Yorkshire Coast nurseries hit out at proposed childcare changes
The government is considering changing to staff-to-child ratios from 1:4 to 1:5 for two-year-olds
There's concern among nursery managers on the Yorkshire coast about plans to increase the number of children staff can look after.
The government wants to bring the rules in England closer to the ones in Scotland.
It would mean one adult caring for up to five toddlers as opposed to four.
Samantha Dawson is from Kiddiwinks in Scarborough - she's not keen on the changes:
"For me, it comes down to the safety of the children. Because toddlers are the most challenging age; you can't take your eyes off them and you're constantly busy with them - if there is say 10 children, you're only going to have two staff and I believe you will struggle to manage their safety.
"To keep staff is really difficult anyway. To put more pressure on staff, without a pay rise, because nurseries can't afford to increase wages, and they're expected to do more and more and more - and for what.
"Government funding is where the changes needed to made. For every two-year-old, we get roughly around £5 an hour but it does not meet what we charge private parents."
Changing childcare
Labour has said the proposed changes are "pathetic", while Neil Leitch, chief executive of the Early Years Alliance, has said the plans are "beyond frustrating" and that the Government needs to admit "that if we want to have affordable, quality, sustainable care and early education in this country, we need to invest substantially more into the sector than we are doing at the moment".
The children and families minister, Will Quince told the PA news agency that countries with more investment in childcare also paid more tax.
"We currently invest around £4-5 billion a year on childcare and early years' education... there are other countries - France, Sweden, the Netherlands - who do put far more money into early years' education," he said.
"They also pay a lot more in tax; so take Sweden for example, where nearly all of your childcare costs are covered - even the lowest paid workers pay 35% tax, whereas we've lifted millions of people out of paying tax altogether.
"So these are all choices that we need to make.
"One thing we can't do in any way is compromise the quality, we have some of the best early years' education... in the world, and those other countries I've visited look at our systems and education outcomes and school readiness with some envy.
"So I think it's important that in the medium to long-term we look at what more we can do without compromising quality and safety to improve the affordability for families up and down the country."
Childcare in Sweden is set at a maximum of 3% of guardians' yearly income for the first child, and for a fourth child it is free of charge.
Asked about pushback from the sector over the reforms, and the fact he has said the ratio reform will be no "silver bullet" for issues in the sector, Mr Quince said these comments "related specifically to the ratio reform" which he described as a "relatively minor change and a smaller part of the package of measures that we are announcing".
"Alongside that we've got a consultation on fairer funding, so making sure that the funding reflects the costs across the country," he said, adding that the Government had invested an an extra £10 million for maintained nursery schools and an expansion of childminders.
He added that what would be "game-changing in terms of cost" would be ensuring that the hundreds of thousands of parents not claiming tax-free childcare took this up.
The minister said the Government was running a communications campaign to raise awareness that families are entitled to up to £2,000 per year towards their childcare costs tax-free, while those on Universal Credit could recover 85% of their childcare costs from Government funding, while disadvantaged two-year-olds could receive 15 hours of free childcare per week.
Mr Quince said that he heard the sector's concerns around whether the ratio increase would fuel a recruitment crisis, and said: "That's exactly why I'm not just pressing ahead with this; we have a consultation which will go ahead over the summer and I'll listen very carefully to both the sector and indeed parents as to what they want to do."