Kate Easter, who owns and runs the Sixpenny Childcare Nurseries and Pre-schools at four centres in the area, has welcomed Nick Clegg’s block on the government’s plans to relax legal ratios of staff to children in an attempt to reduce costs for parents.
She told Marlborough News Online: “I haven’t got a colleague in the industry who believes the government’s plans would be beneficial to children or reduce costs.”
Mrs Easter has seen figures released by the Department for Education to Marlborough News Online under a Freedom of Information request. These figures attempted to show that the reforms could cut childcare costs by 28 per cent.
The department alerted national media to the FOI release and the Guardian ran a story accepting the figures and saying “new calculations released by the Department for Education will boost those seeking to push stalled plans through.” It appears the figures – on an undated document – were arrived at well after the original FOI request was made on March 25.
Mrs Easter says the figures made “a massive amount of assumptions”. Most important was the assumption that all nurseries run all the time at a hundred per cent capacity. She says the industry norm is to run at 73-76 per cent of capacity.
The government’s figures also assumed there was a sufficient flow of graduates to take on increased numbers of children per staff member.
The planned relaxation was to increase the ratio for children under two from 1 staff member:3 children to 1:4; and for two year olds the increase would have been from 1:4 to 1:6. At present the ratio for children over three is 1:8, but rises to 1:13 if a ‘graduate-leader’ is present.
Mrs Easter says that the calculations were very careful in what costs they included. They omitted mention of rising business rates, rising energy costs and rising food costs. When it comes to reducing the costs for parents she says: “Our hands are tied.”
Just before MNO spoke to her today (June 6) she had another example of rising costs which make her margins so tight. Wiltshire Council have increased their charge for waste collection from her nurseries from £400 to £1,000 a year.
And they refuse to provide recycling bins which makes it harder to teach young children the advantages of recycling and means the Council have more waste to collect and take to landfill.
Nick Clegg’s decision was reached when he discovered what the real cost implications of the changes were: “I cannot ask parents to accept such a controversial change with no real guarantee it will save them money – in fact it could cost them more.”
Downing Street is said to very cross with Nick Clegg’s decision (which involved a heated spat with the Children’s Minister, Liz Truss) and will announce the full package of childcare measures ‘shortly’ – admitting that it had not yet been agreed.
Mrs Easter hopes any new package will “Not be something that’s detrimental to children and safety matters.” And she wants it to go to a proper consultation with the industry in all parts of the country.
[For the full story of the Sixpenny nurseries see our earlier story.]
Trials to return to Marlborough Court Room – for one night only
