Nursery World - Early education’s worth

We're balancing the books at the end of term, says Sue Cowley.

As the summer term comes to a close, we are busy doing appraisals, organising staffing for the next academic year, and examining our accounts.

The question of sustainability is never far from our minds, because early years settings are always balanced on a precarious financial cliff edge.

And one of the questions that arises at this time of year is, ‘How can we pay our staff the wages they really deserve?’ This question is especially telling at the moment because, yet again, our hourly funding rate is not going to increase. This summer we must auto enrol staff into a pension scheme, even though this means another added cost for our setting. There is only one pot of money available, and the pot has not increased, while all our costs have.

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