From 1st April, Early Years settings are supposed to provide a breakdown of ‘chargeable extras.’ These include meals, snacks, consumables and activities such as forest schools. This is so that the government can claim that high quality childcare is being provided for free for 15 or 30 hours a week (which assumes term-time only attendance, ignoring the fact that most parents do not have term-time only work!) The guidance stipulates that all children should “receive the same quality and access to provision, regardless of whether they choose to pay for optional hours, services, meals or consumables.” This is completely impossible, and although many of us in the early years sector have been complaining vociferously to anyone that will listen, no-one is offering a workable solution.

To explain why this approach is nonsensical, let me describe a typical snack and meal time. Children are encouraged to serve themselves, where possible, under careful supervision, and the food that is provided has been carefully planned to meet the nutritional needs of young children, toddlers and babies. Children learn to take turns, to use cutlery, and to engage in conversation, often about the food in front of them, which may reflect different cultures and often provides new tastes and experiences from their food intake at home. Allergies are carefully managed, and where there are adaptations for these, and for preferences such as vegetarians, the alternative meals are as similar as possible. Table manners are an example of social capital and provide a life skill. Children are allowed to choose quantities of many items, though encouraged to try unfamiliar foods, and then to scrape their plates clean, and understand the importance of minimising food waste.

The idea that you can exclude some children from this experience and turn them away from the snack table, or to eat a packed lunch while others are having a wholly different experience is to disregard the impact on those children. Some of our children live in poor housing where meals are of necessity eaten on laps, and a meal out might only stretch to fast food, where cutlery isn’t needed. Some of our children rely on our meals and snacks for their nutritional intake each day, and if breakfast clubs are so important for school age children, why is the provision of breakfast not considered important for toddlers? The management of lunch boxes would be a logistical nightmare that we, at Acorn, are not prepared to undertake – the management of allergies, with children too young to understand their impact, is surely enough of a reason on its own, but having a two-tier lunch provision undermines all our efforts to be inclusive and to offer the same high quality for all.

I am also angry about the idea of forest schools being one of these so-called optional extras. Children in areas of economic deprivation are arguably the most likely to suffer from what Richard Louv calls ‘nature deficit disorder’ with insufficient access to natural environments. The idea that those children, whose families are struggling to make ends meet, would be denied the opportunity to experience the wonders of forest school is wholly inimical to our efforts to close the achievement gap. Encouraging providers to offer activities as ‘extras’ is encouraging inequality and entrenching disadvantage.

So what will be doing at Acorn? Exactly the same as we do now. We currently offer as many funded-only sessions as possible, particularly at our nurseries in areas of deprivation, but we do prioritise bookings which use the full day, where we can legitimately charge additional fees for the additional hours. Any child attending a funded-only session receives exactly the same offering as those paying for additional time. We do request a voluntary contribution, but only about 10 percent of families pay that. If families are unable or unwilling to pay it, we do not allow them the option of bringing in alternative snacks and meals, and we certainly don’t exclude their child from any activity. This means that our cross-subsidy model is going to be even more stretched, as the funding for the so-called ‘free entitlement’ is insufficient to cover the full cost of provision, so the nurseries most at risk of not being financially sustainable are those serving low-income families.

A campaign group is asking the DfE to delay the implementation of the new guidance by six months, in order to carry out a meaningful consultation with the sector, and many are awaiting the response from local authorities, as they are the ones who issue provider agreements, on which funding depends.

As a charitable social enterprise, we applaud the intention to make the funding for early years places more transparent, and we would be happy with some conditionality, to ensure that funding is not simply used to boost profits, but the insistence on not allowing us to show on our invoices the amount we receive in funding is far from transparent! At the moment, we have the ludicrous situation of places for younger children being less expensive to parents than those for pre-schoolers, as the funding rate for the under 2’s is significantly more generous than that for the older children – which is correct, as caring for younger children is more expensive, given the difference in staff ratios and space requirements. The problem is that the shortfall for the underfunding of the older children has to be made up somehow. If a few children are given the option of not having snacks, meals, or to engage in forest school activities, it makes a minimal, if at all, reduction in our overheads.

Early years care and education should be high quality and inclusive. The government’s new guidance is encouraging a two-tier approach which will undermine that ambition.