MPs call for nursery schools to become academies

The all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on nursery schools and nursery classes has called for an amendment to legislation to allow nursery schools to convert into academies.

There are currently around 400 maintained nursery schools, a reduction of around 200 since the 1980s. Many are facing increasing financial pressure due to reductions in funding and their requirement to employ qualified staff, as opposed to private and voluntary providers who can employ less-qualified, cheaper staff.

The APPG believes that removing them from local authority control and allowing them to become an academy would allow them to respond to local need, expanding the number of childcare places they offer, or age range they provide for.

In a document published online, the APPG said all nursery schools should be allowed to become academies to allow them to have more freedom to grow and collaborate with other providers.

"The government has the opportunity to include nursery schools in the transfer to academy status and to ensure that these highly successful and effective schools are given the resources to thrive and grow excellence in their own schools and in their wider community of local early years provision," the document states.

Margy Whalley, director of research at early years provider Pen Green, which is acting as secretariat for the APPG, told CYP Now that being allowed academy status is "absolutely critical" for some nurseries.

"If we have those kind of freedoms then it will be possible for us to survive, but without those freedoms we’re really restricted.”

“We are just at the tipping point of either losing them forever, or claiming them as a core part of the early years system."

Whalley said chair of the APPG, Conservative MP Graham Stuart, has tabled a parliamentary question to government on maintained nurseries becoming academies.

"That's the battle, and we must win it," Whalley said. "What we're trying to do is get every single nursery head to engage with their MP and try to bring every one of their MPs to [our next] meeting in May."

Shadow Education Secretary Lucy Powell previously called for the government to allow nursery schools academy status in 2014.