SIR MARTIN NAREY: Nick Clegg is wrong to rubbish Elizabeth Truss's brave childcare reforms which will help the poorest families By Sir Martin Narey, Former Barnardo's Chief Executive Sir Martin Narey, former head of Barnardo's, says government childcare reforms would help give poorer children a better start in life Given all the noise in the past 24 hours - not just from the Deputy Prime Minister but also the Labour party and various others - you could be forgiven for thinking the childcare minister Elizabeth Truss was intent on frogmarching excess staff from nurseries and insisting new minimum staff ratios were never to be exceeded. The reality is rather different. The government are proposing to allow nurseries, if they wish to allow staff to care for larger numbers of children. Under the new proposals the minimum staff-child ratio for children ages one and under will ease from 1:3 to 1:4 (in France it's 1:5 and in Italy 1:8) and those for two-year-olds will move from 1:4 to 1:6 (compared to 1:8 in Norway and 1:11 in Portugal). Minimum ratios for those aged three and older will remain unchanged. Were I still running Barnardo's, the UK's largest children's charity, I would have welcomed the flexibility this offered. In 2006 we tried to get into the nursery business on a large scale, particularly in the North East. We believed that we could simultaneously provide high quality childcare for the poorest children while using the Barnardo's brand to attract paying families. Any surplus was to be ploughed back into our work with the most disadvantaged. But there was no surplus. Indeed we struggled to balance the books. The inflexibility of the ratios were part of the problem. If we had, say, three staff looking after nine infants under one, we found it difficult to expand. If a new mum dropped in to see if there was a place for her child we had to turn her away, unless she could return with two more mums in which case we could then afford to recruit another member of staff. And managing staff sickness was a constant battle requiring us to search desperately for sessional staff whenever a member of staff had flu or some other ailment which she could not possibly bring to work. Last week I phoned Jonathan Ewen, the talented, recently retired, director for Barnardo's in Newcastle and asked him what he would have done had the ratios been changed a few years ago. He didn't hesitate. He would retain the old ratios as standard but exploit the flexibility of the new ones to allow nurseries to expand and to help cope with staff absences whether caused by sickness or training. Such flexibilities are widespread in France, Denmark and Sweden, all widely recognised as having excellent childcare systems and all of which have minimum ratios larger than ours. My impression of meeting childcare staff, as I did in many hundreds over nearly six years at Barnardo's, is that many are of the highest quality and with qualifications and skills, which are of real value. I certainly could not have done their job, which is why I was irritated by one Guardian journalist's dismissal of the new ratios because she - without training or qualifications - would find them challenging. I doubt whether she'd use the same test to explore the reasonableness of asking a teacher to manage 30 fifteen-year-olds. But, impressed as I have been by nursery staff, that doesn't mean that we should not further drive up their education and skills. If we are to focus on developing young minds, we need more staff to have GCSEs in Maths and English. That's particularly important in poorer areas where, as a recent Policy Exchange study discovered, the proportion of nurseries and child-minders rated good or outstanding falls markedly. With a renewed focus on quality, we can help to give poorer young children the best start in life, and make sure they are well prepared for primary school. As Andreas Schleicher, deputy director for Education at the OECD, has said, staff qualifications are the best predictor of the quality of early education and care. We need better staff and we need to allow them more professional discretion in determining how many children for whom they can safely care. I welcome Liz Truss's brave reform.