‘Unlocking children’s potential starts with valuing the people who work to make it happen’

Labour wants to build on the legacy of Sure Start with an early education and childcare system for children and families, which cannot be easily dismantled. With all the available research showing that the greatest impact can be had by investing early in children’s lives, the Government’s renewed focus on early years is one of its most important missions. But if workforce shortages aren’t addressed now, the programme will stall.

The expansion of the funded entitlement for childcare, a commitment to improving the quality of settings shown in the Best Start in Life strategy, and an emphasis on improving outcomes for children, will make a difference for families and children that will last a lifetime. This is an agenda that’s essential to equality, growth, supporting working families and women’s participation in the workforce.

While the rhetoric is right, there is a critical gap between ambition and delivery. People are the answer to this gap. 

READ MORE: ‘If Labour wants to end child poverty, it must improve access to childcare’

Every policy in early education and care, no matter how well-intentioned, ultimately depends on the knowledge, skills and capacity of the people who deliver it. Educators and leaders in nurseries, childminding settings and maintained provision are the ones translating policy into practice for millions of children every day. But across the country, too many of these professionals feel overstretched, underpaid and undertrained.

Recruitment and retention have become perennial challenges. The sector is losing skilled practitioners and leadership pipelines are fragile. Continuity of care is critical for children’s personal, social and emotional development at this stage as they learn how to form relationships with the adults in their lives. For all the Government’s ambitions around quality and expansion, we cannot build a world-class early years system on an unstable and underappreciated workforce.

Current reforms risk exacerbating the situation. The expansion of funded hours, for example, will only succeed if settings can recruit and retain qualified staff. Likewise, targets based on improving children’s outcomes depend on practitioners with the confidence and resources to implement evidence-based practice.

If the Government wants its early years ambitions to succeed, it must treat workforce development as the foundation of reform. That means sustained investment in professional development, career progression and leadership training.

The Government’s recently launched strategy, ‘Giving every child the best start in life’, acknowledges that “too many talented people are leaving the profession”. 

Indeed, in a workforce of almost 370,000 there is a turnover rate of between 8-16 percent in the sector, meaning as many as 60,000 staff are on the move. A serious challenge lies in the fact that only half of staff who move jobs stay in education or childcare and around 35% leave the sector altogether. 

Then think about the additional 29,000 increase in staff needed for this year over last year in order to deliver on the expansion of funded hours.

You can see that this passionate workforce needs support to retain and develop skilled individuals.

The Best Start in Life Strategy must be the start, not the end, of a systemic approach to workforce development. At Etio and NDNA, we’ve worked with leaders and experts across the education system to design and deliver training that empowers professionals to translate evidence into practice. NDNA’s Maths Champions programme has been shown to boost children’s maths skills, putting them three months ahead of their peers, with an even greater impact for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. This is what we need – opportunities to break the cycle of disadvantage.

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If ministers want to transform early years outcomes, they must also transform how the sector is valued. That means addressing underfunding to allow competitive pay structures, clear career routes and a culture of continuous professional learning, underpinned by evidence and partnership.

The Government’s early years policies are ambitious, and rightly so. However, ambition alone will not deliver for children. Without investment in the people who make policy real – the educators, leaders and practitioners at the heart of our early years system – reforms risk falling short. Workforce challenges would mean a failure to deliver a flagship government programme, create bottlenecks in the system and place further pressures on parents.

Sure Start showed the impact early intervention can have under the last Labour Government. If done correctly, childcare reform can be one of the defining achievements of this government – supporting more children to achieve well and more families to thrive. 

We know what works – evidence-based professional development, leadership pathways and respect for the value of early education. Now is the time to make those principles the foundation of reform. With the right investment in the workforce, the early years can become one of the greatest strengths of our education system, not a poor relation.

We need a commitment from government to produce a workforce plan for the sector.

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