The Government argues that it indicated its commitment to the early years in the coalition agreement and demonstrated that commitment in the Comprehensive Spending Review through its funding of the 15-hour free entitlement for all threeand four-year-olds and extending free nursery education to the most disadvantaged two-year-olds. Children and Families minister Sarah Teather also confirmed her commitment to a graduate workforce in questions at the Daycare Trust conference in November. However, announcements of cuts, changing duties and regulations appear to threaten these aspirations.
Research, specifically the EPPE study (http://eppe.ioe.ac.uk/), has linked better-quality provision to graduate staff qualifications. Yet under the changes to children's centres regulation, there will no longer be a requirement to employ staff with both Qualified Teacher Status and Early Years Professional Status in centres in the most disadvantaged areas. Such a change is likely to lead to a loss of qualified teachers in nursery education.
Qualified teachers are at present among the few early years staff who have a career structure and guaranteed pay and conditions. In the early years sector, they are among the few paid above the minimum wage. Early Years Professionals, although graduates and with a specific knowledge of early years, have not yet managed to establish guaranteed national pay structures and conditions of work, or a career structure.
SINGLE FUNDING FORMULA
The move to a Single Funding Formula for the free entitlement also threatens the highest-quality provision, which is the most expensive and cannot be funded at the levels proposed. Insufficient funding will be available to support quality graduate staffing, including QTS.
In practice, then, a children's centre offering only part-time sessional care could be staffed under the EYFS regulations, with only one member of staff holding a Level 3 qualification and up to half of the others untrained, with the rest holding Level 2 qualifications - thus with no need for a graduate and with many untrained staff (see EYFS statutory framework, Appendix 2).
PROFIT, PARENTS AND QUALITY
Eighty per cent of early years provision is provided by the private and voluntary sector, and most of the costs are paid by the parents. How, then, can parents afford graduate-led provision without both continued and increasing Government support? Instead, such support is being withdrawn.
THE MAINTAINED SECTOR
There are potentially grave threats to early years teachers in the maintained sector as well.
Under pressure to save money and with no statutory duty to provide nursery education, local authorities well may try to provide less expensive alternative provision.
Currently, it appears that some EYPs have gone on to gain QTS. While there is such a pay and career differential between the two statuses, this seems an inevitable and positive trend, providing a body of highly trained teachers with an excellent and wide-ranging knowledge of early childhood and a career route for existing EYPs. However, the potential removal of the requirement to appoint qualified teachers will also remove this career path and may prove a strong disincentive to undertake EYP status at all.
LOCAL AUTHORITY CUTS
Cuts to local authority budgets which have been front-loaded are already being implemented. Redundancy notices are being served on many early years staff in local authority employment, leaving them little or no expertise, while other cuts to services are also being made.
The removal of ringfencing in the early years budgets is already threatening provision and is likely to prompt a move to the cheapest, while ignoring quality.
EPPE has shown that the maintained sector and children's centres linked to nursery schools provide the best quality and outcomes for children, but these types of provision are the most under threat, since they are the most expensive to run. They may be the most cost-effective in the long term, but accounts suggest that local authority decision-makers with responsibility for budgets and cuts in services do not necessarily consult early years experts (staff with such knowledge are more likely to be at lower levels of the authority and more likely to be women and so regarded as low status).
Local authorities have a sufficiency duty to ensure childcare is available for parents, but may soon lack the knowledge and the data to carry out this duty. What accountability is there when and if they fail?
In some local authorities, 40 per cent of the early years budget has been spent on quality and workforce development, and this may be immediately under threat. Also, much of the workforce development funding has been delivered by local authorities through the Graduate Leader Fund (GLF), which seems to have been discontinued (links to the GLF on Government websites are no longer active).
The GLF has helped students and practitioners to undertake relevant qualifications, both foundation and honours degrees, and routes to EYPS. In addition, the fund has enabled nursery providers to pay their graduate staff more than they would otherwise have been able to afford.
These cuts are likely to impact on the sustainability of graduate education and training in early childhood and the early years.
GRADUATES IN EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION
It seems likely that ever fewer settings will have to employ a graduate, and that those who do will replace teachers with cheaper EYPs. But in the long term, even if EYPs remain in early years settings, recruiting them is likely to be unsustainable, as graduates increasingly shun the sector in the face of such uncertain rewards.
This trend will be exacerbated by the concomitant changes announced to university funding. English universities are threatened with an 80 per cent cut to their teaching budgets, to be replaced by student tuition fees of up to £9,000 a year. Universities now are having to calculate whether students will be prepared to pay this price for the courses they are offering, and some are considering withdrawing early years courses, given the sector's uncertain future.
GRADUATE WORKFORCE
The Early Childhood Studies Degrees Network (ECS Degrees Network) has been arguing since the early 1990s for the value of an early childhood graduate workforce and has been developing degrees with the aim of providing a new graduate worker who has both a good knowledge of children, their families and their context in society (philosophy, history, policy), and practice that is linked with theoretical and research-based understanding.
The aim is that better children's services can be developed, and ways of working with children and with adults (families and colleagues) in terms of pedagogy and relationships can continue to be improved.
Through the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, the ECS Degrees Network established a benchmark statement for Early Childhood Studies, which established for the first time a national reference point for honours degree requirements in this subject area (see www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/benchmark/statements/EarlyChildhood Studies07.pdf).
The Network has argued for the creation of a graduate early childhood worker, who has a knowledge of child development, can combine care and education for young children from birth and has an equivalent pay and career structure to an early years qualified teacher.
We also assumed that to be effective in the longer term, this new role would entail a merger of the education, training and responsibilities of early years teachers with that of other specialist graduate early childhood workers. The proposed changes to organisational and regulatory bodies will affect these aspirations.
WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT
The Government has announced the demise of the Children's Workforce Development Council (CWDC) as a non-departmental public body, with its workforce development function taken back into the Department for Education. In addition, the schools White Paper, 'The Importance of Teaching', launched last month, failed to mention early years qualified teachers at all.
As Sir Paul Ennals, chief executive of the National Children's Bureau and chair of the CWDC, has noted, 'The severity of spending cuts, coupled with the Government's focus on teaching, is putting other vital children's services at risk...[there is] virtually nothing on early education, on extended services, on promoting well-being, on supporting families' (Children & Young People Now, 30 November 2010).
Currently, the funding and responsibility for the development of the Early Years Professional programme are given by the Government through the mechanism of a Ministerial letter. The CWDC has some funded programmes in place until 2012 - the final date by which this aspect of the CWDC's work is scheduled to return to the DfE.
At present, both the CWDC and the Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA) are responsible for early years graduates, but different ones. This arrangement has created many tensions, with the CWDC responsible for EYPs, and the TDA responsible for early years teachers but still tending to overlook the care and education of under-threes. The transfer back to the DfE could be positive in beginning to open up this area for discussion.
However, the fear must be that the dismantling and the reorganisation will only disrupt what has been achieved in developing new kinds of expertise.
We can only hope that taking the function of workforce development back into the Department will not be a euphemistic way of describing the dismantling of programmes and the withdrawal of funding.
NEXT STEPS
The Government has promised to introduce an Early Intervention grant, though this will not be ringfenced. There will be an early years White Paper by March, despite the sector getting hardly a mention in the schools White Paper. However, local authorities and universities are making vital decisions now - decisions that threaten to leave the sector lacking in knowledge, expertise, provision and education/training.
The coalition Government argues that removal of ringfencing is part of its move towards decentralisation and localism. However, localism in this context makes it almost impossible to collect meaningful data, monitor effects, learn from experience, do research or provide any national framework for determining and providing high-quality early childcare and education.
It is important that the ramifications of decisions being taken by Government departments are understood, in how they can impact on and magnify each other, so that steps can be taken to avert the more catastrophic consequences.
Pamela Calder is chair of the Early Childhood Studies Degrees Network and honorary visiting research fellow at London South Bank University. She is also a member of the Firm Foundations campaign of the Early Childhood Forum, which has developed the campaign to call for high-quality services to young children and their families and promote the importance of investment in early childhood.
