“Family matters,” Rishi Sunak declared as he promised to create a “better future for our children and grandchildren” in his first speech of the new year this week. He is right, of course. What happens at the very start of life determines outcomes later on. Good early years education, including support for parents, holds the key to levelling the playing field between rich and poor while helping every young person develop their full potential.
But the prime minister’s plans to improve childcare and nursery provision are opaque. There was only a brief mention of “family hubs”—local centres to support parents—in his big “vision” speech setting out his priorities for Number 10. Too many parents are giving up work because they can no longer afford spiralling nursery costs. The UK has the third most expensive childcare system in the world and it is also increasingly chaotic. A fifth of families are struggling to find someone to look after their children because so many providers have closed.
Sunak has been criticised by his predecessor Liz Truss for scrapping her childcare reforms. Kit Malthouse, her short-lived education secretary, urged Sunak to “push the go button as soon as possible” on Truss’s plan, insisting that “the current system is a complicated Heath Robinson affair that means no one, parents or providers, is happy.”
This is true—but Sunak is right to dump Truss’s proposals, which included relaxing the staff-to-child ratio in nurseries. At the moment, there must be one adult to supervise every eight children aged three and over and one adult to supervise every four children aged two. The former prime minister wanted to overhaul these rules as a way of reducing costs for nurseries.
She cited international comparisons—but other countries with higher ratios also have better qualified pre-school teachers and more support staff. According to a survey by the Early Years Alliance, almost 90 per cent of nurseries were opposed to increasing the proportion of children to staff and only 2 per cent said changing the rules would lead to lower fees. Polling found that a majority of parents were also against a reform which would have harmed the quality of early years education and made it even harder to recruit and retain good staff.
Truss also wanted to increase free childcare support for three- and four-year-olds to 50 hours a week. This would have only exacerbated the problem that subsidised childcare places are knowingly underfunded by the government. According to the Department for Education’s own figures, the amount paid by the state is only two thirds of the true cost, creating a shortfall of almost £3,000 per child a year. Nurseries have to cross-subsidise places by charging wealthier parents more for additional hours, tipping providers which do not have that option over the edge.
So Sunak is right to think again—but it is not enough just to dump his predecessor’s proposals. He needs to come up with an alternative plan, rather than simply shelving the issue as too expensive or too difficult.
The system is in urgent need of reform. The countries with the best education systems—including Estonia and Finland—pour resources into high quality early years education. In Estonia, they say education is like a tree, and if you want it to grow strong and healthy you have to make sure the roots are deep and secure.
In England, though, early years provision is too often seen as babysitting rather than the first crucial steps of education. Nurseries are struggling to recruit and retain staff when it is possible to earn more stacking shelves in the local supermarket than dealing with obstreperous toddlers. A third of women say the cost of childcare has forced them or their partners to consider quitting their jobs, according to a poll of parents for Onward, the centre-right thinktank. In the UK, parents typically spend 26 per cent of their joint income on childcare costs, compared with an average of 9 per cent in other economically developed countries.
The government funding mechanisms are overly complex and confusing. There are eight different programmes that support childcare but the money is badly targeted. Working parents of three-and four-year-olds are eligible for 30 hours of free childcare if they have a household income of up to £200,000, but unemployed parents can get only 15 hours. This means that some of the children who most need support are not getting it.
It is shocking that disadvantaged pupils are more than 18 months behind their wealthier peers by the time they take their GCSEs, but it is even more appalling that 40 per cent of the gap between rich and poor emerges before children get to school. Nearly a third of five-year-olds are not reaching a good level of development, and the situation has only been exacerbated by the pandemic.
This is one of the few policy reforms that could simultaneously boost economic growth and improve social mobility. The scientific evidence is clear. What happens in the first thousand days of life is critical to outcomes later in life. One study in Jamaica showed that disadvantaged children who were exposed to high quality early intervention stimulation as babies and toddlers earned up to 25 per cent more 20 years later as adults. The American Nobel prize-winning economist James Heckman has calculated that there is a 13 per cent return on investment in the early years as a result of better education, health and social outcomes.
If Sunak really wants to create a “better future”, as he insisted this week, he should come up with his own plan for the early years. As the Princess of Wales says, the early years are the social equivalent of climate change. They are “not simply about how we raise our children. They are about the society we will become.”
