A council-less future looms for early years

The government is plotting a major shake-up of the role of local authorities in early years provision.

A consultation published by the Department for Education last month sets out plans to limit councils’ ability to control funding, inspect settings, and deliver training and support to providers.

The proposals would see Ofsted become the sole inspector of early years settings, and its ratings the only benchmark that determines how much money settings get.

Councils would face limits on the conditions they can place on providers and would no longer be duty-bound to offer settings training, information and advice.

In addition, the early years funding formulae would be simplified, along the lines of the model for the two-year-old entitlement, to try to get more money into the hands of nurseries and other pre-school services.

The DfE says councils retained £160m of £2.1bn it gave them in 2012/13 through the Dedicated Schools Grant. The department believes the proposed changes will encourage local authorities to send more of this money to the frontline.

Level playing field
Nursery providers that work in multiple local authorities support the proposals. Marg Randles, managing director of nursery chain Busy Bees, which operates across 90 local authorities, says it levels the playing field.

“Currently, there is great variation between local authorities on how the free entitlement is administered,” she says.

But she notes that the changes may be more helpful to larger providers than smaller early years settings. “We are fortunate to have our own training department. Sole providers may not be in a position to fund all of their training without the support from local authorities.”

Sarah Steel, managing director of the Old Station Nursery chain, agrees. She says restrictions imposed on settings by councils have caused problems. She tells of one case where a council would only recognise first-aid training delivered by providers it had approved while other authorities allowed the chain to use its in-house trainer.

Steel says plans to guarantee funding to all providers who reach the minimum Ofsted rating will help people start and develop their businesses.

She recalls a situation with one of its nurseries in Lincolnshire, which had to wait a year for the funding even though Ofsted had approved the setting, because the council had its own inspection criteria. “That made it slow for us to get customers,” says Steel. “It also caused problems for parents who had registered with two-year-olds in expectation that we would have funding by the time their children were three. They were forced to move their children or not get the funded sessions.”

Advice and support
Yet Steel is concerned about Ofsted’s ability to perform all of the functions undertaken by local authorities. “Ofsted inspects at the moment, but it doesn’t advise or support,” she says. “Ofsted only visits once every three years, but your local authority adviser can be there every term. It would be a sad loss to not have advisory visits.”

Providers would also incur greater costs if they have to buy training from companies rather than councils, she adds. That, she says, “flies in the face of the government’s objective of trying to keep down the cost of childcare”.

Jill Rutter, research manager at the Daycare Trust and Family and Parenting Institute, worries about giving Ofsted a bigger role: “Ofsted lacks expertise in early years. At the moment, it only has one HM inspector with an early years background.”

She also questions the quality of Ofsted’s assessments, citing a study her organisation carried out with Oxford University in 2012. The study compared the Ofsted grades of settings with how they measured up on the international Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale (Ecers). “A lot of local authorities use Ecers in their quality improvement role,” says Rutter. “The results showed Ofsted grades aren’t always an accurate reflection of quality.”

She also points to the sexual abuse of children that took place within Little Ted’s nursery in Plymouth. The serious case review of the incident, published in November 2010, noted that “while [Plymouth’s] Early Years [Advisory Service] had the nursery identified as red or amber on its own rating system, Ofsted inspections were good or satisfactory”.

“The local authority had concerns, but Ofsted did not,” Rutter says.

Funding formula
A single funding formula is another threat to quality, she argues: “Local authorities can demand quality standards from settings in order to receive additional money. The proposal is that local authorities will no longer be able to set those, so funding cannot be used to demand quality.”

Some believe the changes will also fail to save councils money. “We cannot see how a saving of this magnitude – £160m – can be made when there is no duplication of roles,” says Labour councillor Dora Dixon-Fyle, cabinet member for children’s services at the London Borough of Southwark. “Local authorities do not inspect provision – that is Ofsted’s job. Southwark does work closely with Ofsted, but we are very clear that our roles are quite distinct. What we do is provide active support and challenge early years providers to drive up improvement.”

Southwark, along with the other councils contacted by CYP Now, has yet to decide its full response to the consultation. But it is clear that if the government sticks to its plan, that kind of local authority support could soon become a thing of the past.