Local Tories fudge Nursery budget

Woodlands School, Gillingham

As I write this it occurs to me that there may be more to this story than meets the eye. Unfortunately I am not in the possession of all the facts but welcome any illuminating info from the other side. Until then I can only go on the information I have gained.

A few months ago the Head teacher of Woodlands Road School called a meeting of parents who attend the nursery to inform us what is going on and how Council cuts will affect the children and fees. Unfortunately I was unable to attend. My wife, who knows more about the child care and our house hold funds went and made some notes.

The Nursery has had it's budget cut by 40%

Not 4, not 20, but 40%

Further to this the Nursery will not be able to accept any children under 2 years old which will have a negative affect on mothers going back to work. This has been the case for my family and after several months of stress and viewing nurseries we've managed to get Oliver into a Private sector nursery that seems good. (it isn't Woodlands but it suits our needs at the moment.) Other parents are still looking.

There hangs a certain amount of uncertainty over the nursery as the 40% will come into being next April and will undoubtedly force prices up for those still at the nursery but there is a massive uncertainty as to by how much as it all depends on the amount of Pupil Premium money that will come into the Nursery and as yet that amount is unknown.

I have spoken with a couple of the staff who have looked after my daughter and they have told me that they have been told there is a probability of redundancies (which the Council will have to pay for) and of staff having to reapply for their jobs. This will rise unemployment and I am exceptionally sorry to say, lower quality at the nursery as I can not speak more highly of the quality of care and support that they give to the kids in their charge. Any loss will be a loss keenly felt. Further to that as Nick Clegg and the Libdems have vetoed the proposed ratio changes the Nursery will not be able to trim off as many staff leaving them possibly out of pocket.

The Nursery is also moving to sessional care (8.30-12:00 and 12:30-15:30) over wrap-around care (7:00-18:00) which restricts how many hours a secondary income earner can work and may mean that they have to give up work altogether if the nursery cannot provide a lunch time supervisor for the kids. How many employers would be happy with members of staff only working school hours? Be they retail workers, shift workers or clerical? Many parents are forced to look to the Private sector or bite the bullet and give up work altogether.

There is also the fact that any babies who have been put into the private sector through necessity, such as my son, may not come back to the nursery when they hit two years old. Although there will be some, who sadly have fallen into average nurseries through necessity, whose parents will swiftly move them when they get the first chance, there are also those who will stick with what they've got especially if they haven't seen Woodlands before. Why would you move your child if they are settled and you don't know that there is an excellent Nursery on your doorstep?

So there is more money not coming into Woodlands on top of the 40% cut and no paying parents for children under two. Whack on the fact that the School (now an Academy) cannot support the nursery financially in any way makes it even more dicey.

The Tory Council is banking on the fact that the Pupil premium and some trimming of "fat" will be enough to cover the costs and it is an exceptionally risky gamble to take with our Children's first steps into education and care as well as with the low income working families of Gillingham South ward and the hard working staff.

It really feels like Cllr Jarrett has got his sums and financial planning horribly wrong and it is the tax payer and working families etc who are going to pick up the brunt again.

I implore Councillor O'Brien, portfolio holder for education and early years, to look at this situation before it spirals out of control and leaves Woodlands either going belly up (in the long run) or forcing privatisation through the back door.


 

Letters to the editor on local child care.

My letter to the Medway Messenger that unfortunately didn't get published.

I would like to congratulate Councillor Mike O’Brien on hisappointment to portfolio holder for Children’s services but also to draw hisattention to this;

Due to funding cuts our local nursery is unable to take children under two years old. This is a bitter blow for my family as my wife has two months of maternity leave left and was preparing to go back to work with my son’s name down for the local nursery. We have two months to find a nearby nursery that will take him or my wife will have to give up work for at least a year cutting our already stretched household income virtually in half.

Many of my wife’s friends who, like us, were hoping their second child could go to the same local place as their first born are now faced with either giving up work or taking both children elsewhere, something that is not really an option for us.

The point is that both my wife and I have both worked our whole adult lives and paid all our taxes and now we find ourselves being persecuted for wanting to work. Had the Council really thought through this move before implementation and will they reverse it?

If not, it seems that they don’t care about hard working residents and will leave us contemplating which vital utility bill we have to live without.

Chris Sams,  Gillingham.

Child care must be affordable and for the kids

This morning it is hitting the news that Nick Clegg is opposing or Not convinced by the Government's

proposals to adjust the ratios of Children to staff in nurseries across the country.

The ratio will be increased to 1:4 (from 1:3) for babies and up to 1:6 for two year olds.

There are some concerns that your child will not necessarily get the attention they may need. Two year olds are exceptionally boisterous and into everything - which I am finding out for myself - and I have trouble keeping up with one let alone six! The level of quality can be much depleted.

Through in a child like mine, who has a certain amount of special needs and you are losing even more time. Due to Sophie's condition she does require phsyio and attention for her leg splints and boots. Her walking and running can be very dicey and if there is a fire alarm she needs to be carried out - this can take up a lot of time for a member of staff and we're more than fortunate that her nursery has some really good staff. However in a room where the girl has another five other children in need of attention things will become stretched.

I'm aware that the Ministers announced that the increased ratio is similar to Germany and less than France but let us not be hasty and rush into this - let us listen to parents and staff alike and progress at a reasonable rate and get this right. You cannot make rushed mistakes with Children's futures or education.

Children respond best with stimulation and as much contact as possible, by raising the ratio you are taking some of that time away from them.

Nick was quoted in the Guardian as saying;

It is not a great ideological thing, it is about getting it right for parents up and down the country. When the last government changed the so-called ratios for three- and four-year-olds, it had almost no effect in reducing the costs for parents whatsoever, so you do need to be led by the evidence and that is what I will continue to be in the debate

I would challenge you to spend a morning look after six two-year-olds

As I said recently, the Cuts are now going to impact my family in Gillingham with the rising of nursery costs on the one hand for parents and the slim lining of Surestart centres and nurseries who are asking staff to reapply for their jobs and taking voluntary redundancy.

The ratio of staff and thus the care and attention that a child needs are being cut and we - the already stretched taxpaying parents are being asked to pay more for less.

There is also the somewhat nonsensical approach that is seeing parents priced out of putting their young ones into day care so that they can go to work as the second income is barley covering the costs - it becomes more cost efficient for one parent to give up work completely and stay with the kids at home!

There are some serious (LibDem) boons that are helping working families like mine, the cut in Income tax means that my wife's income is now completely tax free, the free nursery placements for three year olds will help during term time too but until then we're quite stuck and so are many other families.
Many of the mothers that my wife knows through Sophie's friends have all expressed concern about the rising prices and are not in a position to pay it. My Sister's sister in law found that she had to give up work to look after her young children and my sister is looking at the same scenario.

David Cameron ran under the banner of making things fairer for families and working people and yet these reforms are getting kicked in the wallets and our children are being made to suffer in these reforms. Having a family, even the average of 2.4 kids, is now a hinderance and it feels like we're being persecuted for having kids. Child care has to be affordable for all so that children can go into daycare and both parents can work to pay for all the other rising prices in utilities, food and transport costs.

Let's take a moment. Look at the situation, talk to parents and staff then reevaluate the situation

Medway Council "Failing to protect Children"

Sorry for the slow write up on this, hectic weekend of elderly care and hospital trip with little Ollie-bob, I only got around to reading Friday's report this morning!

Any way....

So, the Medway Town's safeguarding Child care has been rated as wholly unacceptable by Ofsted (read the report here). Councillor Wickes has apologised, as has the new(ish) Children's Director Barbara Peacock, for failing to... well here's what Cllr Wickes said:

I apologise for our failure to deliver the service our children and young people deserve.

There are many problems with cases being signed off and then being re-referred. According to Jenni Horn & Rebecca Hughes's article in the Medway Messenger (Council is failing to protect children dated 15-2-13) in 2011/2 32% of closed cases had to be re referred and so far this year 46% of cases have been re-referred which is almost twice the national figure of 24%!

One of the big problems is that the initial assessments of cases are not being done thoroughly and they have not been necessarily identifying the risks or problems faced by childrens. I don't want to jump onto a scare mongering band waggon but this is a similar situation that saw the death of Baby P a few years ago and the sacking of Sharon Shoesmith. We can be glad that nothing like this has happened in the Medway towns and hopefully this Ofsted report is the wake up call that was needed to rectify this.

Although it is easy to blame Councillor Wicks for this failing as the portfolio holder there are greater issues at foot as well and we should not be focused fully on this - though I will return to this momentarily.

I am heartened that the Council seem to be taking this exceptionally seriously with the Chief Executive that they are determined to improve and we've had in place an improvement programme for some time. Amongst the bad news budget, which I'll write about at a later time, Councillor Jarrett has found money to pump into this exceptionally lagging department with new systems coming in to release Social workers from paper work and back into field work as well as a new £1.4m electronic recording system. There is also a board of different departments and agencies getting together to advise and improve and assist - all good news.

However this does rather reek of being caught with your trousers down!

Ms Peacock has only been in post for some five months and with a record of improving Children services at Sandwell is definitely the right person to have on board. To some degree we should be looking at the previous head of department Rose Collinson, who was also in post during the Medway Test debacle and left post last summer. There also needs to be questions asked about the appointment of Duncan Clark who was assistant director of Child services on a 6 months contract. He was forced out of a job by Kingston Council because under his stewardship the safeguarding department's inadequate rating. Medway Council hired someone to such a vital post with a record of failure? 

So, what to do about Councillor Wicks? Well, it is a tough one. Opposition parties are calling for his head and although I do not believe all of the blame lies with him, this isn't the first time for a major failing to fall at his door. As I mentioned earlier there is the Medway test debacle which rocked the Medway towns a couple of years ago. He is portrayed as a bit of a well meaning bungler and whether that is the case or not the public have lost confidence in him as portfolio holder. If this was National Government he would have gone or been promoted sideways. It would go a long way in gaining trust with the public if he did stand down or was replaced so as to completely draw a line under the whole affair - new heads, new board and new direction bent on immediate improvement.

He won't go though... after the Medway test problem the Tory cabinet closed ranks and he held onto his position and this will no doubt happen again.

I do believe questions behind the scenes in Gunwarf need to be asked and much soul searching is needed as to how the service got in such a bad way as well as what can be done to rectify it.The Council have failed to protect one of the most vulnerable sections of our society and now real action needs to be taken to;
a) Make sure it doesn't happen again
b) Improve the situation drastically.

As I say, let us just be thankful that no one appears to have fallen to foul of this godawful mess and it was caught in time. Better this way than with a death on it's hands, better still if the Children's services wasn't in a shambles in the first place though!

Letter from the leader: Why we care about Child Care

Dear Chris,

You’ll often hear politicians say, "Don’t believe everything you read in the newspapers." There’s not the time to correct every inaccuracy but when a mistake becomes received wisdom and gets repeated again and again, it's worth putting things straight.

Like on the Government plans to help families with the cost of childcare.

You'll know by now that this is a topic incredibly close to my heart. Making sure all families, and mothers in particular, can afford to work is important for our economy and for our society. That's why I ensured we found the money to up the hours of free childcare for 3-year-olds from 12.5 to 15 back in 2010, why we're introducing free care for nearly half of all two-year-olds, and why we're changing benefit rules so you can claim childcare help for every hour you work if you need to.

So you can imagine my surprise when I started reading that there's a major split between us and the Conservatives on this. Stories of fights and red lines and arguments abound and of the Liberal Democrats holding things up because we refuse to offer help to any but the very poorest families. Total nonsense.
While of course coalition negotiations can at times be tough and even fractious, the truth is on the issue of childcare that hasn't been the case at all. Let me tell you what’s really been going on for the last nine months or so.

Late last spring, the Quad (that’s me, the PM, Danny Alexander and the Chancellor) sat down to look for new policies in some areas. We were united: we wanted new ideas. So we sent policy advisers away to develop proposals in some key areas, from pensions to civil liberties, from roads investment to house building. And right from the start the one thing all of us wanted to see the most was a new proposal to help working families who struggle with childcare.

Because everyone knows that the cost of childcare is a big worry for many families.

We will make an announcement on exactly how we want to make things easier in the next few weeks. But I can tell you we've looked at about fifteen different alternatives, from vouchers to cashback, from more free hours to childcare loans (that’s the one we liked least!). And as we assessed each option our question was this:

Will this fill the gaps in the current system to make sure mums or dads who want to go out to work can afford to do so without seeing every penny disappear in childcare costs?

If we want to help the working families who struggle with childcare costs, then we don't need to help people earning hundreds of thousands of pounds a year. But we do need to help families on middle incomes, especially those with very young children who don’t yet qualify for the free hours that start at 3 years old.
If you’ve got two children under 3 in nursery, you need to earn about £24,000 just to pay the fees every month - and the average full time salary for a woman is actually less than that, at just £23,100. No wonder lots of mothers (and too often it is mothers) feel that going back to work is simply not worth it.

I think as a society we can do better than this. And while people on the lowest wages of course need the most help, the system as a whole has to help everyone who struggles. And that's a lot more than just people on below-average incomes.

Of course when there is very little money to go around it’s tricky finding the savings needed to fund new childcare help. No doubt when we make our announcement, some people will say it doesn’t go far enough. But I am clear we will do the best we can with the limited funds we’ve got.

So the next time you read in the papers that we are not in favour of helping middle income families, don't believe it. And the next time you hear someone mention the cost of childcare, tell them: the Liberal Democrats want to build a stronger economy and a fairer society and that means enabling everyone, including working parents with young children, to get on in life.

That's what I've been arguing behind the closed doors in Government. It's what I've been arguing in public. And it's what we're about to deliver.
Best wishes,