The way pre-school age children are looked after and educated has finally become a very visible set of issues in the media. The Government was concerned enough about the impact of high childcare fees on parental employment to announce a raft of new entitlements to free nursery hours at the last Budget.
Having watched colleagues across the children's voluntary sector report on how current costs are affecting families, Children England is pleased the importance of early years provision is on the public agenda.
But the concerned reactions and intense debate sparked by the Budget's childcare measures are a symptom and a sign that we do not, as a society, have a collective understanding of the purpose of early years provision for children, and the role of it for families and for the economy.
While early years practitioners see – and deliver – the crucial difference it makes for children, the Treasury treats the sector as an adjunct to parents' employment potential, as necessary to the economy as somewhere to park your car when you get to work.
The Department for Education, for all its appreciation that high quality early years education helps narrow the attainment gap between children in poorer and wealthier families, is now tasked with making provision cheaper and easier to run, which under current proposals looks like lowering quality rather than increasing it.
The early years workforce, despite providing education that is intended to flow seamlessly into primary education, with four- and five-year-olds ‘school ready' thanks to their development at nursery, is valued less than the teaching profession, and paid so little they are leaving for jobs in retail. Parents feel their children should receive good quality education from their early years setting, but are also frustrated that hours and entitlements don't match their working patterns.
In this kaleidoscope of perceptions, policy-making lacks a holistic, consistent definition of early years education and childcare, and is so piecemeal as to be self-defeatingly complicated for both families trying to understand their entitlements and managers trying to run a viable setting. The Early Years Alliance's briefing to parents shows just how complicated - as does their brilliant sandwich shop analogy at explaining the financial complexity for providers.
Government's treatment of early years as childminding that can be entrusted to the market, while injecting money into the system in order to make it affordable for working parents, has made it an appealing industry for private ownership, and increasingly for private equity.
Both the funding mechanism – a unit cost per child – and the funding quantum (not enough to cover all the costs of a child's place) make larger provider chains much more viable than independent settings, because the only way to make ends meet over the longer-term is to cross-subsidise between funded and unfunded places, and between settings in disadvantaged areas – where there are more under-funded places – and wealthier areas where more parents pay full fees.
The more ‘free' places the Government promises families, the more unsustainable genuinely local, inclusive nurseries become.
While the Government says it wants parents to be able to choose the early years provision that suits them and their child, the system actually pushes in the opposite direction: settings are incentivised to pick and choose which children they accept according to how much money is attached to them, from whichever source, simply to balance the books. This is incompatible with the role of early years education in supporting all children to have an equal chance in life, whatever their background.
No one would design the early years system like this if we could build it from the ground up. So what would we do?
First, we need to define the sector as a public good on a par with schools, hospitals and roads, with the protections and considerations that entails. Government must value early years as economic and social investment, with short and longer-term benefits to families, businesses and communities as well as a major contributor to creating the kind of society we all want to see – where all children get the best start in life.
If we can accept this – and it is politicians, not the public, who need to catch up with such a positive, rights-based view of early years – then we can make free early years education available to all families, even if some families will choose to pay for a private service, as they do in formal education.
We need to acknowledge the stakeholders who contribute to and gain from good quality, free early years childcare, and give them all a voice in the ecosystem. This includes parents who work a-typical hours, or are in training or education; employers who would like to diversify their workforce, or could host on-site early years provision to meet shift patterns; local schools (who may also be providers); and early years managers and practitioners who have an unparalleled perspective on what young children in the area need, and what it really costs financially and professionally to meet those needs.
The current national funding mechanism is built on the fatal assumption that every child's early education and care costs the same, irrespective of their needs or the individual characteristics of the setting that cares for them. In reality, needs vary not only from child to child but from time to time within the life of one child.
The costs to the setting – for instance in recruitment, wages, equipment and maintenance – also inevitably vary. Nursery managers have described their distress at trying to fit such a resolutely square funding peg into so many differently-shaped financial holes, and they should not have to do this any more. We need a central mechanism that allocates funding according to real needs, as reported by parents and providers to their local authority.
As with the market in children's homes, we are concerned that public funding doesn't always translate into spending on frontline practice, and in a private equity-soaked market can end up subsidising corporate activity that has nothing to do with children at all.
If Government is to properly fund free places for children who need them, it is in all of our interests that this money reaches direct practice. Local authorities can set a benchmark for decent pay in the settings in their area, but have no power over how private providers spend the remainder of their funding. Government funding should be attached to a national quality standard, with providers required to set out with full, ongoing financial transparency how they will meet the educational and social needs of children and their families, and continuing funding contingent on meeting that standard.
There is no lack of people, or energy, for supporting our youngest citizens. There are many dedicated professionals keen to provide early education and childcare, and many managers persevering in the sector despite the financial impossibilities that overshadow everyday practice. But, given the linchpin their settings provide in communities, there is a lack of local infrastructure to provide nourishment in return – to feed in resources, bring stakeholders together and to help them try out new ideas.
Nurseries report playing an increasingly holistic role to stressed families as other services struggle to help them manage rising bills, rent, health issues, but the trust placed in them by parents and carers is not reflected in their value as part of the local ecosystem.
In these respects local authorities have the potential to act as system stewards, as they do for other services, convening families to map local needs and convening providers, as well as potential/nascent providers, who might meet those needs.
They can connect providers to local resources such as buildings, colleges educating new early years staff and additional funding for more specialised care.
They can ensure they are treated as part of the local ecosystem of social care and other public services, rather than abandoned to support families in crisis when statutory support has fallen away.
By taking a system stewardship approach rather than a transactional one, local authorities can nurture symbiosis between all the services and support young families might need and mobilise relevant resources.
We like early years campaigner Lucie Stephen's vision for councils' central democratic role in the early years sector, and believe the ‘system steward' role could be described in legislation with scope for each area to work with the many local stakeholders of early years education and childcare to design and nurture the ecosystem they need.
Early years provision is already a valuable mainstay in every community and local economy – we just need to match that value with the funding and strategic support such a public service deserves.
Chlöe Darlington is director of policy, campaigns and communications at Children England
@Childrenengland
