Tory Britain today: Children are falling behind due to nursery teacher shortage
![In 2015-16 half of all three- and four-year-olds in England attended an independent nursery without an early years teacher [Image: Dominic Lipinski/PA].](https://voxpoliticalonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/161101-nursery.png)
In 2015-16 half of all three- and four-year-olds in England attended an independent nursery without an early years teacher [Image: Dominic Lipinski/PA].
Simple. The money invested won’t cover the costs and nurseries will go bust.
And when they do, the Tories will say it’s the nurseries’ fault because they put a lot of money into funding them. Meanwhile, our children will lose out, while theirs will benefit from going to private, fully-funded facilities, no doubt.
The knock-on drawbacks will only be felt later, when these children start to fail as adults.
That’s Tory economics for you.
They don’t know how much anything costs and have no idea how much anything is worth.
More than a quarter of a million children are at an increased risk of falling behind in their development by the time they reach school because of a chronic shortage of qualified nursery teachers, according to a leading charity.
A Save the Children report says an extra 10,000 trained early years staff are needed if all children are to have access to high-quality pre-school childcare, but many nurseries are struggling to afford qualified teachers and low pay means applications for nursery jobs have dropped dramatically.
The report – Untapped Potential: How England’s Nursery Lottery is Failing Too Many Children – says children in independent nurseries without an early years teacher are almost 10% less likely to meet the expected levels of development when they start school, compared with children who have a nursery teacher.
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Having worked as a London and Surrey Class Teacher and Head Teacher for Labour, LibDem and Tory council schools over the years, I can honestly say that in my experience it was the Tory council who were doing it on the cheap with a plethora of playgroups, and only providing Nursery Schools, or Nursery classes attached to Primary schools in areas of relative deprivation. On the whole in Toryland it is the N. schools and N. classes that have the trained teachers, whereas the playgroups or “pre-schools” have a mixture of Nursery Nurses (usually running things) and other early years workers with a mixture of non teaching qualifications and experience. In Labour and LibDem boroughs it was my experience that every 3 to 5 year old was in the care of a properly trained Nursery Teacher.
The difference in the children’s attitude to learning is almost invariably apparent when they enter the Reception class. (YR) Children who have been taught by a qualified Nursery Teacher are ready for active and independent learning; they are ready to take advantage of everything YR has to offer, settle quicker and are generally quicker off the starting blocks in every aspect of school. They never say, “Shall I get a pencil?” or “Where shall I put my painting?” or “Shall I get changed for PE?” They look around, search out the resources, investigate and create; they are independent in their learning and generally eager to have a go at everything. This all translates into faster academic, social and physical progress. On the whole, children from playgroups and pre-schools are used to being more directed and are far less independent and curious in their learning. (A fairly sweeping but truthful generalisation.) An experienced YR teacher can usually pick out the children who have had teacher-led nursery education on starting in her classroom.
This is what we want for ALL of our children, but talk to a Tory councillor about teachers in playgroups and pre-schools and you invariably get either a blank look or some spiel about keeping the council tax down because employing qualified teachers is more expensive. Well ….. “you pays your money and you takes your choice.” But I would say that education should never be done on the cheap. We owe the next generation more than that. We owe all early years children a qualified Early Years Teacher with a degree and teaching qualification in child development, child psychology and detailed knowledge about how young children learn. If we don’t give them that, we can set them back years at a very early stage.
With her economics degree and accountancy background, I doubt Justine Greening has a clue about any of this, much less he who controls the purse strings in the Treasury!
In some war zones, enemy combatants mine civilian homes so they can’t return (safely and happily). The tories know they’re on the way out, so they’re doing as much damage as they can while they still can.
Do Tories really want to give working class people a good education. I would suggest not.