Labour when in government severely screwed up the childminding sector of child care. The last Labour government did great damage by insisting that the childminders not only follow an ‘Early Years Curriculum’, which to be fair mostly covered what good childminders were doing already,but also burdened them with an avalanche of rules and regulations ranging from the sensible to the utterly and incomprehensibly petty. I was speaking IRL recently with a former Children’s Services worker who has worked in the field of managing childminders and he said that when these new requirements were implemented in 2008, a lot of childminders, including a lot of very good ones with oodles of childcare knowledge, decided to give up childminding because they could not hack the excessive regulation and buerocracy that the government had dumped on childminders.
Now it looks as if a future incoming Labour Party government might be about to do something much worse to the childcare sector than they did with their over regulation of this sector 15 years ago. Labour look as if they are going to require all nursery staff to have degrees or the equivalent which is likely to further impoverish the childcare sector and increase to unaffordable levels Britain’s already high childcare costs.
As Ellen Pasternack writing in The Critic magazine says:
In England, it costs over 40 percent of the average person’s take-home pay to put a one-year-old child in daycare. In London, where nursery schools can cost upwards of £20,000 per year per child, that figure is even higher. These costs are not just steep: for many, they are literally impossible to manage.
Ms Pasternack puts a lot of the blame for these exorbitant costs on the fact that the childcare sector is over regulated. Having looked into the requirements that anyone looking after children has to deal with and how much time the bureaucracy takes out of a child minder or nursery manager’s day I find myself agreeing with Ms Pasternack.
I also agree with her that Labour’s plan to have a graduate centred childcare system will ramp up costs because those few who will have appropriate degrees to work in childcare will be few and far between. Wages bills for nurseries will sky rocket and there will be a crisis in staffing because there will not be enough appropriately trained staff to go around. The requirements for nursery workers to have degrees will also close off employment opportunities for those individuals, especially women, who might not be able to get to a degree standard of education, but who are good with children and who have an affinity for them.
Ms Pasternack added:
Part of the reason for high costs is the burdensome regulation that weighs down the childcare sector. Many people are not aware that it is currently illegal to regularly look after somebody else’s children during the day in your home in exchange for money without being an Ofsted-regulated childminder. Childminders are not allowed to just be a friendly adult who keeps your toddler safe and entertained while you go to work; instead, since 2008, they have been required to demonstrate that they are adhering to an educational curriculum (the Early Years Foundation Stage) as well as following numerous other health and safety checks and procedures.
To take just one example, if a childminder regularly provides meals, snacks or drinks to the children in their care — or even just reheats or cuts up food brought by parents — they have to register with the Food Standards Agency. Food safety reviews must be completed four times a year, in which problems such as “found a pack of sliced ham out of date in the fridge” and the action taken (“threw the ham away”) are reported.
Petty bureaucracy, one introduced by the last Labour government, has already done great damage to the amount of people who are working in the childcare system and especially in the childminder sector. Ms Pasternack pointed out that we have already, under the system that is already in place, lost a lot of childminders. She said: The number of childminders registered in the UK has fallen by almost half in less than a decade: from 57,400 in 2012 down to just 31,200 in 2021. This of course means that the childcare places that remain are both harder to source and more expensive.
I look at Labour’s childcare plans and I weep. I weep to see the same mistake being made as before. All that requiring graduate status for child care will achieve is to fatten the pockets of the education providers and further impoverish Britain’s childcare system. Labour have had one go at wrecking this vital sector of the economy and it looks like they are going to have another go if they win the next election. People need to realise that voting Labour will not give them affordable childcare but more likely unaffordable childcare.
Labour did the same thing with “degree nurses” where people who had a natural vocation for nursing but not the academic bent, were effectively frozen out by the pointless bureaucracy. Add in the burden of ending up with a massive student debt whereas before they learned on the job, housed, fed and paid (albeit not brilliantly)
The same happened with the care sector.
The result, the UK and NHS are plundering real nurses and carers from other countries, Nigeria, Philippines, Malaysia, Eastern Europe, their health systems.
Meanwhile the British “degree” nurses are too effing precious to feed, dress or wash patients, preferring to play pretendy-doctor and swan around with a clipboard or hand around the nursing station, leaving the real nursing to the imported “lower orders”.
Seen it in several hospitals. All due to Blair and Labour’s obsession with tinkering, interference and micromanaging every last detail to death.
I must however reserve some of my anger at subsequent governments who could have undone much of the damage before is swept like a malignant cancer through the NHS, Education, Councils etc.
A POX on all of them. I’m backing Reform.
Yes indeed and with the police as well. I’m all for people being well trained but credentialism, the requirement of possibly unnecessary and hard to get qualifications, causes shortages of much needed staff. Whilst I accept Julian Le Good’s point about medical equipment of today needing much more skill to operate that that which existed in the past, it’s not impossible to train people in the workplace to use this, especially if the nurse is already workplace qualified it may merely require extra training for the nurse to be able to use it.
When relatives and friends have been in hospital I also have noticed the phenomenon of nurses congregating around the nursing station and on one occasion ignoring an elderly patient who had had their meal placed out of their reach by one of the auxillaries dishing out food.
I certainly agree that the Tories should have put right the problems regarding credentialism and got more people into nursing but then failing to do what is necessary in education, local government etc seems to be a hallmark of this government. Like you the Tories have lost my trust and I’m looking at either Reform or the SDP as a repository for my vote. I can no longer carry on voting Tory to keep Labour out in all good conscience.
I don’t think Skeikh Anvakh has spent much time as a patient in hospital ( I have).
a) If he thinks that poorly educated nurses can understand and operate the kind of equipment used in every day treatment & monitoring then he doesn’t understand his own statement.
b) Nursing assistants are not “lower orders”
c) It was ALWAYS thus. State Registered Nurses and State Enrolled Nurses had different but complimentary rolls, going right back to the start of the NHS..
d) We have never “plundered” nurses from anywhere. 1. clinicians at every level come here to learn, to provide for their families back home, and to experience treatment and procedures they will never see at home and 2. We haven’t trained sufficient clinicians of any type for decades. We needed nurses on the “Windrush” and if you are as old as I am you will have been used to seeing darker faces on the wards and in the theatres since 1960s.
Instead of sniping, come up with a workable solution ?
Depends what you want in Childcare. If you are content with “Child Minding” that’s fine. If you want “Early Years Learning” then you need well educated staff.
You pays your money and you takes your choice.
We used both as and when it was appropriate and we could afford it.
If “Child Minding” equates to hour upon hour of “Peppa Pig” that is not, to me, really “child minding”, more like tending sheep.
From speaking to the children’s services worker who I quoted in the ATL piece there was no real need for the Early Years Foundation curriculum or the massive amount of admin bloat that came with it because a good childcare worker would be doing such stuff as was pushed by the EYFC already.
Maybe what people want from childcare whether that be from childminders or nurseries is a safe and supportive environment for their children and not over educated overly expensive degree holders.
For everyone’s information I’ve seen this happening in several hospitals. The obsession with “degrees” has frozen out thousands of vocational nurses with a natural ability. Tony Blair and his toxic legacy is sweeping through virtually every institution with negative fallout affecting patients. You only have to look at the wokey-dokey leftist twaddle and trans/gender crap being rammed down in innocent children’s throats while real education is replaced by propaganda.
Engineering too. I learned engineering by doing an apprenticeship with some college work. The company that I worked for had dealings with companies that only employed graduate engineers. A big part of my job involved sorting out their screw ups.
There are some areas in life where apprenticeship is probably the better training route than the degree based one. I can well imagine how a graduate engineer with zero or very little experience of practical engineering could screw up so badly that their projects need remedial attention.
Yes, this is very interesting. My younger daughter is a graduate qualified Occupational Therapist and now unfortunately a single parent. She has pretty much given up on working in house in the NHS and she got some private work recently but it didn’t really fit in with school hours and travelling time so she has now given that up as well.
Anyway she has now applied to become a child minder whilst she sorts out her future career options. Will keep you posted about what happens!