IT IS time to properly invest in the early years sector and improve children’s life chances, but investing in early years is not a simple process. Early years provision is diverse, and investment is needed across the whole sector.
 
As part of the government’s so-called Plan for Change, Labour rightly acknowledges that “children’s early years are crucial to their development, health and life chances.” But when you dig a little deeper it seems they are more focused on delivering “affordable childcare” and forcing working parents back into the workplace.
 
Childcare should be affordable, but it should also be acknowledged that early years practitioners are not simply caring for children, they are educators in their own right.
 
While the government says that they “have set a milestone of a record proportion of children starting school ready to learn,” they are missing the point — babies are learning before they are even born, learning doesn’t only happen within schools or in the classroom and learning for young children is complex and not simply about literacy and numeracy.
 
School readiness should not be about a child’s ability to sit and listen and do as they are told. Four-year-olds starting school need firm foundations so that they have the best outcomes and life chances as they get older.
 
Labour says it values the early years sector, and yet in its Plan for Change, it dismisses the learning that takes place every day of an infant’s life at home and in a range of early years settings. We know that children’s life chances are mostly determined by the age of five, and so it is crucial that Labour recognise this and stop dismissing the learning that takes place before children start school and in doing so ignoring an entire section of the early years workforce.
 
The government has also committed to supporting school-based nurseries, but in doing so they appear to have forgotten that we have Maintained Nursery Schools that are closing at alarming rates due to years of funding deficits.

They also fail to recognise that meeting the needs of children under the age of three is not simple; the space, facilities, resources and adequate staffing requirements mean that proper investment and planning are needed.
 
It is also worth noting that Maintained Nursery Schools provide vital education for those children who are most at risk of being disadvantaged and support for their families, so the closure of Maintained Nursery Schools is worsening the already systemic inequalities that exist in our society.
 
So while it is promising to hear a Labour government say that early years education is at the heart of their plan for change, we need more than just soundbites and newspaper headlines.
 
We need recognition of the importance of the entire early years sector. We need our government to truly value early years, invest properly in our sector and agree on long-term, sustainable funding for Maintained Nursery Schools to stop the crisis of uncertainty that is threatening many of them.

NEU members can also step up the campaign in their local area by lobbying local government and MPs over this issue and fighting to ensure that our nurseries stay open.
 
Lucy Coleman is an early years teacher and chair of NEU left — neuleft.org.