The government should raise the quality and status of the early years workforce, writes Mark Bennett

Costs of childcare in the UK are mounting for both families and the government. Research indicates that childcare costs around 25 per cent of the average family income in the UK, despite significant investment from government of around £7bn per year on early years provision.

Into this costly milieu comes the Nutbrown review, drawn up by experts from across the public, private and third sectors. It makes a number of robust recommendations concerning better qualifications for those who deliver early education and childcare across the UK.

Anyone who has ever glanced at qualifications required for early years provision, or indeed the salaries paid to the majority of staff in the sector, will know that standards of achievement could be higher. Under current arrangements, more formal qualifications are required to get an entry-level hairdressing job than a comparable childcare position. We would not want our babies to be delivered by under-qualified hands, yet we routinely entrust them to under-qualified childcare at the most crucial stage of their development.

Fortunately, Professor Cathy Nutbrown’s review recommends that all staff across the early years profession be in possession of at least a level three qualification (equal to an A-level) in an appropriate subject by 2022 – up from 50 per cent at present. It also recommends that a new early years route to teaching be made available, to underscore the importance of a well-trained and professionally developed workforce.

The government has yet to respond to the review’s recommendations, but it is not hard to predict that the cost of implementation will be a decisive factor when it comes to accepting, or rejecting, them.

Certainly, costs are already high, and there are no plausible circumstances in which a better-trained, better-qualified workforce would cost less in future than staff do now. However, rejecting the Nutbrown recommendations would be a grievous error and another triumph for the short-term thinking that too often seizes the coalition.

Half a dozen recent studies, from organisations as diverse as the National Audit Office and the Daycare Trust, complement the Department for Education’s groundbreaking Effective Provision of Pre-school Education study, carried out between 1997 and 2003, to demonstrate conclusively that quality matters. Only quality provision – settings rated as good or above by Ofsted – can help close the attainment gap between well-off and disadvantaged five-year-olds. Only quality provision can help children develop high-level speech and language skills. And only quality provision can ensure that children are ready for school by the time they leave reception class.

That is why these recommendations are so important, and why the government must think ahead and dig deep. If as a nation we fail to invest in decent early education, some children – particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, who are growing in number with a struggling economy – will start school behind their peers. They will face developmental barriers and find it more difficult to keep up with better-off children. These problems will blight the chances of many throughout their lives.

Needless to say, the cost of supporting young people to catch up educationally with their peers as teenagers, the cost of an unemployed youngster claiming housing benefit or jobseeker’s allowance for a year, and the overall cost of expenditure on health and crime, on lost tax revenues and on employment support, completely dwarf the cost of investing in the workforce who deliver childcare.

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Mark Bennett is director of public affairs at 4Children and is a Labour councillor in Lambeth. He writes here in a personal capacity