Appearing before the cross-party Commons children, schools and families committee, Megan Pacey, chief executive of Early Education, said that the EYSFF is a 'no-win situation for everybody'.
From April next year the EYSFF will be used to calculate funding for the free entitlement across all sectors. However, some maintained nursery schools that have been offering free, full-time provision are facing huge budget cuts once the EYSFF is implemented and will only be funded to provide the 15-hour free entitlement, in line with other sectors (News, 7 October).
Ms Pacey said, 'The feeling I'm getting from my membership is that I have people in the maintained sector who are losing somewhere between 20 and 35 per cent of their budget almost overnight, and that's having a huge impact. At the same time I've got private sector members on the telephone telling me that what has been proposed under the single funding formula might add pennies to their bottom line and they need a lot more than pennies to deliver what the EYSFF is all about. Now that strikes me that's it's not working for anybody. I think it's time to put the brakes on, reassess the whole situation, really look properly at what this is about and take it forward from there.'
Early Education has launched a campaign against the implementation of the EYSFF, which includes a petition on the Number 10 Downing Street website (News, 29 October).
Jean Ensing, chair of governors at the Bognor Regis Nursery School and Children's Centre, told MPs that her organisation's budget will be cut by £100,000 under the EYSFF in the first year alone, leading to staff redundancies and reduced provision. Ms Ensing said that one of the major problems was the ending of place funding, which meant that the setting would no longer be able to keep some places open to offer to vulnerable children at short notice.
'The planned places, we really need and use them - we have referrals suddenly coming in, a bereavement, mental health problems with a parent, a parent going to prison, social isolation, children found on their own, substance abuse. If we had to fill up in September and we didn't have the extra space, we couldn't take them in.
'It's going to cost society a great deal more for those children and those families to be broken up and the different aspects dealt with elsewhere.'
