Opinion: Nursery trade secrets

Imagine arriving at your supermarket and finding members of a rival brand advising on how best they should display their goods. Or perhaps booking into a hotel belonging to a major chain and seeing the desk clerk being led by someone from a highly competitive rival on customer relationship training. Does this sound plausible?

If your answer is the same as mine, it's 'no'. Why give away techniques and confidential information which had taken time, energy and a great deal of expense to develop? In a competitive environment, this intellectual property or pool of trade secrets represents one of the most important assets a company owns.

What has this to do with childcare? Well, this is exactly what the Government is expecting the best nurseries to do in an effort to raise standards across the board. In the spirit of partnership working, both the private and maintained sectors will be expected to spend time sharing best practice with other nurseries, even if they are competitors.

Given some of the problems already meted out to the private sector with uneven playing-fields, I am sure this is neither fair nor reasonable. Naturally, where there are outstanding maintained provisions, these should be used to raise the level of experience across the whole maintained sector. However, to ignore the commerciality of such a request to the private sector is simply not realistic.

Naturally, all children should be given the best start in life that is available. The answer, however, is for sufficient money and facilities to be made available for sensible and comprehensive early years training - not seeking to do this essential job on the cheap, or by passing the buck.

I rarely like to criticise a situation without at least offering one solution. Why should funds not be made available to private companies that choose to offer 'consultancy advice'? I would be willing to set up such a training support group within our company - but please, let such a scheme be both realistic and commercial.

Meanwhile, many thanks to all who responded to the debate on uniforms. The overwhelming response was favourably for uniforms, in view of both parental acceptance and nursery bonding.