With just ten days until the election, we take a look at the parties’ pledges for early years, education and families (the SNP and UKIP had not released a manifesto when we went to press).
With just ten days until the election, we take a look at the parties’ pledges for early years, education and families (the SNP and UKIP had not released a manifesto when we went to press).
Conservatives
- A capital fund to help schools that don’t have the facilities to develop nurseries
- A presumption that all new primary schools include a nursery
- Pledged support for maintained nursery schools, which will be allowed to continue to operate independently, or as academies or part of multi-academy trusts
- 30 hours of childcare for working parents of three- and four-year-olds to go ahead as planned, assessing what else is needed, including looking at the best ways childcare is provided in Europe and worldwide
- ‘Strengthen’ the teaching of literacy and numeracy in the early years, and building on the phonics screening test
- Scrap universal infant free school lunches, and replace with free breakfasts for all primary school pupils
- Children from low-income familiesto continue to receive free school lunches throughout their years in primary and secondary education
- Green paper on mental health before the end of the year, and mental health ‘first-aid training’ for teachers in primary and secondary schools by the end of the parliament.
Labour
- Extend the 30 hours to all two-year-olds, and move towards making some funded childcare available for one-year-olds and extending maternity pay to 12 months
- A National Education service from ‘cradle to grave’
- Overhaul existing childcare system, in which susbsidies are given directly to parents, and transition to a system of high-quality childcare places in mixed environments with direct government subsidy
- Maintain current commitments on free hours and make significant capital investment during first two years of government to ensure that places exist to meet demand
- Phase in subsidised provision on top of free-hour entitlements to ensure everyone has access to affordable childcare, no matter their working pattern
- Transition to a qualified graduate-led workforce by increasing staff wages and enhancing training to benefit staff ‘who are among our worst-paid workers’, and improve child development
- Schools funding would increase to £6.3bn, including protection against losses from the new funding formula, free school meals and an arts pupil premium.
- The costings document published alongside the manifesto states that Labour would spend an extra £5.3bn a year on the early years and Sure Start.
Liberal Democrats
- Extend the 15 free hours to two-year-olds
- Then prioritise the free entitlement for all working parents in England with children aged between nine months and two years
- Triple the Early Years Pupil Premium (EYPP)– which provides extra funding for early years settings for children from disadvantaged backgrounds – to £1,000 per pupil a year, up from £302 in 2015-16
- Extend free school meals to all primary school pupils ‘as resources allow’, building on the infant free school meals policy brought in by the Lib Dems in the Coalition
- Promote school breakfast clubs
- Aim to double the numberof businesses taking on apprentices, and ensurethatall receipts from the Apprenticeship Levy are spent on training
- Introduce a Fathers’ Month – an additional month of paid parental leave for fathers to encourage greater sharing of parental responsibilities.
Green Party
- Free universal early education and childcare to all children, with formal education starting at seven
- Academies and free schools would be brought back under local authority control
- Abolish SATs
- Cut class sizes
- Address the crisis of teachers’ workloads by abolishing Ofsted and reforming the curriculum so that it is ‘pupil-centred, freeing up teachers to teach’
- Every child withspecialeducationalneeds or a disability would have access to mainstream education, in accordance with theUNConvention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
- Reinstate the Education Maintenance Allowance and enable apprenticeships for 16- to 25-year-olds
- Phase in four-day working week, with people working a maximum of 35 hours, and abolish zero-hours contracts
- The gap between the highest- and the lowest-paid employees would be cut, with the minimum wage increased to £10 an hour by 2020.
Plaid Cymru
- Free full-time nursery places for all three-year-olds
- Part of a three-point plan for tackling child poverty, which will also include measures to end fuel poverty through reduced household bills and scrapping the‘bedroom tax’
- Pay teachers a more competitive salary and improve teachers’ training
- Oppose re-introduction of grammar schools
- Increase the availability of Welsh-language education from nursery to further and higher educationand to adult learning
- Guarantee employment, education or training for any person under25 looking for work
- Create a new network of specialist National Colleges of Vocational Education for 14-plus and post-compulsory education.
