Prime Minister’s life chances strategy must include nursery education
Gareth Jenkins, Director of UK Poverty at Save the Children responds to David Cameron's announcement on families and life chances.
The Prime Minister sent a strong message that a child’s early learning can decide their life chances and we welcome his focus on parents’ central role in ‘building their child’s brain’ through early language development – the foundations of learning.
The Prime Minister is right to identify the need for better advice for mums and dads to know the best ways of supporting their child’s learning in their early years. But support for parents and the ongoing focus on school standards misses out a vital third factor in determining whether the poorest children escape poverty: high quality nursery education.
Going to a good nursery, led by a qualified early years teacher, can make the difference between children being ready to learn on their first day of school, or being behind – sometimes irrevocably so. But still, thousands of nurseries don’t employ a single early years teacher.
To level the playing field, the government must ensure children in the poorest areas can access high quality nurseries – only then will the Prime Minister’s dream of a more socially mobile Britain be realised.
