What does early years education mean? How important is your choice of nursery going to be for your child’s education?

You look on social media, you ask friends and neighbours and possibly, if you’re very thorough, you look at Ofsted reports. But what really influences your decision? If you’re being totally honest, is it purely convenience? Is it on the way to the station? There’s a possibility of a rota? Or that grandparents can pick up?

Good pre-school education provides a firm foundation for a child’s future. There is significant research to indicate that the first 1,000 days — conception to age two — is a critically important phase; indeed, many claim that this time period is where the foundations of a child’s development lie. When a child feels secure and safe, they have the confidence to take risks in their activities and to learn from these opportunities.

Early years staff are not babysitters, they are trained professionals who are continuously reviewing and reflecting on the activities they provide in order to ensure that each and every child has the opportunity to develop to their fullest potential. In registered early years settings, staff are regularly updating and improving their qualifications, often in their own unpaid time.

Yet still today there is much discussion around the cost of nurseries. We are all facing a period of hardship with costs of energy rocketing and a recession looming. Many practitioners are leaving to work in supermarkets for higher salaries and less responsibility.

Do we as a community really value education? What is it about nursery education that causes us to negate its value? Foundation stage education is the Cinderella of our education system with little, if any, recognition of the important work being done in pre-schools and maintained nurseries, which create the strong foundation for effective lifelong learning.

Early education may simply look like play, but children learn and develop skills and knowledge through play. Playing with dough develops muscles that are needed for fine motor control. Brick building involves mathematical estimation of size and shape.

Working with other children means learning to collaborate and acknowledge other people’s feelings and opinions, to negotiate and learn how to give and to take. These are skills needed throughout life, in relationships of all kinds.

Humans were not made to be solitary animals, as we discovered during the pandemic, when our interactions were so severely constrained, when we saw and continue to see how our children’s development suffered through being denied access to nursery education.

Pre-school settings are finding that children are demonstrating developmental delays in the three prime areas of development: first,  social, personal and emotional: second, communication and language: and third, physical.

Masks obscured facial expressions, which has affected speech development as children were unable to see lip movements or mouth shapes. Sharing and turn-taking has become much more challenging as the opportunities for socialising with others were unavailable.

Without other children to work and play with, the development of gross motor skills also suffered. For small children, the time lost during the pandemic was proportionately much larger than in any other educational sector due to their age and rate of development.

Our children deserve the best early years education that we can provide. Early years should be high on the agenda of our educational and communal bodies. Without a strong foundation our children cannot soar to the pinnacles of success that we strive for them to achieve. We owe it to our early years staff to acknowledge and value their commitment and professionalism in the same way we do with their colleagues in schools.

Helen Style is manager of Yeladenu Preschool in Muswell Hill Synagogue

Miriam Schajer was former head of Yavneh Nursery, Woodside Park Synagogue

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