Opinion: In my view - Ideas must be paid for
Dan Mead, partner at Polly's Day Nursery, Stroud, Gloucestershire
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
If friends ask us about the nursery business these days, we tell them to think of it as a hen coop in which several foxes have recently arrived.
The metaphor isn't the greatest because, unlike foxes, our intruders - the Government and various quangos - don't want to kill us. They want to help us. But sometimes their 'help' results in the kind of panic seen in the hen coop when Mr Fox pays a visit!
The proposal to have an Early Years Professional in every setting by 2015 is a case in point. It 'feels' right, although, given the stakes, we urgently need to see hard evidence of the impact EYPs are making in settings. For a start, Ofsted could provide ratings statistics on settings with an EYP versus settings with no EYP.
If we leave aside the lack of evidence and assume that an EYP's contribution to the quality of provision and outcomes for children merits a 'graduate salary', the big issue is how to fund it.
When I was a brand manager in the food industry, I had an annual budget, and failure to keep to that budget was career limiting. If I came up with a 'good idea' to improve the brand's performance, my boss's first question was always: 'How do you plan to fund it?' There were only two answers: by cutting current spending or increasing revenue. If you couldn't fund it, it wouldn't happen.
Nurseries face the same dilemma - except it's much harder. They have little, if any, scope to cut existing budgets to fund EYP salaries; revenue growth opportunities are limited, given fixed registration levels, and most settings would have grave concerns about increasing fees in the current economic climate for fear of adversely affecting occupancy rates.
A good idea that cannot be funded is not a good idea. If the Government thinks that EYPs will transform outcomes for children and it insists that every setting must employ an EYP, then it should demonstrate confidence and commitment to this path by setting and fully funding an EYP salary premium, paid to settings annually on an ongoing basis.
