Nursery World - Some nurseries granted a head start

Hilton Church Playgroup has been providing a balanced pre-school education for the village for nearly 40 years, providing this service when no alternatives were available. But we are now faced with closure due to the opening of a local authority nursery class since the implementation of grant funding for three- and four-year-olds. We were led to believe that this Government is 100 per cent supportive of all pre-school education, giving a wide range of choice to parents, including working parents, and existing pre-school establishments.

We were led to believe that this Government is 100 per cent supportive of all pre-school education, giving a wide range of choice to parents, including working parents, and existing pre-school establishments.

We find ourselves in a very unstable position.The mainstay of our problems is that local authority nurseries are not governed by the rules and regulations as set out in the national standards for under-eights daycare that are overseen by Ofsted. They work to a staff:child ratio 1:13 whereas our ratio is 1:4, and those nurseries are not required to have as much space as we are for the same number of children.

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