09/01/2024
📢The 'free childcare' offer: What parents and carers need to know.📢
Many of you will have seen and heard about the crisis facing all early years settings at the moment, this may have come from national news bulletins, social media posts, or friends and family. Sadly, depending on where the information originated from it may not always be factually correct and may be spun to look much more beneficial or attractive to those who do not fully understand the impact, on occasion the misinformation has caused friction between early years settings and members of the public as we have been portrayed as 'money grabbers' this, however, is far from the truth.
The Early Years Alliance have put together information and resources for us to inform parents of the struggles all early years settings have been facing and continue to face, and we beg you to get on board and write letters to our local MP to raise awareness. With the expansion of the funded hours in April, this will undoubtedly force more settings to close their doors for good. We would like to reiterate that we are in no way against the government providing families with funding and we are pleased that the expansion of the funding means that early-years education will now be available to children from a younger age and will support parents in funding these places, however, what we are against is the continued lack of funding provided by the central government.
Early Years workers do not do this job for the money, we do this job for rewards that it brings however, the lack of recognition that is given by all politicians is starting to take its toll on the workforce. During Covid, when early years were a fundamental part of keeping the country running, we were under the umbrella of ‘Education’ now that we are having our income capped and the government are searching for votes we are ‘childcare’ however, like schools we have a curriculum to follow, we have records to keep and futures to build.