PVI side of the story
The letter from Walkergate Early Years teacher Jenny Parker concerning full-time places for three-year-olds in maintained nurseries in Newcastle (Letters, 8 October) describes one side of a story. The other side is that offering such places is done at the expense, and to the detriment, of the PVI sector.
For some years now, it has been the policy in Stoke-on-Trent to place all three-year-olds in full-time nursery classes in the maintained sector. Consequently, private nurseries have emptied of the very children that provide their sustainability.
Three-year-olds benefit from a staff ratio of 8:1 (13:1 in the maintained sector) and provide the necessary financial surplus that cannot be achieved from the 4:1 and 3:1 ratios for children under three.
In Stoke, creating sufficient places for three-year-olds in maintained nurseries has, predictably, caused an overprovision of early years places, which the local authority knows will eventually be resolved by the failure of private sector settings - and this has proved, and continues, to be the case.
Jenny Parker rightly says that it is sad when people who have built up such excellent practice are to be rewarded with redundancy. But this has been happening in the private sector in Stoke for years.
In a recession, particularly, parents will take advantage of places that save them money. Several parents left our nursery recently in tears, saying they desperately wanted their children to stay but were unable to ignore the £40 per week they could save by switching. So there is no parental choice for three-year-olds in Stoke-on-Trent. The offer of free childcare is, to use a current expression, a 'no brainer'.
Meanwhile the schools, desperate to fill all their places, are, if necessary, sucking in children from outside their catchment area. Yet come reception year, these children will almost certainly be returned to their catchment schools (which, ironically, are likely to be the ones served by our nursery).
Additionally, 'gentle' settling-in policies see some maintained nurseries offering just one hour of care a week between September and November, leaving us unable to claim the other 14 hours of entitlement (each week) on behalf of the child.
And, yes, our maintained nurseries have 'outstanding' Ofsted inspections too, but that has not prevented us from having the worst Key Stage 1 results in the country. We must be doing something wrong somewhere - many regard it as being too much, too soon.
Finally, the Government is looking for settings to offer nursery education sessions between 8am and 6pm. So far, I do not see the maintained sector at the vanguard of this initiative. I would be interested to know just how advanced plans are at Walkergate Early Years and other maintained settings to meet this aspiration - one which I am sure many settings in the PVI sector will respond to readily.
Brian Cooper, Meir Park Day Nursery, Stoke-on-Trent
- Letter of the Week wins £30 worth of books
EYFS CRITICS IGNORED
The review of the EYFS by children's minister Dawn Primarolo (The Minister's View, 1 October) merely restated the aims and intentions of the framework and ignored the point of the storm of protest against it - namely, its compulsory status that requires practitioners to teach developmentally inappropriate literacy and numeracy skills.
Such an imposition destroys children's love of learning and steals the joy of childhood.
Practitioners are not 'thriving' under the EYFS, as the minister states. Thousands have resigned in protest and those who remain are incapacitated by the burden of assessment tasks that divert their attention and concentration from the children.
The only effective way to 'drive up standards' (a phrase that reveals mechanistic thinking - the central flaw of EYFS) is to help children grow from within, not imposed by adults, in their own way and at their own pace.
Grethe Hooper Hansen, retired teacher, Bath
- Send your letters to ... The Editor, Nursery World, 174 Hammersmith Road, London W6 7JP letter.nw@haymarket.com 020 8267 8401
