Encounters with policy in early childhood education - Policy Week 2024

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) is rarely out of the headlines. The cost of early years provision for parents, the increasing financial precarity of nurseries and current staff recruitment challenges all feature frequently in national media. After decades on the sidelines, provision of education for the youngest children now appears to be both a pressing national crisis and a political football.

In recent years, there has been a move to frame ECEC as ‘childcare for working parents’. As important as this is, this language and associated policies devalue early learning and this foundational work. Colleagues are educators not glorified babysitters.

We know that 2024 will be a general election year and it is imperative that the needs of children and early childhood educators, as well as families, are all central to policy offers from political parties.

Policy encounters

I have spent the last 25 years working in early childhood education practice, policy and, more recently, research. Over the past five years I have drawn on my research experience to engage more in policy work.  This has included authoring policy reports for Nuffield Foundation and Sutton Trust and submissions to the Education Select Committee Inquiry and the Labour-led Bell Review on early years.

Funding

An ongoing challenge is the chronic underfunding of early years settings. Funding per hour paid to settings does not, in most cases, cover the costs of provision. Despite successive governments’ rhetoric, ‘government’s underfunding of childcare places in England has led to an 87% increase in nursery closures’ (NDNA 2023). I, along with many others in the sector, have raised this with Ministers, Shadow Ministers, MPs, and All-Party Parliamentary Groups over a number of years.

Workforce conditions

In addition, I have been engaged in policy work around the early childhood workforce. Following my PhD thesis I undertook research on the ‘Childcare during COVID’ project (Hardy et al 2021) with colleagues at University of Leeds. This work led to colleagues forming the Early Years Employment Research Hub, for which I am pleased to be a member of the steering group.

The pay and status of early childhood educators continue to be a pressing concern, with numerous reports highlighting these factors, leading to an exodus of the workforce from the sector. Job vacancies for early years practitioners have risen by 146 per cent since before the Covid-19 pandemic. I summarised the issues for The Conversation last year arguing that a long overdue early years workforce strategy is more imperative than ever.

Advocacy and activism

I am also interested in the advocacy and activism of early childhood educators, both in terms of their ‘micro resistances’ and collaborative action. Notably, there is a growing momentum of organisations such as the Early Education and Childcare coalition lobbying for the ‘rescue and reform’ of the early years sector. Progress in policy development can be slow and fitful, but importantly, I feel part of a growing community of educators and researchers who are using the evidence and raising their voices to advocate for change.