Too many children in England still arrive at Reception not ready to learn. For disadvantaged children, the picture is even starker. By the time they start school, the gap is already there, and too often it widens as they move through their education.
In response, policy has rightly turned its attention to early years, including through the expansion of school-based nursery provision. The Sutton Trust’s recent Room to Grow report captures both the potential and the risk in this approach: whilst school-based provision could play a powerful role in improving outcomes, the programme is not yet consistently reaching the children who would benefit most, with success is far from guaranteed.
Too often, this policy is still framed as a question of space: how do we make use of under-occupied classrooms to create more places? That misses the point. What matters is not simply where children are, but the quality of experience when they are there.
When we set up Ark Start in 2020, we were trying to solve a dual challenge that many school leaders recognise: how to ensure children, particularly those from the most disadvantaged backgrounds, have access to joyful, enriching early education, while also providing families with affordable and flexible childcare. Today we run nurseries across London, with plans to expand to West Yorkshire next academic year, focused entirely on areas of disadvantage. Around half of the children we serve are eligible for deprivation funding, and 91% of children who finish our nurseries go on to achieve a good level of development at the end of Reception.
Those outcomes are not the result of buildings. They come from how provision is designed, delivered and sustained. If the school-based nursery programme is to succeed, it needs to be anchored in a clearer understanding of what drives quality.
Purpose, expertise and scale
At its core, that comes down to purpose, expertise and scale. When these are aligned, it becomes possible to deliver consistently strong provision.
Purpose matters because it shapes decisions about quality. In a mixed market, providers operate with very different incentives. A child-centred, not-for-profit model allows decisions to be driven by long-term outcomes. For trusts already focused on improving life chances through their schools, extending that purpose into the early years is a natural continuation of their mission.
Expertise matters because early years quality is highly dependent on leadership, pedagogy and staff development. Strong interactions with children, well-designed curricula, and investment in workforce development are what drive outcomes.
Scale is what allows that quality to reach more children in a sustainable way. Standalone settings can and do deliver excellent practice, but they are often fragile, dependent on individual leaders and exposed to financial and operational pressures.
Working as part of a larger organisation provides the resilience that early years provision has historically lacked. It allows for shared services, reduces duplication and creates the capacity to test and refine different approaches before scaling them. It also enables sustained investment in workforce development and leadership, rather than relying on isolated pockets of excellence.
This is where school trusts could have a distinctive role to play. They are not simply another provider in the system. They combine a clear educational purpose, expertise in teaching and learning, and the scale needed to deliver sustainably. They are also rooted in the communities they serve, seeing first-hand the impact when children arrive at school not yet ready to learn.
In practice, this does not mean replicating school models or “schoolifying” early years. It means using the strengths of trusts to raise quality, drawing on their expertise in curriculum and workforce development and designing an offer that works for families.
A vision for better partnerships
With greater clarity of purpose from government, this could become something much stronger than a simple expansion programme.
Trusts have a key role to play in thinking deliberately how to extend their role earlier. Not just in adding places but actively engaging with the needs of their communities and then applying their expertise, leadership and scale to improve quality earlier, either through direct delivery or through the development of strategic partnerships with other organisations.
For early years providers, the opportunity is partnership: combining deep sector knowledge with the organisational capacity that trusts can bring. These partnerships should build on the strengths of both sectors, rather than seeking to replace one with the other.
The Room to Grow findings are a useful reminder of what is at stake. Without that clarity, there is a risk of expanding provision without improving outcomes, particularly for disadvantaged children.
For trust leaders, the question is not simply whether to add nursery places, but how to be help design the part of the system that matters most. Those who choose to act have the opportunity not just to fill empty classrooms, but to reshape early education in their communities.
If we can make this collective shift it would be a win for the early years sector, a win for the schools sector, and most importantly, a win for children and their families.
- Katie Oliver is Managing Director of Ark Start and Director of Ark Ventures
We welcome perspectives from a diverse range of guest contributors. The opinions expressed in blogs are the views of the author(s), and should not be read as CST guidance or CST’s position.
