A few weeks ago, a gentle voice of a carer at a local nursery was telling me that they encourage their one-year-olds to actively reach out for their wholesome wooden blocks as opposed to actively giving it to them. That’s apparently indulgent and doesn’t support a febrile young toddler mind. She was giving me the soft sell on their nurturing policies and pointing out how many mud stations they have so that I know the potential dirt embedded in my son’s fingernails will have come from a good place. But what they didn’t know was that they were the only nursery that deigned to reply after my frantic frenzy of mass email/phone applications, when I enquired at one and someone openly guffawed at me for not applying when I was still pregnant.
I will therefore be taking the precious place at the nursery with the mud pits and the wooden blocks and treating it like the childcare jackpot that it is. I will solemnly promise to abide by their set-in-stone rule that mobile phones will remain firmly out of sight on nursery grounds so that it doesn’t contaminate the pre-technology, Victorian wooden aesthetic.
It’s with genuine gratitude that I give this nursery place celebratory fanfare though, because pre-primary childcare will have been at the forefront of most parents’ minds — particularly after the supposed ground-breaking announcement in last week’s Budget granting 30 hours of ‘free’ weekly childcare for those who are in work for children of nine months and older. You just have to wait until late 2024 for it. It’s applicable to 38 weeks of the year, with the rest being designated as holiday time (even though working adults don’t get that time off). And conveniently, it comes in effect fully after the next General Election, leaving the likelihood of a Labour government to pick up the pieces of a broken nursery system that is momentarily being patched up by dangling this ‘30 hours free’ out to parents (who are already on the childcare backfoot, either because of dwindling nursery spots or prohibitive costs).
I try to visualise five two-year-olds assigned to one key worker and I want to scream silently in a cupboard
In the ostensibly ‘bougie’ nursery setting in Stoke Newington that my daughter was in for two years, the extra funded hours won’t pay for the rising costs of the quinoa porridge or sweet potato curry. Or the problem of training and retaining staff, who often take on extra babysitting work to make ends meet. The qualitative staff to children ratio will be further reduced as the Government intends to push ahead with plans to relax ratios for two-year-olds from 1:4 to 1:5. I try to visualise five two-year-olds assigned to one key worker and I want to scream silently in a cupboard. I can already see nursery parents’ WhatsApp groups up and down the country sounding alarm over the fact their kids don’t have the standard 1:3/4 attention of key workers chasing their crawling babes on soft play mats.
Parents hear the word ‘free’ and momentarily rejoice, until they realise the shortage of places isn’t going to let up. And nursery owners and staff will continue to toil with the minimal rates paid to them by the Government that barely covers costs for the extra attention needed for younger babies. The ‘free hours’ suddenly don’t seem all that free after all. Come 2025 when my son finally goes into his hard fought place at nursery, I expect he’ll be joining a rabble of kids chasing after their own wooden blocks.
