Careers and Training
Editor's View - Higher professional qualifications are to be protected
Many early years practitioners have been convinced that the Early Years Professional Status programme and the Graduate Leader Fund would fall victim to the cuts, as we have seen from their Tweets, Facebook comments and postings on the Nursery World forum.
However, as Sarah Teather exclusively reveals in her Nursery World column this week, the Government is continuing its commitment to funding graduate programmes in 2011-12, and EYP will continue to be delivered by the CWDC.
We do need to look behind the topline statements, of course, to see what it all means in practice. Money for EYPS and the New Leaders in Early Years Programmes will be channelled separately through CWDC, so there is a degree of ring-fencing here at least.
But Graduate Leader Fund money, along with other cash for workforce development, is bundled into the Early Intervention Grant, which will have no protection and will rely on local authorities recognising 'the strong evidence' for investing in this rather than the many other competing areas.
In line with this Government's move away from a target-driven approach, the aspiration to have an EYP in every daycare setting by 2015 will be dispensed with. This is a great shame because, irritating though some found the target, it has been a main driver in getting people to take degrees who never would have without some sort of external motivation.
And the problem of pay and prospects for those who 'skill up' remains. When we posted our story 'Allen's early intervention report calls for better-qualified workforce' on Facebook, one of NW's friends riposted, 'Already Better-Qualified Workforce calls for more jobs and opportunities and higher pay'.
Some things don't change!
