Nursery World - Understanding how early years investment pays off

When it comes to the question of whether we can afford to invest in early childhood health and wellbeing, surely we should be asking whether we can afford not to? In the light of the latest children’s minister appointment, and the wider challenges that children and families are facing, Wendy Ellyatt makes a powerful case for prioritising more investment, right now.

'Every approach – even the most cautious and circumspect in its recommendations – found that returns on investment on well-designed early years’ interventions significantly exceeded their costs.'

The announcement that Kelly Tolhurst has been named as the new Minister of State for Schools and Childhood, responsibilities that were previously split between two ministers, has done little to reassure me that the current government appreciates the huge social and economic importance of the early years (see online 27.09)

There is currently a major crisis of both funding and provision, with providers and practitioners feeling neglected and undervalued, settings closing at an unprecedented rate, and families in the UK either not having access to provision or facing prohibitive childcare costs.

According to the OECD, families in the UK already have the highest costs of childcare for any country apart from Switzerland – 26.6 per cent of average family incomes, compared to an OECD average of 11.8 per cent.

And UK parents therefore have an increasingly high reliance on 'informal' childcare, or in other words the support of relatives or friends. The situation is now a deteriorating one. As Neil Leitch, from the Early Years Alliance recently said:

‘Research conducted by the Alliance earlier this year found that an overwhelming majority of providers said the funding they receive for so-called “free childcare” places is less than the cost of delivery and that even those settings that received funding increases this year said that it wasn’t enough to cover delivery costs.’

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