Sunshine and tears: here’s what my day in a struggling nursery system looks like
“It’s everywhere! It’s everywhere!” the little girl cried with delight as she threw the bubbles up into the air, washing the mud off her hands.
An hour earlier, she had been forlornly sitting on a chair, disengaged with her surroundings, and not speaking. So we’d made mud by mixing dry red earth with water, and she had begun to paint with it, becoming totally immersed. (This state of immersion or “wallowing” is crucial to a child’s learning, forming neural links in the brain.)
Moments like this are why I love working with young children: tuning into them, giving quality attention and creating fun new play activities that capture their imaginations. Yet giving children this kind of attention is only getting harder. Since Covid there has been an increase in the number of children with special educational needs and language delay. With the continuing shortfall in early-years funding, it is a greater challenge than ever to meet all the children’s needs and keep them safe.
It is costing many parents a small fortune to send their children to nursery. Our nursery charges £60 a day for 8am to 5:30pm, or £300 a week. The government’s answer? It has been consulting about changing the “childcare ratio” in early-years settings from four children to an adult to five – with some reports that the government might remove the ratio altogether.
The coalition government increased the ratio for two-year-olds in 2015 from 1:3 to the current level of 1:4, which has been putting pressure on staff ever since. In surveys of nursery managers, parents and staff, the findings are clear. Nobody wants this legislation. What they do want is for the government to pay the full price for the places they provide, and not to leave it to those who don’t get free places to make up the shortfall.
Thanks to a freedom of information request submitted by Neil Leitch of the Early Years Alliance, we now know that the government was well aware it was short-changing nurseries when it created the scheme, and that socalled “free” places would have to be subsidised by other parents. The resulting exorbitant cost is forcing mothers out of the workforce and back into the home. Meanwhile, a lot of private nurseries can’t keep their staff because hours are long, and pay and conditions not good. This means they have to use agency staff, which is unsettling for the children.
Will Quince (recently minister for children and families) visited Sweden in the summer on a “fact-finding” mission to see how nurseries there work to higher ratios than in England. It’s a shame he couldn’t learn from their other policies, for example Sweden’s universal system of early childhood education for children aged one to six, in which preschools provide 525 hours of free service, with capped and affordable costs for additional hours. Or the 13 months of well-paid and very flexible parental leave.
Swedish experts took four years to research what would work best for children, families and the workforce and came up with the current system. It transformed the previous fragmented “childcare” provision into an integrated universal education system. In the UK, we have many experts desperate to transform our broken system, but they are simply not being listened to.
Two-year-olds are famous for their tantrums. Helping children learn to self-regulate, or self-calm, is the goal in early years – when an upset individual, instead of hitting out, snatching, screaming and crying, shouting and throwing things, learns through patient interventions with trained staff to manage their emotions and to ask for help. Not so easy when you haven’t
learned to speak yet, or when English isn’t spoken at home, or when you have a learning disability, or when you’ve been affected by trauma.
When I arrived at work recently for my shift, a colleague was in the bathroom, struggling to remove the many layers of soaking-wet clothing from a small child who was furiously wriggling, crying, tired and hungry, as she tried to calm him, singing “You are my sunshine” on a loop while being sprayed with water as another child put her hand flat under one tap and a third child was ramming a toy banana up another tap.
The current ratio is 1:4 – she should have had another child in there, if this really was just a numbers game. But it’s not, is it? It’s children’s lives. And we should be respecting them and giving them the very best beginnings possible. And the stress on the 98% female workforce is not sustainable, not fair and not healthy. Changing the ratio to 1:5 will be unsafe for children and adults alike and further challenge the quality of the child’s experience.
I first started working in a community nursery in the late 1970s, went on to start a community nursery in the 80s, and was part of an expanding under-fives campaign movement for better pay, and more and better provision. In 1983, we argued for £4.15 an hour. Now, nearly 40 years later, working in the two-year-olds room of a state nursery school, I earn £9.50 an hour, an increase of £1.27 a decade.
The staff are so dedicated, and the quality of care is outstanding. Most of my colleagues work five days a week, full-time or part-time. While it is challenging and exhausting, there are many rewarding moments. Just recently I celebrated with a child how far he’d come in a year. I reminded him how difficult he had found things 12 months earlier – he was lashing out, unable to share, unable to articulate his needs, flying into a rage – and now, here he was, coming to me and saying what he wanted rather than grabbing it off another child.
Two is a very special age. Children transform physically, going from toddling to tearing around at speed, climbing, balancing and riding bikes. They transform socially and emotionally, moving from playing alongside other children, with all the friction that entails, to making friends and creating imaginary games together. They develop their ability to listen and understand, acquiring language (sometimes two). Their confidence grows. Watching these transformations is why the work is so rewarding – but also why it is demanding and skilled work that must be properly resourced and properly paid.
These children are our future. Instead of mealy-mouthed, cost-cutting exercises that deny the children the care and attention they need and deserve, we should be investing in them at this critical stage of their lives. All the indicators show that their futures, and ours, depend on it.
The author is an early years worker at a state nursery