Lockdown Babies: Policy and funding

The Government’s Best Start for Lifevision, published around the end of the last national Covid lockdown, was billed as a post-pandemic action plan for ‘levelling up’ via comprehensive early years services.

Though it was produced by one department – Health and Social Care – it conveys a desire to ensure the health and education of young children are looked after against a challenging backdrop.

It led to the Family Hubs and Start for Life programme, which will deliver family services from 75 (around half) of the country’s local authority areas.

FRAGMENTED REALITY

This ambition strikes some commentators as at odds with the Department for Education (DfE)’s policy at the moment – the huge funded hours expansion.

‘The new entitlements continue the trend towards prioritising childcare support towards parents who work, rather than universal services or targeted early education for low-income families,’ says the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) in its 2023 annual report. The entitlement is estimated by the IFS to double the scheme’s budget from £4 billion last year to £8 billion by 2027-28.

Pressure exerted on the sector by the expansion is already limiting its ability to ameliorate the damage done by Covid and the loss of services, such as supporting children with additional needs. For example, research published in November 2023 by the charity Dingley’s Promise suggests 57 per cent of providers will run out of capacity for SEND once the new entitlements roll out, compared with 27 per cent in 2022.

There has also been a growing trend of settings closing in deprived areas, and in January, the Early Education and Childcare Coalition reported a shortage of 50,000 staff to meet the overall entitlement pledge.

Shortly before the April 2024 roll-out, however, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak reportedly claimed the system was on track to create enough places amid the Government’s recruitment drive – the Do Something Big campaign and £1,000 sign-up bonus.

However, while the improved rate for two-year-olds will make life easier for providers, IFS research suggests it is dwarfed by costs.

‘Those rates have improved,’ admits Neil Leitch, chief executive of the Early Years Alliance. ‘But as an operator, nearly two-thirds of our children are three- and four-year-olds.’ He adds that when the expansion is fully rolled out and costs are factored in, ‘we’ll be 12 per cent down on the three- and four- year-old rate of 2013, according to the IFS.

‘It’s not today that we need to be worried about the two-year-old rate, but let’s see if it keeps pace with inflation.’

The same goes for the extra £500 million over two years to support wages, which the sector cautiously welcomed in March.

‘Where is the substance that will make [staff] stay?’ Leitch asks. He gives an example of a setting manager supporting a parent in crisis, who arrived drunk for pick-up because her partner had left. ‘She went home with that mother and sat with her until 6am until she was capable of looking after that child,’ says Leitch. ‘Nobody funds that.

‘If you’re operating in an area of disadvantage, it is likely you’ll have to provide more support, not only for children but also their families.’

Referring to the relaxation of the ratio for two-year-olds – widely understood to have been allowed to enable the expansion – Leitch is damning. ‘The vast majority of providers will not operate to a 1:5 – that has failed,’ he says.

While settings are under-resourced to deal with high levels of challenging behaviour, the Hubs programme is supporting SEND as a key service, though there is only £301 million of funding available programme-wide to 2025.

Funding is a key limitation identified by Tamora Langley, head of policy at the charity Parent-Infant Foundation, which is interested in the £100 million for services supporting infant mental health, particularly parent-infant relationship (PIR) teams, of which there are now 46 across the country.

Langley says, ‘We need around 400 teams in England to support the babies that the Best Start for Life programme is worried about.’

To address young families’ ‘disjointed experience’ of services, the Manifesto for Babies, published in March 2024 by the First 1001 Days Movement, proposes an ‘ambitious cross-government strategy for babies that aligns government departments to work towards common outcomes’ and a cabinet committee of secretaries of state, reporting to the PM.

The Government has also pledged ‘up to £180 million’ to March 2025, to boost capacity to support children worst affected by lockdowns to catch up, including with communication and social development, through its Early Years Education Covid Recovery Programme. A Nursery World special report about this found examples of success, but patchy take-up. The DfE has still not confirmed the sums spent to date, but says evaluations will be published.

WOULD LABOUR DO BETTER?

If it wins this year’s General Election, Labour has pledged reform. The party has backed the Tory’s childcare expansion, despite telling BBC Newsnight in March that this risked ‘crashing the childcare system’ due to a lack of places.

A review, led by former Ofsted chief Sir David Bell, will inform Labour’s approach, including boosting school nursery capacity.

Meanwhile, Labour has promised ‘half a million more children [will be] hitting early learning targets by 2030’ – through ‘maths champions’ and ‘innovative early speech and language interventions’.

In recent weeks, the First 1001 Days Movement has called for something like New Labour’s flagship Sure Start initiative, amid concerns over a five-year decline in toddler development. There is also new evidence for Sure Start’s success, having had a significant effect on education outcomes, according to research by the IFS.

Labour’s manifesto commits to training 5,000 more health visitors that the Institute of Health Visiting (iHV) says is needed. The Government will not address health inequality without a proper strategy for increasing health visitors, says iHV chief executive Alison Morton.

‘This matters, as the first babies born in the pandemic will start school this year,’ says Morton. ‘If we do nothing, we risk undermining the life chances of so many who were badly affected.’

Designing a coherent system to address additional needs and disadvantage

Christine Farquharson, associate director at IFS: If SEN is a priority then it makes sense for the funding system to recognise this.

Once these entitlements are rolled out, you really need to get the funding rate right. What we have seen is governments setting a rate, leaving it frozen in cash terms for several years, then bumping it up in a bit of a panic. That’s been better in the last few years, but the margin for error is much smaller now.

It’s really important the Government gets the rate right now and then continues to evaluate it. There needs to be a regular process for revising it in response to that evaluation. I think annually is appropriate, though it needs to be balanced against providers’ needs to plan for the future.

Services working holistically with parents, such as Sure Start, make a difference. Family hubs are at least trying to move in that direction, but there is a wider target age range and less funding.

We’re going to double spending on the free entitlement so, put together with childcare subsidies through the tax and benefit system, that’s a reasonable-sized pot overall for early years. What’s been lacking is a strategy for what the Government wants to get for that money – support families in paid work and reduce a family’s costs, or help children develop. Both are good things. What we’ve seen is flip-flopping between the two. That makes it much more difficult to design a coherent system. We should be asking what outcomes we want to achieve and what the best policy tools are to do this.

Of course, there are trade-offs, but looking at the evidence base is a good start. It’s a big piece of work, but that’s how you get to a system that’s more stable and has a bit more buy-in from across the political system than what we’ve got at the moment.