Nursery schools: roots and new shoots

 As Beatrice Merrick pointed out in her article published in Nursery World , the role and value of nursery schools has been hotly debated for over a century. Pioneers for early education, such as the McMillan sisters, had witnessed the inappropriate admittance of under-fives into large elementary school classes with an emphasis on rote learning and static pedagogies, and began an active campaign for a distinct phase of nursery education for two- to five-year-olds which continues to this day.

The early nursery schools offered a play-oriented, open-air learning environment, with a concern with nurture as well as learning. Central in the development of these early nursery schools was the recognition that poor, less advantaged and vulnerable children can thrive in nurseries that blend both care and education, focus on supporting a child’s own sense of wonder and capacity for exploration and self-initiated activity, and which offer children rich learning experiences within warm, nurturing relationships with specialist trained teachers.

Despite vociferous campaigning at that time, the case for establishing nursery schools as a powerful vehicle for improving life chances, increasing social mobility and enhancing social cohesion was left to local authorities to take up and was largely ignored by central government.

Astonishingly, despite today’s unequivocal evidence of the power of maintained nursery schools to transform lives, the lack of central action has continued. Indeed, under current austerity politics with its concomitant rising levels of poverty and decreasing social mobility, when the contribution of maintained nursery schools should be especially celebrated, they are under more threat of closure than ever before.

The establishment of the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) with a mission to secure the future of the remaining maintained nursery schools underlines the urgency of the case that must be made if this precious world class service is to be saved from extinction.

In the current political dialogue around the availability of affordable childcare, the role and contribution of maintained nursery schools is often ignored. There is a lack of understanding of the complex work most maintained nursery schools currently do and the deep impact they are making on the life chances and wellbeing of some of the poorest and most vulnerable children within our communities. 

A key element in the ‘magic dust’ of maintained nursery schools is their sustained commitment to work with some of the most excluded and least advantaged children in their communities.  and their strong educational focus, because they are staffed by highly qualified and skilled professional staff, including specialist teachers, who understand child development and early pedagogy and see this as rooted in the daily life of the communities in which they work. They are always ‘education-rich’ and this is what drives their success with the children who need this most.

The differing capacities of early years providers to meet the needs of disadvantaged children were illuminated in the recent ‘Quality and Inequality’ study, funded by the Nuffield Foundation (Mathers & Smees, 2014). This study compared the quality of early years providers serving the most and the least disadvantaged families.

While the maintained sector offered comparable quality for all children, PVI settings serving the most disadvantaged children and families offered significantly lower quality than those serving the more advantaged. Particularly worrying was finding that support for language development was significantly worse in PVI settings catering for the most deprived children; worrying because we know that early language skills are one of the strongest predictors of later success (Justice et al., 2003) and that disadvantaged children are already almost a year behind their more affluent peers in terms of their vocabulary by the age of five (Washbrook & Waldfogel, 2010). In the PVI sector, the children most in need of strong professional support for their developing mastery of language are the least likely to receive it.

The research identified workforce inequalities – and particularly the presence of skilled graduates – as a key factor in the ability of providers to meet the needs of disadvantaged children. While the study did not consider maintained nursery schools as a separate group (the ‘maintained’ group included both nursery schools and classes) the strong focus of maintained nursery schools on employing not only graduate teachers, but also staff with specialist skills in meeting the needs of vulnerable children, suggests that they are the most qualified of all providers to take on this challenge.

Maintained nursery schools are sharing this professional knowledge with other providers to spread excellence, and contributing to the training of the next generation of early years teachers and professionals. Finally, they are offering much more than early educational experiences for children, and are working in close partnership with health, social care and other family services to ensure children and families receive the comprehensive support required to function well in challenging circumstances.

Case study: Bristol

Bristol offers an insightful case study of how maintained nursery schools are being used successfully at a time of austerity to close the attainment gap and to drive excellence in practice across the local system.

There are 12 maintained nursery schools in the city, all of which have been judged as good or outstanding by Ofsted and two have been designated as an Early Years Teaching School by the National College for Teaching and Leadership. The Early Years Teaching School works in partnership with the local authority and a broader Bristol Nursery School Alliance to provide pedagogical leadership of the city’s early years strategic priorities. This includes co-ordination and quality assurance of integrated early education, health and family support services, delivered through the Children’s Centre programme, as well as the early education and childcare offer, delivered by childminders, private, voluntary and independent providers and nursery classes and reception classes in schools.

The Children’s Centre lead teachers visit all the early years providers and schools in their reach area regularly to create a strong infrastructure of support, build cohesion and encourage all practitioners to reflect and continually improve upon their previous best practice. Three of the lead teachers co-ordinate area-based early years networks which provide termly opportunities for information sharing, dissemination of effective practice and professional development for all early years practitioners and professional partners, including health visitors, speech and language therapists and Early Help practitioners, tailored to local needs. Three nursery schools are also commissioned by the local authority to facilitate Area Childminding Hubs which are well attended and enthusiastically received.

Bristol is fortunate to be able to draw on the expertise of the wider early years sector to support quality improvement, but believes that none of this would have been possible without the dedicated pedagogical leadership that the city’s maintained nursery schools provide. Through the head teachers, lead teachers and designated Specialist, Local and National Leaders of Education it is felt that the nursery schools play a key strategic role as system leaders in:

• Improving access for children with complex needs and disabilities through Inclusion Support and SENCO Networks;
• Reducing health and education gaps by promoting opportunities for early intervention and prevention;
• Improving the quality of early years provision by promoting researchful practice and opportunities for professional learning;
• Reducing social isolation through facilitation of community hubs and lifelong learning opportunities;
• Strengthening transition from the Early Years Foundation Stage to school through head teacher partnerships.

The Bristol experience reveals the potential power of maintained nursery schools nationally to be the engine for improving the whole early years system. If this impact is to be replicated, one of the key tasks facing those who believe in securing the future of maintained nursery schools once and for all, and even extending their reach to all areas, is to promote relentlessly their unique qualities.

Maintained nursery schools are uniquely placed to work in support of the most challenging agenda that faces our society in the 21^st century – that of tackling inequality, social injustice and the lack of social mobility which results in the most gigantic waste of human talent. It is paramount that the unique contribution of maintained nursery schools continues to be recognised, cherished and championed.

Chris Pascal is co-director of the Centre for Research in Early Childhood, Birmingham. Sally Jaeckle is service manager, Early Years Education and Skills,
Bristol City Council.  Sandra Mathers is senior researcher, University of Oxford.

This article is the second in a series marking Nursery World and Early Education's tenth decades

Look out for the other articles, to be published online or in Nursery World over the coming months. Authors for the series are leading figures within the early years sector:

• Learning & Development: Early Education - Over time, by Beatrice Merrick, cheife executive of Early Education.
• Babies under 12 months’ by Peter Elfer, principal lecturer, Early Childhood Studies, University of Roehampton.
• Susan Isaacs and the Chelsea Open Air Nursery: biophilia and the affordances of the great outdoors’ by early years consultants and trainers Kathryn Solly and Dr Sue Allingham.
• Charlotte Mason, the McMillan sisters and the Early Nursery Teacher Training Schools as a model for today’ by Prof Cathy Nutbrown, head of theSchool of Education, University of Sheffield.
• Early years subversives and radicals: Froebel and non-conformity’ by early years consultants Helen Moylett and Linda Pound.
• The early childhood tradition in Scotland: then and now’ by Aline-Wendy Dunlop, visiting professor, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow
• Bertrand Russell’s perspectives on early childhood’ by Prof Tony Bertram, CREC.