A battler unbowed

For a man known for his grass-roots campaigning, Neil Leitch’s office has a surprisingly corporate feel. To go with the smart black furniture is a fourth-floor, panoramic view across the rapidly regenerating King’s Cross area of north London. Despite the relatively plush surroundings, Leitch, the chief executive of the Pre-school Learning Alliance, has been very much down on the frontline in the battle with the  government over the future shape of early years in England.

Indeed, in recent months he has led the fight against the government’s proposed reforms. As the largest early years membership organisation with more than 14,000 settings under its umbrella, the alliance began its campaign against proposals to change the ratio of carers to children before the Department for Education formalised the plans in More Great Childcare in January. The survey it released in October 2012 showed that 94 per cent of its members feared an increase in child-to-staff ratios would decrease quality in childcare.

The government was eventually forced to abandon the plans last week as a result of Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg’s intervention. Speaking to CYP Now days earlier, Leitch predicted the changes would mean “a diminution in the quality of childcare in some areas – predominantly those where price is critical”.

A total of 19 letters to the government, four Freedom of Information requests and two petitions – including an official government e-petition that to date has gained 14,000 signatures – have pressed home this point.

Despite providers’ overwhelming rejection of the ratios proposals, Leitch’s conversations with practitioners convinced him that if legislation changed, they would employ the new levels “by default”.

“If you’re operating where it’s critical you provide a service to parents, and you have no damn money, you’ll be put in a position whereby if you take on two more children without increasing your costs, you could just about keep alive,” he says. “When business gets better, you think you’ll go back to your original ratios. But…” Leitch does not have to spell out what he expects would happen. “That’s reducing the quality of childcare in this country. When the first provider moves to it, the next one will follow.”

Childcare minister Elizabeth Truss had insisted that taking up new ratios would be optional. But Leitch says she knows “market forces would drive the position”. “Being an intelligent woman, why has she put her neck on the line with such a hideous proposal?” He suspects Truss had a hidden agenda and would have turned on providers that would not adopt the proposals had they been introduced. “We will become the awful cog in the wheel that is stopping parents having low childcare costs – and she will have done everything she possibly can. It’s dishonourable.”

Leitch has travelled across the channel to see first hand the experience of French nurseries – a system upon which Truss had partly based her reforms. In April, Truss described French children as having “good manners”, while English settings were “chaotic”. Leitch says what he saw during a trip to Paris in May contradicted this account.

Conflicting evidence
“I saw 25 four-year-olds sitting for considerable periods of time, and after a while they’re doing this and that,” says Leitch, as he begins fidgeting and pretending to poke his press manager. “They were doing this with their chairs” – he tries to scrape his chair legs on the floor by swinging his body and making a bored face. “I have to show you this,” he adds, pulling his mobile phone out of his suit pocket. The picture shows rows of school chairs with each leg painstakingly pushed through a tennis ball. “They stick them on because the kids wriggle and make a noise – they get distracted,” he explains. “Research tells us formalised learning before the age of seven is not a great idea. And I saw it.”

Leitch has not held back with his criticism of Truss’s policies – to the extent he believes his organisation has suffered financially as a result. He says that when the DfE asked the alliance to bid for funding, officials told them to expect less than before as budgets had been reduced. “When I’ve spoken to colleagues about this, they have told me that wasn’t the dialogue they had with DfE,” says Leitch. “I wrote to DfE to ask them about it, but I didn’t get a response. Now I’m starting to recognise why that might be. Some other organisations didn’t have as massive cuts as we did. And we were probably the most outspoken.”

The DfE did award the alliance a voluntary, community and social enterprise sector grant worth more than £1.2m for two years in May. Leitch says the DfE would have performed “an absolute travesty of justice” had it not provided any funding. “The work we do is at the front end of supporting some of the most vulnerable families out there,” he says. “But we were noisy and as a percentage we seem to have been cut. I accept that and my board of trustees accepts it. Everybody in the alliance has that reassurance we are doing the right thing.”

Leitch has personal experiences of deprivation, which he says drives his ambitions for children. Born to a Scottish father and Irish-Indian mother in Scotland, he spent some of his childhood in care after his abusive father deserted his mother. “I had a wonderful mum who did everything she possibly could to get us back out of children’s homes, which she did,” he says.