Children’s commissioner demands ambition, not ‘tinkering’, in childcare reform
The children’s commissioner for England has poured cold water on Liz Truss’s proposal to scrap regulations governing child-to-staff ratios in nurseries, describing it as tinkering around the edges and calling instead for ambitious and transformative reform of the childcare sector.
In an interview with the Guardian, Dame Rachel de Souza said children’s safety and wellbeing must be “paramount” in any plans to reform childcare and she said she thought it was “really depressing” if the current conversation about childcare focused purely on ratios.
The former headteacher, whose work as children’s commissioner has highlighted the cost of living crisis affecting families across the country, also said she thought benefits should be uprated in line with inflation – an issue the chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, will address in his fiscal plan to be published at the end of this month.
Concerns have been mounting about the state of the childcare sector in England, with parents facing spiralling costs, nurseries complaining of underfunding and the number of places available for preschool children going down.
The government has said it is exploring a range of options to make childcare more affordable and easier to access to help boost economic growth through getting people back to work. One proposal is to relax childcare ratios from one adult to four two-year-olds, to allow one adult to care for five children – a move which has been overwhelmingly opposed by everyone involved in the sector on safety grounds.
Ministers are also reported to be considering getting rid of the regulatory requirement on ratios altogether, leaving it up to childcare settings to decide how many staff they need to care for their children. De Souza said she had looked at
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