Questions raised over daycare closures after council backs down on Sure Start cuts
Article published: Friday, February 10th 2012
Core services in Manchester’s 39 Sure Start centres are to be preserved following a year-long battle by campaigners. Council-run daycare is still to be scrapped however – despite councillors raising serious concerns.
Parents at a protest against Sure Start cuts in February 2011
Proposals from a Manchester City Council consultation made public last week revealed a track back from Town Hall bosses on plans to shut off funding for universal Sure Start services. The service’s “core offer” of employment, education and health support for young children and parents is to remain open and accessible to all, and a new outreach scheme will see every family with a newborn child visited at their home by a council worker to offer guidance and support until the age of three.
Public daycare for pre-school children provided by the council will still end under the proposals, with annual funding to centres and daycare slashed from £11.5 million to just £500,000, in a process planned to be phased in over the next four years. A decision on the plans will be made at the council’s executive meeting next Wednesday, subject to a new 90-day consultation with trade unions.
A “targeted family offer” for families judged in need of extra support, for example children in care, in “deprived areas” or with a disability, will still see the council commission daycare through schools, companies and charities. Support will also be offered through the council’s “Manchester Investment Fund” for some parents at risk of losing their jobs for lack of childcare, although details as to what will be available and how the provision will run have not yet been disclosed.
Struggling for daycare
Up to 360 full time job posts could be lost in the plans, although the council still maintains there will be no compulsory redundancies, and the move to scrap universal council-provided childcare was strongly opposed by 67.8 per cent of parents in a listening exercise described by strategic director Mike Livingstone as the “largest consultation the children’s directorate has ever undertaken”. 38.5 per cent said they “would not be able to make alternative daycare arrangements”.
At a council scrutiny meeting to analyse the plans Livingstone explained that council-run daycare accounts for roughly 11 per cent of the childcare available in the city for 809 children, arguing that “the numbers, while significant, are relatively small”. Private companies and charities are estimated to provide around 5,000 child “places” in the city, with childminders accounting for a further 1,000.
Parents welcomed the retention of Sure Start’s core offer and proposals to relocate more services into the city’s Sure Starts, with one lead campaigner Danielle Leadbetter saying she was “overjoyed” at hearing the news. But campaigners warned of unheeded dangers of closing council-daycare, noting how one mother was already considering moving from the area as she could not long afford to stay in employment for lack of local childcare.
Speaking at the scrutiny meeting, Sure Start parent Joanne McCann drew attention to the huge waiting lists of Manchester’s council daycare services, and raised several concerns over how the quality, availability and affordability of private childcare would be monitored. McCann noted how plans to charge rent on group activities in Sure Start buildings could cause private and charitable playgroup sessions already based in the centres to close, risking “a major impact on families in the community.”
She further questioned the lack of detail on plans to use council funds to support low income families, noting the “huge variation” and “lack of detail” in council estimates that between 15 and 54 per cent of parents using council daycare could be at risk of losing their jobs because of projected fee increases ranging from £11 to £37 per week. And McCann revealed how the council made no reference in its consultation to its own 2011 sufficiency report carried out by the Daycare Trust, which found that over half of all of Manchester’s parents were already struggling to cover their day nursery fees. She asked if the information was ever used when drawing up the council’s plans, demanding to know “if not, why not?”
Quality assured?
Further questions arose over council plans to use its “quality assurance framework” to ensure private daycare kept up to scratch. In exchanges between scrutiny councillors and council officers it emerged that the framework is primarily a self-assessment tool, albeit one currently used by all of the city’s providers, and that Ofsted would remain the only mandatory oversight tool.
Manchester’s 2011 sufficiency report found that while 47 per cent of the city’s daycare settings were good, 48.5 per cent were deemed only satisfactory – in other words, meeting the bare minimum of requirements. Livingstone conceded that council-run daycare was more likely to be judged either good or outstanding, and admitted that he shared concerns “that withdrawal from daycare could increase prices and decrease quality.”
Labour councillor Julie Reid was scathing in her assessment of the quality of some private daycare, saying that while many were good, for a small minority she “wouldn’t put a dog in there”. Although she strongly welcomed the continuation of council-supported childcare in deprived areas, she warned that private childcare is often provided by far less well-trained staff and raised the idea of the council running its own arms-length childcare company under the name of Sure Start.
In response, Livingstone countered that the council was planning to withdraw from daycare rather than commission it, and said his directorate “could not afford to subsidise” its high cost. He also conceded that private companies could not afford the pay of the more highly trained council staff, saying “it is not feasible for any other organisation to cover these staffing costs”.
Manchester Unite branch secretary, Jimmy Thornton, said people in the city “are crying out for childcare” and warned that once universal council daycare was gone, it could be “gone forever”. He argued that “the report as it stands is not conclusive” as long as the consultation did not fully account for how “4,000 people were demanding that we keep childcare”.
“You lot still have a piece of work to do,” he said.
Richard Goulding
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[…] research by a 2011 sufficiency report carried out for the council by the Daycare Trust found that 48.7 per cent of the city’s childcare settings were only rated as satisfactory by Ofsted standards, meaning they meet the bare minimum of legal requirements. Earlier in the year […]
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