Despite the government’s recent promise of an extra £66m, the funding crisis rumbles on. The sector’s collective coffers have a black hole of ten times that - £662 million - at last count. As we all know, this translates as a lack of quality, lack of affordable places and lack of access for parents.
Campaigns have been waged on this issue for several years now and had some cut through. But if the recent spending review pledge represents the latest ‘win’, it clearly doesn’t go far enough to address the damage when rates have been frozen since 2015.
We need to get parents on board, and saying ‘childcare is underfunded’ doesn’t really grab the gonads. As one practitioner said, ‘even when you tell parents about underfunding, the reply is ‘Yes I know, but we’re entitled to this, and it’ll save us a fortune, so we don’t want to pay anything extra’ and then they shop about for the cheapest deal.’
We could try reframing the message. We know that practitioners are on low wages. So how many are officially in poverty? Our survey on pages 4-8 is a shocking indication of the extent of financial hardship in the workforce. If a parent knows their key worker might be having trouble putting food on the table, or finding the money to pay the rent, or can’t afford to have children themselves, that might galvanise some outrage. We need to make it clear that this is because government subsidies are inadequate and not because nurseries are stingy, but the sector has been doing this for years now anyway. If we can get parents sounding off en masse about the scandal of poverty pay in the early years, we’ll have a better chance of getting the payrise the sector so desperately needs.