Childminders quitting over tests for five-year-olds

Childminders are in revolt over a government plan to introduce literacy targets for all five-year-olds, MPs were told yesterday.

Members of the Commons Select Committee for Children, Schools and Families heard that hundreds were quitting this summer because they felt they were not trained to test their charges on the targets. Many parents will no longer have a childminder and will have to put their children into a nursery.

Early-years experts yesterday demanded the scrapping of the targets and called for the age of compulsory formal education to be put back to seven, as in many European countries. The experts were giving evidence to an inquiry into the Government's decision to introduce 69 statutory learning goals which all children should achieve by five.

Anna Frith, of the pressure group Open EYE, described the targets as "absurd" and produced letters from childminders saying they would quit because their job was "too bureaucratic".