Childminders

Sarah Teather Excerpts

Friday 6th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[The Minister of State, Department for Education (Sarah Teather)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier) on securing this debate, and I appreciate the opportunity to put on record the Government’s admiration for the work done by childminders and their enormous professionalism and contribution to the early years sector.

As I was listening to the hon. Lady’s speech, in my mind I was transported back to a similarly deserted Chamber on a Friday afternoon about four years ago. I do not know whether she remembers, but I was sitting on the Opposition Benches then, and she was on the Government side. She treated me with considerably more grace than I returned on that occasion. I hope that now, from the Treasury Bench, I treat her with as much respect as she always gave me in the past.

As the hon. Lady said, there is a lot of media interest in childminders at present. The National Childminding Association—the NCMA—has been running its own campaign, partly because some of that media interest has created anxiety among childminders about the future direction of Government policy. First, we must be clear about the vital role childminders play as part of the early years work force, in both early education and the child care they provide. The NCMA and many other bodies have done important work to professionalise the reputation and the practice of childminders. We fund the NCMA to carry out some of that work, and we are working closely with it on many issues.

The Government believe it is vital to maintain choice for parents in the early years. We have a very diverse early years sector, ranging from maintained nurseries through to voluntary and private sector nurseries, as well as childminders and a host of drop-in and parent and toddler groups. All of them have their role to play, both in terms of child development and in providing care and support to parents and enabling parents to get back to work and sustain a better work-life balance.

There are lots of reasons why a parent might choose a childminder over a nursery setting, including flexibility, location, security of the home-based setting and the reputation of a particular childminder. Whatever option parents choose for their child, it is critical that the Government do their bit to ensure that the setting offers the high-quality experience necessary for child development and that it is available at a convenient time for both the parent and the child at a price they can afford to pay. Indeed, those guiding factors are behind all our work on early years: quality, because the evidence shows that quality makes a difference to child development; and availability and cost, because they are what really matter to parents. All factors are very important for parents when they choose where to place their child.

The Government fund the early years foundation provision because we know that it has many benefits for society. First, improved child development offers education opportunities later but also benefits mothers, in particular, as well as fathers as regards their ability to participate in the work force with its benefits to wider society. Usually, those benefits are complementary, but sometimes they are held in tension. When they are, the Government have decided that the priority will always be child development. It is worth saying that, because it deals with some of the anxieties people have about how we might make a decision and what we would prioritise.

As the hon. Lady mentioned, we asked Professor Cathy Nutbrown to report to us on quality to inform our long-term strategy focused on qualifications and training over the next 10 to 15 years. I asked her to consider that, not only because of the evidence on quality but because we know that there is a particular issue with the esteem in which early years professionals are held in wider society and their reputation across the piece, whether they are working in nurseries or are childminders. She has made a lot of good recommendations and we want to take some time to consider them. We will respond to her report later in the year. I want to make it clear that Professor Nutbrown’s recommendations are for those who work in early years settings across the piece and do not just focus on childminders as our work on early years is more widely focused.

The hon. Lady also mentioned the reform of the early years foundation stage curriculum, which comes into force this year. We have tried to focus on improving quality, so that it focuses on the core areas of child development that we know are foundation building blocks for all that happens later in schools. Settings that offer the free entitlement all offer the early years foundation stage curriculum, including childminders.

On the questions of availability, access and cost we are doing a great deal to try to improve access. First, as the hon. Lady mentioned, we are increasing the number of hours available to parents through the free entitlement from 12.5 hours a week to 15 hours a week and extending that to two-year-olds, beginning with the poorest 20%, who will have a free entitlement from 2013, and working up to 40% by 2014. Yesterday, I published a consultation on the criteria that we are suggesting that we might use to prioritise those children.

We want to do a great deal more. We know that families are under extreme pressure at the moment because of the cost of living, and that is why the Government made the changes we did to the tax system to ensure that those earning the least were taken out of paying tax. We know that child care is a particular pressure on many families, including in London, as the hon. Lady suggested. That is why the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister have asked me and the Minister responsible for disabled people, the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Basingstoke (Maria Miller), to work together on a review of the availability and cost of child care.

The hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch asked me a number of questions about the terms of reference and detail of that review. We will shortly publish the terms of reference, so unfortunately I cannot answer all her questions today. When we publish the terms of reference, we will make it clear how people can submit their views to that review and how we will consider them. As the announcement made clear, we are looking at a number of aspects in particular—first, out of school wrap-around care.

We know that many parents have difficulty accessing child care which is appropriate and available to them at the times and places that they need it. For parents with a number of children of different ages, that can create real pressure. That is one area where a good deal more progress could be made, so that is one of the first areas that we want to look at. What can we learn from some of the best schools that have taken an innovative approach to wrap-around care? The Free school in Norwich, for example, a new school, has on-site affordable child care six days a week, 51 weeks of the year, which makes a substantial contribution to parents’ support network. Mossbourne academy provides a longer school day—again, a great support for many parents who have to juggle a working day and perhaps pick children up from child care in different places.

It is important that we identify regulation that creates unnecessary burdens which detract from quality. Unfortunately, regulation does not always support quality. Sometimes regulation that was initially intended to raise quality becomes burdensome over time, possibly because it is gold-plated or misunderstood, or because things move on and professionals gain enough knowledge to be able to exercise their own judgment. That was our focus when we looked at the early years foundation stage. Therefore, for example, we pulled away some of the health and safety regulation that was a distraction for many in the sector. They had to do risk assessments that were out of all proportion to the task in hand when they were taking a child to a park.

Similarly, the old structure had 69 goals and was extremely prescriptive. We focused it much more on three core building blocks, which we hope will focus professionals’ minds on quality, be less distracting for them, and encourage them to use their professional judgment more. As the hon. Lady said, great progress has been made in the knowledge of early years professionals across the piece, not just childminders. We felt that now was the right time to do that. We will take a similar approach when we look at other regulation for childminders and others in early years settings.

On ratios, Cathy Nutbrown’s report made it clear that sometimes we can offset different ratios against the quality of the staff in a setting. The hon. Lady asked whether we would be looking at international examples. That is one of the first areas where we have much to learn from other countries. The hon. Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss) gave examples from the Netherlands. There is a great deal that we can learn from the Netherlands, as well as from France and the Scandinavian countries. Some countries have slightly different systems. Others have systems similar to our own.

The core aim is to focus on the three elements that I outlined at the beginning of my speech: quality, affordability and availability. If we do not bring all those three together, parents will feel that they are losing one of the legs of the stool that is vital for them to sit on if they are to be prepared to leave their child in an early years setting.

Quality is incredibly important to the Government. Our defining principle is to try to raise social mobility. If we were to take decisions that were at the expense of quality, that would undermine the core work that we are trying to do in other areas. However, parents are finding it extremely difficult to pay for child care, and where regulation is getting in the way it is right and proper to see what we can do to relieve the burden on the setting and to see whether that will have any long-term impact on costs for parents.

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for making available this opportunity to place my commitment to the area on the record, and to thank the NCMA for all the work that it does in raising quality for childminders and in making its views well known to Government. I am sure that it will make its views well known during the next few months as we think about how to extend affordability and availability of child care to parents.

I heard the hon. Lady’s invitation to visit Hackney, and I shall certainly bear that in mind as we think about how we might get more information about how any of these changes might affect practitioners on the ground.

Question put and agreed to.