Given crippling cuts to local authority funding for children's services, this seems a difficult time to increase free entitlements that are chronically underfunded, and can only reduce quality of what is on offer. Providers are almost universally agreed in their arguments about the inadequacy of the funding for the expanded offer. And the government's plan to fill the gap in funding is to take resources away from nursery schools and nursery classes attached to primary schools, putting at risk the high quality associated with maintained provision. Levelling the playing field in funding has been requested by the voluntary and private sectors for at least a decade. The PVI sector was asking for their funding to be increased to that of the maintained sector, not reducing the "generous" maintained funding to prop up a struggling PVI sector.
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