Free childcare expansion at risk from 'recruitment crisis'

In total, 86 per cent of respondents to NDNA's Workforce Survey 2016 said struggles to recruit and retain staff will have a moderate to severe impact on their ability to deliver the doubling of 30 hours of free childcare for three- and four-year-olds from next September.

The main reason for practitioners' concerns, the survey found, was due to problems caused by the requirements introduced in September to have maths and English GCSEs at a grade A to C for Level 3 Early Years Educators (EYEs) so they can count in a setting's ratios.

The surey found that only 46 per cent of those qualified to Level 3, and 31 per cent of those at Level 2, held the relevant GCSEs.

Overall, the number of staff qualified at a Level 3 or above has fallen from 83 per cent in 2015 to 75 per cent this year.

In addition, 58 per cent of respondents said recruiting qualified staff at Level 3 was difficult or very difficult.

Lack of progression due to the Level 3 GCSE requirement holding staff back was also partly to blame for the increase in staff turnover - which rose from 14 per cent in 2015 to 18 per cent this year.

The NDNA found that 59 per cent of employers think allowing staff to progress to qualified Level 3 with functional skills, rather than GCSEs, would have a positive impact on business.

Functional skills, according to the government, "enable students to demonstrate real-life literacy, numeracy and IT skills through assessments set in everyday contexts".

Stella Ziolkowski, NDNA's director of quality and workforce development, said: "Numbers of qualified staff are dropping too low, which will have a detrimental impact on the quality of early years education, the single most important factor in reducing the attainment gap and supporting children to achieve.
 
"Unless the current double whammy of staff leaving and few staff applying for practitioner positions is addressed urgently, we risk that there won't be enough nursery places to be able to deliver the 30 hours free childcare promise.
 
"This requirement is preventing many good candidates from applying for positions or progressing to higher qualifications within the nursery.

"We urge the new childcare minister Caroline Dinenage to change the GCSE requirement to one for practical everyday maths and English as part of her promised early years workforce strategy to ease this escalating crisis."

Liz Bayram, chief executive of PACEY, added: "In order to deliver the government's promise of 30 hours funded  childcare, we need to see some significant steps to encourage early years professionals to stay in the sector and offer the increase in places that will be needed to meet the demand from parents."

Julie Hyde, associate director of CACHE, the organisation leading the Save Our Early Years Campaign, said the government must reverse the GCSE policy "before it makes the recruitment crisis even worse, and jeopardises nurseries from delivering the 30-hour free childcare promise".

"Good literacy and numeracy are vital for early years practitioners - and alternative Functional Skills qualifications in these subjects provide these skills, as well as the practical soft skills so vital to be a high-quality early years practitioner," Hyde added. 

"Other sectors have functional skills accepted as an equivalent qualification - there is no reason for the early years sector to be an outlier."

The government will be publishing a workforce strategy for the early years in the autumn.