Early Years Educators

Debate between Stephanie Peacock and Helen Hayes

Tuesday 25th January 2022 Westminster Hall

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Gray. I congratulate the hon. Member for Winchester (Steve Brine) on securing this important debate to mark Childcare and Early Education Week, and on his work with the APPG on childcare and early education to establish and promote this important week to acknowledge, celebrate and reflect on the vital role of the early years sector.

I pay tribute to everyone who works in early years education and childcare. There are few more important tasks than ensuring that every child has the best possible start in life. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to everyone who dedicates their working time to looking after and supporting very young children to grow, develop and thrive, whether as childminders or in nursery settings. It is a vocation to work with children. Across the country, as we speak, hundreds of thousands of early years professionals, the vast majority of them women, are nurturing and caring for children, and supporting them to develop and grow.

The theme for this year’s Childcare and Early Education Week is, “We are educators”. Under-fives learn in different ways from older children, but they are learning voraciously every single day. The best early years provision is underpinned by an understanding of child development and a richness of curriculum, every bit as complex as that found in our formal school system. Early years educators have the capacity to have a dramatic and lifelong impact on a child’s life, protecting against the effects of poverty and disadvantage, and reducing inequality. They can literally alter the foundations. “We are educators” is an important statement of fact, but it is also a challenge, particularly to the Government, to give early years professionals the status they deserve as a vital part of our education system that has parity with post-five provision.

I thank all hon. Members who have spoken this afternoon. We are in danger of an outbreak of consensus on the importance of improvements in the status and pay of early years professionals, of staffing ratios and of good SEND provision and support for kinship carers. I would like to pay tribute in her absence to my hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Tulip Siddiq), who was my predecessor in this role and who for six years tirelessly showed her dedication to the early years sector. I join the hon. Member for Bury North (James Daly) in paying tribute to Jack Dromey, who was a dedicated champion of early years education and who I know is very much missed by Members from all parties in the House.

Today, we are celebrating the early years and childcare sector, but the speeches we have heard are in stark contrast to the woeful neglect of the sector that we have seen during the past two years of the coronavirus pandemic. Time after time, early years provision has been an afterthought for this Government, considered and treated differently from the rest of the education system, and too often early years providers are left to fend for themselves.

[Stephanie Peacock (Barnsley East) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on her powerful speech. Does she agree that the situation she just described is reflected in the Government’s decision to cut over 1,300 Sure Start centres in the last decade? In one year alone in Barnsley, nine were shut and we have a quarter of our kids growing up in poverty. Although family hubs are welcome, does she share my disappointment that we could have prevented there being a need for them by not shutting Sure Start centres in the first place?