Nursery schools provide a valuable service to poor areas, but they have the potential to offer far more. Professor Helen Penn reports
Nursery schools represent an important tradition in early years services, focusing uniquely on the needs of younger, often socially excluded children.
For most of the 20th century - even as recently as five years ago - they were regarded as making a significant and distinctive contribution to early years education. Now they are a run-down service. Many have closed; more than a third are urgently in need of capital investment, and many face imminent closure - I estimate between 50 and 100. So what has changed and why?
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