Nursery Management: Foundation Years - Reality check

The Government set out its stall earlier this summer for the reform of early years education and the workforce in its document Supporting Families in the Foundation Years. But some nursery managers are reluctant to buy in to all the proposals.

The paper, published jointly by the Department of Health and the Department of Education, is aimed at local authorities and professionals working with young children.

It sets out plans for a new covenant between central and local governments and all parts of the early education and childcare sector, with the vision of ensuring that all children enjoy the best possible start in life.

Key to this is supporting child development - 'so that by the age of five, children are ready to take full advantage of the next stage of learning and have laid down foundations for good health in adult life'.

One proposal is to maximise the take-up of the free entitlement to early education by offering parents greater flexibility over when they can claim their free sessions. Children's minister Sarah Teather has suggested that nurseries could be open from 7am to 7pm to fit in with parents' work, but with a maximum of ten free hours per day.

LOGISTICAL HEADACHES

Responses to this proposal are inevitably mixed. 'We already open from 7.30am to 6.30pm,' says Ginny Taylor, proprietor of Wind in the Willows, which owns four nurseries on Merseyside. 'I am not sure about this idea. A 12-hour day is a very long day for a young child to be here.'

At the Paint Pots chain in Southampton, proprietor David Wright says, 'It is fine for Sarah Teather to say this, but it is not so easy to provide. Our earliest start is 7.30am. Only a small proportion of parents actually want the early start. If the Government is saying to us, will you offer parents whatever hours they want and whatever weeks they want, then it is a different business model.

'Similarly, where they are saying they want the funded sessions to be over a stretched 52 weeks a year, I think the Government has not thought about how challenging that could be for providers. For example, many settings are based in leased premises and are open term-times only. What happens to them if parents want sessions during the holidays?'

The stretched offer certainly presents logistical dilemmas. Nurseries are traditionally quieter during the holidays so staff are able to take their breaks, and it could be difficult for managers to organise staff rotas and maintain staff:child ratios if there is an influx of children during the holidays.

Paint Pots is open 51 weeks a year but some children attend term-time only, so the settings take in others during the holidays to fill the gaps.

Mr Wright says, 'The aim is to fill in the pieces in the jigsaw. When you have children taking full-time places it is really simple. If we have the free sessions stretched across the year we will have to be looking at what space we have got available. We will have to allocate key workers, and that adds to the overheads in terms of the paperwork and record-keeping. It presents more challenges when many more children are just coming in for a day here or a session there.'

QUALITY QUESTIONS

There is some scepticism about the ability of the Government to achieve its aim of reducing unnecessary regulatory burdens, involve local authorities and practitioners in the policy-making process at an earlier stage and create the right conditions for all providers to thrive - including nursery businesses.

Ms Taylor says, 'We have been operating since 1993. We have seen all the changes that have come and gone with the various Governments, and here we go again. I do think the EYFS has been fantastic for practitioners, although I am looking forward to a reduction in the paperwork. As to their other plans, it is a case of waiting and seeing what happens.'

Quality care remains paramount for the Cheshire Day Nursery group. Director Brenda Burling says, 'Our priority is providing quality care for our families and children. If they can be assisted financially with that through the free entitlement, that is a bonus and is fantastic, especially for the children from families in straitened circumstances.

'However, the Government seems to be trying its hardest to make everything very cumbersome for small business. We have five nurseries across three different education authorities and they all interpret the rules differently. It makes it very difficult to manage the business centrally.'

For many children the free entitlement is the only early education they receive, and the Government is planning to strengthen the quality criteria for free early education for threeand four-year-olds.

Possible measures might include requiring the provider to have at least a good Ofsted rating, hold membership of a local authority or recognised quality assurance scheme, or meet a certain level of staff qualifications.

Supporting Families in the Foundation Years stresses that high-quality early education is vital to closing gaps in attainment and improving school readiness of the neediest children. However, Ofsted found last year that there were proportionately fewer good and outstanding providers in the most disadvantaged areas.

Therefore, ministers are consulting with the sector about whether even more stringent conditions should be required of providers offering free places to the most disadvantaged two-year-olds when the scheme is rolled out to include them in 2013.

How their performance will be improved in such a relatively short space of time is unclear. Mr Wright says, 'I think the principle should be that everybody should come up to the same levels. I think we are doing children a disservice if we are offering the bare minimum standards that people just have to meet to stay open.

'All the research, such as EPPE, would suggest that the higher the quality of the childcare provision, the better it is in terms of reaching the children from the neediest and most deprived backgrounds.'

USING OUTREACH

Providing places for the most disadvantaged children costs time and effort. Ginny Taylor at Wind in the Willows says, 'We work with the local outreach teams from the children's centres. Many of the staff have gone from the children's centres and have been redeployed in other areas. We call in the outreach team when we have a child we are concerned about, perhaps due to speech and language difficulties.'

She reports that outreach teams are also pro-active in contacting her. 'In some of our children's centres there are no daycare facilities, so the outreach teams ring us to see if we have got spare places for a short-term placement. In our area we have a lot of drug and alcohol problems and sometimes they want to place a child with us while the parents get respite and attend courses at the children's centre.'

Mr Wright says that when disadvantaged two-year-olds take up funded places, there are often additional needs that have to be addressed. 'They are not necessarily the easiest children to provide for, because you end up taking on a sort of social services role and engaging with the families, which can be quite emotionally draining for the staff,' he says. 'For example, you might be taken out of work to contribute to social services meetings.'

He thinks that settings should have a balanced mix of children from different backgrounds. 'There needs to be an element of aspiration. You need to have that balance so children have someone to aspire to in terms of their peers.

'We have found there are only so many families that you can manage within a setting. We like to restrict it so we can make sure we are meeting these children's needs - and doing the very best we can.'

CASE STUDY: JANCETT NURSERIES

Parents at the Jancett group of nurseries in south London can take their 15 hours free entitlement how they choose, says Gail Shenton, deputy to the partners.

'They can decide how they want to take their hours across the week, so some take five mornings or five afternoons or three whole days.

'We work it out around the parents. They tend to only do term-time and we fit in around what suits them and their family needs. If parents want to take their hours over a longer period than 38 weeks, we will fit around them.

'We work in partnership with our parents. They are all different with different demands, so the requirements do vary a lot. It is up to them to say what they prefer and we fit in as best we can.

'Obviously we have to remain viable as a business. If everybody was just doing part-time hours and we had masses of gaps, it would not work. However, we are very fortunate because we have six settings within a mile of each other and we can spread things about. We have got that flexibility.'

She thinks the grant for taking funded disadvantaged two-year-olds should be set at an enhanced rate to reflect the level of commitment involved.

'We find we are having to do more work with families. The nursery managers are often being called away to attend social services meetings and we are compensated for that. Obviously we can cover from other settings. We are happy to be involved with the two-year-olds and we want to help give these children a better start in life, but we have to remain viable. If you just had the two-year-olds you could not continue in business.'