Government’s Childcare Expansion

Lord Laming Excerpts

Monday 21st October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

My noble friend is right that having sufficient well-qualified staff is one of the biggest challenges for developing the entitlement in early years. That is why, as I outlined earlier, we have a national recruitment campaign, we are piloting whether financial incentives will boost recruitment in early years, we have skills boot camps for early years that lead to an accelerated apprenticeship, we have the new T-level, and Skills England will look at the sector to see what more qualifications we need to have in place. We are providing additional flexibility for childminders to help to care for children and to come into childminding through the childminder start-up scheme.

The DfE currently supports a pipeline of early years teachers into the sector by funding early years initial teacher training and developing an undergraduate early years teacher degree apprenticeship to support early years leaders and teachers to earn while they learn. My noble friend is right that the range of provision within a primary school is a challenge for a head teacher, but we also heard from the noble Lord, Lord Storey, some of the benefits that head teachers will find from having that early start for children, with all that it brings to their development.

On the quality and scope of early years, we made some announcements last week about ensuring that, as we develop the scale of the provision, we do not lose quality through new provisions around the early years foundation stage. We will also want to continue thinking about how we can ensure that the highest quality of learning happens during that stage. We will undoubtedly have more to say about that as we develop the quality and extent of early years care.

[Lord Laming (CB)]

My Lords, I very much welcome this Statement, especially the section that reads:

“The Government believe that all children deserve access to a brilliant early education, regardless of who they are, where they come from or their parents’ income”.


The Minister will share my concern about young children who either are not registered at nursery school or are registered but rarely attend. What steps might be taken to monitor what happens to those children, who should be in school but are not?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The noble Lord makes a very important point. We have already said, more broadly, that we intend to bring forward provisions in the children and well-being bill for a children’s register for those outside schools. However, in the changes that we announced last week to the safeguarding provisions in the early years foundation scheme, we are also intending, after consultation, to introduce a new provision that will ensure better follow-up of children who have been registered with nurseries and who then do not attend, in the way in which the noble Lord suggests.