The Government's crusade to combat child poverty and social exclusion by encouraging more parents into work or training risks eclipsing from early years provision a powerful tool for helping disadvantaged children - education.
'It is the old problem that the two separate strands of early years provision, education and care, have never really been amalgamated,' says Professor Helen Penn of the University of East London.
'They have completely different funding arrangements. On the education side, two-and-a-half hours is on offer so parents have to purchase care.
The care side has to be self-sustaining, so people do not employ teachers because they are too expensive.'
Two Government-funded initiatives, the Beacon Schools programme and Early Excellence Centres, which both celebrate early education, are winding down, while more than 435m is being spent over the next three years on the new Children's Centres, which, it is feared, are focused more on childcare than learning.
Central funding for the Beacon Schools programme is being phased out in the nursery/primary/special school sector from August 2004. In future, schools will have to seek finance from their hard-pressed local authorities to continue their pioneering role in sharing good practice and offering training and advice.
The Early Excellence Centres (EEC) programme was set up in 1997 to develop models of good practice in integrating early education, care and family support services. A Department for Education and Skills spokesman says that with 91 centres operational, 'we are well on track to meet the Government's manifesto commitment of up to 100 Early Excellence Centres by 2004'. The EECs in the 20 per cent most disadvantaged wards will now be absorbed into Children's Centres while the new Sure Start Unit at the DfES considers what to do with the others.
Educationalists say the success of Beacon Schools and EECs was due to the leadership and input of teachers, and warn that Sure Start projects and Children's Centres will not realise their full potential unless teachers are totally involved.
The start-up guidance, Children's Centres - developing integrated services for young children and their families, says local authorities should ensure the centres have in place strong support for teaching, through either the employment of qualified teachers or significant input from teachers in an advisory role. However, it falls short of requiring that centres are run by teachers, or that teachers should work on a daily basis with the children.
Early years consultant Wendy Scott asks, 'If we do not have teachers in the centres, how are they going to relate to education? If you are trying to bring together services, how are you going to be able to integrate them if education is not there?'
Imperfect partners
Professor Penn says the focus of individual Sure Start projects tends to be influenced by whichever professional group is leading the scheme. 'There is immense variation in the educational focus of Sure Start projects for children. I think probably the Sure Start programme is not doing as well as it could for children if it leaves out education.'
Possibly one reason why early education is overlooked is that people who do not understand child development do not appreciate how much children are learning with a trained nursery teacher. As Wendy Scott says, 'One of the tricks of early years practitioners is that they do it so well. It all looks so easy and everything flows.'
The emphasis on care ahead of education has been reflected in the early years partnerships. Professor Janet Moyles of the School of Education at Anglia Polytechnic University says, 'I feel that early education is somewhat threatened by the focus on care. It does appear that there are few educationalists, for example, who serve on many of the EYDCPs. Also as an example, a number of reception class teachers, in my current research, feel that EYDCPs in general don't want to know about reception class practitioners or practices.
'EYDCPs were put into place without any infrastructure or time for a depth of discussion about the integral links between care and education. We are now paying the price for this, with the sectors each trying to retain their focus, sometimes at the expense of the other. If we genuinely believe that young children are important and are our future, then we really need to start discussing some of the deeper philosophical and sociological issues before it's too late.
'By "too late", I mean before the Government has had a chance to say, "Education and care are very different services. Education is more expensive, so why don't we just make nought to six-year-olds part of a care service?"'
The Government's passion for setting measurable targets and the Treasury's insistence on financial prudence are at the root of the problem, according to Jane Cole, head teacher to the Forum for Maintained Nursery Schools.
'The difficulty is when people come to count up and see that you can get two nursery officers for one trained teacher. It also takes four years to train a teacher, while childcare staff can train on the job.
'It's a numbers game. The whole approach is that there have to be such and such a number of childcare places provided.'
However, basing policy decisions on a comparison of the employment and training costs of a teacher and a childcarer would seem to be short-sighted. Helen Penn says, 'Children who have had educational input in their care tend to show cognitive gains when they get to school. The educational component in their care seems to benefit them. If it is not there, the chances are they probably won't do as well.'
Indeed, the latest report from the EPPE (Effective Provision of Pre-School Education) project, published on 26 March, says, 'Pre-school has an important impact on children's development. While not eliminating disadvantage, it can help to ameliorate the effects of social disadvantage and can provide children with a better start to school. Investing in good-quality pre-school provision is therefore likely to be an effective means of achieving targets concerning social exclusion and breaking cycles of disadvantage.'
EPPE reports that integrated centres and nursery schools have the highest score on pre-school quality compared with playgroups, private day nurseries and local authority centres. At the same time, it says, 'Children in pre-school centres of high quality show reduced anti-social/worried behaviour by the time they get to school.
'Having qualified, trained teachers working with children in pre-school settings (for a substantial proportion of time, and most importantly as the pedagogical leader) had the greatest impact on quality, and was linked specifically with better outcomes in pre-reading and social development.
'Furthermore, we found that less qualified staff were significantly better as pedagogues when they worked with qualified teachers.'
There are signs that the Government is beginning to recognise the value of early education. Its cross-cutting review of childcare, 'Delivering for children and families', notes findings from the Syracuse University Family Development programme that 'failing to provide babies and toddlers with good-quality integrated provision resulted in the multiplication of the risk that they would become delinquents as teenagers by ten times.'
The Children's Centres start-up guidance says the children 'should get the same high-quality learning experience that would be on offer in a maintained nursery school.'
Jane Cole adds, 'There are around 300 nursery schools in deprived areas and a number will be able to take up Children's Centre programmes. Nursery schools have proved that they are cost-effective and have good local community links.'
New teachers
The suggestion from 'Delivering for children and families' that the tasks of strategic planning and meeting delivery targets should be switched to local authorities, away from the early years partnerships, could also favour early education, because there are more people with a teaching background working in LEAs than in the partnerships.
Traditionally within the teaching profession, early years is not always taken as seriously as other age phases. That attitude looks set to change as teaching degrees begin requiring students to look at the age phases immediately before and after the one with which they want to work so they can understand how the child develops.
Maybe what early education needs is a champion to extol its benefits. Tina Bruce, honorary visiting professor at London Metropolitan University agrees. 'I believe it would be immensely helpful to have someone who could pull together all the strands together and impose some inner logic upon them so we could have people really working together in the way they are keen to do,' she says.
'A birth-to-six strategy director would ensure much more efficient use of public money. There would be no need to appoint another layer of advisers.
The strategy director would disseminate information via the existing channels in EYDCPs and local authorities.'
Further information
* Children's Centres - developing integrated services for young children and their families can be obtained from Richard Neville, tel: 020 7273 1244 or e-mail: richard.neville@dfes.gsi.gov.uk
* The Effective Provision of Pre-School Education (EPPE) Project, see www.ioe.ac.uk/projects/eppe
