Maintained Nursery Schools

Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi Excerpts

Thursday 31st January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Lucy Powell]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. He is right. This is the key issue. It is about by when we need this funding commitment. I hope that the Minister will get a strong signal from the House that he can take back to the Treasury and get the commitment that we need.

[Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on having secured this important debate about the sustainability of maintained nursery schools. More than 1,500 very concerned Slough constituents have signed petitions on this very issue from Slough Centre, Cippenham, Chalvey, Baylis Court and Lea nurseries. Does my hon. Friend agree that if we are to ensure the brightest possible future for our young children, we need to invest properly in their education from an early years nursery stage?

[Lucy Powell]

My hon. Friend has made a very good point. We will be handing in a number of petitions in the House next week. We know that the single biggest indicator of how well children will do in their GCSEs is their developmental level at the age of five. That is why the critical early years are so important.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephen Twigg (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Chichester (Gillian Keegan). She and my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester Central (Lucy Powell) demonstrate the powerful cross-party support for the motion.

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate and her tireless work in giving a voice to the nursery school sector in this country. I also pay tribute to the fantastic work of the all-party group on nursery schools, nursery and reception classes in promoting high-quality early childhood education.

I am proud to have two maintained nursery schools in my constituency: East Prescot Road and Ellergreen. Like most nursery schools, both are rated as outstanding by Ofsted. Children receive an outstanding education at both schools, and I want to quote from their respective Ofsted reports. Of East Prescot Road, Ofsted said:

“Children blossom in this outstanding school. Irrespective of their starting points, children thrive and make exceptional progress in their early learning. The achievement of the most able children and those with special educational needs is outstanding because of high-quality support and challenge.”

Of Ellergreen, it said:

“It is an excellent and improving school. It is a wonderful place to send your child, to look for support or to work. The outstanding quality of teaching helps children to make great strides forward in their learning. The school motto ‘broadening horizons, brightening futures' shapes much of what the school does each day.”

Under the leadership of Jane Rogers and Colette Bentley, both schools do wonderful work in areas of my constituency with high social and economic need, and help to transform the life chances of children and families. Both headteachers place great emphasis, in particular, on ensuring that children who start with lower-than-average development are ready when they go to school, and I am grateful to the Minister for agreeing to meet them and me in two weeks. Both schools have outstanding reputations with their feeder schools for how school-ready their children are, and I think that is testament to the hard work of the staff of the two schools in providing the groundwork for a smooth transition to reception classes.

In Liverpool, we have five maintained nursery schools—three outstanding and two good. I am delighted that my hon. Friend and constituency neighbour the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Dan Carden), who is in the shadow Cabinet and therefore unable to participate today, is in the Chamber, because I know he has worked very closely, since his election two years ago, with the outstanding Everton Nursery School, which serves one of the areas of greatest social and economic deprivation in our city. Everton’s head, Lesley Curtis, is a very powerful voice for nursery schools in Liverpool and also in the national debate.

Nursery schools are the very best of quality early years education. Not only do they directly benefit the children and families who attend the schools, but they have a much wider benefit across the early years sector, with the expertise of maintained nursery schools acting as a catalyst to raise standards and supporting early years settings to work together to improve their quality.

[Mr Dhesi]

Does my hon. Friend agree that maintained nursery schools have a unique pool of expertise in supporting children with special educational needs, which is particularly pertinent and important for places such as my Slough constituency? Without such expertise, they simply would not be able to cater effectively for so many children with special educational needs.

[Stephen Twigg]

My hon. Friend makes an important and powerful point on behalf of his constituents, and he anticipates the next part of my speech.

In Liverpool—this is happening in other parts of the country—there has been a significant increase in the number of children going into primary schools with very complex needs. The expertise of the qualified teachers who work in nursery schools has become even more important for identifying and addressing those needs at the earliest stage. As my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester Central said, we know from all of the evidence, from here and internationally, that the earlier we intervene, the more likely we are to make a real difference in the life chances and educational opportunities of our children.

As my hon. Friend said, two thirds of maintained nursery schools are in the third of England that is the most deprived, and because of the quality of education they offer, they are often at the forefront of tackling inequality and poverty, driving social mobility and closing the attainment gap. Indeed, the Government’s own social mobility strategy declared in 2011:

“Children’s life chances are most heavily influenced by their development in the first five years of life. By the time children start at school there are already wide variations in ability between children from different backgrounds”.

I think that that is the case in general, but it is especially the case in cities such as Liverpool that have been hit hardest by austerity and have some of the highest levels of child and family poverty in the country.

In addition to providing high-quality education, the outstanding nursery schools in Liverpool work tirelessly to engage with parents and carers. From before the child has even started at nursery school, staff will work collaboratively with families to seek to provide the best outcomes for their children. For example, at East Prescot Road, parents are welcomed to the school and very much encouraged to feel part of the learning environment. It runs “Stay and Read” sessions, as well as practical workshops to help parents to support their children in early reading and mathematics, and to enable parents to have the confidence to support their children’s learning at home, as well as at school. The current data for East Prescot Road shows that its emphasis on supporting children with speech, language and communication needs is having a significant impact on reducing the gap between children with special needs and their peers.

At Ellergreen Nursery School, the staff go above and beyond. For example, last Christmas, as universal credit was rolled out in Liverpool, the staff donated presents and hampers to vulnerable families. Support is also provided to help families with problems such as housing and debt. Each morning, the nursery school provides all the children with breakfast, and it ensures that they take home a piece of fruit at the end of the school day.

If we are to tackle the multiple challenges of poverty, inequality and social mobility that we face in this country, we need to ensure that the best possible support is in place for children and families right from the very beginning. Early years education is at the heart of that, which is why it is so concerning that there is any question mark over the sustainability of our nursery schools.

As has already been said, maintained nursery schools meet higher standards than other providers—they employ a headteacher and they employ qualified teachers—so it is welcome that the Government recognise that the early years national funding formula did not adequately provide for nursery schools. As my hon. Friend set out, the Government have rightly committed to providing supplementary funding until April next year. However, we have no guarantee beyond then and, for the reasons that colleagues have set out, that poses serious challenges for nursery schools as they plan for the year ahead.

Liverpool’s annual supplement equates to £1.5 million. Without the protection of that funding, Liverpool’s maintained nursery schools, based on current staffing and expenditure, might not be financially sustainable. As Ellergreen Nursery School put it to me:

“What will happen to these vulnerable children and their families if the nursery schools are closed? All our years of developing high quality early years provision and our expertise will just be lost”.

That is clearly a very serious concern across Liverpool and across the country. Without a sustainable funding solution, we risk reversing the real progress that has been achieved in developing nursery schools as a beacon of early years education. I urge the Minister to listen to those concerns and, when he responds to the debate, to reassure our nursery schools that they have the opportunity for sustainable funding in the long term. They need to know that they can offer places in good faith, confident that their funding will not be cut next April. If that happens, it will make a real difference to the communities that I and other Members represent.

We need to work together on a cross-party basis to say to the Department for Education and to the Treasury, as my hon. Friend rightly said, that we do need a sustainable funding settlement that acknowledges that nursery schools have a special status in early years because they are schools, meaning that they have higher costs and play a distinct role in the early years sector. Most importantly, they are drivers of social mobility, and key players in tackling poverty and inequality. That is why there is such strong cross-party support for the motion and for the principle that nursery schools must be sustained for the long term.