Since the industrial revolution, childcare for working mothers has been a perennial problem for both governments and families. Since the turn of the twentieth century, when it became culturally and economically expected that both mothers and fathers would routinely be engaged in earning money within the national economy, the profile of the problem has elevated considerably.
The childcare conundrum
Last year, government statistics showed a 5% decline in registered childcare providers over the previous year. In fact, the sector has been in steady decline for over a decade.
The previous Conservative government announced in their 2023 Autumn budget that they would be expanding the ‘child care offer’ for two year olds so that every parent in the country would be entitled to a government funded place for their two year old in a school or setting by April 2024, and that this would be extended to include nine month old children accessing 15 hours per week by September 2024 and 30 hours a week by September 2025.
At the time the policy was announced fewer than half of all local authorities said they have enough places for full-time working parents wanting childcare, and only 18% of local authorities had enough places for disabled children.
How the Conservatives intended to enact their plans was very much open to question. The more detailed policy information that they circulated indicated that they were very poorly informed about the physical and psychological needs of such young children, and they had not taken any account of previous policy development on this topic.
A new regime, an old promise
Fast forward a few months to the July 2024 election, it transpired that one of the Labour’s election manifesto promises was to increase the ‘childcare offer’ to support working parents by turning empty school classrooms into nursery spaces. Given the issues faced by leaders in schools following the Conservative announcement, I was sceptical about the practicalities, but ever the optimist, I felt that the devil would be in the detail.
And it certainly is. We have few details about this new government’s proposal, but we have been told that they are allocating only £15mn pounds between the first 300 schools who set up these spaces. However, there are still many unanswered questions about how this will work.
For example, will these schools provide year-round care from 7am to 7pm as many private providers do? If so, who will fund the additional fees for those opening and closing of buildings, the additional energy and water costs and the cleaning and maintenance of the spaces? Who will oversee the administration of the funding, which is often complex and involves multiple application points and payment points per year? If the provision isn’t year-round, will this new service actually meet the needs of families and working parents? What will the impact be on other local providers?
A view from the chalk face
My role as an education adviser for early years settings and primary schools takes me all around the country working with hundreds of leaders. I found that of all the head teachers I work with, only two felt they were able to make the proposed offer work. Many cited a lack of space and a lack of staffing as key issues when considering how to put this innovation into practice. Several heads reported parents inquiring at the school thinking that the provision was already available and being severely disappointed when they had to explain that they just didn’t have the facilities to accommodate such young children.
I would agree with that assessment. I am passionate about young children’s education and wellbeing, having worked in various roles in education as a teacher, special needs coordinator, leader, headteacher, inspector, improvement adviser and curriculum developer over the last 30 years. I’ve taught every age group in primary schools, but my real passion is early years, from birth to seven years old. I was involved in the original pilot of the funded two-year-old places for disadvantaged families and have supported many schools to set up two-year-old provision.
I frequently advise and support schools who set up two-year-old rooms. I also wrote the Oxford International Early Years curriculum for two-year-olds. So, I know quite a lot about two-year-old provision. Let’s start from the important premise that two-year-olds are very different developmentally to three-year-olds, and that this is not always common knowledge amongst those trained to teach three- to seven-year-olds.
The developmental difference
Working with two-year-olds is very different to the more teaching-oriented practice that goes on within a primary school offering education to three- to eleven-year-olds. For example, I recently had to advise a leader that they couldn’t tell parents that children couldn’t attend the two-year-old provision until they were fully toilet trained and no longer having accidents. Apart from being illegal (The Equality Act 2010 is very clear about this), one of the most central elements of working with two-year-olds is two toilet training support; it is the developmental stage in which this typically takes place.
Early years practitioners working with children under three are in charge of meeting their most basic needs and acting ‘in loco parentis’ at the most basic level. For example, children in the birth to three stage of development are still building secure attachments with caring adults; as the third year of life begins they are most frequently in the toilet training process, and they don’t have many words to explain what they want, or how they feel.
Typical language development is around 50 to 100 words at age two, expressed in phrases rather than full sentences, and between 100 and 200 words by 30 months, when sentence development starts to proceed at a rapid pace.
By the time children start nursery education at 36 months (three years of age) when nursery teachers would normally first meet them, they are typically quite adept communicators. But two-year-olds are very different. We need to remember that a child who entered the world 24 months ago has 33% less life experience than child aged 36 months. That’s the same proportional difference that exists between a three-year-old and a nine-year-old.
To care effectively for a two-year-old, a practitioner has to start from the understanding that the vast majority of children in their care will struggle to express their basic needs. They may supplement orthodox language with ‘scribble’ words and gestures for communicating with the adults who have cared for them up to this time. As such the adult taking over the care must take time liaise with parents and carers to learn these, if they don’t want to deal with a very distressed child and thence a wall of frustration for both parties in the new relationship.
A typical two-year-old child hasn’t fully developed interoception (explicit awareness of the feelings and physical sensations they are experiencing such as needing the toilet, thirst, hunger, anger etc). Hence a major role for a carer at this stage is to support them to understand and regulate their own behaviour, and to model the necessary language and social skills. Literacy and numeracy are not the most crucial skills on the agenda at this stage.
What is an effective ‘enabling environment’ for a two-year-old?
Two-year-olds are in a developmental phase in which most of their learning is rooted in the concrete (physical) environment; they need to be active and moving for much of the day. The NHS recommends 180 minutes of movement per day, 60 of which should require that the children get out of breath through running, jumping etc in a safe environment. This is crucial for their future physical fitness; if they are couped up in a classroom all day, their later health will be significantly compromised.
Ofsted recognises that caring for under threes takes a skilled adult, in their framework for schools. Here are the things they list as key indicators of good practice.
Staff are:
- knowledgeable about the typical development and characteristics of learning for two and three-year-olds, including their emotional and physical dependence on adults
- aware of the large difference in development between children who are just two and those approaching their fourth birthday
- responsive when children need comforting, and provide support appropriate to the individual needs of the child
- attentive to children’s care needs and use times caring for them as an opportunity to help children’s learning
- giving children time to be in familiar, small groups and opportunities to be in smaller, quieter areas for play
- patient and attentive when allowing two- and three-year-olds to express their ideas
- listening to children and responding to their verbal and non-verbal communication, rather than interrupting them.
And we know from the SEED study (DFE) that skilled and experienced staff impact on outcomes for children.
“High quality staff were viewed as the foundation for good practice” in effective settings leaders looked for a good understanding of child development and the EYFS; high quality interactions with children; enthusiasm for early education; and an ability to communicate with and engage parents effectively.”
The impact of ratios
Of course, all of the things Ofsted cites as being indicators of best practice take skill, time and patience. They’re difficult enough to provide with just one child under the age of three. In the SEED study review some settings recognised the challenges of providing high quality care and support for young children with a 1:4 ratio.
“Some case study settings chose to operate at staff/child ratios higher than statutory requirements because they felt this increased the quality of their provision by giving staff more time to spend with each child.”
Sadly, since then the law has changed and it’s now legal to have one adult working with five children aged two-three. In their recent study Bradbury and Meechan (2024) quote several practitioners working in the sector and their experience of the increase in adult to child ratios.
“Higher children to staff ratios mean staff under more pressure. Meaning staff taking time off due to stress, illness, being run down. Meaning children to not get basic needs met.” (Nursery Practitioner with 4 years’ experience)
“I feel, for much of the day, that I am simply firefighting. There is absolutely no slack in the system; if someone is absent, we combine classes. Practitioners come to work when unwell because they know what the impact will be without them.” (Teacher with 30 years experience)
One of the perennial challenges in the sector has been to recruit and retain staff due to lack of status and low levels of pay. It seems that we are already at breaking point within the system in settings which have been set up to specifically with very young children in mind. Which brings us back to converting classrooms in schools, which is quite challenging.
Converting classrooms
So, amongst those who study and work with children under three, it is very clear that young children’s needs are very different to older children. Opening up a space for two-year-olds is not as simple as repurposing a classroom. There are specific requirements around the space per child, the statutory framework states that two-year-olds should have 2.5 square metres per child and the outdoors, toilets, kitchen space and corridors cannot be factored into this. Appropriate size toilets need to be in the room or very close by so that the children can access them easily when they’re toilet training, if toilets aren’t directly adjacent, this will impact on ratios if adults have to leave the room to support the children in the toilet.
There need to be kitchen facilities, changing facilities and quiet spaces for sleeping. I know, having converted a staff toilet into a disabled access toilet and changing room at the turn of the century, that this alone may well eat up the £50k per school that £15mn equates to. That’s before we’ve thought about providing the right furniture for the two-year-olds, and the right resources, as well as recruiting and training suitable staff.
Ideally the children should have direct access to outdoor provision, but even if access can’t be direct, it will need to be appropriate to their specific needs; again these are very different to the needs of children aged three years+. Child minders and small daycare settings routinely take crocodiles of children and pushchairs on daily walks to the nearest park, if their integral outdoor space is insufficient. I would imagine that schools are going to find that all of this is probably going to cost far more than the £50k they’ll be given.
Working with babies
All of this is before we even start to think about care for babies up to eighteen months. This type of provision is different again, and the ratios and requirements for working in the baby room are far from straightforward.
“There must be at least one member of staff for every three children. At least one member of staff must hold an approved level 3 qualification, and be suitably experienced in working with children under two. At least half of all other staff must hold an approved level 2 qualification. At least half of all staff must have received training that specifically addresses the care of babies. Where there is a room for under two-year-olds, the member of staff in charge of that room must, in the judgement of the provider, have suitable experience of working with under twos.”
Statutory EYFS framework 2024
I don’t wish to be a doom merchant, but I do think we need to think more carefully about the detail here. In my experience, settings who have successful two-year-old provision share some key characteristics:
- They thought very carefully about why they were providing care specifically for two-year-olds
- They didn’t rush into it, they learned a lot about the developmental nature of two-year-olds, did their research and didn’t expect the two year old room to operate in the same way as their nursery
- They recruited staff who understood the needs of young children
- They invested in the right resources, the right furniture and good training
- They are outward looking, continually seeking to improve and put child development at the heart of their practice
- They know that high quality early education can’t be provided on a shoestring, is built on relationships, and requires good continuity of care.
Finally, where families are experiencing poverty or challenge in their lives and cannot subsidise shortfalls in funding, those most in need of places may be the ones who will be unable to access the new provision. This may have the unfortunate and unintended result of making the gap between children from disadvantaged backgrounds and their more fortunate peers even wider. This is an issue that dogged Labour’s previous Sure Start project on the advent of the Cameron government, and eventually led to its wholesale abandonment.
The dangers of ‘schoolifying’ babies and toddlers
In conclusion, the schoolification of very young children in attempts to ‘shoehorn’ them into schools has been a huge concern for many years now. I’ve already come across a school with “lesson plans” which resemble the work done in year 1, being imposed on the two-year-olds, and I was recently asked about history teaching and phonics teaching in the two-year-old room.
We need to remember that just because children may be in the school building, what they do does not need to look like what happens in the year 1 classroom. Young children’s needs are developmentally determined, and we need to invest sufficient funds into suitable premises and appropriately trained staff with leaders who understand both the theory and practice of child development, to meet their needs, which differ significantly from those of older children.
I hope that heads, governing bodies, trusts and multi academy trust leaders will think carefully about all of these potential issues before rushing into opening school classrooms to care for babies and toddlers.
Done well, with sufficient training and resource applied, this could be an absolute gem of a policy. As a head I had two children’s centres linked to my school and the work we did in collaboration with the provision attached was transformative for some families. The potential is huge. But in the wrong hands the potential for real damage in the crucial early stages of development could be catastrophic.
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