Nurseries and Early Years Settings

Kieran Mullan Excerpts

Thursday 3rd December 2020 Westminster Hall

[Dr Kieran Mullan (Crewe and Nantwich) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester (Steve Brine) on securing this important debate. Nursery and early years providers are vital, not just to allow parents to work, but to support the development of the children in their care. We saw how vital they were in allowing our key workers—nurses, doctors, supermarket staff, police officers and many others—to keep doing their vital jobs during the lockdown. More than ever before, they were literally a necessity, as the Government advised against informal childcare arrangements with at-risk grandparents. Without them, many people would not have been able to carry on going to work as the nation needed them to.

For many providers it was an incredibly stressful time financially, because although we needed them to stay open to help key workers they lost huge chunks of their income, and their costs increased due to things such as using more agency staff and extra cleaning measures. It is welcome that the Government continued to pay for Government-funded hours, but that still left shortfalls for many. Nurseries in my area, such as Little Angels, which I visited a few months ago, really struggled. I am pleased to say that it has survived, but others locally and across the country have not.

On the importance of early years settings, it is helpful to remind hon. Members of the 2019 Education Committee report, which found that early years education for children below the age of four had a positive impact on the life chances of disadvantaged children. Maintained nursery schools in particular are extremely successful in ensuring excellent outcomes for disadvantaged children.

I was lucky to recently visit the grant-maintained Westminster Nursery School—appropriately named—in the heart of Crewe. As a maintained nursery, its catchment area includes very significant deprivation and the children who come to it often require significant levels of additional support. The headteacher, Elizabeth Hulse, her staff team and the chair, Donna Reed, have worked incredibly hard to keep the doors open and manage and minimise the risks of covid. I put on record my thanks to them. When I visited them in October, however, they still did not know what their funding would be. That uncertainty does not make it easy for any business or organisation to plan.

Thankfully, Ministers have now confirmed that supplementary funding, worth up to £23 million, for maintained nursery schools will be continued for the summer term of 2021 to enable local authorities to support them. That will provide maintained nursery schools, such as Westminster Nursery School, with some reassurance about funding for the 2021 academic year. However, although it is very welcome, it does not take us past the 2021 academic year and does not address all the financial shortfalls that nurseries experience, and there is still no long-term funding solution. Those nurseries need to be given security and stability for the years ahead.

Currently, the local authority, Cheshire East, provides additional funding to the nursery to which I have been referring, but there are no guarantees about that and there is not an agreed approach for deciding what funding should be made available. We need to develop an agreed framework, so that the funding for maintained nursery schools can be standardised and so that the funding formula is up to scratch for the whole sector. The criteria used to allocate the funding should reflect the actual levels of need locally and the challenges that different nurseries face, so that they can deliver the best possible outcomes for their children.

I want to see maintained nurseries such as Westminster Nursery School, private providers such as Little Angels, school-based providers and the entire sector prosper and, hopefully, do more. Their success is our success. For the most disadvantaged in our society, they are just about managing to be a vital stepping-stone, when I want to see them become a fully fledged escalator of opportunity. I ask my hon. Friend the Minister to listen very carefully to the representations made today, and to help build that brighter future for a very important sector for so many young people in this country.