Analysis: Sign up to campaign for quality in the early years

This will be an interesting year for everyone working in and using early years services.

By the end of the year we will have the outcome of the General Election, the introduction of the 15-hour flexible entitlement for threeand four-year-olds, and the review of the Early Years Foundation Stage. Together with the delay in the roll-out of the Early Years Single Funding Formula, there is a lot of uncertainty, much to debate and everything to play for.

The profile and importance of early years services have grown enormously over the past 12 years, and it is now widely recognised that good-quality early childhood education and care are beneficial both to children themselves and to society. It is time to take stock of what has been achieved, and to plan for the future.

That is why the NCB Early Childhood Unit, with the support of the Early Childhood Forum, has established the Firm Foundations campaign as a way to share information, good practice and experiences about early years provision, and to bring together practitioners, families and policymakers, to demonstrate the widespread support there is for continued and increased investment in quality for the youngest children.

CAMPAIGN GOALS

The Firm Foundations Campaign is an information campaign working to ensure that the evidence of high-quality early years services and their benefits for children and communities is well-known and understood. This includes the following headline messages.

- The need for a universal entitlement to high-quality early years education and care for all children

Research shows that good-quality early education and care has wide-ranging benefits for children. It is provided across nurseries, nursery schools and classes, reception classes, pre-schools, children's centres and childminders. It enhances social and cognitive skills, and is of particular benefit to disadvantaged children.

The best-quality settings provide both care and education in a joined-up, integrated way. The evidence is clear that excellent early education and care services lay a firm foundation for a child's future; they should be available for all children.

- The effectiveness of real partnership with parents and families in educating and caring for young children

Parents, with the support of the wider family, are children's primary educators. What parents do at home with young children has the most impact on all aspects of their development - social, emotional, physical and intellectual.

Early years education and care should be about putting children's needs at the heart of everything, and working with the people who matter most to them - their parents and families - to help them to grow and develop well. Children with strong home learning environments are already ahead socially and intellectually by the age of three, and this advantage continues into later schooling.

- The need for consolidation and continued improvement in recent developments in early years education and care

There have been a number of major and positive developments in services for young children in recent years. Local authorities are now obliged by law to ensure that there are enough childcare places for children in their area. Children's centres have been established to provide integrated early years services, particularly in areas of disadvantage.

Local authorities are working to narrow the gap in outcomes between disadvantaged young children and others in their area. All threeand four-year-olds are entitled to free education and care for 12.5 hours per week (soon to be increased to 15) and there are plans to extend this to some two-year-olds. Everyone working with young children is now working to the same quality framework as set out in the EYFS, with the aim of ensuring that every child has both the quality and the equality of opportunity that they deserve. All Ofsted-registered early years settings are now inspected in the same way and under the same quality standards.

We should be building on these developments while making improvements where necessary.

- The importance of greater investment in early years education and care to reduce inequality and tackle disadvantage

Money spent on the early years is cost-effective because it saves a lot more money later on. It works as a preventative measure against the effects of inequality and disadvantage. Investing in early childhood is much more effective than waiting to invest in later development, and yet we still spend a fraction of our education and care budget on babies and young children.

As a recent Daycare Trust report has highlighted, in England the current public spending directly on early education and care is around £4bn, compared with the £30.1bn that is spent on secondary education.

Good-quality early years settings promote equality in their work with children and families under the EYFS framework. International research has found wider benefits to society from an investment in early years, including reduced welfare expenditure, reduced contact with the youth justice system, increased take-up of health prevention services such as immunisation, and higher employment and skill levels in mothers.

- The necessity of having a good-quality early years workforce through improving training, pay and conditions

Unsurprisingly, there is a direct link between well-qualified staff and better outcomes and experiences for young children. Historically, those who work with very young children have always suffered low levels of qualification, status, and pay. In recent years various measures have been introduced aimed at ensuring that the early years workforce is more professional and better qualified to work with babies, toddlers and young children.

We need to continue the efforts which lead to a highly-trained, well-rewarded workforce with a holistic approach to children's care, learning and development.

WHY THIS CAMPAIGN?

There is a lot of research evidence about the direct benefits to children of good-quality early years provision, but less about the wider societal benefits and cost savings of investing more in the early years. A recent report by the New Economics Foundation identifies 'childcare workers' as among the lowest-paid workers in Britain, and yet estimates the social rate of return on investment for a worker in a good-quality setting at £9.50 for every £1 paid to them.

The report identifies economic benefits in providing opportunities for parents to work, and social benefits in reducing problems as a result of children getting a better start in life. In short, good-quality early years workers have a societal worth almost ten times greater than their pay. It is startling to look at costs and benefits in this way, but understanding evidence such as this is vital to continue the investment in early years services, particularly at a time of economic challenge.

The EYFS is in its infancy as a quality framework, but its core principles and good practice guidance are not new to the sector. There is a real commitment among early years professionals to working with the EYFS as a means to ensure quality and equality of education and care. There is a genuine debate to be had about revising certain aspects of the framework, and this will continue. However, what the EYFS provides is a much-needed unity of purpose across the range of settings that parents can choose from for their child's early learning and care. It is a single framework, based on agreed principles that place the child at the centre.

This perspective needs to be recognised in the debate around the EYFS, a debate which raises important questions for all policymakers, professionals, parents and the wider public, not least the question of what early education and care is for.

The Firm Foundations campaign aims to ensure that this debate is founded on evidence rather than hearsay and that it looks at the importance of early childhood education and care both for individual children and for wider society: to provide equality of opportunity for all children and, by extension, investment in a more equal society. And that is worth making some noise about.

Footnotes

1. www.daycaretrust.org.uk/data/files/Research/ Qualitycosts_execsummary.pdf

2. 'A Bit Rich: Calculating the real cost to society of different professions', NEF, December 2009, available at www.neweconomics.org/sites/neweconomics.org/files/A_Bit_Rich.pdf

HOW CAN YOU GET INVOLVED?

We want as many people as possible to contribute to the information campaign. You can sign up on our website: www.firmfoundationscampaign.org.uk. You will receive regular updates from campaign manager Patricia Durr.

The website has more information and some resources for improving understanding of the evidence on early years services:

- Sign up as an individual or as an organisation

- Publicly support the campaign on the website by sending us a message

- Promote the campaign to your members, staff, settings, locally

- Contact the media to promote your own work in early years locally and the broad messages of the campaign

- Provide content for the website in the form of articles, briefings, case studies, links

- Spread the word with your contacts, including parents and families

- Let us know what you're doing.