To provide children with the best start in life, councils’ early years teams need to be adequately resourced by government to be able to provide support to their local childcare sector and directly support children, young people, and families.
Councillor Louise Gittins
Chair of the Children and Young People Board for the Local Government AssociationThe expansion of funded childcare support announced in the Government’s Spring Budget last year is due to come into effect next month, starting with 15 hours for two-year -olds and broadening out to 30 hours for 9 -months-olds to 3-year-olds by September 2025.
While this expansion is a positive step towards helping parents with the high costs of childcare, it is putting significant pressure on already struggling providers, workforces, and council teams.
Challenges in Implementation: Pressure on Providers and Councils
Historic underfunding and wider pressures, such as COVID-19, have resulted in significant financial and workforce challenges for early education and childcare providers, which have seen staff numbers fall and driven an acceleration in providers closing.
Council capability to provide essential support to early years providers has also faced challenges due to complex reform arrangements and wider council funding pressures. This meant councils and early years providers were already experiencing significant challenges even before the pressure to implement the Government’s proposed expansion of the scheme ahead of the deadline. Furthermore, the limited timeframe councils were given to prepare for the scheme has also left local authority early years teams less able to be ready to support providers to expand and struggling to recruit and retain staff to meet demand.
Call for Systemic Reform: Balancing Quality and Sufficiency
To combat these workforce challenges, we were pleased to see the Government respond to our calls and launch a recruitment campaign for early years workers in February. This campaign is a positive move towards addressing the capacity and workforce issues facing childcare providers.
However, many councils feel constrained by their inability to determine where new providers can be established. There are also particular concerns about access to services for children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) in rural areas and deprived communities.
Councils have a difficult job of balancing the need for high-quality places with the need for sufficient places in order to fulfil their statutory duty, but they don’t have full control of the system. The current system is complicated and disjointed due to ad hoc policies introduced over time with no long-term strategic vision, and it crosses different government departments such as the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Education. This results in inconsistent information being passed to local authorities, providers, and families and can leave some of the most vulnerable families without access to funded entitlements.
This all means that the system is in need of reform. Councils have insight into the needs of families and children and are in the unique position of being able to bring together different parts of the system and work with different organisations to respond to this need. However, to do this effectively, local authorities need the right tools and sufficient resources, alongside clear guidance and support from central government.
The statutory guidance on the local authority sufficiency duty should be reviewed, ensuring that councils have sufficient levers and funding to deliver on their duties. The roles and responsibilities of councils need to be clear: balancing good outcomes for all children, quality of provision, and sufficiency to meet parental needs.
Councils should have the tools they need to stop a provider from setting up in an area that doesn’t need any new provision, for example, where this is undercutting well-established, local provision without adding any new value to local families. Councils also need a greater ability to incentivise providers, particularly for them to set up in areas of disadvantage or areas of greatest need.
As with most council departments, many council early years teams do a lot on a small budget. However, with the increasing needs of providers and children, and the expansion of entitlements, there should be greater flexibility in what local authorities can retain from the early years block through the early years national funding formula to be able to deliver essential services. Further capital funding is needed to support the development of new provisions in light of the expansion of the entitlement. If this is a provider-led process, councils need to be involved to fulfil their market-shaping duties.
A child’s earliest years are their foundation; if we give them a great start, they have a much better chance of fulfilling their potential as they grow up. It is essential that we get it right in the early years. Reforms to how the system is run and funded will ensure that all children have access to high-quality early years provision and can prevent reliance on statutory services later down the line. Reforms will also give parents and carers access to affordable childcare and mean that councils can better meet the needs of their local population.
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