They have received a ringing endorsement in the EPPE research and secured the backing of the children's minister, Margaret Hodge, who wants them to become children's centres. So why are local authorities continuing to close maintained nursery schools, discarding what one of their leading advocates describes as their 'distinctive ethos and specialist knowledge'?
There are now fewer than 480 in the country and closures continue unabated, despite guidance from the DfES to local authorities that 'they should presume that maintained nursery schools will always stay open unless there is a very good reason to close them'.
The main reasons cited for closure are a local authority's duty to remove surplus places, the trend away from demand for sessional nursery education, the expense of this kind of provision compared with others, and the presence of other sites more suited to the development of integrated centres.
Amalgamation threat
Parents and staff connected to the Sunny Brow nursery school in Rochdale, Lancashire, thought they had won their recent battle against closure when the independent adjudicator ruled in their favour and said the local council's grounds for shutting it could not be sustained.
Yet within weeks the authority effectively sealed the fate of the nursery school by deciding to amalgamate it with a local primary and turn it into a nursery class. Headteacher Julie White, who will lose her job if the amalgamation takes place, says the nursery school governors had drawn up a business plan to develop it as an integrated centre in the long term.
Pauline Trudell, support headteacher to the Forum for Maintained Nursery Schools and Children's Centres - it recently changed its name to take account of the move to integrated centres - says, 'The difficulty is that a lot of nursery schools want to become children's centres but are not being allowed to, and this is a concern to us and the Government.
'Nursery schools have a distinctive curriculum and pedagogy, they are centres of specialist knowledge and practice. But some local authorities have simply not recognised that and see them rather as antideluvian, or elitist and expensive.'
She says that the local authority for Slough, Berkshire, which has some of the oldest state nursery schools dating from the Second World War, had also planned to amalgamate them with local primary schools. But the forum is opposing this move. Ms Trudell argues, 'You lose the leadership of the nursery school head, and primary school heads do not always have early years experience. They may welcome extra pupils but are not always keen on responsibility for the early Foundation Stage.'
She blames the admissions policies of some local councils for creating empty places. In one Midlands authority, children are not allowed to take up their places in maintained nursery schools until a term after their third birthday and are placed in the interim with a private or voluntary provider. 'This means the child has to make two transitions and means the nursery school has unfilled places, fuelling arguments for closing it,' she says.
Bristol early years development manager Anne Price notes that three of the city's 12 maintained nursery schools are included in the first wave of children's centres to be developed by April 2006 and a further five are in areas due to have centres in the next round. Consultation is also continuing on plans for some of the nursery schools to become fully integrated into nought-to-11 primary schools with Foundation Stage units and full children's centre services.
In Sunderland, the city council has clearly been swayed by a strong endorsement of the value of nursery schools made in a report by early years specialist Wendy Scott. While nursery schools have closed elsewhere in the north-east, the authority is planning to use its facilities as the springboard for several children's centres.
In Bradford, six maintained nursery schools are poised for the transition to children's centre status, among them Canterbury Children's Centre.
Head of centre Sharon Hogan says, 'There's a really strong commitment to nursery schools in Bradford and we are very lucky that the chair of our governing body is also chair of the council's education committee.'
Naomi Compton, head of the early years and childcare service in Derbyshire, says that the authority has no plans to close its nursery schools, but that they have to develop extended services even if they do not immediately become children's centres.
She explains, 'Only two of our nursery schools are in the 20 per cent most disadvantaged wards and will be designated children's centres, but the other six will be developing children's centre-type ways of working by linking up with childminders and working with other agencies.
'We have to recognise that maintained nursery schools are extremely expensive to run because they have to have a headteacher and a qualified staff. In order to justify that expense they have to be really excellent and provide over and above what a nursery unit does. Margaret Hodge said they would have to develop or close.'
Integrated services
A similar approach has been adopted by Hertfordshire County Council, which has three of its 15 nursery schools already designated as children's centres. Early years manager John Blake says the remaining 12 are already playing their part in the process of integrating services for children and families and are well-placed to develop towards joining the national programme of children's centres in the future.
He says, 'We have been very successful in the past few years in drawing down Government funding to expand facilities in our nursery schools. Along with their traditional expertise in early education, most now also offer extended care integrated with education and other services, such as parenting support, and most of them already work with health professionals.'
The Greenfield Centre, which has been designated as a children's centre in the disadvantaged area of Waltham Cross in Hertfordshire, has been developed out of the nursery school and a mini Sure Start programme.
Ruth Moore, who heads the centre and manages the programme, says, 'We have been able to stay open by having a vision of what an integrated centre should look like. It's about giving opportunities to parents and being community-driven - not deciding what we think their needs are, but listening to what parents say they are.'
The centre has a health visitor, a speech and language therapist, a full-time playworker for children with special needs, a sensory room and adult learning, as well as links with childminders and JobCentre Plus.
Ms Moore says, 'I've always had an holistic approach and I've always believed in the importance of consistency, and that's why all the things I have started to develop at the children's centre have been led by existing nursery staff.'
But with 'a very limited Sure Start budget' she is concerned at the level of children's centre funding she can expect in 2006. She also says the terms and conditions of heads need to be clarified as well as the management structures and governance of centres.
Safeguarding quality
Sian Rees-Jones, forum representative for the south east, is excited by the transition that her Bognor Regis nursery school in Sussex is set to make from early excellence centre to children's centre. There is a neighbourhood nursery already on site and much of the core offer for the new centre is in place, with health visitors, IT resources, a training room and facilities for under- and over-threes.
Underlining the important legacy nursery schools offer, she says: 'High quality nursery education should be at the core of the children's centres and I feel very passionate about it. From being focused purely on early education, we are now looking at ways that the nursery school can be used as a cultural resource for the whole community.'
Despite the closures, Barbara Riddell, adviser to the DfES on maintained nursery schools, remains hopeful for their future. 'The Government wants nursery schools to become children's centres and does not want them to close. It recognises that the EPPE evidence and also the HMI evidence show that nursery schools do best,' she says.
But, in the transition to children's centres, she warns against jettisoning all the elements which define the qualities of a nursery school, including headteachers.
Ms Riddell adds, 'It's about maintaining and extending those qualities.
There is already plenty of evidence that the most effective integrated centres are nursery schools. Lose those elements of quality and we throw the baby out with the bath water.'