Ministers have been asked to clarify government policy on part-time funded nursery places after claims councils may be “ignoring” official guidelines.
Scottish Conservative education spokeswoman Liz Smith is seeking assurances that funded places have not been withdrawn from private nurseries.
If this happens, parents need to find another partner nursery or risk losing a part-time funded place.
In some cases this can be worth up to £1,550 per year for each child.
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NAME: Belinda Woolford
SETTING NAME: Little Meadows @ The Willows LTD
BIO: I am the director of Little Meadows Day Nurseries, creche provision and Early Learning Recruitment an agency specialising in early years practitioners.
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Girls believe they are cleverer, better-behaved and try harder than boys at school from a very young age, new research has shown.
Such opinions are present from at least the time that girls are in their reception year, at the age of four or five, and persist throughout primary school.
Moreover, by the age of eight, boys appear to agree with their classmates, believing that girls are more likely to have what might be deemed the right qualities to do well at school. Children of both sexes also think that, in general, adults believe girls do better at school than boys.
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How much is free childcare costing you?
All three- and four-year-olds in England will be entitled to 15 hours of free childcare a week from 1 September. Ross Watson, CYPNow, asks what providing an extra 2.5 hours of free childcare will mean for parents and providers.
Two-and-a-half hours of free childcare a day is not enough time to get anything done, according to Belle Kaur, whose three-year-old son Jason currently attends the nursery at Fox Hollies Children’s Centre in Acocks Green, Birmingham, each morning. “It is hell doing the day-to-day essentials like shopping. He has tantrums in the car and in the shopping centres,” she says.
Like every other three and four-year-old in England, Jason is currently eligible for 12.5 hours of childcare a week under the government’s free entitlement scheme. Kaur uses her free hours over five days, paying extra for Jason to stay longer on Wednesdays and Fridays.
But from 1 September the Kaurs will be eligible for an extra 2.5 hours of childcare a week under government plans to extend the free entitlement to 15 hours a week for all three and four-year-olds. The new rules are also more flexible, allowing parents to use all their hours over a minimum of three days if they wish. Local authorities are also encouraged to work around the needs of individual families, even allowing parents to use their free childcare allowance for up to 10 hours a day.
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Practitioners using the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) often find assessing children’s communication, language and literacy levels a cause of “tension and frustration”.
A study commissioned by the former Department for Children, Schools and Families and published under the current government, found that among practitioners, there was “criticism of the levels required” by the communication, language and literacy, problem solving, and reasoning and numeracy goals.
But the Practitioners’ Experience of EYFS concluded that the framework does receive high levels of support from all practitioner groups.
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We have found a handy video that maybe of use to you for sharing with your staff! Following on from this week’s story about the frustrations of EYFS targets, we would like to share a video we discovered regarding communicating with children.
Train staff how to encourage children to talk with a free video resource for early years practitioners! The video provides ten handy tips on practical approaches for encouraging communication with children.
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