Early Years Educators

Debate between Steve Brine and Tulip Siddiq

Tuesday 25th January 2022 Westminster Hall

[Steve Brine (Winchester) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the role of early years educators.

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Gray. Looking around me, I also see many friends and supporters of our early years sector. I thank them for taking time out of their schedules to come to debate this issue; I know that there are a lot of important competing issues in Parliament today.

I start with two declarations of interest. First, I am married to a hard-working early years educator, who will be arriving home very shortly to pick up the school run and then juggle all the different things that working mums do while working dads are in Parliament—or vice versa. Secondly, for the last couple of years it has been my pleasure to chair the all-party parliamentary group on childcare and early education; we held our annual general meeting in the last hour, actually. I want to extend my thanks to parliamentary colleagues who have supported our work over the last year and have committed to do so for the year ahead. I was somehow re-elected chairman of the group for the next year. I also thank many colleagues old and new who have agreed to serve as officers for the coming year: we have much to do.

This afternoon’s debate is timely. It rather wonderfully coincides with the all-party group’s annual childcare and early education week, which celebrates and promotes the hard work of our early years educators and sector. Our theme for this year is celebrating the role of the early years workforce as educators, which is what I wanted to place at the heart of my chairmanship of the group, and seeking to explore the challenges that the workforce faces and celebrate the good work that it does.

Last week, the all-party group held a forum for parents to share their experiences of early years educators and settings. It was chaired by the brilliant Professor Kathy Sylva of Oxford University. Professor Sylva is at this very moment providing an update to the meeting of our all-party group, which is being chaired in my absence by the Father of the House, my hon. Friend the Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley). The session is being recorded, and I urge any colleagues who would like to catch up on it to follow our social media channels. Parents provided some incredible examples. I see this as an example of the very best work that we can do in Westminster, and I am sure that Professor Sylva will not mind me touching on some of the things that were said. One parent spoke about the empathy, patience and humour an early years educator shows when working with both her and her child, who has significant special educational needs. Another reminded us of the little freedoms that early years settings empower families to have. One lady said she occasionally has lunch with her partner; that may sound frivolous, but one the best things that we can do for our children is provide them with a loving, secure home environment—and making sure that mum and dad stay mum and dad is rather important, too. One phrase that touched me was from a parent discussing the key worker in their child’s early years setting, who said:

“Simply, we would be lost without these people. They are truly amazing.”

Of course, there are areas for development in the early years workforce as we strive for its continued betterment. At our forum, parents raised the issues of settings’ opening hours and, overwhelmingly, the need to ensure that early years educators are properly paid, a subject to which I will return.

I commend the Government for acting on this issue in the spending review. Following a meeting that my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (James Daly) and I had with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, my right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond (Yorks) (Rishi Sunak), he placed early years at the centre of some of his announcements in this area in the Budget. He quadrupled the funding for early years settings over the next three years. That was most welcome, and an important step towards shoring up a sector that has been heavily hit, it is fair to say, during the pandemic.

However, as I have said before, this is not just about money. The early years sector faces an existential crisis as settings are being forced to close, and the valued early years educators that we are talking about are then lost to other lines of work, often due to remuneration. Most worryingly of all, bright young prospects are put off a career as an early years educator. At a meeting of our all-party group in December, two apprentices spoke compellingly about their work with children under five. However, those brilliant talents were pursuing careers in social care and not in early years. Social care is an important vocation, but they are a great loss to the potential early years workforce of tomorrow, and we need them. So more must be done to draw the early years educators of tomorrow towards the profession, and not push them away.

[Tulip Siddiq (Hampstead and Kilburn) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Steve Brine]

I will give way to my predecessor as chair of the all-party group.

[Tulip Siddiq]

I know the hon. Member is a doughty champion for the early years sector. I have heard him mention his wife on several occasions and admire the work that she does. In an ideal world I would stay and make a speech in this debate, but I have to leave because I have moved to the shadow Treasury team and I have a commitment.

I wanted to come and pay tribute to the early years educators, and I am pleased the hon. Member still uses the term “educators”, because they are educators. They are not just key workers. They are the unsung heroes of our nation who make a massive difference to our children’s life chances. I do not think he mentioned how much they are paid, but on average, as he knows, it is only £7.42 an hour, which is dismal compared with how much it costs to live.

I wonder whether the hon. Member will comment on the fact that we need a cultural change in how we value and talk about early years practitioners and educators. Instead of just referring to the early years sector as childcare, we should also refer to early years educators and talk about early education. I could go on about this for ever.

[Steve Brine]

It is funny how often, in my almost 12 years in this House, people say, “That is amazing; I was just about to come on to that in my speech”, and funnily enough, I was. The hon. Lady led on this subject when she led the all-party group, and she is absolutely right. Far too often we have seen early years practitioners presented as well-meaning amateurs who are good at changing and plasticine. They are good at those, but they are also educators, so she is absolutely right. Following on from what she said, I think a major contributing factor to the fact that we are losing people from the profession and not attracting them into it is that early years educators have been subject to so many misconceptions about their role that it has affected how their profession is viewed and then how it can attract people.

First and most commonly is the notion that early years educators somehow do not hold the same status as those who work in the subsequent parts of the education profession. That could not be further from the truth. The first few years of early education is the foundation on which lifelong learning, health and wellbeing are built. Handling this phase of a child’s life requires specialist knowledge and specialist approaches from trained, qualified practitioners. Early years educators are highly trained professionals and they hold specialist qualifications accordingly. Despite that, many settings are struggling to pay competitive salaries, and providers have therefore reported that staff are increasingly moving into sectors such as retail.