ATL

Extra hours

Extended nursery provision presents a challenge for schools. ATL's head of education policy and research Nansi Ellis explains

If you are working in a nursery class or a nursery school in England, you will know that from September 2010 local authorities must increase the amount of free nursery provision for three- and four-year-olds from 12.5 hours to 15 hours a week.

Parents will be entitled to take up the 15 hours flexibly, over at least three days. Local authorities should be coordinating this change across all early years providers (including schools, childminders and private and independent nurseries), but many schools have begun to offer the full 15 hours within nursery classes.

This means that, where currently a nursery class may have two groups of children, for example from 9-11.30am and from 1-3.30pm every day, schools are now finding ways of fitting in two three-hour sessions. It also means that many schools are trying to offer sessions of three hours alongside sessions of five hours. This is even more complicated in practice than it sounds!

There is no agreed model and so schools are trying different ways, for example:

• increasing the length of the morning and afternoon session by starting earlier or finishing later

• increasing the length of the morning and afternoon session by using only support staff or other agencies at the start and end of the session, for example, by offering breakfast, lunch or after-school club provision

• increasing the length of the morning and afternoon sessions, but allowing crossover at lunchtime so that all children are in the nursery during lunch

• offering a combination of full- and part-time provision to meet the requirement for flexible provision.

ATL members have concerns about both their own working practices and the impact on children and families. The changed nursery hours don't work for some parents who are also collecting older children and so nursery children are arriving late or being collected early. It can mean less time to talk to parents, because arrivals and departures are too pressured, or because parents are dropping their children into the breakfast club rather than into the classroom.

Classrooms are not necessarily resourced for young children who may still need a sleep during a five-hour day at school, or for those who still need support to eat lunch with a knife and fork. And planning the day's provision can be a nightmare if you need to timetable it so that a morning group and an afternoon group have similar entitlements, but also so that a group that is in the nursery for the morning and for part of the afternoon doesn't repeat itself.

The extension of hours can also mean that teachers and support staff find it harder to get a decent break during the day, as well as have time to plan and evaluate, and to set out resources. That's without the difficulty of being available for whole-school staff meetings. And the changes are likely to impact on caretakers, cleaners and midday supervisors too.

If your school is changing its nursery provision, you need to know:

• All staff must be consulted before any changes are made to nursery hours.

• Staff must be allowed a reasonable break between 12pm and 2pm for lunch.

• Full-time teachers can be required to work for up to 1,265 hours in any academic year ('directed time'). These hours should be reasonably allocated over 195 days (190 days of which you may be required to teach pupils).

• For full-time teachers, an increase in the nursery day would not result in an increase in your annual salary.

• Part-time nursery teachers should be paid pro-rata to their full-time colleagues and are also required to work for a proportion of the directed time of a full-time teacher.

• While there are no nationally agreed provisions for support staff, any increase in working time must result in a commensurate increase in pay. Any changes to the pattern of work must be agreed with you, following consultation.

You may also want to think about how you will manage to:

• identify at a glance which children are attending which sessions if your school is offering both part-time and up to full-time provision

• plan curriculum provision for all children, particularly if a combination of full- and part-time provision is planned

• find time to plan and assess as a team.

And you might want to challenge your school to think about:

• how to work with other providers to offer the entitlement, rather than attempting to manage it on your own

• how to manage lunchtime provision for younger children

• when whole-school meetings will be held if nursery hours are different from the rest of the school.

The full guidance on this is available from this website.