LEYF: the London nursery group getting men into teaching amid a staffing crisis

This summer, London Early Years Foundation is turning its attention to encouraging more men to work in early years education to address a staffing crisis brought on by low pay

‘I was interested in what helps children learn more. It’s always wrapped around language,’ says June O’Sullivan, chief executive of the LEYF

June O’Sullivan knows how hard it is for parents to find good childcare. She was working as a nurse when she fell pregnant, with no choice but to leave her son with the mother of a colleague during her night shifts – an arrangement she never felt comfortable with. The boy got a place at a nearby nursery, but when O’Sullivan went to pick him up one day she found him trying to escape from the garden.

“Back then they didn’t allow you to settle your child,” she remembers. “I was a young mum, I didn’t know any different. So I left my little boy crying. When I went to pick him up the nursery manager screamed at me because she couldn’t find him. I thought, one day I’m going to do something about this.”

Years later she was working as a social worker in Battersea when she overheard some parents telling others not to send their children to a particular nursery because it was run by social services. “I remember them saying that if you send your child there people think you’re beating them. I thought that was just not right. I had to find a way of building a model where the nurseries are places every parent wants to go, from all backgrounds and class.”

These two moments were in her mind when she joined Westminster Children’s Society to manage operations in 1996. She added training to her job in 2004, then worked with the charity as it became a social enterprise and rebranded to the London Early Years Foundation (LEYF) in 2008. The organisation now works with 4,500 children across London and employs more than 600 staff.

As a social enterprise, LEYF is run not only as a profitable business but with a mission to create long-term social change. O’Sullivan set out to show that it was possible to run very good-quality nurseries in areas of deprivation so that no family would go without high-quality childcare.

“We know early years education is really good for children,” O’Sullivan says. “It’s particularly good in lower-income families, but I found those families were least likely to get decent nurseries and there was no model for finding good nurseries that are sustainable.”

Good nurseries in poorer neighbourhoods are often reliant on grants and funding to stay afloat, which puts them at the whims of politicians and changing childcare policies. “I thought, there must be a way to run community nurseries where everyone can attend but to develop a fee structure to make them independent. So that’s how this came about.”

LEYF charges parents an average of £7 an hour, but these rates are subsidised for 40 per cent of families. “We try to subsidise as many as possible,” O’Sullivan says. Across the network some nurseries are full of children paying fees and others are full of subsidised children.

Mark Deyzel, the nursery manager at LEYF’s Warwick Community Nursery in west London, says he loves working with groups where the demographics are mixed. “For me it’s the perfect model, because children don’t see class they just see a peer. It’s lovely to see parents interacting who might not cross paths outside of the nursery.”

Deyzel has been in education for 12 years. He started out working as an assistant teacher in primary schools before moving to early years and leaving when the pressure to make money out of families wore him out. “I loved the company I worked for but it became less about what I loved, which is the high quality of education, and more about running a business,” he says. “At the time I thought that was what I wanted, but then I realised I had drifted quite far from what I loved, which is having spontaneity to do something bonkers with the children.”

When Deyzel decided to come back to the profession he went to visit some private nurseries he liked. But he saw that as manager he would be under pressure to squeeze profit margins at the expense of the children. “When I went to LEYF, right from the start it was different. The first consideration was the children’s welfare. We have to stay afloat, but it was all about the quality of care.”

One big difference at LEYF is the focus on learning. O’Sullivan has developed a LEYF pedagogy based on the premise that early investment in education can change the course of a child’s life.

“I was interested in what helps the child learn more,” O’Sullivan says. “It’s always wrapped around language and the cultural capital of it, so our curriculum is around how do you enrich language.”

Research has shown that children from poorer backgrounds hear 30 million fewer words by the age of three than their counterparts from richer families. O’Sullivan set out to address this. In training sessions she encourages teachers to use other words instead of “nice”, while classrooms are filled with objects with long names, like candelabras and chandeliers. O’Sullivan talks to parents about songs, music and books as ways to pass on language. She says: “It’s very hard to think if you can’t speak.”

After years of experience, O’Sullivan says she can identify from looking at a group of boys aged three which ones will end up in trouble in later life. “It’s about self-motivation, and an ability to control your temper,” she says. “When children learn this they are much better able to deal with conflict. So for us that’s about learning to sit at the dinner table, learning to follow a conversation with your eyes, learning how to persevere with something if you are finding it frustrating. No matter how much the world changes, that will always be important. That’s where the measurable benefits come.”

O’Sullivan was awarded an MBE in 2013 for services to London’s children, and this year she was nominated for a 2018 Veuve Clicquot business woman award for social purpose. But her work isn’t done. This summer, LEYF is turning its attention to encouraging more men to work in early years education to address a staffing crisis brought on by low pay.

“Children need to know from a young age that men and women exist in all areas of life,” Deyzel says. “If we are teaching them from a young age that it is a female job to look after children, then we are teaching them inequality.”

LEYF is calling for the nursery sector to recruit ambassadors and role models to visit schools, colleges and career fairs, as well as forming an advisory group to meet twice a year to monitor progress.

On top of that, O’Sullivan wants to open more nurseries in the outer boroughs of London. She is planning a platform where people interested in setting up social enterprises can share research and ideas.

“Whatever we do,” O’Sullivan says, “it’s about how we can give more young people careers in early years and how we can touch the lives of more children.”