St Anne’s College will close its day nursery, ending an institution that was pivotal in supporting women students and academics at the University of Oxford.
The nursery will shut its doors on 18th December following a decision by the College’s Trustees. Parents were informed of the change last week, giving them just two months to find alternative provision for their children.
A group of St Anne’s fellows founded the day nursery in 1963 for their own newborn children. At the time, it was the only college nursery at the University and was designed to let female fellows manage work and childcare.
Baroness Ruth Deech, a former student, fellow, and principal at Anne’s who enrolled her child in the nursery, previously wrote that: “To be a woman don in a women’s college, with a full-time nursery and a well-stocked law library was, relatively speaking, very heaven.” Partly down to Deech’s efforts, five college nurseries now operate alongside the University’s own childcare services. All offer priority to parents associated with the specific college or the University as a whole.
Baroness Deech told Cherwell that she “heard the news with a heavy heart”, describing the nursery as a “lifeline” for working parents. Having discussed the closure with the college, the Baroness blamed “creeping over-regulation” for making it unaffordable to run small nurseries. She highlighted the Oxford city traffic filters as the “last straw” preventing staff from reaching the city centre.
Current nursery parents expressed dismay at the sudden closure of the institution. Speaking to Cherwell, one parent described feeling “let down” by the decision: “Permanent closure was never mentioned as a possibility or even crossed our minds, given St Anne’s pride in operating Oxford’s first college nursery.”
Cherwell understands the decision to close comes after staffing difficulties at the nursery, which have reduced service to three days a week. An affected parent told Cherwell that there has been a “collapse in the standard of governance at the nursery” just three years after it was rated outstanding by Ofsted.
Since the announcement of the nursery’s closure, several parents have written a letter to the College’s Governing Body to “express our [their] deep sadness, frustration and disbelief at the decision to close the nursery at such short notice”. The letter says that “the nursery is not simply an ancillary commercial service” but “embodies the College’s pioneering commitment to women’s education and equality of opportunity”.
Parents also raised concerns about the impact of having to move their children to another nursery. One parent expressed their worry that they will not be able to find an alternative place for their child in the two months before the nursery’s closure. They told Cherwell: “In these areas of life, the best support you can have is a long notice period because it takes so long to secure a place.” Waiting lists at nurseries in the UK can range from immediate availability to two years.
Consequently, the affected parents have asked the College to postpone the nursery’s closure until the end of the academic year to give families and staff “a reasonable opportunity to make alternative arrangements”. The parents have also started a change.org petition that, at the time of print, has received over 120 signatures.
In a statement to Cherwell, St Anne’s “strongly refute[d]” any suggestion that there has been a collapse in the standard of governance at the University. It added that the nursery has undergone “several challenging years” to secure increased regulation and maintain the service amid greater staffing costs and challenges in recruiting senior staff. The College also told Cherwell that the proportion of students at the nursery with ties to college has recently decreased.
Regarding the immediacy of the announcement, they state that: “The decision to permanently close the nursery on the usual Christmas closure date was not taken lightly nor was it based on any single factor.”
While the parents recognise the recent challenges faced by the College in running the nursery, they describe the closure as a “defeatist” response that “unnecessarily severs the college from its proud history”.
All the parents who spoke to Cherwell criticised the level of support offered by the College in light of the sudden closure. One parent told Cherwell they had received “virtually none at all”, while another characterised St Anne’s support as signposting the University’s Childcare Services “at most”.
St Anne’s told Cherwell that “our immediate priority is to support affected children, families and staff through the transition”. They are “working closely” with the Childcare Services team with this goal in mind.
Regarding the importance of the nursery to the College’s history, the College states that: “The nursery has been and will remain an important and proud part of the history of this College.”
One parent, who previously taught Oxford University history, is dissatisfied with this response. “As a female academic, I have seen many of my peers struggle with the precarity of early career students.
“I would argue that there is something fundamentally patriarchal about imagining the ideal university without making provision for young children at its core.”
