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On a shoestring - community nurseries

With subsidised fees, community nurseries are able to make childcare more accessible. But they need secure funding, says Anne Wiltsher

With subsidised fees, community nurseries are able to make childcare more accessible. But they need secure funding, says Anne Wiltsher

If you want to experience genuine anger at how little early years care and education is valued in the UK, you need look no further than the new DfEE good practice guide for Early Years Development and Childcare Partnerships on community nurseries. It features potted profiles of some of the 256 community nurseries in England. If healthcare or compulsory schooling for the less well-off were financed in this hand-to-mouth way, there would be a national outcry.

Community nurseries are non-profit-making organisations, often with charitable status, run by voluntary management committees, which may or may not include the parents of children attending. According to a two-year research project by the Daycare Trust, called Childcare in the Community: Community Nurseries in England and published in December last year, about half of English local authorities have at least one community nursery. They offer 8,000 childcare places, about five per cent of all places in 1997. The nurseries are usually in deprived areas and very often linked to schemes to get parents into work or training.

The Daycare Trust says it wants to 'draw on the tradition' of community nurseries for its vision of 13 Centres for Children in every EYDCP area, attributing their appeal to the fact that they are more inclusive than either private day nurseries or local authority ones. While private nurseries exclude all but the relatively well-off with weekly fees of up to 180 (1997 figures), council nurseries tend to exclude any child who is not 'in need'.

Community nurseries, on the other hand, are able to take children from a whole range of backgrounds. They can charge low fees, sometimes on a sliding scale, depending on a parent's income. The average cost of a full- time place in a community nursery is 81.80 per week for a child aged under two, and a subsidised place is 49.99. Older children cost slightly less.

The DfEE is encouraging EYDCPs to assist in setting up community nurseries to help fill the childcare gap for poorer parents. But is this just a cheap option for the Government? Community nurseries have to rely on grants from a welter of different sources and general fundraising to subsidise fees. According to the Daycare Trust report, an alarming 66.7 per cent felt under threat of closure. Managers of community nurseries have their work cut out just trying to survive.

'You have to be very creative about what funding you try for,' says Sarah Tooze, co-ordinator of the Sheffield Community Childcare Network. The Network was started in 1997 in partnership with the Sheffield Community Enterprise Development Unit and includes 14 nurseries. Initially, many of the Sheffield community nurseries were funded by the council, but this start-up funding is coming to an end and each nursery has had to put together a complex funding package drawing on European funding, the National Lottery Charities Board, Children in Need, the New Opportunities Fund and education grant.

Sarah Tooze explains that further funds can be obtained by providing services for children in need, special needs children or training for parents. 'All this takes an enormous amount of time,' she says. 'Even though these bids are for three or four years, managers have to plan well ahead. They're good at it, but they shouldn't have to do it. When we sit down with new management committees and say there's this, this and this you can apply for, they sit there with their hair blown back. It's a steep learning curve.'

The Daycare Trust report found that the proportion of income community nurseries received from fees varied enormously, from below 25 per cent to over 75 per cent of income. The main source of subsidy for fees came from the local authority (75.9 per cent of nurseries had a grant). A similar percentage used general fund- raising, a quarter applied to charities - one manager Nursery World spoke to spent a day a week writing to a list of addresses in a fundraising manual.

In 1996, Pauline Hatherall, a former Pre-School Learning Alliance co-ordinator, started the First Steps Nursery in a deprived area of Bath. Now a family centre, it is being considered as an Early Excellence Centre. Money comes from fees, fundraising, a National Lottery grant and the education grant, but the centre still loses 20,000 a year. Pauline says, 'Our four- and five-year-olds stay on and don't go to school. If we had universal funding for three-year-olds this would give us sustainability.

'I don't get angry about the money but I do get frustrated sometimes,' she adds. 'We had to fund-raise to send ten staff to the PLA conference last week.

'Children would be in care if they weren't with us. We have 150 children attending and a two-year waiting list - it shows what a need there is. If you have childcare for a few hours you can get a part-time job, study or have quality time.'

Not only do community nurseries  have to struggle to survive, but their staff tend to be paid less. 'I wish some of the money the Government was ploughing into childcare would go to increasing salaries,' says Beverley Carrick, manager of the community Tik-Tok Nursery in Gateshead. 'You get nursery assistants on the minimum wage and they have a lot of responsibility. We shouldn't be that far behind teachers really.'

Another question is whether voluntary management committees are the appropriate way to run such an important service. Managers told the Daycare Trust about difficulties recruiting and retaining members if the committee was made up primarily of parents.

In the light of all this, it is refreshing to read the chapter on how early years services could be funded in Peter Moss and Helen Penn's Transforming Nursery Education, published by Paul Chapman in 1996. The authors stand back, think about what sort of early childhood service would be best for children and parents - a comprehensive, integrated and coherent one for 0-6 year olds with a well-trained and properly paid workforce - and cost it.

As in the rest of Europe, the authors would divide the costs between society and parents. After one year's maternity and parental leave, a portion of attendance time, which might eventually be equivalent to full-time school hours, would be free of charge. Non-working parents would be recognised, as they could use the free time for free.

For children attending for longer hours, funding would come from a mixture of public money and parental contributions adjusted to take account of family income. As in Europe, parents' contributions would cover less than 30 per cent of costs. The authors would like to see services subsidised directly and come from the education budget. They calculate that at the end of a ten-year build-up period and with parental contributions, expenditure would be just under one per cent of GDP (total expenditure on education was 5.3 per cent of GDP in 1991).

When Nursery World spoke to Pauline Hatherall of First Steps Nursery, she stressed that the centre was 'not a dumping ground for children.' Perhaps the fact that someone who is keeping children out of care felt the need to say this, demonstrates why Britain still has no publicly funded early childhood service. We're still not sure it's the right thing to do.

Maybe these words can reassure us. 'A publicly funded early childhood service does not deny the primary responsibility and interest of parents in children and their upbringing,' write Peter Moss and Helen Penn. 'It does, however, acknowledge there is also a substantial public interest in children and their upbringing, and consequently some public responsibility.

'Such a service is 'not a 'takeover' from parents, but a practical and effective way of supporting (them)... sharing both the costs and the care involved in this essential work.'    


Further information

Funding for community nurseries was discussed at yesterday's Daycare Trust conference on Making Childcare Sustainable (020 7739 2866). Good Practice for EYDC Partnerships No. 10 on Community Nurseries is available from 0845 6022260.