Nursery World - Editor's View - How should we take nurseries' threat to close or withdraw from the free entitlement?

Further pressure is being piled on the coalition Government in advance of the review of the free entitlement code of practice, with the release of a survey by the feisty Save Our Nurseries campaign.

This suggests that more than 1,900 childcare places could be lost from the free entitlement scheme by September, just from those PVI nurseries who responded to the survey, if the rules of the code are not amended to deal with funding shortfalls.

Well, it's one thing saying that you will either close your nursery or pull out of offering the free places if you can't charge top-up fees, but it's rather another actually doing it. Some settings have already withdrawn, but there is no accurate measure of how significant this is across the country at the moment.

For most nurseries, opting out of the free entitlement would be commercial suicide, unless there is a mass withdrawal or they are situated in well-off areas where parents would be prepared to forgo their free hours.

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