Nursery World - Room for improvement (1)

With the general election over, Natalie Perera looks at where the Government should go from here.

Before the general election, the Education Policy Institute analysed the manifestos of the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats to assess and compare their offers in relation to a range of education issues, including the early years.Let’s park the latter two manifestos for now and focus on the Conservatives’ commitments.

There were no big-ticket commitments in relation to the early years. Unlike the other two parties, the Conservatives made no pledges to either increase the free entitlement or to invest additional funding in improving the quality of the workforce.

There were, however, two interesting proposals aimed primarily at bolstering the maintained sector. The first was to provide a capital fund to expand nursery provision within primary schools. So far, there isn’t any evidence that this approach would have an impact on quality or outcomes, but it could help to ease the pressure on places in some areas.

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