General Election 2019

General Election: Childcare & Primary School pledges made by key parties in run up to vote

Here at LearningBook, we’ve summarised what key promises political parties are making for early years, childcare and primary schools:

Conservative

  • • £14 billion boost in school funding.
  • • £4,000 minimum funding per primary school pupil by 2012/2022.
  • • Raising teacher salaries and benefits. New teacher salaries will be increased to £30,000 by 2022-2023.
  • • Increase contribution in to the Teachers’ Pension Scheme.
  • • £1 billion fund to help create affordable childcare, including before and after school clubs and holiday clubs.

Labour

  • • Create 1,000 new Sure Start childcare centres at a cost of £1 billion.
  • • Entitlement for 30 hours free childcare available for all 2, 3 and 4 years olds within 5 years.
  • • Free early years training to the workforce to attain qualifications whilstworking.
  • • Recruit nearly 150,000 additional early years staff.
  • • Provide sustainable, long-term funding for early years and schools.
  • • Provide free school meals to all primary school children.
  • • Maximum class sizes of 30 children.
  • • Scrapping Key Stage 1 and 2 SATs and baseline assessments.
  • • Replace Ofsted and transfer responsibility for inspections to a new body.

Liberal Democrats

  • • Entitlement of free childcare to start from 9 months old.
  • • Triple the Early Years Pupil Premium.
  • • Expanding Children Centres with £1 billion a year investment.
  • • Require all Early Years settings to have a training programme for staff.
  • • Recruit 20,000 more teachers.
  • • Reduce class sizes to 2015 level.
  • • Scrapping mandatory SATs.
  • • Replace Ofsted with a new HM Inspector of Schools.
  • • Increase schools funding by £10 billion a year.
  • • Free school meals for all primary school children.
  • • Increase teacher starting salaries to £30,000.

Green Party

  • • Provide 35 hours a week of free childcare for all from the age of 9 months.
  • • Increase funding by at least £4 billion a year.
  • • Renaming ‘Free School Meals’ the ‘School Meals Allowance’ to tackle stigma.
  • • Reduce class sizes to under 20.
  • • Formal education will start at 6 years old.
  • • Replace Ofsted with a collaborative system of assessing and supporting schools locally.

Find out more:

Don’t forget to regiester to vote here: https://www.gov.uk/register-to-vote

LearningBook joins forces with Just Childcare

Nursery group Just Childcare is teaming up with leading education technology company LearningBook to deliver a top spec recording and development tracking system across its sites.

The award-winning chain of over 30 nurseries will use LearningBook’s safeguarding-aware digital learning journey in a rolling multi-year contract, enabling staff to perform observation recording and tracking in half the time*.

Dr James Huntington, founder of LearningBook, comments; “We’re delighted to be joining forces with Just Childcare. Our system will help Just Childcare deliver a more comprehensive and efficient level of data collection, ensuring they continue to meet national and Ofsted standards, while having more time to help develop the children and engage parents.”

Liz Carroll, Nursery Operations Director at Just Childcare, adds: “Our team have found the system so simple to use, while allowing for a real depth of information to inform staff of children’s progress – and parents and carers really appreciate the unique safeguarding element and having the ability to view and contribute to their child’s education at home. We knew quite soon into our trial that we would be looking to roll the technology out across all our nurseries.”

 

LearningBook is based in Manchester and Macclesfield and is run by Dr James Huntington. The company was started when James’ family, who own Ofsted Outstanding nurseries, spotted a need for a more streamlined, safe and simple system for staff to track children’s early years development. James, a cloud computing company owner, combined his IT knowledge with ex-head teachers and nursery owners to create the system, launching it in 2014. It is the only company in the UK to offer the technology to clients on tablets which are stripped of all other applications, delivering a higher level of safeguarding than other companies. LearningBook now works with over 1,000 schools, preschools, nurseries and childminders all over the UK and further afield.

Liz concludes: “Thanks to LearningBook, we can spend more time improving the development of the children in our care, and communicating it really effectively to their parents and carers, who love the safeguarding element.”