IT will be with a jaundiced eye, surely, that East Lancashire parents will look on the announcement this week of millions of pounds being allocated to improve nursery and child care provision in the county.

For hard on its heels come letters telling them they cannot have free nursery places for their children because they are over-subscribed throughout Lancashire.

True, they will welcome the £9million that the county council and Blackburn with Darwen are getting to boost pre-school and out-of-school child care. But even with the improvements in provision that have created more than 1,300 extra places in the past year -- overwhelmingly for out-of-school care -- they will view sardonically the targeting of much of the new money for new nursery provision in deprived areas. For when it comes to free nursery places, it seems that everywhere is disadvantaged.

And parents with pre-school children are rightly concerned with the here-and-now situation, not the future benefits of money for nursery provision that is in the pipeline and not government pledges of a free nursery place for every three-year-old by 2004.

After all, their own three-year-olds will be six by then and in their second year of primary school and if they have missed a year's nursery education because of the present woeful situation, they will quite possibly be at a disadvantage compared to those lucky ones who have won nursery places this year.

But what are the losers in the system to do? Many young parents are on the lower rungs of the earnings ladder and will find paying for private nursery care either a hardship or unaffordable. And, as we have seen with previous prioritising of nursery places for single parents seeking work, couples are at a loss to understand why their children should be penalised for belonging to a normal, tax-paying two-parent family.

It is not as if the demand for nursery places -- or those in mainstream schools -- cannot be foreseen, for the birth-rates are there for all to see. But if the government and local authorities are slow to match it with resources, parents are right to be resentful. And education authorities would do well to quell their anger by using the money they have in the pipeline for better education tomorrow as collateral for extra resources for extra provision here and now.