Functional Skills and other reasonable equivalents will once more be accepted.
It’s a victory for the early years sector, particularly the Save Our Early Years group and the apprentice trailblazers, but it comes with heavy collateral damage. The time taken to reverse what was evidently a wrong decision from the start means that the recruitment crisis for employers and colleges will continue to cause problems for at least the short term, just when expanded capacity is needed to meet the 30 hours policy.
The Government admits in the strategy documents that apprenticeships starts have fallen by 40 per cent; only a tiny minority of consultation respondents say that the GCSE rules improved quality of applicants; and the ability of employers to recruit was hampered and the delivery of the 30 hours at risk because of the GCSE stipulation.
Many potential nursery practitioners have already been lost to other professions, and there will be confusion about the position of those halfway through apprenticeships, for example, unless there is quick and clear communication to all concerned.
Elsewhere in the strategy, there is much to ponder about encouraging entrants to the sector, diversity of workforce, improving further education, and developing CPD and career pathways. One tricky area is graduate practitioners – the proposal for EYTs to be able to teach school nursery and reception classes will be controversial in several ways, and the comment about strengthening QTS to ‘raise the parity and status of early years teachers’ is somewhat oblique!