Nursery teacher shortage 'risks children's learning'

A chronic shortage of fully qualified teachers in England's private and voluntary nurseries is risking young children's education, warns a charity.
Last year more than a quarter of a million under-fives attended non-state nurseries without a qualified teacher, says a report by Save the Children.
Applications for early years teacher training have plummeted, leaving nurseries struggling, say the authors.
                 

The government said staff quality was already good and continued to improve.
Contact with highly qualified staff is crucial to young children's development, says the report.

The researchers focused on privately run, voluntary and other independent childcare settings as opposed to state-run nurseries, which tend to be attached to primary schools and are more likely to employ qualified teachers.
They looked at three- and four-year-olds, 95% of whom attend some form of childcare each week.

The report, based on new analysis of official figures, also found that in the academic year to July 2016, half of all three- and four-year-olds or more than 280,000 children, had attended a private, voluntary or independent setting without a teacher who held a degree-level early years qualification working directly with them.

Overall, just half of independent nurseries in England employed a qualified teacher last year, says the report.
But this masked wide variations between local authorities: 86% of young children in Sunderland were in childcare settings with qualified teachers, but only 16% in the London borough of Newham.

And the report quotes National College of Teaching and Leadership figures showing a fall in early years teacher trainee numbers.