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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Business
Letters

Liz Truss should focus on nursery funding, not staffing ratios

Liz Truss
Children playing with toys in a nursery school
Liz Truss has previously criticised ‘chaotic’ nurseries, but John Wadsworth says toddlers rarely charge around in an uncontrolled manner. Photograph: Alamy

Zoe Williams brings up Liz Truss’s proposals to cut staff-to-child ratios as a solution to the funding crisis faced by both maintained and private, voluntary and independent (PVI) providers (Toddlers, stop your running around: Liz Truss is coming for you, 3 October).

Truss put forward this idea in 2012 in the CentreForum thinktank paper Affordable Quality: New Approaches to Childcare, and the following year as undersecretary of state for education and childcare in the report More Great Childcare. Both documents are riddled with inaccuracies, which I detailed in 2013 in the article Like an ‘Uncontrolled Toddler’ Elizabeth Truss Risks Causing Chaos in England’s Nursery Education and Child Care Sector, published in the journal Forum.

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