Contribution
I do not regret the Government not accepting Liberal Democrat amendments that are not accompanied by any means of plugging the funding gap that would be left by the additional commitments they ask the Government to make, but it is important that the Government continually look at the resilience and sustainability of the early years sector in the light of what are undoubtedly additional costs and challenges that the sector is having to bear. That will be important for the delivery of the roll-out and for provision across the country.
Early years practitioners do such important work. We trust our most precious family members into their care, and they have the capacity to make an enormous difference. Yet there is a recruitment crisis in the early years. We do not value early education and childcare enough, staff are paid far too little, and there are insufficient opportunities to gain specialist qualifications and to progress. I visited the Sheringham nursery and children’s centre in east London, which has a large sign at the gate that reads “Building Brains Here”. The nursery’s work is just that: laying the foundations for the rest of a child’s life. We must find the ways to value early years staff more, promote the early years as a rewarding and vital vocation, and ensure that staff are appropriately paid, with good opportunities for progression.
In that context, I welcome the Government’s newly launched strategy to give every child the “best start in life”, and the commitment to expand the number of stronger practice hubs, such as Sheringham nursery school and children’s centre, which play such an important role in strengthening good practice across the area in which they sit, and to incentivise early years practitioners to work in areas of deprivation where their expertise is so important.
Childminders are often overlooked in the debate about childcare and early years education, but they are a vital part of the landscape of care and education for many families. They play a critical role in the lives of the children in their care and they are the option of choice for many parents and carers, particularly for very young children. The number of Ofsted-registered childminders has been declining for several years, and many earn unacceptably low levels of income.
I welcome the steps the Government are taking in the new strategy to try to stabilise the income of childminders and encourage childminding as a profession, as well as promote innovations in childminding practice, which would help childminders to work together across a local area and in partnership with schools. I also wholeheartedly welcome the Government’s commitment to expand Best Start family hubs, building on the success of the previous Labour Government’s Sure Start programme, the proud achievement of my late predecessor Dame Tessa Jowell.
Sure Start played a vital role in supporting the landscape of childcare, often with a nursery on site plus supporting networks of childminders in a local area, offering them training and development, and building relationships with parents. For the most vulnerable and disadvantaged parents, more is needed than simply making a child place available. Sure Start centres, by offering play-and-stay sessions and parenting classes, built relationships of trust with parents, boosted their confidence and often acted as the gateway to taking up a nursery place, which is beneficial for children, and to re-engaging with the labour market and education for parents. Best Start family hubs are badly needed, and I hope they will play a similar role.
I also welcome the focus in the strategy on the quality of early years provision and inclusion. It is an unacceptable reality that the parents who find it hardest to find childcare places are the parents of children with special educational needs and disabilities, and that approaches to SEND inclusion vary widely across early years providers, which is not acceptable. I welcome the attention the Government are giving to that issue.
Finally, I want to draw attention again to the role of maintained nursery schools within the landscape of early years providers. Maintained nurseries are unique in being constituted as schools and required to employ a headteacher and qualified teaching staff, but they are excluded from the schools funding formula. Their funding has been dramatically eroded relative to their costs in recent years. Maintained nurseries are often beacons of good practice located in areas of deprivation, and are inclusive settings with an expertise in SEND.
The Minister will know that many maintained nursery schools have closed and many that remain are operating with unsustainable financial deficits. I say gently to my hon. Friend the Minister that the response of the Government to my inquiries on this topic, which is largely to push responsibility to local authorities, simply is not sufficient when local authorities are not fully funded to support maintained nursery schools. It cannot be right that, as the Government set out an ambitious new strategy for early years, some of the institutions with the greatest levels of expertise and the most successful track records of delivery are being left effectively to wither on the vine.
I call on the Minister to set out a plan for maintained nurseries, to reform their funding model and ensure their long-term sustainability. The Education Committee, which I chair, will turn attention to the early years in the coming months, and I look forward to making our contribution to scrutinising the Government’s work in this vital sector that makes such a difference.