Early Years Educators

Ben Bradley Excerpts

Tuesday 25th January 2022 Westminster Hall

[Ben Bradley (Mansfield) (Con)]

I apologise, Mr Gray, for appearing a couple of minutes late; I sprinted across the courtyard to try to get here to speak in this important debate. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester (Steve Brine) for bringing it forward.

Early years education is vital to the development of our children—our future adults—and to our levelling-up agenda. Education and early years are key when we talk about what that means, what we are going to do, and how we tie together a coherent package around the phrase “levelling up”. Education is absolutely at the heart of that.

Just a week or so ago, I was lucky enough to visit Kangaroo Teacher Led Childcare in my constituency, where I met Alison, the owner and manager of the centre. She was adamant—my hon. Friend made this argument too—about the importance of the education element of early years settings. They do not just provide childcare—particularly not her setting, as she is a qualified teacher and a former deputy head of a primary school.

Alison explained how important her setting and others are to everything we understand about development in those preschool years—everything from nutrition to brain development, and the social, language and communication skills that are important. Even in that setting, I could see the difference between those children who had had many hours of early years education throughout their childhood and those who had not been socialising in the same way in their early years. The difference in speech and communication between those children was profound. We know that there is a huge correlation between children’s communication skills, in particular—their ability to express themselves and how they feel about things—and negative outcomes such as being expelled, being unemployed or even going to prison in later life, so this is hugely important from that perspective.

As someone who believes in small government and low taxes, I have always felt that if there is one area of life or society that the Government absolutely should invest and intervene in, it is education, because that is what sets people up to be independent adults who can make their own decisions in later life, and who hopefully will not need the Government to intervene.

From that perspective, I welcomed the Chancellor’s Budget last year, which put more money into the sector, with funding for workforce development in particular. We have already touched on how important that is for the sector. All of us in the room, who run what are effectively very small businesses, will recognise the challenge of having a very shallow structure where the most junior person in the office might only be one or two layers below us. There are very few places for people to go in that hierarchy, and often, after not many years, it is difficult to continue to progress and develop people, so they leave. We often find that in early years settings.

To retain staff, we need to help them and continue to develop and train them throughout their careers; those careers will be short if we do not do that. I would love to see a joined-up workforce strategy across early years, as was mentioned earlier, but also into other education and care pathways, such as primary schools and children’s services. People could then start—yes, perhaps on low wages—in an early years setting, but clearly see and understand the many varied, positive routes to all sorts of different careers. I think we need to do the same for social care and health; if people starting as care workers could see the massive range of opportunities that exist within the NHS, that would change our ability to recruit and retain people in social care. That is hugely important.

There was also £500 million in the Budget for family hubs and the Start4Life advice service. All that will be beneficial to our wider set of children’s services, and to those interventions in support of the most disadvantaged children.

My hon. Friend the Member for Winchester used the phrase “market failure” to describe early years. I hear that phrase a lot around children’s services and early years settings. I think it has also been used by Josh MacAlister when talking about the wider children’s services sector—about foster care and looked-after children. All these areas are hugely important to our ability to support the most disadvantaged kids and to churn out—for want of a better phrase—adults who can live productive and happy lives. I know that my hon. Friend the Minister feels strongly about this, too. There is so much to grasp, and trying to fix the market failure will be a huge challenge, but it is such an important challenge for him to focus on.

I will make two practical suggestions before concluding. They are only simple, and they are perhaps not the answer to all these problems, which will take much wider and more challenging work. First, a couple of Members have already touched on the fact that they access free childcare. I access free childcare—30 hours—for both my children. I waited with bated breath for the day when my bills would be halved, when my elder son turned three, and we took advantage of that great benefit. We did not need it; I was on an MP’s wage and my wife worked part time. People on up to £100,000 a year can access that taxpayer-funded benefit. I am all for extending the benefits system—the universal credit system—into the workplace slightly if that helps to encourage people to be in work rather than getting trapped on benefits, but a hundred grand a year is kind of pushing it. I am not sure that that is entirely necessary. I think we could redistribute that money in a way that helps more of the most disadvantaged children, where we see a particularly acute issue. I think that more children accessing free childcare would get much more bang for the buck.

Secondly, one way to use that might be to offer the early years experience to more looked-after children. I raised this with the Minister informally last week. It is really important to recognise that not every child in the care system, even, is able to access early years education in the same way or in the same amount. A child in foster care does not have the same right to 30 hours as other children in the care system do. There is no reason why they should not, other than an arbitrary line that has been drawn in the sand. For those children who have either lost parents or been taken away from their parents and had very traumatic experiences in their early lives, consistency and support from an early years provider could be hugely beneficial. It could be life-changing for those children. There is no reason why a child should not be able to get that if they are living with their nan or auntie rather than in children’s residential care. We could make a very simple change there, and I think it would also help us to incentivise people to begin to be foster carers or to take on their nieces and nephews in those circumstances. I think that would happen if there were the offer of a bit of respite and some incentive for people to join and help in those services.

Those are some small examples of areas where I think we could make an early change that would benefit a lot of young people. As many Members have said, this is a hugely important sector, and the Minister has a huge task on his hands to try to fix just some of it, but I know that he feels very strongly about it, as we all do. There is a real opportunity, through the MacAlister review and these kinds of conversations about early years and additional changes in funding, to make a real difference to the most disadvantaged children. That needs to be at the heart of our levelling-up agenda, and I trust that it will be when we see the work from the Government on this over the next months and years.