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What does it say about the value of care when low skills are aligned to low salaries?

Does our Home Secretary need to be quite so offensive to the 319,000 staff who provide early childhood education and childcare to parents every day to enable them to work and contribute to the economy?

Offensive? Yes, by aligning low-skill to a salary level of less than £25k which exceeds what so many early years staff are paid.

Oh, and why is that? Are we all so greedy we want to keep huge profits? No, most childcare providers from the 24,500 nurseries nationwide own one or two nurseries, which they set up to provide a service to local parents. They barely manage to pay themselves and those nurseries in poor neighbourhoods are closing on a weekly basis. The highly leveraged big chains only constitute nine per cent of the sector so any profits they make won’t impact significantly on the wider sector. The reality is that we are all squeezed to discomfort by the insufficient government funding which has caused a year on year continual shortfall, currently constituting £662m and that is why our staff are paid less than £25k.

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