CEY0918

Written evidence submitted by Sandbrook Community Playgroup

Evidence from Vanessa Linehan on behalf of Sandbrook Community Playgroup, 85 Sandbrook Road, London, N16 0SL.

We are a charity setting in Hackney, founded in 1976. We are based in a residential property in Stoke Newington and currently have 27 children on our register.

We keep our fees as low as we can so that no child is excluded through cost. This has always been at the heart of our ethos and is part of being a community setting. 50% of our children are from low-income families, 40% of our children have Special Educational Needs and 45% speak additional languages other than English at home. 12% of our children are on Child Protection Plans or are Children in Need.

We currently charge £5 an hour for three- and four-year-olds and £6.50 an hour for two-year-olds.

Rising costs are making it increasingly hard for us to remain financially sustainable.  We are based in a council property, so our rent, as a charity, is only £5000 a year but all other costs have gone up considerably. 

Energy costs and the cost of basics like food for snacks, cleaning products, toilet rolls, wipes etc continue to rise in line with inflation. The rise in the Minimum Wage, the recruitment and retention crisis in early years and the rising cost of living for our staff have all meant that we have had to increase salary costs recently.  We currently pay our Level three practitioners £12.15 an hour which is competitive although not as much as we would like to be able to pay.

We have a high number of children with SEND which means that our staff ratios need to be high. Inclusion funding and EHCP funding does not fully cover that cost of the additional staff that we need to employ. We are not in a position where we could consider reducing staff ratios when we have so many children that need one to one care or a high level of adult interactions. We were against recent Government proposals to reduce ratios as we felt that this did not take into account the individual needs of all children, both in terms of physical safety and teaching needs.

We receive no additional funding for taking children under Child Protection Plans etc despite the huge time commitment that this entails in terms of reports and meetings required.

Funding has not increased to allow us to cover increased costs. We have no other way of increasing our income. The majority of our children are funded, only 14% are fully fee paying, so it is not possible for us to make up the shortfall in funding by charging high fees, which is what many other private nurseries are forced to do. We are about to increase our fees by 10% in the next financial year but that will only give us something in the region of £1000 a year extra which is a drop in the ocean really.

The funding rate we got in 2020/21 was £5.72 per hour but it dropped to £5.52 in 2021/22 because we happened to have less children from low-income households in January 2021 when the census was taken. Although the rate for 2022/3 is £5.90 per hour that's only 3.3% up on what we got in 2020/21 and isn’t enough to cover the cost of the actual place which is over £7 an hour. We have yet to be told our rates for 2023/4.

Our biggest difficulty currently is recruiting suitable staff. Morale amongst those working in the sector has never been lower. I think this is a direct result of the way that we were treated during the pandemic, when we were expected to remain open with little support or appreciation.

The increasing expectations from the Government for the sector, in terms of what we are supposed to achieve and have expertise in, are not matched by any sort of recognition or respect. We still hear cabinet ministers talking about education as if it starts in Reception and as if those working with children of pre-school age aren’t teaching in the same way as those working in schools with older children are.

As an older Manager, I have taken the decision to retire early later this year as I no longer want to deal with the demands and stress of the role. In a setting like ours, where we have children at risk of harm and children with special needs, we need highly qualified and experienced staff. I have a master’s in early Years as well as Early Years Professional Status, but only about a quarter of those working in early years are educated to degree level. We need more graduates. I have struggled over the last few years to find the quality of staff needed and this situation seems to be getting worse as time goes by. The reality is that graduates don’t want to work for £12.15 per hour, and neither do less qualified people when they can get more working in retails or catering.

All evidence shows the importance of high-quality early years education especially for the sort of children that we have at our setting, those from low-income families. We know we can make a difference because we have been doing it for years.  The question is how much longer settings like ours will be able to survive given the current funding levels and the lack of highly qualified staff.

January 2023