Neil Leitch: Early years professionals are educators

When I speak to early educators about how they feel about working in the sector at the moment, one word comes up time and time again: exhausted.

From the never-ending battle to stay afloat in the face of chronic underfunding to the daily fight to stay open amid relentless staffing shortages – and of course, the recent and hugely significant impact of the pandemic – the last few years have heaped immense pressure on a sector that has already faced more than its fair share of challenges.

What has been truly draining for our workforce is that despite our sector delivering quality care and education to young children even in the most challenging of circumstances, the early years remains hugely underappreciated and undervalued, both by society and those in power.

Last month, the Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood released the results of a survey which found that only 17 per cent of the public recognise the unique importance of the first five years of a child’s life, relative to other age brackets.

We know that the first five years of a child’s life are absolutely critical to their long-term learning and development – but for much of wider society, early years provision is still seen as little more than babysitting: children being ‘watched’ while their parents work.

Of course, there’s no doubt that for many parents, working would be impossible without the services of their nursery, pre-school or childminder – but isn’t the same true of schools? Like primary and secondary teachers, early years professionals are much more than caregivers – and even more crucially, they help lay the foundations that shape a child’s future, teaching them vital social, academic and emotional skills.

This is why we at the Early Years Alliance have launched the #WeAreEducators campaign: to ensure that those in the early years sector are finally recognised as the education professionals they are.

Of course, we are very aware that recognition alone doesn’t pay the bills, and so our ultimate aim is that by highlighting the value of early education, we will be able to drive long-term policy change that will ensure our sector not only gets the respect, but also the investment, that it needs and deserves.

How can it be right that the government spends £5,800 per pupil in primary schools and £6,600 in secondary schools, but just £4,600 for the early years? How can it be fair that the early years pupil premium is still around a quarter of the amount given to primary schools? How can anyone justify the fact that just three per cent of education recovery programme funding has been allocated to the early years so far, despite acknowledgements from many, including Ofsted, that young children were the hardest hit by the pandemic?

Through the #WeAreEducators campaign, we want to show that the early years is just as important, if not more so, as any other part of the education system, and that our sector should be at the top, not the bottom, of the government’s priority list.

As part of the campaign, we have published a range of free resources and materials to help early years professionals share this positive message: from posters to pin up at your setting to template letters to help you to highlight the importance of our sector to your local MP. We’re also in contact with a number of MPs and organisations to widen the reach of the campaign and were incredibly pleased to welcome support from the Royal Foundation earlier this month.

We hope as many early years professionals as possible will join our fight. Because play is learning and early years is education – and it’s high time that was recognised.

Neil Leitch is chief executive of the Early Years Alliance

• More from www.eyalliance.org.uk/WeAreEducators and #WeAreEducators on Twitter