Archive

"High turnover of staff was by far the biggest threat to sustainability with 84 per cent of day nurseries and 81 per cent of playgroups", reported the National Audit Office earlier this year. High turnover is also a threat to the quality of care in the formal child care sector because, as recent national studies of parents of young children have confirmed, trust in and familiarity with the carer are the two most valued characteristics of care.

Staff turnover rates in child care services are then a good proxy for quality of care, together with the proportions of the workforce with relevant experience and qualifications. The Department for Education and Skills understands this because the first questions the DfES website advises parents to ask when visiting a nursery to which they are considering sending their child, are: "How long have staff been working in this setting?", "What training have staff had for the job?" and "What qualifications do they have?"

It is therefore disappointing that the most recent Ofsted report does not give any indication of how turnover rates vary between providers, between different areas or by level of qualifications of the staff. Every new provider is visited and then, unless there is a complaint, they will not be visited again by Ofsted for two years. As the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee asked the DfES when taking evidence for their enquiry into child care services: "How do you counter the large turnover in some of these nurseries and the requirement to maintain training when you have people coming in with Ofsted’s ability to get in there and maintain quality control?"

The committee recommended more frequent visits to the providers with poorer standards and less frequent to those with high standards. This would reduce the problem but does not remove it because the issues involved are more fundamental

The BBC programme Nurseries Undercover: The Real Story screened in August illustrated a number of important issues. First it showed the dangers arising from treating care like a commodity and leaving it to the private market. The parents were not involved in any of these nurseries beyond making an initial visit and taking and collecting their children. Many parents, anxious to take an older child to school and to get to work themselves or get home at the end of a long day are not going to hang around for long to talk to staff or observe what is happening in the nursery. Research suggests that the amount of time parents spend in the nursery a week can be measured in minutes. All parents can do is to remove their child and if they feel very strongly, complain to Ofsted. However, by then some damage may have been done - bad care cannot be replaced like a faulty cooker. Given the importance attached to continuity of care it is not an easy strategy to adopt, even if another place can be found immediately.

The second problem arising from using the market to provide child care relates to regulating standards more generally. In his classic 1970 study Exit, Voice and Loyalty, Hirschman looks at the merits of the different forms of regulation possible in civil society, the state and the market. Within civil society and its informal associations, social relations are regulated through trust and loyalty. Historically, childminders maintained their standards because they were known and trusted in the neighbourhood. They could not risk getting a bad reputation.

In the case of state-provided child care, parents and others, as citizens, could hold to account local officials and politicians responsible for nurseries by voting, pressure group activity, the media etc. They had a voice. In the market, however, it is the owner or shareholders to whom managers and staff are accountable first. Individual parents have no voice - they can only exert pressure by exiting to something better. Ofsted seems far removed.

The third problem The Real Story programme illustrated were poor standards resulting from heavy dependence on young, inexperienced and untrained staff. The Public Accounts Committee concluded: "A key means of improving the quality is through training of staff, although the department acknowledges that this is a problem in a low pay field."

In the UK, child care staff’s pay puts them in the bottom decile of the earnings distribution. The DfES aims to get half of all staff up to at least NVQ level2. This is a large task for there are 160,000 existing staff needing training to this modest level. The government has provided more funds, training courses and apprenticeships but drop out rates are high. Training must also involve the providers but only a quarter have a training budget, which is not surprising given that the finances of half of them are precarious - mainly a result of time-limited funding and parents’ inability to pay higher fees. New recruits also need to be supervised by experienced and qualified staff. This also takes time and resources which many in the private sector are not able or willing to commit. We all accept that good quality education costs money but we still haven’t faced up to the true cost of high quality child care and the pitfalls involved in relying on the market to provide it.

Hilary Land is emeritus professor and senior research fellow at the Centre for Family Policy and Child Welfare, University of Bristol.