Greater support for parents, an enhanced community role for schools, specific proposals for children's trusts to act as the focal point for partnership working to ensure the well-being of all children, a root and branch review of the primary curriculum - just some of the contents of the Children's Plan.
There is a great deal to savour for nursery owners and managers, parents, early years practitioners and local authorities as they come to grips with the Plan's far-reaching proposals, aimed at making England, in the words of Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, Ed Balls, 'the best place in the world for our children and young people to grow up'.
As the Plan states, the quality of services for children and improved outcomes 'depends above all else on the people who work in them'. These details have now been fleshed out in the DCSF report Building Brighter Futures: Next Steps for the Children's Workforce.
Workforce investment
Purnima Tanuku, chief executive of the National Day Nurseries Association, welcomes the plan, which includes £73m in proposals to improve training and £305m in boosting graduate leadership.
The two-year Transformation Fund proved an unwieldy beast for practitioners and local authorities, and there is a general appreciation that the Government realises that its inflexibility was a chief reason for it being massively underspent. Purnima Tanuku says there was a reluctance among nursery providers to access the fund because they were concerned about the longer-term financing of graduate salaries.
Ana Simons, workforce development manager at Devon County Council, welcomes the greater flexibility surrounding the Graduate Leader Fund, which is designed to ensure that there is a graduate to lead practice in every daycare setting by 2015, with at least two in areas of disadvantage.
However, Devon's allocation for the Graduate Leader Fund for this year represents a 50 per cent cut compared with its slice of the Transformation Fund last year although it is due to rise next year. She says this has 'caused us to lose some of the momentum that we had built up', and the impact of this shortfall has had to be cushioned with money from the Sure Start grant - something which will not be possible next year, as those funds will be needed to advance the work of children's centres.
While many authorities struggled to spend their Transformation Fund, Ms Simons says the county spent most of its allocation on the provision of increased incentives for staff to get qualified more quickly, with bonuses for candidates and assessors working at NVQ levels 4 and 5.
The council also used Transformation Fund money on special needs, for example sending speech and language therapists into settings to work directly with groups of practitioners.
Professional issues
Tracey Osborn, who runs the Jolly Giraffes day nursery in Leeds, has been closely involved with the development of training for the Early Years Foundation Stage. 'When I read the EYFS document I thought this was very positive and just what early years should be about. I hope practitioners see it as a framework that we can all work towards,' she says.
As she has obtained early years professional (EYP) status, she is able to claim the quality premium from the Transformation Fund and close her nursery for a whole day - at a cost of around £3,500 - so all her staff can experience EYFS training together. The money will be used to reimburse parents and pay her staff.
She regards the EYFS as essentially a 'reaffirmation of good practice', and does not believe it signals huge change for her setting. But in advance of the formal training day, she has been trawling through research papers and getting staff to read about issues, such as the personalised learning agenda. 'Already I have noticed they are making changes to their practice where they can see opportunities to do things differently and better,' she says.
While the number of EYPs continues to grow, John Chowcat, general secretary of Aspect, the trade union representing many of them, says there is 'no set rate of pay for EYPs, not even a minimum level determined'.
He adds that while it is 'a clear Government objective to secure equivalence between EYP status and qualified teacher status', EYPs are often subject to ad hoc pay arrangements at local level, compared with the established national deal for teachers.
Mr Chowcat says EYPs are keen to engage with a range of professional issues, including the guidance to their national standards, which they believe can be improved. There is also a readiness to determine how their role as curriculum leaders operates alongside centre managers.
Another key component of the outline workforce strategy contained in the Children's Plan is 'a new focus on early years leadership, focusing on the change management and leadership skills required to deliver a continuously improving service in a mixed market'.
The plan recognises that many schools have close working ties with early years settings, enabling young children to make a seamless transition between the two, but it also acknowledges that 'the picture is by no means uniform'. The Government has therefore pledged £15m over three years 'to promote buddying and other joint work between schools and early years settings'.
The Government says it plans to reflect the importance of the local authority role as strategic commissioner of services by revising guidance on children's trusts, the children and young people's plans and the role of director of children's services and lead members. In keeping with the high expectations which underpin the Children's Plan, it wants children's trusts to have in place by 2010 'consistent, high-quality arrangements to provide identification and early intervention for all children and young people who need additional help'.
GOALS FOR 2020
The key priorities for the Children's Plan include ensuring:
- Children and young people's well-being, particularly at key transition points in their lives
- Every child is ready for success in school, with at least 90 per cent developing well across all areas of the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile by age five
- Child health is improved, with the proportion of obese and overweight children reduced to 2000 levels; child poverty halved by 2010 and eradicated by 2020.
- Building Brighter Futures: Next Steps for the Children's Workforce can be downloaded at ww.dfes.gov.uk, or e-mail info@dcsf.gsi.gov.uk
CASE STUDIES
LIZ RAILTON, PROGRAMME DIRECTOR, TOGETHER FOR CHILDREN
For Liz Railton, programme director of Together for Children - the consortium supporting local authority development of children's centres - the commitments in the Children's Plan to improve outreach services from children's centres and extend the free nursery entitlement to two-year-olds are key to combating disadvantage.
Careful attention needs to be paid to the quality of outreach workers, their skills, training and development, and what support and supervision they are getting. Working with 'the grain of the community', Ms Railton emphasises, 'means recruiting and supporting effective workers from within communities'.
She adds that there is 'an issue of trust and confidence with the harder-to-reach families' and points out that her organisation is updating its toolkit for reaching priority and excluded families.
Some children's centres have successfully recruited parents using their services to take up training and act as conduits to the local community.
She concludes, 'What the plan does, at a time when there have been lots of initiatives, is to take the whole Every Child Matters approach and all the outcomes, and point to the things we need to strengthen. It's pushing the boundaries of ideas and making them more robust.'
ALISON GARNHAM, JOINT CHIEF EXECUTIVE, DAYCARE TRUST
Alison Garnham, joint chief executive of Daycare Trust, says the plan 'sets the right mood music' for implementing Government policies. She particularly welcomes the focus on supporting parents through initiatives such as the parents' panel, which will advise on policy.
The emphasis is rightly on early years care and education, not simply as 'some temporary solution so parents can work, but part of a life-enhancing experience for young children'. She welcomes more funding for play, but insists that more can be done through the Early Years Foundation Stage, which 'doesn't make it a requirement that you provide outdoor space or access to natural light'.
Ms Garnham says, 'One of the big gaps at the moment is the fact that our childcare settings don't yet match the best in Europe. We have 40 per cent of staff who are completely unqualified, and we know that the Government cannot reach its amibition to end child poverty if children from disadvantaged backgrounds don't get the highest quality childcare.'
She warns that parents cannot keep absorbing increasing costs of childcare, and she says the charity intends to look at what is needed to put UK childcare services on a par with those in Europe.