A wave of closures should be ringing alarm bells in government. Nurseries are a piece of social infrastructure that we cannot do without
New figures showing a net loss of more than 315 early years providers in England in February and March arrive hard on the heels of a survey that found just one in four maintained (state-funded) nurseries will be able to remain open with current levels of funding. To many parents, and early years workers, the crisis in the sector is no surprise. Nurseries were suffering before the pandemic due to cuts. No wonder Covid-19 is killing off a growing number of them.
Last month, Labour launched a “big conversation” about the future of education for under-fives. The sad truth is that ever since its flagship Sure Start project began to be rolled back by David Cameron, the tentative advance towards parity with other areas of public provision that began in the 2000s has either stalled or reversed. The Tory promise that three- and four-year-old children of working parents would be entitled to 30 hours of “free” nursery education disappeared in a haze of smoke and mirrors (and chunky top-up charges). An indication of the sector’s failure to prosper, as educational and feminist progressives once hoped, is contained in the statistic that pay fell by 5% in real terms between 2013 and 2018.
