…NOT!
Supporting caregivers—both parents and those caring for their own parents—is a growing trend in business especially since COVID. It’s not clear how much of this happened because of Kate or would have happened anyway, although as Kaiser said, it probably sounds good at board meetings to nod at the EY initiativeThe IKEA emotion sets sound like a good idea, the toddler meals program sounds necessary. What companies really need to do is provide better telework and flexible leave programs to working caregivers, though, but sometimes they settle for less expensive cosmetic changes instead.
I was thinking the same thing. A lot of these changes are larger industry wide trends that companies were heading towards for the past 5 or 6 years already. This is definitely good, but I don’t know how much influence this particular task force had on this more so than companies like Deloitte or Ikea wanting to offer the same benefits package as their competitors. I have friends who work for a large insurance company in the US and they rolled out 20 week paid parental leave for fathers about three years ago, so a lot of it is retention and recruiting as well.
If I’m not mistaken most of these companies are on the Kate’s Business Taskforce so they’re obligated to implement some programmes at their companies. Iceland is definitely on the Taskforce
I would flip it – I think most of these companies were already in the process of creating or implementing these programs so thats why they were willing to join the task force.
Whichever is true, I’m sure no one is more surprised at these developments than Kate herself. I hope she gives the Early Years intern a raise. If nothing else, then the good googling job they did to put this briefing together.
The next time we see Kate it’ll be in front of a “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED” banner 🤣.
Geez, first the Wales solved racism in football. Then mental health. Now child poverty. I guess just homelessness still to go, right?
This has been going on in other companies for years before Keen latched on to the cause. She is getting way too much credit. It is ludicrous because Kate never had any real work her whole life and has lots of time away from work now
I still have no idea what the Early Years program does. What is the point, what is the goal?
To let people know that Early Years Are Important!
Seriously, this is all I’ve heard for years.
Deloitte do not mention Kate or her Early Years Taskforce in their press release about paternity leave.
https://www.deloitte.com/uk/en/about/press-room/deloitte-uk-equalises-paid-parenting-leave.html
I wonder what maternity and paternity leave her own staff receive?
Well, that must surely be because Kate was so subtle, so ladylike and demure in her enormous influence that Deloitte didn’t even realize she was influencing them at all. A true gentlewoman indeed! 😜
Good gracious, she has aged so much in just two years.
She looked good in that businesswoman cosplay. If you imaginally photoshop 30% of her hair off in every direction, it would be a+. The haircolor is certainly her best, imho.
A stopped clock is right twice a day (or once a day, depending on the clock). It’s interesting that “the task force” is the one getting credit, not her specifically. However, it is good that something good is coming of this.
Kate looks like Michael Jackson in the thumbnail photo. LOL
To be very clear, I spent 4 years working for the UK gov on pursuading businesses (among other things to support gender equality) including Deloitte, to increase their parental leave offer for fathers and providing more flexibility and support for women returning to work. So to see this badged as part of this task force is galling!
I’m so sorry, I feel awful for everyone who actually did this work. Someone deserves credit, and it definitely isn’t Kate.
The lives of the BRF ring so hollow against real people who need help and have struggles.