Nursery Provision: South-west England

Kevin Foster Excerpts

Tuesday 6th February 2024 Westminster Hall

[Kevin Foster (Torbay) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Sharma. I congratulate the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard), who represents my birthplace and is, therefore, a fellow Janner, on securing this debate. It is appropriate for the two of us to be speaking today, following on from the joint visit we made last year with the Education Secretary and Cheryl Hadland to raise some of the issues being experienced, not just by Tops Nursery—there are five of its nurseries in Plymouth and one in Torquay, in my patch—but more generally in the nursery sector. We then did a double act for BBC “Spotlight” afterwards, so it is good to reprise that role today.

This is a timely debate, when we look at the changes coming forward in childcare and at some of those that have taken place over the past year. As we know, there are currently three childcare entitlements: the 15 hours universal entitlement for all three and four-year-olds, the 15 hours entitlement for disadvantaged two-year-olds and the extended 30 hours entitlement for three and four-year-olds of eligible working parents. Within the next two months, the 30 hours entitlement will be extended in stages to children aged nine months to three years. We are seeing a big increase in what will be expected and what will need to be provided physically in our communities. Parents are obviously looking forward to those entitlements being available, but that means that good-quality nurseries need to be ready and able to deliver them.

I am aware of how the funding is provided to local authorities. People might think of my constituency of Torbay as a retirement area, where the focus is more likely to be on those over a certain age—I sometimes reference the fact that 9% of the population in one of my wards is aged 86 or over. However, when one digs into the figures, we also have some of the areas of highest deprivation, and that particularly falls on many working families in parts of our community. People probably would not realise that the Paignton parish is one of the most deprived in the Exeter diocese, because it does not include the areas of retirement in Torbay.

That presents some interesting challenges, particularly when we are talking about recruitment. If many people in the population are aged over 80, they are unlikely to be looking for work in childcare. They are more likely to be retired and looking for care for themselves than providing care elsewhere. That means that, for the size of population, the pool of working-age people in the urban area of Torbay will be slightly smaller than it might be if we had, for example, Plymouth’s age demographics.

As has rightly been highlighted, there are challenges in terms of housing and what makes a pool of workers available. When I had one of my old briefs, people would suggest that having a visa would be a great solution. Well, if we do not sort out housing issues and pay and reward issues and there is no transport—all the things that go with someone being able to sustain a job in early years education—even that visa is not going to provide a magic solution.

That is not to say that there is not good provision in Torbay. There are some long-standing nurseries that offer excellent provision to local people, sometimes in quite challenging circumstances. Sometimes, they very much rely on the fact that they are based in a community-motivated building. For example, Preston Community Preschool is based in Preston Baptist Church, and is able to benefit from the fact that the landlord is clearly not a commercial one and is very community-minded. The long-standing manager there, Susan Gibbons, and her deputy, Terena Cottell, have worked hard for many years to keep that facility going. They certainly do not take the type of rewards that you might expect people with their skills and experience to take, and last year they picked up issues around the funding amount.

There is good provision, but it will be interesting to hear the Minister’s thoughts on how we make sure that provision—and a choice of provision—is available. As some of us have found, we say that parents can choose where they would like to send their children to primary school, but when they move into an area, they realise that they are pretty much being told, “Here is the school with a vacancy in your year group”—and that is that, particularly if their child is entering primary school above reception or entering secondary school above year 7. When we are looking at nursery provision, how do we make sure that parents will generally have a choice? That innately requires some flexibility in the system—not planning that if, for example, 7,000 places are needed, 7,000 places will be provided, but ensuring that there will be some scope. It would be interesting to hear the thinking around ensuring that there is some capacity to allow parents to choose the right nursery provision for their child, in the way that they would want to choose the right primary or secondary school provision.

Torbay is not the lowest funded area, partly due to some of our demographics but, again, there is some funding disparity. It would be interesting to hear some thoughts about how that could be lessened to address some of the costs we have talking about of trying to recruit and retain staff. The nursery sector in Torbay will be competing with sectors such as hospitality for school leavers and people who are looking to start training. I am always particularly interested in what link-ups we have with local colleges. One of my local colleges, South Devon College, is effectively becoming the sixth-form provision for one of the local schools. That is great, and if it works well, it will give people, particularly those from difficult backgrounds, some really good opportunities, potentially with an academy trust, to start at nursery school and be supported all the way through primary and secondary school. After that, they would flow naturally straight into college to get qualifications and then straight into fulfilling and rewarding jobs and opportunities and, crucially, into well-paid careers. That is a great thing. It is about how we make sure that people see this as a new opportunity not just for the pupils and children who will be cared for, but for those who will look to work in this sector.

The debate is therefore very welcome—and welcome in the light of the fact that we need to look at nursery capacities because of the massive extension of eligibility for parents. We should have in the back of our minds the reason for this challenge, which is that many more parents will be able to access childcare following the reforms that the Government are making and the changes that have already been and are due to be implemented.

To sum up, I want the Minister to cover some specific points. What steps are the Government taking to assess the capacity of provision in local areas and regions to meet the expected demand from April, alongside the assessment of capacity nationally? It would be easy to draw a graph showing the number of places and eligible children across England. Clearly, a nursery space in Plymouth will not be of much use to a family in Torbay, and a nursery space in Torbay will not be of much use to a family in Plymouth, so what work is being done particularly at local authority level to identify that capacity is there?

How are the Government working to ensure choice of provision? How do they see family hubs such as those in Torquay and Paignton supporting parents during the roll-out of this provision? In particular, how will the Minister work to achieve consistency of funding?

The changes to childcare entitlements will make a big difference to many children and families in our constituencies, potentially helping the early years development of many thousands of children and setting them up to have the best course and the best start in life. It is just about making sure that that promise is delivered, and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s reassurances about how he will make that happen.