Why working with parents is key to tackling early years underfunding

Anyone who knows anything about the early years will know that tackling the issue of stagnant funding rates versus rising costs has been an uphill battle for providers across the country for years now.

During the pandemic, when early years settings were asked to remain open while schools and colleges closed, the Government talked repeatedly about the importance of early years provision and how vital those first five years of a child’s life are. So why is it that the long-running problem of sector funding still has yet to be addressed by the Government?

Many of you, like me, would have been disappointed and yet utterly unsurprised that this week’s Spring Statement did not include a single mention of the early years sector.

For countless years, the sector has been crying out for better funding while the Government has continued to prioritise schools, in the apparent belief that education doesn’t start until the age of five, over and above the early years sector.

Now more than ever, the sector is grappling with a long list of issues that shows little sign of reducing. The challenges of the pandemic pushed many providers to the brink as they grappled with unclear government guidance, sharp falls in income and the challenges of adapting to a completely new way of operating, to name but a few.

These challenges, alongside the long-running issue of sector underfunding, has meant that we are seeing now hundreds of providers being left with no choice but to close their doors every month.

So I understand the frustration that many feel that when our sector does hit the headlines, it’s often the result of a new survey or report on how much childcare costs have risen, and how much pressure this is putting on families, and not on the very real struggles of providers who – it is often forgotten - provide not just childcare, but vital early education.

But parents are not our enemy in this fight; they are our greatest allies. Reports that show that childcare costs are rising are increasingly – and rightly – seen as proving not that we have a sector of 'greedy providers’, but that the early years system in this country is fundamentally broken.

Today saw the release of a new parent survey conducted by campaign group Pregnant Then Screwed in collaboration with parenting forum Mumsnet, which revealed that nearly two thirds of parents say that the cost of childcare is now the same or more than their rent/mortgage while 40 per cent of mothers say they have had to work fewer hours because of sky-high childcare costs.

To ensure that their survey was not used to unfairly attack the sector, Pregnant Then Screwed asked the Alliance as the voice of the early years to run a parallel survey of providers demonstrating the pressures we too are facing. And while 66 per cent of providers confirmed that they will indeed be increasing childcare fees this year, of those, 43 per cent said if government funding covered the cost of delivering places, they would increase fees by a smaller amount, while 35 per cent told us that if government funding covered the cost of delivering places, they wouldn’t be increasing fees at all. The message to Government couldn’t be clearer: Want childcare costs to come down? Start funding the sector properly.

Both the early years industry and parents do not want these staggering statistics to fall on deaf ears. The old adage of 'strength in numbers' has never rung truer as a lack of adequate sector funding pushes both parents and providers to the brink.

At the Alliance we have been tirelessly campaigning to tackle early years underfunding for years now, but there is always more work to be done and we know from our successful campaign against ratios all those years ago that partnering with parents is the best and more effective way to ensure that our calls to Government reach as many ears as possible.

We have made great strides in raising awareness of the sector’s challenges but the enormity of the issue at hand shows we cannot do it alone. Working with, and not against, parents provides us with the opportunity to not only spread awareness of these issues but actually drive genuine, tangible change.

The publication of both the provider and parent survey data today makes it crystal clear that the early years funding black hole is having a catastrophic impact on the ability of providers to deliver affordable care and education to children and families. By working today, we, and our parent allies, can ensure that this is a message that Government simply cannot ignore.