
LEYF, photography by Isabelle Johnson
Rounded, scalable early education at LEYF
Sevice Area:
childcare
Sevice Area:
childcare
Background
The London Early Years Foundation (LEYF) has a varied 120-year history, responding to the changing needs of Londoners through time. Initially known as the Westminster Health Society, it was founded in 1903 to address maternal and infant mortality rates. LEYF then specialised in family support throughout the 1920s (addressing food poverty and children’s health) and first offered nurseries during WWII to support women working during the war effort. It has remained in the sector ever since.
In England today, childcare is primarily left to the market, so that quality services are expensive and concentrated in affluent areas. Government support schemes have so far done little to offset this effect, with a patchwork of inadequate entitlements often restricting access for the lowest-income families.
Notably, the level of public funding for the 15-hour weekly entitlement for disadvantaged two year-olds fails to meet the real operating costs, particularly due to the higher staff-to-child ratio requirement for this age group compared with over-threes. As a result, many providers do not offer the scheme, with only around 60% of eligible children
Local Action
With direct experience of England’s dysfunctional early years services, June O’Sullivan, the current CEO, rebranded LEYF in 2008 and reconfigured the model to focus on improving access to high quality socially just childcare for all children but especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Today it is one of the UK’s largest charitable childcare social enterprises.
As a social enterprise, LEYF combines social purpose and businesses techniques to deliver scalable, efficient and widely accessible childcare services. Its approach rests on a cross-subsidy scheme to promote inclusive, high-quality early education in low-income areas. Funds from fee-paying parents fill gaps left by inadequate government subsidies, enabling full provision of free entitlements (specifically the 15-hour entitlement for disadvantaged two year-olds).
Impact on local residents
LEYF currently runs 41 nurseries across 12 London boroughs, providing for nearly 4,000 children (around 31% are from disadvantaged backgrounds). It delivers the highest number of places in London for the government funded 15-hour offer for disadvantaged two-year olds. Many parents in full time employment eligible for 30 hours pay for additional hours beyond their subsidised entitlement, typically another 10-15 hours. While many providers use this profit rate for dividends, LEYF functions as a circular economy, reinvesting surpluses to fully fund children on targeted entitlements, support staff career developments, offer an enhanced apprenticeship scheme and develop support packages free to the sector such as the Prison Pack for staff working with children with a parent in prison or practice guides such as the Twoness of Twos. This is all done while achieving financial sustainability. Additional fees contribute to the cross-subsidy system, funding more subsidised places for disadvantaged children (where government subsidies fall short). Across LEYF nurseries 27% of attending children have fully subsidised places. Fees for non-subsidised hours are set competitively according to each nursery’s location.
With the benefit of economies of scale, the social enterprise can effectively pool resources and target low-income areas to maximise redistributive effects. More than three quarters of its centres are sited in areas of deprivation.
LEYF employs nearly 1,000 staff with around 100 apprentices. In 2023/24 71% of staff were on the London Living Wage, up from 68% in 2022/23 and 43% in 2021/22. Its training academy, The London Institute of Early Years, incorporates LEYF’s Social Pedagogy, offering accredited courses to encourage staff development within and beyond LEYF nurseries. Space for career development and supplementary training help build the necessary conditions to improve outcomes for all children. Just over half its nurseries receive outstanding Ofsted reviews, compared with an average of 14% across London.
Nutrition is a key aspect of LEYF’s services, echoing its origins as an organisation confronting food poverty. Rather than the general shortage of food LEYF addressed in the early 20th century, the challenge it faces today is an overabundance of ultra-processed food. Eating healthily is expensive and challenging in the UK, leading to increasing levels of obesity that disproportionately affects children in areas of poverty. Alongside providing nutritious food in every nursery, LEYF is aiming to train chefs across the sector about nutritious menus, portion control and sustainabl
Environmental Impact
The social enterprise is the UK’s first early year’s organisation to develop a sustainability strategy, running through its governance, leadership, operations and pedagogy. The strategy supports the three pillars of sustainability; economic, social and environmental, aligned to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. LEYF employs a designated sustainability manager who leads the delivery of the sustainability strategy (annually measured through the ISO14001 Environmental standard and accredited by Planet Mark, an environmental consultancy). To raise awareness about sustainability among staff across the sector, LEYF designed the first NCFE accredited Level 4 Diploma Sustainability in the Early Years.
What's next?
LEYF’s model – which encompasses the cross-subsidy system as well as its pedagogy and sustainability policies – has been designed for scalability and replicability. While planning to continue to open and/or rescue more centres in deprived areas of London, LEYF actively shares its methods and knowledge externally to achieve better Early Years Education and Care nationwide. Specifically, the recent formation of the Early Years Social Enterprises Collective aims to link providers together to build a shared voice, offering free access to constructive guidance and pragmatic advice about how to develop social enterprise solutions to address the unique challenges faced in the sector.
Find out more at:
Social Leadership in Early Childhood Education and Care: An Introduction by June O’Sullivan