Policy brief: State Maintained Nursery Schools in England: their role in reducing disadvantage - Dr Kate Hoskins, Lewis Fogarty and Alice Bradbury

Early years has been a source of interest for governments as part of the implemented ‘early intervention’ agenda of the Coalition and Conservative governments. UK Conservative-led governments have introduced policies to reduce the ‘disadvantage gap’, including:

Policy recommendations:

• Nursery schools need long term, cross political party consensus on funding to allow them to expand and have a positive impact on more children from disadvantaged families.
• Nursery school provision needs to expand by 200 schools (the amount that has closed down over the past three decades) so that children from disadvantaged families have an opportunity to attend a high quality early years provision, thus boosting the take-up of the existing 15/30 free hours policy.
• The free provision for disadvantaged two years old should be extended to all two years to ensure that all children receive the best start possible. This move would also reduce the sense of cultural, social and economic stigma many practitioners expressed as a barrier to entry for low-income families.
• The expansion and long term funding of nursery schools would improve retention of specialised nursery school staff and ensure access to the additional services provided at nursery school. Recently, these additional services have included the provision of food parcels and clothing and support with understanding and applications for benefits claims.

Read the full policy brief by Dr Kate Hoskins (Brunel University London), Alice Bradbury (UCL) and Lewis Fogarty (Brunel University London)