What Liberal Democrats think - about education in the early years

Written by Wendy Scott on Sat 12th Jan 2008

Convinced by arguments about the value of investing in early education, day care and family support, the government has done a great deal to expand provision for young children since it came to power in 1997. It is essential that this is sustained and developed so that potential benefits are realised. Improving all services to match that of the best is vital, but there are worrying signs that quality of provision is being levelled down rather than up.

There is incontrovertible evidence that having qualified teachers makes a significant difference to social as well as cognitive outcomes for children, but the Childcare Act of 2006 offers a limited perspective. The nursery education grant that has enabled all three and four year olds to have access to early education in the private, voluntary, independent or maintained sectors is now described as free childcare. A new cadre of graduate workers, known as Early Years Professionals, are not eligible for the terms and conditions of qualified teachers, and funding for the new Children's Centres does not cover the real costs of high quality provision.

It is highly desirable that the arbitrary distinction between care and education should be bridged, but it seems that the government's primary aim is to get parents off benefit and into work. This will only be effective as part of a strategy for narrowing the gap in achievement between disadvantaged children and their peers if provision is of high quality, and includes work with families and employers.

Government guidance for the new Early Years Foundation Stage suggests that it will raise quality. This is naïve: it is the calibre of staff, not written guidance, that makes the real difference. Although there are growing opportunities for professional development for staff working in the private and voluntary sectors, these depend heavily on experience in the workplace, where there are currently not enough expert practitioners, and few who are qualified above NVQ level 3. The closure of maintained nursery schools over the last ten years has resulted in a serious loss of specialist expertise. It is essential that training, especially in pedagogy for this crucial stage, is strengthened so that Children's Centres can offer high quality early education along with daycare, and help parents understand their children's development and learning as part of family support. Liberal Democrats are committed to improving staff terms and conditions of service as well as training.

Meeting the needs of parents undoubtedly benefits children, and enabling mothers to earn or to train for employment helps to narrow the poverty gap. However, long hours of daycare, especially for very young children, are far from ideal, especially where staff are not adequately qualified and turnover is high.

International research suggests that it is preferable to retain a home- and community-based phase for children up to two or three, and then to extend the foundation stage from three to seven, as has been done in Wales. This would avoid top down pressures on the youngest children, and promote continuity through the early years in school. It is supported by plans to extend parental leave after the birth of a child, and is consistent with LibDem proposals that formal schooling should not start before six. Young children in Northern Ireland experience an enriched curriculum, including work through linguistic phonics between the ages of five and seven. Rather than imposing a rigid, disembedded phonics programme on four year olds in England, before many of them can pronounce the sounds they are expected to encode, Northern Irish colleagues build on the knowledge of language and literacy children bring with them to school . Scotland too takes a more responsive approach to work with the youngest children, based on a comprehensive review of international literature on effective practice .

LibDems believe that effective provision is built around children's interests, and will ensure that policies in England take account of more enlightened programmes for education and care being implemented in other countries of the UK as well as wider international evidence.

WENDY SCOTT is President of TACTYC (Training, Advancement and Cooperation in Teaching Young Children). She is an early years consultant who has worked as a specialist adviser to the DfES after chairing the national Early Childhood Forum and The British Association for Early Childhood Education, has since worked with several local authorities and the British Council in China. She is currently employed by UNICEF. She has contributed to LibDem Early Years policy for over a decade.