Education Committee
Oral evidence: Support for childcare and the early years, HC 969
Tuesday 21 March 2023
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 21 March 2023.
Members present: Mr Robin Walker (Chair); Caroline Ansell; Miriam Cates; Mrs Flick Drummond; Andrew Lewer; Ian Mearns; Mohammad Yasin.
Petitions Committee Member present: Catherine McKinnell.
Questions 118 - 190
Witnesses
I: Victoria Benson, CEO, Gingerbread, Joeli Brearley, CEO and Founder, Pregnant Then Screwed, and Anne Fennell, Chair, Mothers At Home Matter.
II: Jane Harris, Chief Executive, Speech and Language UK, Mary Mulvey-Oates, Early Years Project Manager, Contact, the charity for disabled children, and Jolanta Lasota, Chief Executive, Ambitious about Autism.
Written evidence from witnesses:
– [Add names of witnesses and hyperlink to submissions]
Witnesses: Victoria Benson, Joeli Brearley and Anne Fennell.
Q118 Chair: Welcome to today’s session, which is our third oral evidence session in our inquiry into support for childcare and the early years. Today we will hear evidence from Victoria Benson, the chief executive of Gingerbread— welcome—Anne Fennell, the chair of Mothers At Home Matter, and Joeli Brearley, who hopefully will be joining us shortly, the chief executive and founder of the campaign, Pregnant Then Screwed.
I am delighted to welcome our newest member of the Committee, Mohammad Yasin, and also Catherine McKinnell, Chair of the Petitions Committee, who has joined us because of the large number of petitions in this area.
I will start by reflecting that the Government have announced an increase of funding to the universal and extended entitlements. To what extent did the panel feel that that funding will help to ensure that there is sufficient and high-quality childcare within local authorities? I will go to Victoria first and then Anne.
Victoria Benson: Thank you for inviting me to speak today. Overall, Gingerbread welcomes some of the changes in the Budget. As you know, we support single parent families, of which there are nearly 2 million in this country, and around 66% are working. We know that single parents want to work. They want to work for economic reasons, for their own development and to provide a good role model for their children. However, we know from our research, including some recent research that we have conducted, that childcare is one of the biggest barriers to them getting into work, because of its availability and because the vast majority of single parents—currently around 80%—are on universal credit. That is expected to be 90% when it is rolled out fully.
Single parents are very dependent on the mechanisms through universal credit for reimbursing their childcare payments. That is why we welcome the increases to the cap, which, as it was previously set in 2005, did not reflect the 2023 costs of childcare. We also welcome the change to paying childcare costs up front, because we know that was one of the biggest barriers to going into work. Single parents simply did not have the savings or the money to pay for childcare before they had their first payslip.
We still have some concerns, including about the availability of childcare in different areas. According to the most recent Coram report, there is still a shortage of childcare especially for children with special educational needs. We also have concerns about the universal entitlement, because there is research by IFS that shows that only 20% of people with salaries under £20,000 can take advantage of that childcare. That is something we want to look into more, because if lower income people are not able to access that childcare, that is a big concern.
We also have some concerns that the childcare isn’t available to people who are not in work, because we know that 49% of single parents are in poverty, and that childcare and early education would benefit them and improve their outcomes. We also know that childcare would help single parents who want to retrain or prepare to go back to work, and that isn’t currently available either.
Q119 Chair: Thank you; that is a useful introduction. I will bring in Anne. You are looking at this from a different angle, but parents who want to stay at home with their children were just mentioned. Do you want to talk about your initial reaction to the Budget and we will come back with some more detailed questions towards the end?
Anne Fennell: Our initial reaction was dismay. Not completely—we completely understand that families are struggling and that they need help with childcare costs—but the Budget does not deal with the underlying reasons why families are struggling. It completely ignores the desire of many mothers and fathers to be there for their children, particularly when they are very young, when they are under two. That is something that has been discriminated for many years now and I think that almost was the final nail in the coffin. Stay-at-home parents, particularly mothers, feel undervalued and that the work that they are doing is not acknowledged at all in government or in Parliament.
Something that we have heard from many childcare providers is that it is just not enough to provide high-quality care. If you are going to force people in a direction where they must go to work and must put their children in childcare, can the Government ensure that what they are providing is better than what we are providing at home?
Q120 Chair: I guess they would always argue that nobody is being forced to put their children into a childcare setting, but people want to have the choice.
Anne Fennell: That is exactly what we are campaigning for. We are campaigning for choice. If you put all the funding in one direction, and continually deny stay-at-home parents any form of support, you do not allow parents to make that choice and it becomes unaffordable. It is already unaffordable. Many people cannot survive on one income and you are making that harder and harder.
Q121 Chair: We will come back to some of the questions about how to better support families at the end of this. As the Education Select Committee, we must look at what is being done through the educational side of things, rather than all the levers, but certainly one of the things that we have discussed and heard already is whether there is more that could be done with the tax system. In terms of the reforms that were announced in the Budget, that is perhaps the one area of the system that was not touched.
Anne Fennell: It was talked about. When Jeremy Hunt announced it, he announced it under education, but there was not one thing that he said about whether it was better for children. It was all about removing the barriers to work. Children are not barriers to work. Is it education? Are you educating babies?
Q122 Chair: The importance of stimulation, love and attention in that respect is enormously important, and I think widely recognised, and the role that parents play is absolutely right. One of the things that we want to do as a Committee is to try to strike the right balance on that front.
Welcome, Joeli. We are just asking for the initial reactions to the Budget. Perhaps you can give your view in a slightly wider answer to Catherine McKinnell’s question, as Chair of the Petitions Committee.
Joeli Brearley: We were elated, obviously, to see childcare form such a significant part of the Budget. There are of course issues with what is being proposed and many challenges ahead, which I am sure we will discuss.
Q123 Catherine McKinnell: I will come back to Victoria, because you highlighted a couple of issues that you are concerned about in terms of the proposals. One that jumps out at me is reaching only 20% of those earning under £20,000, which, as an MP representing the north-east, I know has been raised in a regional context as well. There will be regional disparities in terms of ability to access childcare. What more do you think the Government could have done to better target the support, if that is what is needed? Have the Government focused on demand, rather than supply? Is that the challenge?
Victoria Benson: I don’t understand enough yet about why people who are earning under £20,000 cannot access it. We need to look into that further, but clearly, if that is the case, the income limits are an issue. The other issue that is affecting nursery provision regionally is the cost of it. While welcome, the new caps are applied universally across the country and, of course, nursery and childcare costs are different amounts in different places. We have calculated that the caps in London will only cover 55% of the cost, which clearly will have a big impact on people who cannot afford childcare, even if they are only paying, in theory, 15% of their childcare.
The other regional difference that the Budget did not take account of is the availability of childcare in that area. For example, we know in Worcester that there are only 20 nurseries with “outstanding” or “good” ratings. That means that many people will not have the choice as to which childcare they use, if indeed any is available. Of course, the other point, which isn’t covered by the remit of this Committee, is that many single parents need wraparound or holiday childcare, which isn’t available. We have heard that time and time again, and there is nothing in the Budget to look at availability and supply of childcare.
To go back to the other point, in areas of high deprivation where there is a lot of poverty, the main reason to send your child to childcare isn’t necessarily that you are going back to work; it is because it is in the best interests of that child to go to high-quality preschool education and it will help that child’s outcomes. Again, I do not think that has been looked at. The main driver of the childcare provision in the Budget seems to be to support parents back into work which, while it is a very valid reason, isn’t the only reason that childcare exists or should exist.
Q124 Catherine McKinnell: That is helpful. Joeli, I am focusing particularly on the extension of the universal provision. In the broader context, by all means comment on the Budget more generally, but do you think that is job done?
Joeli Brearley: No—absolutely it is not job done. There are many issues with the current funded entitlements for three and four-year-olds that are not working for parents. First, there is the eligibility criteria, so you have to earn under £100,000 and that is done on individual income, rather than on household income, which of course creates massive barriers for women, particularly, who are more likely to earn less money than their male partner. Their male partner might earn over £100,000. They may be earning £16,000, but it then does exclude them from the workplace, because it does not add up. It works in term-time only. I do not know anybody who works term-time only. It does not make sense. Coram did some calculations and you still have to pay over £6,000 a year even if you are eligible for those funded entitlements, so there is still quite a high cost.
They are complicated. They are quite tricky to access. We get lots of complaints that it is quite hard to navigate the system. You cannot access them if you are training or studying, which to me makes no sense whatsoever because you are trying to improve your skills and progress in the workplace, yet you have this barrier of paying an extortionate amount of money just so that you can progress and be better qualified.
The process of applying can penalise self-employed parents, because you must reapply every three months and, of course, self-employed parents’ income changes. In three months, they may earn very little and in the next three months, they may earn a large amount, so that can cause big problems for self-employed parents.
In terms of the amount of money that has been pledged in the Budget, there was £204 million to bridge the current funding gap for the three to four hours funded entitlement. That funding gap is about £3.40 per child per hour, according to the Women’s Budget Group. That equates to an increase of 4%, when SEDA estimates that the gap is about 55%. What we need for these new funded entitlements to work is a lot more provision, but that isn’t going to create a lot more provision.
We know from providers that we have spoken to that they are hanging on by their fingertips and they were waiting for this Budget, hoping that a rabbit would be pulled out of the bag that would save them. They do not feel that this is anywhere near what they need. We hear from lots of providers saying, “I have given up now. I cannot keep going”. What we will see is more providers closing when what we need is a lot more to cope with the increased demand.
We also know that we are going to need a much stronger workforce. We are haemorrhaging staff. The Women’s Budget Group estimates that we are going to need over 38,000 childcare professionals to deliver these new places. Where are we getting these people from? We know that they are leaving because they get paid more to work in Asda or McDonald’s. Their salaries are not high enough and there are no progression routes for them. In fact, the qualifications threshold compared to all other liberal welfare states is the lowest in the UK, as well as pay being the lowest in the UK, so we really need to see a robust workforce strategy that must focus on good pay for these brilliant, predominantly women who are caring for and educating our youngest people.
There are a number of gaps and if you look at the overall amount that the Government are pledging, it is £4.2 billion to fulfil all of the funded entitlements. Again, the Women’s Budget Group estimates that we are going to need more than double that, about £9 billion, to do it properly.
Q125 Chair: Is it not £4.2 billion by the end of a five-year period on top of the current £5 billion? Does that not bring the amount up to £9 billion by the end of that period?
Joeli Brearley: I think it does, but the Women’s Budget Group says that just to deliver these new funded entitlements, you are going to need £9 billion to do it properly. It is double the amount that has been pledged.
Q126 Ian Mearns: As a supplementary on that, you have outlined the breadth of the problem and the uncertainty for current providers, but we need more providers, buildings, staff, training for staff and money to pay for all the previous things I just mentioned. Are you aware of anything coming out of DFE that says that we are planning to do all of this?
Joeli Brearley: Not currently, but I did have a very good meeting with the Secretary of State for Education. We talked about this in detail, and the Secretary of State said that a strategy is being drawn up at the moment, but I did make it very clear that pay is the crux of the issue. The current plans do nothing to increase pay for childcare professionals. Of course, childminders will get a £600 one-off payment, or £1,200 if they are registered with a childminder agency, but a one-off payment of £600 does not numb the pain of a lifetime of poverty wages. I don’t think that is what is going to make the difference. We need to look at an overall positive pay package that works for these brilliant women who work in the sector.
Q127 Ian Mearns: It is interesting that you have had a meeting with the Secretary of State, so did Gillian Keegan mention anything specifically about levelling up regional disparities or income disparities, in terms of how that affects families?
Joeli Brearley: No, we did not discuss that, but that is a really big issue. Of course, we are seeing childcare deserts in areas of deprivation because they cannot afford to operate, because of the funding gap. They are more reliant in areas of deprivation and children are more likely to have those funded places, so the gap is larger. We are seeing a lot more providers close in areas of deprivation. We would like to see a tapered or tailored subsidy scheme that ensures that those in areas of deprivation receive more money than those in more affluent areas.
Q128 Ian Mearns: Just for the record, could you reiterate where the £3.40 per hour per child figure came from, please?
Joeli Brearley: It is from the Women’s Budget Group, and it is based on freedom of information requests that were done by the Early Years Alliance, which found the initial funding gap when the subsidies were first created, and then it accounted for inflation on top of that. That is where the figure comes from.
Q129 Chair: Was that for the two-year-old offer?
Joeli Brearley: No, it was for the three to four-year-old entitlement.
Q130 Chair: There are various figures that get cited on these things.
Joeli Brearley: Yes, everybody is scrambling to work it all out at the moment.
Q131 Ian Mearns: There was a figure mentioned by the chief executive of the National Day Nurseries Association at the weekend that, on average, providers are losing £2.20 to £2.30 on funded places.
Joeli Brearley: Yes, I have seen that. I don’t disagree with the figures they have come to—I am not sure how they came to them—but I can tell you that the Women’s Budget Group has done it based on the figures that came from the Government, and then it has accounted for inflation.
Q132 Miriam Cates: I have a question for Victoria, but let me ask one more follow-up to Joeli first. I completely share your analysis of the underfunding of the current offer and the fact that nurseries will continue to close, even with the additional funding, because it is still not enough. We face this prospect of an offer for a nine-month-old that will be live in less than two years, but there will just be no provision. At the same time, you are saying, and again I agree, that childcare workers are not paid enough. If you increase their pay, you then require even more funding for the same offer, so we are talking double-digit figures of billions. It is highly unlikely that the Treasury will get that money back in tax, so how do you square that circle?
Joeli Brearley: I do not have an insight into how the Treasury works out its figures, so I cannot tell you where it would take money from. I stress that this is early years education, not babysitting, and that children below the age of five deserve a high-quality early years education. If we can create that, not only will it have enormous benefits for our children that will save us money down the road, but it will mean that parents can go to work. Yes, you may not recoup that immediately in tax, but it will start to close the gender pay gap, because women will then be able to progress their careers, should they choose to do so, so they will have more earnings over their lifetime.
Japan is an interesting model. They have high-quality childcare. Their childcare workers are paid well. They are well qualified. Children can be in childcare for long hours in Japan, but they have shown that they mitigate the potential negative outcomes of children being in childcare for long hours because they have such a highly qualified workforce and they believe it is good for their economy, because it enables women to work.
If you look at Australia, they have just invested a lot of money in their childcare system. They have found that for every $1 they invest, they get $2 back. Canada has done it; they have found that for every $1 they invested, they received between $1.50 to $2.80 back. There is a lot of research that shows there are other benefits to the economy besides the immediate tax income.
Q133 Miriam Cates: Yet in Japan, nobody is having children and they are facing a population crash, which is clearly not the whole answer.
Victoria, coming on to you, could you expand on the impacts that the changes to universal credit, the childcare element, will have for single parents, how it will potentially help and what the problems are with it?
Victoria Benson: From a positive perspective, previously where a single parent has been on universal credit—which is most of them—if they wanted to claim back their childcare costs through universal credit, or if they wanted to go to work, they had to pay their initial first month of nursery fees up front. We know there was an extremely low take-up of the universal credit childcare element—something like 14%—and of course it is mainly single parents who are entitled to use it. Therefore, around 80% of that take-up should be single parents.
We know that one of the barriers to them using it, and one of the barriers to them taking up jobs, was that they simply could not afford the first month of childcare fees. Single parents do not have savings. They do not have a buffer and, of course, they did not have any income. That will be immensely helpful to single parents.
The other change that has been introduced by the Budget is to the amounts that will be paid, which again, we knew was a barrier. Previously, the maximum that they could receive for one child was £646, when a childcare place typically costs £1,200. We have had calls to our helpline that have shown that people simply could not afford to take up jobs because they could not make up the difference. Increasing the caps is a positive and it is going to make a difference to many single parents.
As I said, the caps applied across the country are the same when, of course, childcare costs are very different across the country. The other issue is that there will still be an amount that single parents have to find, which will still be out of reach for many of them. Many single parents are on minimum wage jobs. If you earn £15,000 a year, finding £200 a month is still a big ask. That is still an issue.
The other issue from the changes is that the childcare offer does not apply to single parents who are training. We know that many need that. When they become a single parent, they need to retrain, because they need a different kind of work to fit in with their caring responsibilities. To get them back to work, it would be helpful if they could claim childcare costs for training. We know that many single parents are stuck in very low-paid jobs, which do not meet their skills level or their desired career, and I think it would be helpful in the long run if childcare was available while they were retraining.
Q134 Miriam Cates: Single parents face the toughest job of bringing up children. Anne said that even in two-parent families, so many struggle to survive on one income, but single parent families don’t even have the option, often, of having one income, because of the trade-offs that they have to make. How do single parents feel about those early years and the trade-offs that they have to make about whether they want to stay at home or go out to work? Do you think the system could be more flexible, so that instead of only being able to use the support for childcare, it could be used for other things, perhaps for paying granny or even staying at home? Is it flexible enough?
Victoria Benson: No, it is not flexible. Quite simply, single parents do not have any choice about whether to stay at home with their children. Single parents overwhelmingly are on universal credit, and of course, there are work requirements that have become increasingly stricter. In fact, the Budget has increased those work requirements, so that parents of one and two-year-olds will have to see a work coach more frequently. It is expected that a parent of a three-year-old must work for 30 hours now, because the childcare is available, and that is what the DWP has told us.
For many single parents, that isn’t what is right for them and their family. For example, if you have escaped an abusive relationship, or you have had a big change in circumstances, it is going to be better for you and your children to stay at home, or it might be better. Single parents don’t have the luxury of making that decision. It might be better for the children also for their parents to stay at home with them, but they do not have that choice. This is a big issue for single parents.
I am all for single parents or any parents having the choice of whether to go to work or to stay at home, because you need to look at what is best for your family. Single parents, where the burden is solely on them to care for their child—and arguably their child needs them more and they need more flexibility—have the least flexibility of any kind of parents, which I think is really tough.
Q135 Miriam Cates: Anne, I assume you have some single mothers in your group. Do they have a similar experience?
Anne Fennell: Yes, I agree completely with Victoria. When I have spoken to single mothers they feel the shame, but they have to be the main breadwinner and the main carer, and it is very hard. One thing that is never talked about is that families face a 70% effective tax rate when they are on universal credit. That affects couples and single parents. It is one of the reasons they are not taking up their full entitlement to free childcare.
Mothers want to be with their children, and they weigh the economic benefit against the loss of time with their children, but if you are only bringing home 30p out of every extra £1 you earn, it is a very small benefit to lose time with your children. You are working hard to not bring back much income, and that is the marginal tax rate. That works because the tax system does not support families—it does not even recognise the family. Therefore, many families are forced on to the universal credit system, but then there is this tapering effect. For every extra £1 you earn, the universal credit tapers off and you start paying tax, so, effectively, you are only bringing home 30p, when you earn over £12,000.
Q136 Chair: What is the bracket within which that marginal rate is hitting people? It is between £12,000 and—
Anne Fennell: Surprisingly, it can be up to £100,000. This is the other thing. If you rent, you can access universal credit up to quite high incomes, especially in London and if you get childcare, but if you have a mortgage you can only access universal credit up to about £30,000. These families are struggling. They don’t have a choice. Families with mortgages are struggling and pretty much the only choice is to go to work.
Q137 Andrew Lewer: Statistics are surprisingly stark, in terms of the much lower take-up of the tax-free childcare offer than the Government initially anticipated or put into their figures. Why do you think that is, and what approach do you think the state should take to increase awareness and potentially, therefore, the take-up of tax-free childcare among families, Joeli?
Joeli Brearley: There are lots of problems with tax-free childcare. It isn’t tax-free. It is £2,000 a year, which, when you look at costs—
Andrew Lewer: It isn’t tax-free, or free—
Q138 Ian Mearns: The quarterly allowance is £500 and, of course, that is totally inadequate, in terms of the current costs that we talked about earlier.
Joeli Brearley: Yes, it is about £15,000 a year now for a childcare place, according to Coram, and it has not increased since 2017, so we would like to see that amount increased. We would like to see the amount that people can apply for double, so, rather than it being £2 in every £8, we think it should be £4 in every £8, bearing in mind the struggles that parents are going through now to be able to work and to financially contribute to their families and the economy.
There is a lack of awareness of tax-free childcare. I talked about it on social media two days ago. Probably half of the messages I received were from people saying, “I didn’t even know this existed” or, “I didn’t realise I was eligible. I thought it was only for people on universal credit or only for children over the age of three”. There is a real misunderstanding about what it is and why it exists.
Q139 Chair: Especially when it can be used for wraparound care as well, as many parents do.
Joeli Brearley: Exactly. I have only recently started using it for that, and I work in the industry. There needs to be a lot more information available in places that parents go, rather than on the Government website. Parents do not tend to spend their time on the Government website.
The system is quite clunky to navigate as well, so I even received messages from people saying, “It isn’t worth my time bothering because it takes so long to do and it is such a frustrating system to navigate”.
Q140 Chair: I did a written question a little while ago to ask: of those people who have opened accounts, how many are using them? It has just reached above half. Those are people who have gone to the hassle of setting up the account, but they are not using them.
Joeli Brearley: When I used it, I have to say that I almost threw my laptop out of the window. It was so frustrating. There could be something that you could do where you encourage providers to talk to parents about it. I don’t think that happens, or it certainly does not happen in every nursery, so perhaps there could be an incentive to get providers to talk to their parents about it. Of course, there are issues with eligibility, which we have just talked about. You cannot get it for training. You cannot get it if you are a student. You cannot get it if you have an individual in your household who earns over £100,000.
Victoria Benson: This isn’t something that we have looked into a great deal, because tax-free childcare isn’t available if you are on universal credit, or rather you cannot claim universal credit if you are on tax-free childcare. If you want to extend tax-free childcare to single parents—as I say, 80% of them are on universal credit—it will need to happen alongside the universal credit system.
Andrew Lewer: That is a useful point, thank you.
Anne Fennell: There is no support for stay at home parents, but we would love to have a transferable tax allowance, which would help in some way with the finances.
Q141 Andrew Lewer: Do you think it is the extent of the offer, the awareness, or the complexity?
Joeli Brearley: It is all three. The three are interlinked. There is a lot that could be done to raise awareness. There has been a big uptick in the number of people using tax-free childcare more recently, but I think getting providers to talk to parents about it is probably the key, as well as trying to deal with the very clunky, complex system.
Andrew Lewer: We used to have this thing with the council newspaper, that it was not “Field of Dreams”—“If you build it, they will come”. You have a website, so obviously people will go and look at it or they won’t, but at least the council newspaper meant that people got hold of this information and found out about things, when they would not necessarily have thought, “Oh, I know! I will go and have a look at the DFE website to see what my entitlement to tax-free childcare is”.
Q142 Mohammad Yasin: What are the main issues in accessibility to childcare for those living in deprived areas?
Anne Fennell: Even people in deprived areas or people on low incomes would like the choice to be able to be there for their children. That is where we are coming from. There is support on universal credit but, as Victoria was saying, single parents and people on low incomes are worried that they are going to have these sanctions applied to them and, therefore, they are going to have to go out to work probably for 30 hours. I think that there should be more support for parents who would like to be at home generally.
Victoria Benson: The two issues are, first, that this childcare offer isn’t available to people who are not earning, and arguably children who are living in poverty do need support from education. They will benefit from it, from early years. Secondly, we hear a lot about the availability of childcare across the country and, as we have heard, in the deprived areas there is an even lower amount of availability.
Also, if you have a child with special educational needs, the gap there is the biggest. Coram, I think, estimated that only 18% of local authorities have enough provision for children with special educational needs.
Q143 Chair: The second panel we are hearing from today is particularly focusing on that issue. It is a big issue.
Victoria Benson: Yes. I think it is around availability generally and availability of childcare for people who are not working.
Joeli Brearley: It is important that we get this right, because we know that children from low-income families stand to benefit the most from high-quality childcare. The problem is that in affluent areas, providers can be really profitable, because they are less reliant on the Government-funded schemes. Parents pay full whack for their childcare place so that those providers can cross-subsidise any of the funded places that they have.
The London Early Years Foundation found that private equity is rapidly acquiring many of the nurseries in affluent areas, but then is not interested in nurseries in areas of deprivation. It does not make financial sense for them to acquire those nurseries, so they are just being completely abandoned.
Of course, there is an increased cost for nurseries in areas of deprivation, because they are more likely to have children with special educational needs, and children are more likely to have lower levels of development. The latest Ofsted findings from August last year showed that only 11% of nurseries in areas of deprivation were rated “outstanding”, whereas it is 18% in the least deprived areas. We are not supporting these kids in the way that early years education should be.
In terms of solutions—I have to say, I have stolen these from the Early Years Foundation; they are not mine—overall, the issue is money, of course. As we have laid out, areas of deprivation need more funding to stay financially viable. We think differential funding models, which we touched on, would make a big difference. There could be a commitment to more staff training and a fair wage commitment, because it is really hard to recruit staff, particularly in areas of deprivation. Removing business rates for providers that are not for profit, or providers that have a certain percentage of funded places, would be helpful.
Because these funded rates are not profitable, even in areas of deprivation, they are limiting the amount of children they take on those funded rates. That means that lots of children in those areas cannot access any early years education. Creating an impetus for providers to have a certain percentage of funded places would help.
Q144 Chair: Is there a specific percentage they have in mind for the point at which you would remove business rates?
Joeli Brearley: No, they have not said and I would not be sure. We can certainly look at that as part of the coalition that I am on.
Providers have a very limited ability to expand, so as more and more children start going to early years education under these schemes, we will need to encourage providers to be able to grow and expand. Including high-quality provision as part of the infrastructure levy would make a big difference, so that any new developments must factor childcare into their plans. Alternatively, you could offer rental holidays to nurseries until they have a certain occupancy level.
Anne Fennell: I want to pick up on the point about research. We were looking at early childhood education and care, ECEC, and it does show that there is the potential to enhance school readiness, particularly for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, but only if the quality of the care is high. If the quality of the childcare is poor, it can have a negative impact on children, especially from disadvantaged backgrounds.
The research also shows that parenting and the home environment have an even greater impact than childcare on children’s educational development, and we are not just talking about their school readiness. We are talking about their emotional resilience and wellbeing, and that needs to be a factor.
This is from the research briefing files for Parliament, “In England, the best available evidence indicates that some use of high-quality ECEC is beneficial from age 3 for all children and from age 2 for disadvantaged children. There are limited data on children aged 0-2.” We do not have a lot of evidence at the moment.
Q145 Chair: I think it is important to look at the evidence, but it is also important to recognise that not everyone lives in ideal family circumstances. Striking the right balance in terms of allowing choice is—
Anne Fennell: Absolutely.
Ian Mearns: I am a school governor where we have a nursery in a very deprived area in the middle of Gateshead. It has to be said that, while there are questions about the quality of provision within the provided sector, there are also significant questions about the quality of provision in parents’ households in certain places.
Chair: I have to move the session on, because we have a few more questions to get through ahead of the other panel. Ian, can I bring you in on the debt trap?
Q146 Ian Mearns: Victoria, this is specifically to you in the first instance. Your “The single parent debt trap” report of about two years ago found that the cost of childcare and the structure of the funded schemes prevented single parents from working full time. To what extent will the Chancellor’s childcare funding reforms support single parents in increasing their working hours, by comparison with your report two years ago?
Victoria Benson: Our report did find that one of the biggest causes of debt in single parents was childcare costs. Incidentally, today is Single Parents’ Day, and we have conducted more research about debt levels, and they have increased.
We know that accessing childcare was one of the challenges for single parents. They have told us that they need childcare both to go to work and to access training. We also know that single parents are more likely to have been out of the workforce for longer. As I said, we think that there are still going to be issues with affordability for single parents, because the caps apply across the country and, in reality, childcare costs are not going to fit within those caps. Even if they did, there is still going to be a challenge for some single parents to meet the additional costs, plus all of the optional extras that are included during the day.
Q147 Ian Mearns: What would your shopping basket include? What measures would you like to see improved in any further packages?
Victoria Benson: If there isn’t free universal childcare, there should be a sliding scale of childcare where you pay according to your income, but certainly single parents—many of whom are on minimum wage—cannot afford the extras, cannot afford the 15% top-up.
We know that they also need the childcare to support them if they are training. We also know that there isn’t enough childcare in school holidays and for wraparound care—I know that isn’t necessarily in the remit of this Committee, but single parents work all year round. They work shifts and they need childcare to support them in those shifts. Previously, our research has shown that the more hours a single parent works, the less economic sense it makes for them to work, because most of any increase in salary is taken up by childcare costs. We don’t have any reason to think that is going to change.
The support that single parents need beyond the remit of this Committee is to get them into better jobs, to support them into jobs. We did not see anything in the Budget that is going to do that, that is going to give them support from work coaches and that is going to enable them to access the kind of jobs they want. In addition, we have concerns about the increase in conditionality and sanctions, which are going to penalise single parents more, rather than give them the support that they need.
Ian Mearns: From my perspective, I think anything that includes the word “child” is the responsibility of this Committee.
Chair: Caroline, you have been waiting patiently.
Caroline Ansell: Do we have just one minute?
Chair: We will overrun by a few minutes to allow for a couple more questions.
Q148 Caroline Ansell: In many ways, you have answered the question I was going to put, which was around removing barriers, and to what extent what you saw in the Budget announcement and some of the reforms would remove barriers, particularly relating to discrimination against women who wanted to move back into work. You have already cited issues around training and studying—that these barriers remain and that workforce unavailability barriers remain—but mentioned positive things too, around the lifting of the cap and the up-front costs.
I want to raise one group with you—mums to special needs children. An informal poll of over 100 parents in my area of East Sussex found that over 51% had to give up work entirely, and all of that 51% were women. Does this marry up with your experience and what you are seeing across the piece?
Joeli Brearley: Yes, it absolutely does. We know that there are so many challenges. One of the biggest barriers is that if you have a child with a disability, you are less likely to want to put them in formal childcare, such as a nursery setting, because they need more individualised care. Many people employ a nanny, who will give them that individualised care. You then cannot access any of the funded schemes, because nannies are often not registered with Ofsted, and you must be registered with Ofsted to access those funded schemes. It can take a year to register with Ofsted, so by the time they have registered, there is quite a turnover with nannies, usually, and they have often gone. The costs are extortionate.
Q149 Caroline Ansell: Those nannies can be live-in childminders. Is that part of the sector that you are referencing?
Joeli Brearley: Yes, childminders as well as nurseries. Because childcare professionals are on such low salaries and have been treated so badly for so long, we have lost the ones that are qualified to deal with particular children who have special educational needs. Parents who have children with SEN are more reluctant to use those formal settings, particularly since covid. The evidence shows that many parents are more reluctant to use those formal settings.
Q150 Caroline Ansell: Is there anything about the reforms that would touch on some of these challenges?
Joeli Brearley: No, I’m afraid not. We want to see a real strategy around children. It is so important and I feel that we are getting it wrong.
Victoria Benson: I agree. Single parents are disproportionately likely to have a child with special educational needs or a disability—whether that is a factor in them separating from their partner. We hear all the time that there isn’t childcare available to them. Of course, they still must work under the universal credit regime, and they must take up available childcare if it is there, which isn’t necessarily what is best for the child.
Q151 Caroline Ansell: Anne, this is more specifically related to those women who want to return to work, but presumably you also encounter this?
Anne Fennell: It is not my area of expertise.
Chair: Finally, Miriam, I am going to bring you in.
Q152 Miriam Cates: Anne, we have heard a lot about how this policy is focused on getting parents into work, and has ignored the educational aspects and other aspects that childcare can potentially provide. A report by the CSJ showed that 78% of parents with children aged nought to four said that they would like to spend more time with their children but cannot afford to, and 44% of parents of nought to four-year-olds said they would like to stop working altogether. This isn’t a niche group of people. It is a large segment of the population that currently feel they have no choice. If you could redesign this Budget—I have spoken to a lot of your members about this—to give that choice, what would you do?
Anne Fennell: I think I would start from what the child needs and what families need, and start from choice. Families are the ones who know what is best for their own family and their own children. Each circumstance is different, and every child is different. I have six and each one is very different. One responded well to nursery and one did not. A family needs to be able to respond to their own children and their own circumstances. For one family, earning money is important; for another family, it is being there. Choice is a factor.
For us, we want a level playing field because at the moment, it is not that. One of the difficulties is that it is so hard for the main breadwinner to earn more money, particularly now that the thresholds are being frozen. As people come off universal credit, they are in a tax trap, so they cannot earn more money because for every pound they earn, they lose 70p. As you start coming out of that, they then hit the loss of child benefit and they lose their married tax allowance, all at the same time, and they become a higher rate tax earner.
We are seeing many families now where it is just not worth them earning any more. If you take a traditional family, the father cannot earn more, or it could be the mother who is the main breadwinner. Therefore, the second earner is forced out to work. We need a situation where those marginal tax rates and cliff edges are removed. It isn’t fair that child benefit is removed from an individual’s income, from single-earner families at £50,000 and at £100,000 for dual incomes. We must make that fair, and we must allow people to work harder and bring in more money and not to have it all taken away.
There are some families who are saying that their employers are responding to the cost of living crisis and they are getting pay rises, but they are worse off. This is what I found myself. When I did the figures—a long time ago, when they took child benefit away—I would have been better off dropping our income by £15,000, going on to tax credits and keeping our child benefit. We really must remove these cliff edges and the marginal tax rates that stop the main earner being able to bring home more income.
Q153 Miriam Cates: Victoria, you are nodding. Is that because of a similar lack of flexibility?
Victoria Benson: Single parents do not have any choice because of universal credit and the conditionality, and of course they must provide for their children. I was nodding on the child benefit point, because there is no logic to it—that a single parent earning £51,000 does not receive child benefit, whereas two-couple parents earning £49,000 do. Of course they need that more, so that is what I was agreeing with.
Chair: We will have to wrap up shortly.
Ian Mearns: Briefly, I think there is a range of scenarios that are panning out here. As evidence to support the Committee and the recommendations that we might want to make, could you supply us with some anonymised case studies of a scenario that has affected different families in different situations?
Q154 Chair: I think that would be very helpful. I apologise for having to rush to a conclusion of this. Joeli, you want to say something. Is there something we have missed? You are very welcome to come back.
Joeli Brearley: Yes. We would not support the notion of taking money out of the formal structures that currently exist for safeguarding and child development, which is early years education, to create a system where parents have that money and can choose how to spend it. We know that, if it is of a high quality, early years education works. It is good for kids. We can monitor it. Ian talked about this earlier. We cannot monitor what is happening in the home.
Secondly, the notion of choice in this is a little bit flawed. To give parents genuine choices about whether they stay at home or whether they work, you would have to pay somebody a real living wage to stay at home, and a real living wage is £25,500. There are 2 million families with a child under the age of five, so if you add that up it is £51 billion-ish, which is your whole education budget. I think the people that could access that money will have wealthy partners, so you are only going to predominantly benefit those who have a lot of money.
I think we need to fix the current parental leave system, particularly to give access to paternity leave for dads and other partners. We have the least generous paternity leave in Europe, and we know that kids do well if their dad or their second parent spends quality time with them. We know that the mother has better mental and physical health and that the dads are happier. There are so many benefits, and we are way behind other countries on this.
That would be the first thing I would do: fix the paternity leave and get the current early years education system so that it works for everybody and is high quality—and then, absolutely, stay-at-home parents deserve to be recompensed for the valuable job that they do, but it must not be part of this mix. It is a separate question.
Q155 Chair: There are some things that we have been discussing here that go beyond the remit of this Committee in any case, but I think it is all part of the picture that we want to explore to make sure that the support and the investment is being made in early years education, in childcare, and also in supporting families. I am going to let you have a very quick response to that, but then we will need to wrap up this panel.
Anne Fennell: We are talking about spending £9 billion and more to get high-quality early childcare, but is it fair to tax families at 40%, 70%, 80% and only give them back if they outsource their care? We are talking about babies, and babies do not need education. Babies need love and who is the best person to give them that? That should be the family’s choice. Mothers at home are not doing nothing.
Chair: I think there was a great deal of agreement with that, particularly when we look at issues such as shared parental leave. It is interesting to see some of the think tank reports that say that is a really important part of the equation, and it is certainly something that the Committee will want to look at.
I have to wrap this panel up at this point, but I am very grateful to you all for your evidence. It has been a really useful session—thank you very much. We will allow the next panel to assemble.
Witnesses: Jane Harris, Mary Mulvey-Oates and Jolanta Lasota.
Q156 Chair: I think we are all assembled. In the second session, we are looking at support for young children with special educational needs and disabilities. Thank you for waiting patiently through a lively first session. We have Mary Mulvey-Oates, the early years project manager at Contact—you are very welcome—Jane Harris, the chief executive for Speech and Language UK, and Jolanta Lasota, chief executive of Ambitious about Autism.
I will start by talking about the SEND review, which identified a vicious cycle of late intervention and insufficient allocation of support in the early years. What are the long-term implications of late intervention and identification of need for young children and how can we support young children with SEND in a more timely fashion? Who wants to start?
Jane Harris: I am happy to start. At the moment, there are 1.7 million children with speech and language challenges in the UK. That is up from 1.5 million a year ago. We are sitting back, and our relative inaction on this is making it worse. We know that if we don’t give those children support, they are twice as likely to have mental health problems, which is a cost to them and also a cost to society and our economy—they are six times less likely to reach the expected standard in English at age 11, and 11 times less likely to reach the expected standard in maths. Given all the discussion about maths recently, this feels like a missed opportunity to think about that.
More than half of young offenders have some kind of speech and language challenge and, often, that has not been identified. I should say it is a mix of early identification and just promoting good speech and language development for all children, because all children need support to learn to talk and to understand words. It is not like walking, where your body will just impel you to walk. You must hear something—
Chair: I have an 18 month-old.
Jane Harris: I also have an 18 month-old, so I am experiencing that too. Children need to have somebody engage with them. They need to have a to and fro of conversation. It is almost like the serve and return of tennis. One of the things that we are worried about in the Budget is the change in childcare ratios, which will mean that that is much harder for practitioners to do. Particularly if a child has a challenge, they need early years practitioners to be very patient with them. They need them to ask a question and wait, and not to be distracted by a child who needs a nappy change or a child who is having a problem with a toy that they don’t want, or whatever it is. If we get the early years right, there is a massive opportunity to reduce those numbers and, therefore, reduce the economic and societal costs later on.
Unfortunately, despite a few commitments that the Government have made—including in the SEND AP plan—they are just not on the right scale to reach this challenge. For example, the early years professional development programme—which we helped to run and think is great, in terms of the model—will reach 10,000 practitioners over two and a half years. That is one per early years setting in Birmingham. That isn’t a national programme. It is great that that recognises that speech and language need to come first before you think about numeracy and emotional development, because if you can name your feelings and do self-talk with yourself, that is part of emotional regulation. There are a number of initiatives that I am sure we will get to in other questions.
Q157 Chair: If that scheme were to make a real impact across the piece, what is the figure for the number of practitioners you would want to reach?
Jane Harris: It would be many times that. Birmingham is 1 million in population, so I guess roughly 50 or 60 times that—significant.
Q158 Chair: Thank you. A useful introduction from a speech and language perspective. Jolanta, do you want to come in next?
Jolanta Lasota: Yes. For children who are autistic, we know that 92% of children wait longer than the 13-week timetable to access an autism diagnosis and, in fact, nearly half wait at least 18 months. On top of that, at least 20% wait over 18 months for an education, health and care plan. We can see how we have burnt through the whole of the early years period to access support for those children.
Q159 Chair: How many children could be diagnosed with autism in the early years? Is it always possible? I guess a lot of children do not get diagnosed until they are much older.
Jolanta Lasota: A lot of children do not get diagnosed simply because we don’t have a culture of early diagnosis and support in this country. We have system that waits for children to fail and waits for parents to come and beg for support.
The impact is enormous, because these children do not get developmental support. They are not ready for school; they are often below the radar; they are not even known to the system. Their families are already in an adversarial position with the system, so we have parents who are fighting before they have even entered school, and the impact in school is enormous.
We know that exclusion of autistic children has doubled in the last decade. We know that persistent absence is greater for autistic children than other groups. We know that attainment is low, and we know that the lifelong outcomes are horrific. We know that children transition into education, training and employment at very low rates post-
education. We know employability rates are very low. We know those families are living in poverty. We need to change the culture to have an emphasis on early identification and early support. We are creating enormous barriers for those families to access that support. We are waiting for pieces of paper, when sensible professionals could identify these children quickly.
Q160 Ian Mearns: You could argue that that then carries on into statutory education age limits as well, in terms of slow diagnosis, rationing of the professionals that would carry out the diagnosis, waiting lists, and all the rest of it. That carries on not just in the early years but into later life.
Jolanta Lasota: It isn’t just a moral imperative. We know that failure to support autistic children and young people leads to a cost of £32 billion a year to our economy, and only £2 billion of that is spent in childhood. If we are trying to manage the cost and trying to create a productive life for these young people and families, we know we need to start early, but we have a system that does not do that. The opportunity right now is to marry together the proposals around expansion of childcare together with the SEND reforms, to think about how we revolutionise the system for early support for autistic children and their families.
Q161 Chair: I want to nail down this point about support for autistic children. I think we all recognise there is a need to improve the situation there, but how much of that do you believe can be delivered in the early years, and how much of the identification of need can be achieved in the early years? We all know of cases where children have received those diagnoses or their EHCPs much later on in their development. Is there always going to be a significant proportion of the children who turn out to be autistic who realise that at a later stage, or are there systems elsewhere in the world or other countries where they identify the need significantly earlier and provide more effective support in the early years? Do you have any evidence on that?
Jolanta Lasota: We have examples within the UK where we have had great models of best practice. I know that Speech and Language UK ran fantastic early years centres that were jointly commissioned by Education and Health to support children and provide them with that intensive support early. Within the UK, we have those systems. What we need is a more robust, universal system that is funded well enough to support children with SEND. We also need mandatory training. We have mandatory training now in health and social care, so we need that in education.
We need a much stronger, enhanced system. We need to deal with the workforce strategy. We have a workforce crisis around speech and language therapists, OTs, all of those people who provide support to those nurseries, and we need better commissioning at the specialist level for children who need that specialist support between health and education. That is about creating an early years system. We do not have a system. We have a collection of disparate services that parents may or may not access.
Mary Mulvey-Oates: Not having access to the interventions that disabled children need has a significant impact on their development—things such as developmental delay, autism, as we have heard—and those with serious health conditions can fall behind their peers and can experience greater social exclusion. As we have heard, when they enter reception class, disabled children are twice as likely as their peers to not know other children, to not have friends coming into class, and that social exclusion can continue. So it is about getting it right in the early years and getting early interventions.
We have heard about excellent speech and language interventions and therapies, and that extends to the physical therapies that health practitioners can offer when they are working together with early years settings, and also adaptations and equipment that disabled children need. Those kinds of interventions are critical to children’s development. Often, parents tell us that they have to provide equipment to come into nursery if that equipment isn’t available. Therefore, it is important to get that right early on and support families so that they do not have to battle to get those therapies and equipment and other supports.
Having the right kind of training for the early years workforce will mean that those discussions can happen in a positive way with families, to focus on the strengths and the opportunities for disabled children from the very early days, rather than families struggling to get the care and input they feel that their child may need.
Sometimes this is About observable need. In many cases, the workforce is well trained. They can observe a certain need and perhaps a diagnosis might come down the line, but if that child has a need that is observed by a well-trained workforce, it is about being able to access the right support for that, whether it is one-to-one support or other therapies.
Q162 Caroline Ansell: I want to ask about securing the education, health and care Plan. We heard earlier in our inquiry from providers that this was a real issue—trying to secure that for the children, trying to build the evidence—and very often they were just paving the way for the reception year when provision was rather better in place. Why is that? I think you alluded to late diagnoses, which obviously informs the EHCP, but why do you see this as a particular issue and how widespread is it?
Jane Harris: I should say that most children with speech and language challenges do not get diagnosed until age five or six, if they have an inherent speech and language challenge. There will be some children who have a speech and language challenge due to autism, due to cerebral palsy, and that might have an early—
Q163 Caroline Ansell: Because of their development?
Jane Harris: Exactly. The way that you identify them is that you make sure that your setting has good preventive measures to ensure that children do not develop those challenges. You support good speech and language development. You do that through play, by having toys where children pretend to be a doctor one day or pretend to go to the shop another day. You also take them out so that they can go to a farm and point to a sheep and learn the word for sheep, and all of that stuff.
Q164 Caroline Ansell: What you are describing is good teaching and learning, rather than any statutory requirement as delivered through the vehicle of an EHCP.
Jane Harris: Exactly. If you put that in place, what happens is the number of children you might be concerned about reduces. You can then put in place some group interventions, which can be delivered not by speech and language therapists, but by a generalist.
For example, we have a programme called Tots Talking that works with two year-olds. You can also provide that information to families, because it is important that families help children with speech and language in a consistent way with the early years setting. If you do that, you end up with a group of children who have not been helped by those kinds of interventions, either through the universal support or the targeted group interventions. It is those children who might then have a more inherent challenge, who then go on to have a diagnosis.
Part of the issue with getting children to that diagnosis point is not enough settings doing the first two parts—so not enough settings integrate speech and language development into their model, and not enough think, “We can do something in this setting”, rather than putting somebody on a waiting list for a speech and language therapist that might take 18 months to two years.
The other issue is what the Ofsted guidance says for settings. Ofsted says that to be outstanding, children must consistently use new vocabulary that enables them to communicate effectively. They can speak with increasing confidence and fluency, which will give them foundations for future learning. Why on earth is that the level for outstanding? Surely you would expect a good setting to help children to learn new vocabulary and to speak with confidence. That is just the wrong aspiration. That is one of our consistent themes: that we don’t have the right sort of ambition in terms of scale or just in terms of the right aspirations for settings.
Q165 Caroline Ansell: You are saying that that does not translate into a proper focus or allocation of resources and time to speech and language.
Jane Harris: Exactly.
Q166 Caroline Ansell: Jolanta, on autism, are there similarities here?
Jolanta Lasota: A lot of similarities. I think for autism, children simply are out of the system, so to secure childcare alone without these pieces of paper is very difficult. A lot of universal providers will not want to admit a child who has significant need, because they are not funded for it. Parents told us in our “Right from the Start” research that they were simply told by GPs, “Don’t bother. There is nothing that we can do until he is at least four. Don’t worry, you won’t get an EHCP until he is at least five”. Of course, the parents are in a catch-22, where they are not getting childcare, they are not in the system and they are not getting access to this integrated support.
Q167 Caroline Ansell: Could they, and should they, be able to get that EHCP in earlier years—earlier than five?
Jolanta Lasota: The first thing we must attend to is to have a robust childcare system that integrates support for children, so they don’t have to race towards diagnosis and paperwork simply to get to that childcare, that early education. We have created a system that is adversarial, so parents are forced to fight for these pieces of paper to just have their child in a childcare system. We need a childcare system that is more sophisticated, more gradated. Yes, of course, if children need an EHCP we need to fast-track them through diagnosis and the process of EHCP, but that fast track should not be necessary to get children their basic needs met.
Q168 Caroline Ansell: Is the workforce there to be able to fast-track or expedite?
Jolanta Lasota: Absolutely not. We have a workforce crisis now. We must acknowledge that. I chair the Autism Alliance, which supports providers all around the country. We have a workforce crisis, particularly in rural areas. We have a crisis of both frontline service staff and specialists. We need a workforce strategy for SEND.
Q169 Caroline Ansell: Is that part of the delay?
Jolanta Lasota: It is an enormous part of the delay, but we also need a funding system that will support that workforce strategy—
Q170 Chair: A workforce strategy for SEND including the early years, because I guess it is very easy for the Government to focus on workforce strategies for the bits of the system that they run and control. Part of the challenge that we consistently see in the early years space is the fact that, because it is outside of the Government’s control, it is largely an independent and voluntary sector. Therefore, there is perhaps not as much focus on that workforce strategy as there might be in other parts of the system.
Jolanta Lasota: It is also important that we have a system that incentivises support within the voluntary and the private sector to take on that support. We must recognise that it is not in the interests of many private providers to support these children. They need incentives and we need an earlier system that will recognise that.
Q171 Caroline Ansell: Mary, can I ask you about the EHCP and then, very quickly, the inclusion funding, which sits separately?
Mary Mulvey-Oates: In terms of EHCPs, we know that it can take time for parents to navigate the complex system. They are often turned down, and where parents would like to have a nursery place, have applied and have perhaps even found a provider—which is hard to do—that they think will work for their child, it then takes time to go through the process of the EHCP. In the meantime, what provision is available? What support is available if a child needs a one-to-one?
For example, one child that we heard about needed one-to-one support. They were in nursery and, as they reached the next year, they were told they would not have that support. The parent had to go away and apply for an EHCP once their child turned three and then try to come back to get it. That parent had to leave work to be able to support their child. Those examples, sadly, are more common than they should be.
Q172 Caroline Ansell: On the inclusion funding, should there be lower-hanging fruit to provide that more immediate intervention and more specialist support? What is your experience of that?
Mary Mulvey-Oates: We welcome the inclusion funding that there is, but there needs to be more of it and it needs to be easier to access for providers. Where a provider is able to access it, the child is then—
Q173 Caroline Ansell: What would make it easier to apply for?
Mary Mulvey-Oates: At the moment, it is a very complex system. We support parents through our workshops, through our training for parents and for practitioners, to understand and be able to navigate the system. I think there needs to be greater simplicity and clarity. I think the barriers around language are huge—the jargon that is used.
Q174 Caroline Ansell: Is it around evidence in terms of simplicity, less evidence or a different threshold?
Jolanta Lasota: I think it is down to commissioning. The reality is that we do not have systematic commissioning in early years. We do not have any ambitions in early years in this country. We need that reflected in the SEND implementation review. We do not have enough ambition in that review around early years and we need to understand that the clock is ticking for these children and these families. Why are we waiting for them to fail in school? To provide what would be relatively inexpensive support in early years, we need to think about the fact that there is a £32 billion cost at the end of this rainbow, so that rainbow is—
Q175 Caroline Ansell: How do we crunch that time? What you are describing—delay—is toxic, as I think we can all agree, particularly in those very formative years. If the funding is there but providers are saying there is a delay to that funding, securing it and drawing it down, what would crunch that time?
Jolanta Lasota: Quite simply, that funding needs to be provided on a formula basis to early years providers, with some mandatory training and some standards. That requires an early years strategy. That requires local authorities and health trusts to work proactively with providers, rather than reactively asking individuals or individual providers to apply for funding. There needs to be a commissioning strategy that recognises that we have a percentage of children with special educational needs coming through the early years system, and that needs to be proactively funded.
We also need to remove the assumption that parents of disabled children do not work. I am a parent of an 18-year-old disabled young man and here I am working. However, the system assumes that we can leave parents working at home looking after these children—that they are not a vital part of our workforce, and that work isn’t important to them as families. There is an assumption that we can leave families under the radar not working, waiting for their child to fail at school.
Mary Mulvey-Oates: The other thing to say is about the disability living allowance, which is used as a proxy to access inclusion funding. Often, there is a delay to being able to go through the process of getting that. If your child enters in September, they are assessed during the first term and perhaps they will get access later that academic year, or perhaps not until the next academic year, at which point the threshold changes for funding entitlements. Expediting access in those early years is important.
Chair: Thank you. These are very important issues, but we need to move on a bit quicker. Ian, do you want to come in?
Q176 Ian Mearns: On the workforce development strategy, if not the DFE, who else would do that? Someone has to have a national overview of how many youngsters or how many settings we have, how many currently well-trained staff we have, what the needs would be and how we will fill the gap.
Years ago, local authorities used to clump together to have a strategy to create and pay for the training of educational psychologists. That does not happen anymore. There is no strategy of that nature. It used to be top-sliced from local government budgets. Now, the system overall is fractured in who does what. The trouble is, we have a system where there are more gaps for people to fall between than we had a number of years ago. It is never perfect, but surely it has to be the DFE who looks at the national picture and says, “Look, we have shortages in a whole range of different fields. We have placement shortages. We have professional shortages. How do we draw these things together?” Who else would do it?
Jane Harris: It could be the DFE. I think there is also a role for DHSC when you are looking at people like speech and language therapists—that could be joint.
I also think it is important that any strategy is based on data. At the moment, DFE does not collect data from the early language identification measure. DFE sensibly funded that in 2018. It was a free tool for health visitors to use at the two-year check to see who is struggling with speech and language issues, but there has never been a plan to then collate that data locally, regionally or nationally. That should then drive the workforce strategy because it would tell you what workforce you need in different areas.
Chair: Very interesting, thank you.
Q177 Andrew Lewer: This is specifically to Mary, moving on a little bit. Contact has delivered parental confidence sessions to increase the take-up of funded nursery places. Could you tell us about the findings of those sessions and the measures that you feel, as a result of that work, we could take to increase parental trust? I said that with a bit of feeling because in the constituency, I have parents who are very passionate about their kids and when they have learning difficulties and disabilities, they are even more so. That is a powerful and often helpful thing, but sometimes it leads to a lack of contact and a lack of willingness to take on opportunities for support.
Mary Mulvey-Oates: Parental confidence in providers and settings is a key barrier to accessing childcare in the early years, and 66% of parents who called our helpline recently were not accessing the full free early years entitlements. They said that one-to-one care or additional support was not available for their child. So confidence is also about having the right support, the right workforce, availability and capacity.
There is a second part to that, which is how settings and those caring for young children are communicating with families. We work with families to raise their confidence to understand what they can expect and what they can ask for. We also work with practitioners to support them to ask the questions, to approach and share information with children to work together collaboratively.
We talk about co-production, because families need to have confidence in settings that when their child goes through the door, they will be welcomed and cared for, and that parents’ input will be valued by the setting. I think that we need workforce training and support for the workforce to be confident in having those conversations and in tackling the tricky issues of the discussions that need to happen with families to build confidence. Families need to know that the practitioners are on their side and that practitioners will listen and support them. It might be about toilet training, for example. Parents get turned away from because their child has toileting needs. They are sometimes asked to come into nursery to change their child. Children with SEND may have additional needs in toileting and behaviour in various different areas. Working together with families in co-production can help to support that, but communication needs to be right and the language that is used needs to be collaborative and not adversarial. That is important.
Q178 Andrew Lewer: Do you think that the main focus should be on the direct relationship, rather than people acting as intermediaries or interceding? Aligned to that, there is the ability to manage expectations. Settings try their best and parents obviously want their best, but sometimes parents want absolutely everything and resources and expectations need to be managed. Is that best done directly, or is there a role for some sort of intermediary work in there as well?
Mary Mulvey-Oates: At Contact, we support parent carers to have a voice, and to do that together with other parent carers. There is a role for parent carers to be represented with local authorities and to have a voice to say, “This is happening in our area and this is what parents are experiencing”. This isn’t just about working one-to-one with the setting. It is about addressing issues across a geographical area. Where that happens well, it can make a big difference to families to have that voice and to be able to share what is happening. Sometimes, it is simple things like the forms that people are asked to fill in or the language that practitioners use. It isn’t always about more funding, although that clearly is an issue, as we have heard.
Q179 Chair: Jolanta, Ambitious about Autism raised particular concerns over the stress and anxiety caused to parents and families during the wait times for diagnosis in autism, and we had a lot of debates about that recently in Westminster. How can the early years sector support families during that difficult period? You mentioned some good examples earlier, including speech and language working to help to identify need and to help to provide support. Can you expand on what can be done to provide the right support that will make it better for children and families?
Jolanta Lasota: Yes. This links very much to the previous question around trust. Our research in “Right from the Start” showed that, when parents worked alongside professionals who understood their needs, their trust increased and their stress decreased. However, 70% of parents said that, post-diagnosis, they received no support. They were left with a relatively negative narrative around their child and no positive support to help them think about their child’s strengths and the positive things that may happen in the future.
We would call for pre-diagnostic support. We know that, in some areas, speech and language therapists and so on are running pre-diagnostic support groups for families who are on a waiting list. Although those waiting lists are not acceptable, pre-diagnostic support is a way of reducing anxiety and helping parents to have some tools prior to diagnosis to support their child.
We also need post-diagnostic support. We are currently running a pilot on post-diagnostic support. We know that relatively inexpensive interventions for those parents, post-diagnosis, will help them to think more positively about the pathways for their child and to work collaboratively with their education settings. Sometimes what are perceived to be unrealistic burdens placed on settings are simply because parents are bombarded with information that isn’t evidence-based. They need tools. They need a first 100 days post-diagnostic toolbox that tells them how to access support and how to access the system.
We would also support KIDS’ call for some form of early intervention support worker who helps parents to navigate that system. It is a very confusing system when they are accessing education, health or benefits, and the anxiety of having to face all those barriers will increase people’s adversarial position. They are not unreasonable requests. They are requests that are needed for the family and for the child, but there is no support in navigating that.
Q180 Ian Mearns: We talked earlier about training needs and the shortage of well-qualified staff. What are your main concerns about the current level of SEND training provided for the early years sector, both in quantity and quality?
Jolanta Lasota: I am happy to start. I chair the Autism Education Trust, which is funded by the Department for Education, thankfully, and provides autism training for early years professionals, schools professionals and post-16. We have seen that where training is made available to early years practitioners, it makes a difference. Parents say it makes a difference. Those early years practitioners have greater confidence in supporting those children.
The uptake of that training is very much determined by whether the funding is made available for the training, and we know that tends to be in early years settings that are aligned with either schools’ provision or statutory provision. We need to make that training mandatory, and we need to fund it. Unless we have a foundation of solid universal support, we will constantly see an escalation into specialist services.
Q181 Ian Mearns: Have you made any estimation of what well-trained, well-qualified staff are needed to fulfil the needs out there?
Jolanta Lasota: Again, the Autism Education Trust trains around 40,000 professionals across early years, schools and post-16. We know that the workforce is much greater than that. I would not want to put a cost on it because it is also about modelling best practice. So it is about this early years strategy and thinking about how you set up train the trainer schemes locally or how you provide online. It isn’t all about face-to-face, one-to-one training of staff. It is about creating a strategy that allows the workforce to absorb this information in a way that is practical and cost-effective.
Jane Harris: I think that one of the things that has not been discussed enough post-Budget is that, while we are changing to Scottish-style childcare ratios, we are not putting in the same level of qualifications as Scotland has. My understanding is that there is a high level of qualification. It feels like we are taking something that might actually reduce the quality of childcare, but we are not putting in the measures.
Q182 Chair: I totally agree with your point, and it is one that I have raised in debates. Of course, it is important to point out that what the Government have done about the ratios will be entirely optional, and I have argued that that means most settings and most parents will not take that opportunity.
Jane Harris: Our worry about that is that they will be used in more disadvantaged areas, which is already where children are more at risk of speech and language challenges. About 50% of children in disadvantaged areas have speech and language challenges. In research we did last year, where we talked to practitioners in those areas, most of them said that this is now a majority issue. One of the concerning things is that, because so many children have these challenges, it is lowering the practitioner’s sense of what is typical.
It was interesting that Kindred’s report last year about school readiness said that 93% of teachers in primary said that they had at least one child without basic language skills. That means not being able to recognise your name and not being able to respond to instructions. That is a really low level.
One other point I want to make is that it isn’t just about training the workforce. It is also about information for parents. Most parents do not understand how you support a child’s speech and language development. DFE had the Hungry Little Minds campaign, but we have not seen an evaluation of that, and it feels like there is no strategy at the moment for how we get information to parents about what they can do, which would be a relatively low-cost intervention. In our experience, when we run things like the Tots Talking programme, parents love this stuff. They are absolutely amazed to learn about things such as contingent language and how you can add words to a child’s vocabulary. It isn’t that parents do not want to do this; it is just something that they are ignorant of.
Chair: Of course, different parents will react to it in different ways. I remember that Hungry Little Minds campaign very well. During lockdown, every time I walked out of my house, I walked past a bus stop with a big advert on it. I think it was one of the more effective campaigns. Absolutely, an evaluation of that would do well.
Ian Mearns: What struck me, Robin, is we have gone straight from 4:1 to 5:1 as being the option. That is a 25% increase in the number of children per adult within a particular setting. It could have been done a bit more subtly, if that was the way they wanted to go, by saying 9:2 or 13:3 and having a very slow marginal increase, because the number of children in a setting usually isn’t four, and the number of adults in a setting usually isn’t one. You could have done it on multiples and not diluted it so much, so it isn’t as radical.
Chair: The devil is in the detail in these things, but, of course, often we are talking about a specific room being managed by a certain number of staff.
Ian Mearns: Absolutely, yes.
Chair: I will move on to Miriam.
Q183 Miriam Cates: On children arriving at school without sufficient language, I speak to primary heads in my constituency and it is exactly the same. Some are saying that where there used to be one or two in the whole school, there are now one or two in each class that face that difficulty. You mentioned that parents have an important role to play but often do not know what to do. It strikes me that it is a bit like physiotherapy. You need the professional to make the diagnosis, but it is up to you to do the exercises that will make it better.
Would it not be a much better use of resources and fundamentally better for children and families to find a way of equipping all parents with the knowledge of how to talk to children? Of course, there would be some conditions that need professional support, but, for the vast majority, it would be fixed by parents having that knowledge. Would that not be a better way of doing it, rather than waiting until problems are identified?
Jane Harris: I think that is absolutely part of the solution. There is something about equipping the parents and equipping practitioners, because you want a consistent approach across the home and the early years setting. There are also the specialists, and we need to preserve our scarce resource of speech and language therapists for the children who really need it.
I think that there is also a bit in the middle, where there are children who are still struggling despite the parents doing whatever they can, and we have to be clear with parents that not every child will respond to that approach. The vast majority will, but we cannot make parents feel bad if their child does not respond because there might be something more complex going on.
There is something in the middle as well where a setting can run their own group intervention. For example, we run Early Talk Boost, which is a nine-week programme. It is three 30-minute sessions a week, and a teaching assistant or a generalist can run that programme. At the end of the programme, 50% of children have entirely resolved their challenges. Another 30% of children will have made significant progress. They might need to do it again, and then they will have resolved their challenges. You then understand who the 20% are who absolutely need that specialist support.
That is the kind of programme that should be in every single nursery across the country, given the level of need that we are seeing, but it is just not there. Part of the reason is that there isn’t enough guidance to settings about what can be done. I hear this all the time from settings saying, “It’s terrible. There are these long waits for speech and language therapists”. Actually, you can do something, too. It isn’t just about the specialists.
Q184 Miriam Cates: Would it not be even better to start even earlier than that in family hubs or Sure Start centres, and equip parents of newborns by saying, “This is what to expect and this is how to do it”?
Jane Harris: Exactly. Unfortunately, the family hubs guidance does not provide any funding for interventions on language until children are three or four, which is so silly that you think it must be an error. The guidance does say that early language acquisition impacts on all aspects of children’s non-physical development. However, the only funding available is for the home learning environment for children who are three or four years old. That is literally after those 1,001 days. I guess it is an error, but it is an error that needs to be rectified quickly.
Q185 Miriam Cates: More controversially, do you think there is any link between smartphones and the reduction in language ability of children?
Jane Harris: When we looked into this a little bit during covid, what we actually found was that it was not screen time that practitioners said was an issue. They said the biggest issue was children’s contact with other children. That makes some sense. We hear a lot from parents that when their child joins a setting, they feel their child is a bit shy and that is why they are struggling, rather than recognising this is a language challenge.
I think that is often because if a child is at home with their parents and they want an apple, they will find a way to tell their parents—such as pointing—and their parents will understand. They will find a way to communicate, whereas in the setting, those same sort of protocols between a family are not there, so that is when these things are discovered. Also, I think that when a child is with a peer and that peer has the red car that they want, they are motivated to speak. That is when they want to convey what their need is in a way that they will not do in a home setting. We cannot 100% say that, but that is certainly what practitioners said was the biggest issue.
Chair: That is interesting. I was going to ask the same question about people giving a child a screen to keep them entertained and distract them, whether that is settings or parents. I worry about the extent of time that a child can spend on things like that instead of interacting. I guess that is part of the challenge in that space. Anecdotally, we have all seen parents with children on the bus managing them by giving them a screen, which never strikes me as terribly constructive. One of the nice things about the Hungry Little Minds campaign is it made the point about talking to a child even if they do not understand, which is so crucial for language development.
Q186 Mrs Flick Drummond: That is actually the point I was going to make. I was a governor at a school where only three out of 60 are school-ready, and from a very deprived area, but as the children came out, all the parents were on their smartphones. They did not talk to the child as they came out. You also see now people pushing prams and looking at their phones at the same time. Nobody is talking to their children anymore and generally they are facing away, particularly when you put your babies facing away as well. I wonder whether there should be a campaign—maybe it is Hungry Little Minds; I don’t know that campaign particularly. Is there anything more that we can do to say to parents, “Put your screen away and talk to your children”? We are talking about children having screens, but I am worried about the parents having the screen.
Jolanta Lasota: I think we are both dying to say something here. It is important that we differentiate between development needs and disability, and that we do not blame parents who have a disabled child for those sorts of behaviours. I think that there is a real balance between providing those parents with the training and support that they need to interact with their child. There is no book that helps you to navigate some of these things. You need that individualised support versus actually placing the burden on parents to fix the situation themselves, which then leads to frustration, anxiety and stress. It is important that we differentiate between development and disability.
Mary Mulvey-Oates: At Contact, we offer training and support for parents. We have online workshops that are very popular, funded by the DFE and early years through our partnership programme. Parents can learn a lot from these programmes and take that information away. They also say to us that when they come together, they feel less isolated and feel more able to access information and entitlements.
On our helpline, we support parents to access the funding that they are entitled to. On average, parents of disabled children increase their incomes by £5,000 once they have been through our helpline support. They need information, but they also need other support systems. They tell us that they often feel blamed when there isn’t the right support in place. When small children are struggling with behaviour—perhaps behaviour that challenges in classroom settings—parents feel blamed rather than feel empowered to have the information to take action.
Q187 Chair: We will have to wrap up shortly because Treasury questions have already started.
I want to ask one further question on the availability of specialist children’s assessment centres. I have lost one recently in my constituency—it is a big loss—and I know that there are widespread concerns about the availability of that specialist support. As experts in the field, what is the picture that you are seeing nationally? To come back to this point about having a proper plan in place, what role do you think there is for local authorities to plan for the level of need for specialist assessment centres?
Jolanta Lasota: I am happy to say that Coram’s research tells us that only one in five authorities say they have sufficient provision for children with SEND. The data also shows that between 3% and 7% of children who access their free childcare availability have a SEND. We know that there is a low uptake and insufficient provision, and we need an early years SEND strategy that encourages joint commissioning between local authorities and health to provide that specialist provision to prepare children for school, to give parents confidence themselves, to give parents an opportunity to go to work or to have respite, and to reduce the failures later in school.
Mary Mulvey-Oates: I would certainly support that, and the joint commissioning approach for early years is important. We also need better data and information. Parents tell us that they have been turned away from providers and their providers tell them that there is no place for them at this nursery, and that happens multiple times. We need better data on how many disabled children have access to provision, how many are turned away and how many are not getting their full entitlement, so they are only getting a couple of hours a day or a week. Information would support better workforce planning.
Jane Harris: Can I just come back to the point about the campaign? I think that there is a role for that. You have to be careful about reaching the most important target audience, which is the people in disadvantaged areas, and that you do not end up just reaching people who are information seekers. I used to work on the Time to Change campaign in mental health, so I know how hard that is to do. It isn’t simple. For example, we hear from some parents who say that they think that their children can learn language from TV. They don’t understand that that does not really work. We have even heard from some people who think that eye contact is rude, particularly people who have any sort of gang history.
So it is a real job to do that. Actually, these two things work in parallel because, if you do that and you have more children who are prevented from developing a speech and language challenge, you preserve the specialist resource for disabled children and we really need that.
Q188 Mrs Flick Drummond: The Down’s Syndrome Association is talking about having a census in schools that records them, so that we know how many children with Down’s syndrome are in schools. Do you think that should be the case with all SEND children, so that we have a proper awareness from nursery all the way through, as a census? We can properly direct funding in that case.
Jane Harris: We already have that for speech and language. We know that in primary, 34% of children who were identified with special needs have a speech, language and communication need. The gap in data for us is in early years and unfortunately, when this early years identification measure was launched, roll-out was disrupted by covid and it has never been restarted. Many health visitors have not had the training on how to use that tool, but also that data isn’t used except at an individual level. That seems like a missed opportunity.
Q189 Ian Mearns: Is there not a problem in understanding what the proper diagnosis of each individual child is?
Jane Harris: Yes, but I suppose the diagnosis comes at a later stage. That is an identification of a need. It is not necessarily giving a diagnosis, which would need to be done by a speech and language therapist. If you can identify the need early on, you can put children through these universal and targeted interventions before you think about diagnosis.
Q190 Ian Mearns: I am not talking about just speech and language; I am talking about special educational needs in general.
Mary Mulvey-Oates: I think that there is also a place for better support for home learning. We heard from parents who are at home with their children, and it is certainly about better support for home learning, but if you just look at the provision nurseries, you would not pick up on those children who are at home. Parents are often struggling at home. Portage and services do a great job, but we need more of that and we need that in the home, not just in group settings.
Chair: Thank you. I will bring the session to a close—it has been a rich session. Thank you very much to all of our panel.