Heads would turn if a football team rose from scratch in one season to take a place in the premier league. But in the childcare sector such a goal is comfortably in the sights of the Pre-School Learning Alliance.
In little more than a year, the educational charity, which represents and supports 16,000 pre-schools in England, will have gone from opening its first setting under the Neighbourhood Nurseries Initiative (NNI) to ranking among the15 largest nursery chains.
Sure Start minister Catherine Ashton opened the PLA's first Neighbourhood Nursery, the Wheelhouse in Lewisham, south London, last June. By July 2004, the PLA will be running a chain of 25 nurseries, providing 1,238 places with around 1,000 part-time staff.
Jane Armstrong, the PLA's Neighbourhood Nurseries co-ordinator, says, 'It turns us into a major provider. We were looking at Nursery World's supplement Nursery Chains and we realised we would be in the top 15.'
The empire of new-builds, Private Finance Initiative programmes, conversions and extensions could be bigger yet. The PLA is looking at tendering for further projects after approaches from local Sure Start teams and early years partnerships who are anxiously seeking a provider with whom to collaborate to meet their NNI targets.
The initiative, which was launched as a three-year 300m programme in 2001, is part of the Government's drive to tackle child poverty by creating 45,000 new nursery places in the country's most disadvantaged areas.
From supporting and advising pre-schools to becoming a major childcare provider is, as Ms Armstrong admits, an enormous undertaking.
'It is a huge step change,' she says. 'We are doing it for a variety of reasons. It is an opportunity to provide exemplars for our member pre-schools. It is an opportunity to demonstrate our administrative approach of involving parents, which has been such a part of our philosophy. It is a natural progression from supporting providers to becoming a direct provider.'
The settings will provide full day-care, five days a week, from 8am to 6pm for children from six weeks to school age and will offer out-of-school programmes such as breakfast clubs and holiday playschemes.
Diversifying all round
The nurseries will be directly managed by the PLA, unlike its member pre-schools, which are run by volunteer parents. 'We are envisaging a parents' board or parental advisory group which works closely with the nursery manager,' says Ms Armstrong. 'We don't want these to be monolithic structures like in France, where the minister of education could look at his watch and know what every school child was doing at that set time. We hope the centres will develop in response to the communities with whom they are working.'
The PLA is not alone in the childcare sector in diversifying. The National Day Nurseries Association (NDNA) is building five regional centres under the NNI programme. And the Kids' Clubs Network has opened a business unit, which a spokeswoman says will offer a consultancy service to advise on setting up out-of-school clubs at children's centres, or actually run them.
The capital and revenue funding available under NNI has been a catalyst, but these organisations have also been motivated by a desire to provide centres of good practice for their own members.
Ms Armstrong says, 'As far as our members are concerned, we hope the nurseries will be best practice centres, providing training and acting as exemplars. We have been quite careful in the way we have chosen the localities and have consulted our members. In some cases the existing pre-school is actually becoming the NNI. We have been careful to consult to make sure we do the best for them. We don't want to be seen to be in competition with an existing pre-school.'
Flexible centres
The PLA and NDNA both see a future for their new settings within the Children's Centres programme. Indeed, the PLA's second nursery at Droitwich, West Midlands, has already been given early designation as a Children's Centre. Both deliberately opted for flexible designs so their settings could reflect the ethos of Children's Centres by providing facilities for family learning and childcare training.
Ms Armstrong says, 'We realise that in some of these areas regeneration is not going to be overnight. Parents are not going to need full daycare straightaway. We are going to incorporate some family learning activities and educational opportunities so they can develop the skills to get jobs.
'Our services will change as demand changes. Flexibility is the key. Having our relationship with the parents, we will be able to identify what is needed and meet that need.
'The majority of the places will be NNI-funded, so we have to attract people from the Sure Start areas, from specific wards and specific postcode areas.' The first two nurseries are exceeding the PLA's conservative estimates. But, Ms Armstrong says, 'Sustainability is the big question. We have business plans and costings which show these to be sustainable, but we are going to be very flexible so we can attract as many parents as we can.
'We estimate there will be some 360 new full-time equivalent posts. Many will be part-time. We anticipate taking on an additional 1,000 people. Initially a third of these jobs will be unqualified, but with training offered. We have no intention of having people stay as unqualified staff.
'In the longer term we will grow our own senior staff. Historically our pre-schools have encouraged parents to volunteer and then do some childcare training.' Ms Armstrong says managers will also be encouraged to extend their qualifications by studying for NVQ 4 and foundation degrees.
The NDNA wants both the Kids' Clubs Network and the National Childminding Association to be involved in its five regional centres, the first of which opens in Widnes next month.
NDNA chief executive Rosemary Murphy hopes the Network will be involved with local youth projects, while childminders may be brought into the nurseries and forge an effective link with the homeworker scheme. 'When a parent works a 4pm to 10pm shift, the child could spend the afternoon at nursery before being taken home by a homeworker, fed, bathed and put to bed,' she says.
'The Government is very concerned about informal care. Maybe we will be able to get carers to register with our centres and undergo training. We are trying to find practical solutions to real problems. It's easier to do this with our own centres than trying to get our members to take something on. We can be the testing ground. To do all this we have taken on a large bank loan.'
Around 50 places at each setting will be for the most disadvantaged families under the NNI criteria. 'On sustainability, we hope we have done our homework. These centres are in areas with a mixed economy, so we can attract parents from a wider brief,' says Ms Murphy. 'We know we are in for the long haul, but we already have interest from parents, as well as local employers, companies and the NHS.'
The bank loan has been mitigated by funding from the New Opportunities Fund, European Regional Development Fund, Sure Start and the London Development Agency.
Typically the centres, which each cost between 1m and 1.4m to build, will offer upwards of 80 full-time nursery places, 24 out-of-school places, a toy library, a parent and toddler group, a creche, offices for regional support staff and terminals for services such as the Children's Information Service, as well as facilities for adult learning, training and community meetings.
'These centres need to be embedded in the local community and owned by the community or they won't be used,' says the NDNA's project manager Patricia Jackson. 'We hope local people will want to rent the main hall for celebrations. At planning, we went for weekend and evening use.'
Centres will also be used by the wider childcare community as premises for recruitment and training. The nursery rooms have been designed with vision panels, so good practice can be observed without disturbing the children.
Ultimately the scheme enables the NDNA to achieve its goal of providing a regional support network for its members. Ms Jackson says, 'We hope members will see our centres not as competition, but as providing support and training.'
