Nurseries in schools - Academisation of Early Years

Louise O'Hare and Jo Henley detail their analysis of the "school-based nursery" applications awarded cash by the government.

 

Our analysis, for the Public Childcare Now campaign, of the school-based nurseries being rolled out by the Government from September 2025 has identified that nearly 200 of the 300 schools awarded funding are part of multi academy trusts (MATs). 

Last month, the Government announced the successful recipients of the £37 million first round of capital funding for schools to expand existing nursery provision or build a new nursery.

This school-based nursery scheme might make it appear that the Government is rolling out public nursery places, particularly as the early years industry lobby has been vocal in opposition – highlighting where established private nurseries in schools have not had their lease renewed as part of expansion plans. However, the detail of the scheme, which is reliant on the entitlement model of funding that has embedded privatisation, instead looks set to further expand the fragmentation and privatisation of early years education and care services.

Indeed, it may entrench the fragmentation of education more broadly – embedding the dominance of academies – as new nursery places are a great way to get children into schools (applying for reception places) amid falling rolls.

Manifesto promise

When the school-based nurseries pledge was made in Labour’s  General Election manifesto, many mistakenly saw this as a commitment to public nurseries. A director at the Institute for Public Policy Research, now working for the Policy Unit at Downing Street, even commented on X that it could “double capacity and reverse the 30 year decline” of nursery schools, along with a graph, but without making clear the difference between the remaining 379 maintained nursery schools and school-based nurseries. 

Since then, DfE announcements have indicated an aim to improve quality of provision, noting that “school-based early education tends to be more inclusive – with a higher proportion of children with special educational needs than other settings”.

However, this overlooks what this tendency tells us about the link between high quality care and staff working conditions, qualifications and pay, which capital funding does not address. The funding is for building work only – with nothing extra allocated for more qualified staff, or to reduce child to adult ratios. Simply being located in a school does not mean better quality early years education and care, and while the Government's Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, currently in the Lords, addresses some issues regarding staff pay, terms and conditions in academies, we are yet to see if these will continue to be undermined, and a tendency to use less qualified staff will persist.

Expanding private nurseries 

Qualified, experienced, skilled early years workers, and resident SENCOs, are what make for accessible and inclusive nursery provision. When community schools run their own nurseries and nursery classes, these are likely to be better integrated with wider council-run early years services and SEND support, and staff will be employed under local authority terms and pay scales.  But the school-based nursery scheme doesn’t even require schools to run their own provision.

The DfE data shows that a private, voluntary and independent (PVI) childcare provider will run 27 of the new or renovated nurseries. Thirteen of these will be in schools where there is no existing provision – the Early Years Alliance has been warning of established private nurseries being evicted from schools, with a freedom of information request pending. But the figures, so far, show that the Government is funding the building of 13 brand new nurseries for PVIs to run.

A further two nurseries are to be governor-run – which as Early Education (the British Association for Early Childhood Education) raised at the time of the manifesto pledge, is also not a guarantee of quality or decent conditions for staff: schools can develop “governor-led provision” which can “operate on the same staffing model as private and voluntary [PVI]  sector nurseries”, without a requirement to employ teachers (around 900 schools already run their nurseries this way).

Community schools and maintained nursery schools left out

A total of 95 community schools were unsuccessful in their bid, and just 20 per cent of the nurseries supported will be in community schools. Meanwhile academies were two thirds (68 per cent) of successful applicants, despite representing 47 per cent of primary schools nationally (and 59 per cent of applications).* Worse still – the scheme excluded maintained nursery schools, from applying for the first phase of funding, the government arguing that they would “not have spare space freed up by falling primary school rolls”.

The remaining 379 maintained nursery schools have early years specialist head teachers, and have been evidenced to provide the highest quality play-based early years education and care, while supporting the largest proportion of children with SEND.

They are fully integrated with wider local early years services and support, something we fear new nurseries hitched on to academies, running with centralised top-down management and independent from local authorities, will not be fully set up for. Yet, under the new government, un-tested nurseries are funded, while maintained nursery schools continue to grow only in deficit, at risk of cuts and closures.

Chain nurseries – Multi Academy Trust prevalence

 The Department for Education (DfE) transparency data suggested – if taken at face value - that just 46 nurseries would be run by multi academy trusts, but when looking at the successful schools we found that, actually, 196 schools that are now part of MATs were awarded funding (eight were single academy trusts, and  two community schools were in the process of conversion).

Furthermore, 90 of the grant recipients were part of a MAT that had been successful more than once. REAch2 Academy Trust (the second largest MAT in the country by number of schools) has been awarded capital funding for five of its 62 primary schools. St Cuthbert's Roman Catholic Academy Trust, Lift Schools, Leo Academy Trust, and The Thinking Schools Academy Trust each got funding for four schools in their chain.

Gorse Academies Trust which has been covered several times by Education Uncovered  through reports of high teacher turnover rates, employment of family members, and in one case the alleged negative impact of “positive discipline” on an autistic child, will run three.

This will offer little comfort for those concerned about distanced top-down management, some academy trusts seemingly prioritising CEO pay over investment in retaining better qualified experienced staff, and how this impacts early years settings, which should be community-based and provide connection for children and families to wider structures of local authority-run early years and learning inclusion support.

Our findings also indicate the need to consider what the Government’s academy-based nurseries mean more broadly for community schools in the same area – as wealthier parents – those eligible for to the expanded 30 hours entitlement that the Government has said this scheme is set up to deliver – will be encouraged to feed their children into the academy system from a younger age.

Delivering an exclusionary 30 hours education 

The expansion of school nurseries suggests an understanding of early years childcare as always education, too. Yet the policy underpinning the need for new places is one that excludes children from lower income families – who are entitled to less publicly-funded early years education and care than those from better-off families. Just 20 per cent of families in the bottom third of the earnings distribution are eligible for the expanded 30-hour entitlement that the Government has committed to “deliver”, and is hoping to build capacity for, through the school-based nursery scheme. 

“Disadvantaged” two-year-olds, and all children aged three to four, are entitled to 15 hours funded early education – a morning a week during term time, although take up of this is patchy. 

However, the expansion of 30 hours of childcare, from age three years to now start from nine months, is for “working parents” only. That excludes parents who are students, who earn under a certain amount, and those who have No Recourse to Public Funds.

This Monday, the Government shared the results of a survey showing “lower-income families” had seen “the biggest impact” of the roll-out to nine months so far, perhaps to ward off criticisms from charities such as the Sutton Trust who have raised that 70% of those who are eligible for the support are from homes in the top half of earners.

However, the income bracket celebrated in the DfE release was families “earning £20,000 – £40,000”. Yet the Sutton Trust has warned that 80 per cent of families earning less than £20,000 will not have access to the 30 hours – a point which the Government release did not address.

Alongside sticking with an exclusionary eligibility for the expansion, and ignoring calls for universal provision, the new Government has done nothing to improve quality and accessibility of settings overall – it has failed to reverse the larger ratios for two-year-olds introduced in September 2023 by the Conservatives. 

In the context of rising child poverty, it should be of as deep concern that funding is being found not for inclusive and accessible public childcare infrastructure, and new nursery places for all, but to “deliver” the previous government’s promise of providing more, often privately-controlled education, to the youngest children of better-off families.

 Expanded privatisation

 The funded entitlements for 30 or 15 hours early years education and care largely subsidise provision at private nurseries, and the Government spend is doubling with the expansion of the 30 hours, set to be £8.5 billion a year by 2026/27.

The entitlement hours model sees public funding pegged to the child, rather than invested in free-at-the-point-of-use public infrastructure, offering families a dubious “market choice” of different childcare provision. This funding model has driven the privatisation, and more recently the chainification and financialisation of early years education and care in England – creating a fragmented system that has some of the highest childcare costs in the OECD, while childcare workers remain some of the lowest paid in the formal economy. 

This is not an inclusive system – the Department for Education itself recognised as early as 2010 that private providers are often “reluctant” to operate in low-income areas, and the significant issues surrounding disabled access within the childcare market. Last year the Coram Family and Childcare Survey 2024 found that just six per cent of councils have enough childcare for disabled children.

The school-based nurseries scheme doesn’t provide any extra support to schools to run their own provision: the expectation is that places will be funded by entitlements. However, as Early Education raised, because the funding of the hours has been insufficient to cover the full cost of nursery provision in schools, “where staff costs are higher due to higher qualification requirements and national and local pay agreements” this “often relies on schools cross-subsidising nursery provision from elsewhere in the budget”, which will put them at risk, and is “not viable at a time when school budgets are already under huge pressure.”

As such, considering ongoing pressures on schools – with the School Cuts coalition warning that 76 per cent of primary schools will not be able to afford their costs next year – it may not be surprising that only 20 per cent of bids were from community schools.

Inclusivity or “Schoolification”?

 The maintained nursery schools, which were excluded from bidding for funding, have a history of providing what was once regarded as “radical” early years play based pedagogy, but is now recognised as vital for child development. Meanwhile the draconian discipline and behaviour practices that have been reported from some MATs raise particular concerns regarding accessibility, and the Government decision to use academies to increase available childcare places.

In 2019 a House of Commons Select Committee into SEND reforms reported evidence from local authority representatives describing “a fragmented accountability system, with academy trusts not admitting children with SEND, and inclusive schools disadvantaged by a school system driven by attainment, performance and behaviour.”

Early years provision should be focused on nurturing all children, experiment and play, and support for parents – not valued merely as a means to enable work, and a chance to discipline children early, as part of a “mission” for “school readiness”. The Government perhaps should pay attention to the Unicef approach to “school readiness” as interdependent – with the school needing to be ready for the child, as well as the child being ready for school.

In 2018, when academies made up just a quarter of primaries, Nursery World reported on concerns from the Family and Childcare Trust that since “academies do not have to engage with local authority early education networks, they could lead to a further weakening of such networks, already under pressure from lack of funds.” They noted comments from academics at the Centre for Research in Early Childhood which suggested early years can be “vulnerable” to “whole-school pedagogic policies and practices” focused on scores and performance .  In 2018 those local authority networks would often involve visits from teaching staff from maintained nursery schools – attending school nurseries to share best practice – vital and often hidden work that has diminished due to funding cuts in many places over recent years.

Although alert to the way that fears regarding the “schoolification” of early years might be weaponised by a private nursery lobby (fearful of school-based public provision undercutting their market) this doesn’t mean we should ignore alarm bells at some of the government rhetoric – particularly when it is accompanied by funding a huge amount of building work in once publicly-owned school buildings that have now been handed over to privately-controlled education trusts.

The early years (0-5yrs) are the moment different learning needs can first be identified and supported, and a universal high quality public provision is what is needed to ensure that identification happens for every child. 

Instead of providing inclusivity and improving access to quality early years education and care for all, the school-based nursery scheme may do the opposite.

 

Louise O’Hare wrote this article in collaboration with Jo Henley. Both are organisers with the Public Childcare Now campaign.

 

*The DfE successful applications data does not include free schools as academies. However, our analysis does. We discovered that two schools listed as community schools in the DfE figures are in the process of academisation, or have now closed and academised, and so have included these in our figures for academies.