Proposed changes to childcare ratios have been dropped. Hurray!

[neolara]

Not sure if there is a thread about this already, but saw that BBC is now reporting that the proposed increase in child ratios for nurseries looks like it has been abandoned.

See here.

There was a mumsnet webchat on this about 2 months ago and the changes were pretty universally condemned. I think MN took it up as an appeal.

Good. About time too. How on earth did this crazy idea ever get so far in the first place?

It got so far because Liz Truss flatly refused to listen to anyone who disagreed with her. The webchat is a fair example of it: Early Years groups, experts, campaigners all report the same thing. She was listening only to the big business nurseries who were lobbying for their own interests.

Only the ratios have been scrapped, though. It's my understanding that the rest of her proposals are still going ahead. To my mind, the most worrying is the childminder agencies. These will severely restrict childminders in what they can offer (we can talk to people in France, too - only the people we talk to are the practitioners, who paint a very different picture).
They are also likely to increase costs for parents.

Liz Truss says the advantage to us is that the Agencies will take on our paperwork - did you ever hear of anything so ridiculous in your life? Wasting money on setting up agencies, all that disruption - why not simply reduce the paperwork if it's so burdensome and time consuming that it needs an agency to do it all for us??