Nursery World - Changing the mindset

As a caring profession, the early years sector can play a role in shifting priorities away from profit and towards well-being

‘It’s easy to moan’, I told a colleague, ‘but to really effect change you must want to be part of the solution.’ So, this month I have been thinking about how we might begin to elicit that change.

There has been a slow but steady shift in the national priority from community and well-being to profit and intensive expansion. Political dialogue is centred around economic gain or ‘output’ rather than ‘value’.

As a result, more philanthropic services begin to have market principles applied to them. Look at Dominic Raab’s idea to ‘lift the bar on profit-making companies running academies and free schools’ (2013). We already work within this context in the nursery sector and it currently appears that only large players seem able to expand (or for that matter to break even). Should children be connected to profit?

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