Calls for all nurseries in South Yorkshire to have qualified teacher

A charity says all nurseries in South Yorkshire should have a qualified early years teacher to make sure kids start developing at an early age.

All nurseries have staff trained to care for children, but not all have trained specialists to help children develop their early language and numeracy skills.

In fact, new figures show only 1 in 5 nurseries in Barnsley, Rotherham and Doncaster have one - in Sheffield half of nurseries do.

Save The Children now want the government to give funding to every nursery to employ an early years teacher.

Emma Murphy's a trained teacher and runs a nursery here in Yorkshire - she says her training's helped her:

"What I've found useful is the experience and the background learning that I did when I qualified to become a teacher - all that methodology and all the knowledge about child development I've been able to use. I've had experience of schools so I know where children are moving on to.

"The government talk very much about school readiness and I have a knowledge of what school readiness looks like in terms of children moving to a reception or year one class.

"Sometimes parents don't know how to be able to develop children's language so when we refer to speech and language the speech and language therapist will give the parents tips about what they can do at home."

New figures show over a third of parents don't know whether their nursery has a trained teacher or not.

The idea of having one in every nursery here has had a mixed reaction from parents.

Niel's a dad in Sheffield who's been disappointed by the lack of learning happening at his son's nursery:

"When the nursery sold the nursery to us, they were the kind of things they were selling it to us on. As it's come to light over the two years he's been there, they've not really done as much as they said they'd do. That's why we chose the nursery we did.

"They were saying phonics and stuff like that - it appealed to me at the time but for the past few years he's just played really rather than learning anything."

But Sheffield mum Tasha Johnson thinks teachers aren't necessarily needed at such an early age:

"The nursery my kids go to do practice a lot of numeracy and literacy. They're not necessarily trained teachers but they do learn the numbers 1 to 20, how to write their names and so on - I think that's a great start for them for when they go to school.

"I don't think you're going to atract a lot of people into that profession if they are trained teachers given the pay, especially with the free hours, nurseries are already struggling. I'd rather pay less fees - they're already expensive enough - than pay more and have trained teachers to be honest. The key thing is that they're having fun and they're being well looked-after."