Liz Truss should focus on nursery funding, not staffing ratios | Letters

Underfunding is the biggest challenge facing all providers in the sector, says John Wadsworth

Zoe Williams brings up Liz Truss's proposals to cut staff-to-child ratios as a solution to the funding crisis faced by both maintained and private, voluntary and independent (PVI) providers (Toddlers, stop your running around: Liz Truss is coming for you, 3 October).

Truss put forward this idea in 2012 in the CentreForum thinktank paper Affordable Quality: New Approaches to Childcare, and the following year as undersecretary of state for education and childcare in the report More Great Childcare. Both documents are riddled with inaccuracies, which I detailed in 2013 in the article Like an Uncontrolled Toddler' Elizabeth Truss Risks Causing Chaos in England's Nursery Education and Child Care Sector, published in the journal Forum.