Before the general election, the Education Policy Institute analysed the manifestos of the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats to assess and compare their offers in relation to a range of education issues, including the early years.Let’s park the latter two manifestos for now and focus on the Conservatives’ commitments.
There were no big-ticket commitments in relation to the early years. Unlike the other two parties, the Conservatives made no pledges to either increase the free entitlement or to invest additional funding in improving the quality of the workforce.
There were, however, two interesting proposals aimed primarily at bolstering the maintained sector. The first was to provide a capital fund to expand nursery provision within primary schools. So far, there isn’t any evidence that this approach would have an impact on quality or outcomes, but it could help to ease the pressure on places in some areas.
The second was to enable maintained nursery schools to convert to multi-academy trusts so that they can leverage more funding by offering services to other providers. Again, this may well help the financial sustainability of some maintained nursery schools, but there is no real evidence that it will shift the dial in improving outcomes and equity for young children.
So where should the Government go from here? A good place to start would be the recent report from the OECD on Key Indicators for Early Childhood Education and Care. It looked at data from more than 30 countries and reviewed existing evidence. Its findings confirmed what many of us understood already.
There are six important features of an effective early years system: significant public investment; a highly trained, well-paid and diverse workforce; the engagement of parents; equitable access; a curriculum framework co-constructed with stakeholders; and integrated education and childcare. The OECD’s appetite to analyse and benchmark the early years will provide much-needed focus on this area. But securing this focus will require consensus on standardised assessment for under-fives.
The report finds that, overall, the UK doesn’t perform significantly badly in comparison with other countries, but there is certainly room for improvement if we want to go from average to world-class.