Giving Every Child the Best Start in Life

Helen Hayes Excerpts

Monday 7th July 2025 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

I call the Chair of the Select Committee.

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

I warmly welcome the statement from my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State on restoring a comprehensive and strategic approach to early years support, childcare and early education—an approach that has sadly been lacking during the 14 years of the last Government. In that time, we saw Sure Start dismantled, the cost of childcare soar, and the absence of any focus at all on quality or addressing the disadvantage gap.

I welcome the commitment that there will be a SEND co-ordinator in every Best Start family hub. Given the shortage of SENDCOs in schools, what are the Secretary of State’s plans for the training and recruitment of this workforce, and what qualification will they have? How is she working with colleagues in the Department of Health and Social Care on the wider challenges in the workforce for educational psychologists and speech and language therapists?

I welcome the approach to inclusion in early years. My right hon. Friend will know that there are huge differences in the approaches to inclusion taken by different providers. How will individual settings be held to account on inclusivity under this strategy?

Finally, my right hon. Friend will know that there is huge expertise and quality in our maintained nursery schools across the country, but many are struggling with significant financial deficits. What role does she envisage for maintained nursery schools in this new strategy, and how will they be helped to be sustainable?

[Bridget Phillipson]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Chair of the Select Committee for her detailed questions, and for the welcome she has given the strategy. I would be more than happy to discuss all the areas with her in more detail, because I appreciate that time is often short here, Madam Deputy Speaker.

We want to ensure high-quality training and support for all staff working across our education system, but my hon. Friend is right that we will have a SEND trained professional in every Best Start family hub, because the evidence from Sure Start was clear about the importance of early identification of need, aligned with better parenting support and wider health service access, so we will deliver that.

Maintained nurseries have an incredible role to play, given the expertise that they can share across the system, and we are considering further steps to support them in sharing and building on that expertise. As my hon. Friend will know, maintained nurseries often have a large number of children with SEND in their settings, and we think there is a lot we can do around inclusion there, too. On inclusion across the board, there is an important role for the revised Ofsted framework in ensuring that all schools and education settings are genuinely inclusive.