In fear of next week’s local elections, the cabinet thrashed around on Tuesday for cost of living eye-catchers that would cost the Treasury nothing. One of them costs the earth – Jacob Rees-Mogg’s call to abandon the net zero climate target. The other one costs children’s futures – a plan to cut numbers of nursery staff in England in the vain hope of reducing the high costs of childcare. Among advanced Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development economies, only the Israeli government spends less on childcare than the UK as a percentage of GDP.
Just as the cabinet was meeting, Ofsted released an alarming report saying Covid had hit the early years workforce hardest. “Thousands have left the sector since the first lockdown in 2020, while those who have stayed are often struggling to get by on low wages.” More than 5,000 childcare providers have closed down in the past two years, Ofsted reports. As ever, says the Early Years Alliance, the areas with the least childcare and fewest nurseries are poorer districts where children need it most. The head of Ofsted, Amanda Spielman, told the Today programme yesterday that many under-twos – who have lived all their lives under Covid – urgently need extra help with delayed speech, vocabulary and social skills.
Yet just when they need more highly skilled teaching, the number of childcare places drops. Spielman told Today that it was “concerning” that fewer parents are using childcare, and many are cutting their hours. Research from Pregnant Then Screwed shows 62% of women spending more on childcare than on their rent or mortgage. This is lose-lose all round: 1.7m women are unable to work as long as they want to, according to the Women’s Budget Group, because they can’t afford astronomical childcare costs. The greatest loss is to children themselves, who may never catch up with more affluent kids who get more and better nursery education (genuinely free nursery places with no hidden top-ups are hardest to find in poorest places). The bizarre government subsidy system gives more help to higher-earning than lower-earning households.
Now the government proposes that instead of more trained early years workers, very young children can have fewer: just one care worker looking after four under-twos, instead of three. Has anyone in the cabinet tried that, all day, every day? Rees-Mogg (“never changed a nappy”) could ask his famous nanny. So much for levelling up children’s future life chances.
Staff are now leaving the sector for other industries; many are “exhausted” and feel “undervalued”, with 16,000 nursery places lost in five years, says Neil Leitch of the Early Years Alliance. Leitch believes that cuts in the staff-to-child ratio would only cause more early years workers to quit. What’s more, “not a penny” of the so-called savings made from this measure will ever be passed on to parents, he says. “Nurseries will pay off debts, and pay their staff a bit more to stop them leaving.” It took two and a half years and a freedom of information request for the Early Years Alliance to force the government to publish its official report showing that the ministers knew they were underfunding the sector by £1.7bn – making it completely impossible for nurseries to provide the amount of free childcare the government pretended it would offer. Leitch says last month’s spending review offered only cuts for nurseries, with below-inflation rises for the next three years.
Of the many monstrous acts of vandalism committed by the Tories since 2010, one that did exceptional damage was the destruction of Labour’s best achievement, its 3,600 Sure Start children’s centres. As well as good nurseries, many had become remarkable local community hubs that offered new families every help they needed, from midwives and health visitors to speech and language therapists, open-door play schemes, psychiatric help for depressed parents, help with job seeking and adult education and training. Every family would get the earliest support to have every child ready for school, catching child development problems early. Some Sure Start centres still exist, where councils, despite savage cuts, have clung on to them. Some state-maintained nurseries have survived, the highest-quality beacons of nursery education, in a sea of often low-quality threadbare private provision. But most Sure Starts have gone.
A child’s first 1,000 days matter most: after that, it’s all repair and catch-up, which costs more. Sure Start was based on US Head Start research that followed people over a 30-year period from childhood to adulthood and found that after two intensive years of nursery teaching and family support, every $1 spent yielded $7 saved in later life, in better jobs, lower crime, and a lower chance of mental illness. The shadow education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, recently made a pledge to the teachers conference to increase the early years pupil premium more than fourfold and improve the quality and provision of nursery support. In a speech later this week she is set to reprise the great value of Sure Start.
But now we have Liz Truss in power, who in 2013 wanted to cut childcare staff to a ratio of one care worker looking after six under-twos. At the time, she refused many pleas to demonstrate how this could feasibly be done. This is just one example of cabinet thinking: every time these Tory ministers and their claque in the press call for cutting taxes and cutting spending, this is the kind of everyday brutalism they mean.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
