In the spending review in October, the government confirmed its commitment to increasing teacher starting salaries to £30,000.
This, ministers argued, was an “incredibly compelling offer” to make “teaching an attractive graduate option” and “attract the best and brightest” into the profession.
In stark contrast, just over a month later, the Low Pay Commission published its 2021 annual report, in which the early years was once again singled out as a particularly “low-paying sector”.
In fact, research suggests that the average hourly wage across the early years workforce in England is just £7.42, equating to around £14,500 a year, and a 2019 investigation by Nursery World magazine found that 14 per cent of those working in the early years sector were living in relative poverty.
Early years: an overlooked success story
This is a sad state of affairs - especially when we consider that it is well-established that the first five years of a child’s life are pivotal to their long-term learning and development and, as such, to their later academic and, indeed, life outcomes.
This, in part, is why early years providers are, like schools, registered with and inspected by Ofsted.
What’s more, the early years is an area of real success: over the past six years, the proportion of nurseries, pre-schools and childminders rated as “good” or “outstanding” by the inspectorate has increased from 85 per cent to 97 per cent.
Yet, despite all this, the early years is still not considered by many to be part of the education sector in this country - as the unwillingness to properly fund the sector shows.
This is damaging not just to the morale of the workforce but also in terms of how policies that impact the sector are designed and implemented.
It’s not just about childcare
For example, one of the highest-profile early years policies of recent years is the 30 hours funded childcare offer - but what the sector offers is much more than “childcare”.
It is high-quality early education, underpinned by the Early Years Foundation Stage, delivered by early years professionals who establish the vital foundation of learning upon which their primary and secondary colleagues will build in later years.
Yet the government’s refusal to recognise the importance of the early years has meant that over recent years, funding for the sector has failed to keep up with the rising cost to providers of delivering early education places.
This, in particular, has hit the ability of settings to pay wages in line with those of the wider teaching workforce, which, in turn, has helped to fuel a sustained and incredibly damaging recruitment and retention crisis within the sector.
Breaking Point, a report published by the Early Years Alliance in December 2021 and based on a sector-wide survey of more than 1,300 respondents, says that 84 per cent of settings were finding it difficult to recruit suitable staff, while 62 per cent had employed staff who had left the early years sector completely over the previous six months.
Inadequate pay was repeatedly identified as a key challenge for both recruitment and retention: 57 per cent of those considering leaving the early years sector cited poor pay as a contributing factor, while 52 per cent of leader respondents struggling with recruitment said an inability to meet the salary expectation of applicants was a contributing factor.
Withering morale
But this is not a purely financial issue.
More than three-quarters (77 per cent) of the survey respondents who were considering leaving the sector cited “feeling undervalued by government” as a reason.
As one said: “The work we do is essential, high-energy and highly involved. To work 40 hours a week, to be undervalued, under-respected and underpaid...just isn’t working for me.”
And this doesn’t just impact on nurseries and pre-schools.
Childminders, who are so often left out of debates and discussions about early years provision, continue to leave the sector in huge numbers: as of August 2021, there were 14,000 fewer childminders operating in England compared with August 2015 - a fall of 31 per cent over a six-year period.
The social impact
The damaging effect of this situation extends beyond the workforce itself because the children and families who use early years services also feel the impact of staffing shortages, as the quality and consistency of care and education that early years professionals are able to deliver continues to suffer.
For example, in the six months prior to the Breaking Point survey, 49 per cent of respondents had been forced to limit the number of, or stop taking on, new children at their setting; 21 per cent had been forced to reduce or restrict opening hours; and 17 per cent had been forced to temporarily close their setting altogether.
Of those experiencing staffing shortages, 61 per cent said that this had negatively impacted on the quality of provision at their setting.
When, during the 2020-21 winter wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, the government opted to keep early years settings open while instructing schools to close, ministers argued that this was, in part at least, because “the earliest years are the most crucial point of child development”.
But unless government action - and, crucially, government investment - starts to match this rhetoric, the sector will continue to lose dedicated, committed professionals.
Early years professionals are educators, and it’s about time they were treated accordingly.
Shannon Pite is communications and external affairs director at the Early Years Alliance
Childcare and Early Education Week runs from 24-28 January 2022
