Staff at accredited Real Living Wage nurseries are set for a pay boost thanks to a 10% increase to £12 an hour in the UK and £13.15 in London.

The Real Living Wage is voluntarily paid by more than 14,000 UK businesses, who have six months to implement the pay rise after the rates for 2023-24 were announced on October 24. It is calculated according to the cost of living, based on a basket of goods and services, and is separate to the government’s mandatory National Living Wage for over 23s, which currently stands at £10.42 an hour.

Around 100 early years organisations have signed up to pay the Real Living Wage, including Beach Babies, which has two settings in Cambridgeshire. Teresa Hutchinson, Beach Babies owner, said: “The first and still the most compelling reason we pay the Real Living Wage is that it is morally right. This wage is what an independent charity calculates as the wage needed by employees and their families to afford to live. This isn’t going to facilitate a high standard of living, it is simply what people need to get by on.”

She said paying the Real Living Wage also made sense for the business as it led to a more motivated team and boosted retention rates.

However, Purnima Tanuku, chief executive of National Day Nurseries Association (NDNA), said many nurseries would struggle to pay the Real Living Wage, even if they wanted to. “With the Real Living Wage rising to £12, nurseries across England and Wales are really going to want to pay their staff more,” she said. “Unfortunately they are constrained by the funding rates for funded childcare places which do not allow them to pay qualified and experienced staff what they deserve. “