Angry parents have started a campaign calling for their nursery to be spared from spending cuts.

Moss Hall Nursery School, in Nether Street, Finchley, faces having its £220,000 subsidy from Barnet Borough Council cut by 50 per cent next year, followed by 25 per cent the following year, before being scrapped altogether.

An online petition opposing the measure has received more than 900 signatures since last Wednesday, warning of staff cuts and a drop in quality.

The nursery is one of four in the borough – the others being Brookhill Nursery School, in Brookhill Road, Barnet, St Margaret’s School, in Margaret Road, New Barnet, and Hampden Way Nursery School, in Hampden Way, Southgate - which has qualified teaching staff.

They all receive an annual subsidy through an underspend of the dedicated schools grant.

Proposals have been put forward by council to merge the four nurseries, with a single management structure and governing body.

A proposal was submitted by the nursery to the council last month, asking for £60,000-a-year from the school funding budget, but was rejected.

Dylan Davies, a parent governor at Moss Hall, said: “If we lose the money, it will mean hardship for all the families. The quality of service given would be severely affected.

“Without the funding, people are going to lose their jobs. There will have to be redundancies, and it will no longer have qualified teachers.”

Andrew Smith, a father of two children, now aged six and eight who attended the nursery, said he was worried.

The 41-year-old engineer said: “I am really concerned people are going to lose something at the heart of the community. The experience was brilliant for our kids, and should be for others too. A lot of people are really angry.

“It sets the standard and we should always be trying to meet it. Instead of hacking away at that service, they should be supporting it. It’s exactly what we should be investing in.”

Oruj Defoite, whose two daughters aged five and six attended the nursery before going to Moss Hall Infant School, said the nursery was “crucial”.

She added: “This is a service which is loved. If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. It’s absolutely outrageous that when something is so successful and needed, they come in and decide they are going to mess with it.

“The children that come out of here are well adjusted. They form friendships and bonds that carry on. It sets them up here for the rest of their lives. It makes no sense to close it. Having it here is a privilege. We are so lucky to have this sort of state provision. They shouldn’t mess about with it.”

Barnet Council has said that the subsidy has been possible because funding has been based on target numbers, with actual numbers lagging behind the targets. From 2015/16, it will be based on actual numbers.

A Barnet Council spokesman said: “The four nursery schools offer an excellent service to parents and children in the borough but have received a one-off subsidy of £890,000 a year for the past two years over and above the income generated from ‘free entitlement’ places. This is 70 per cent more than is paid to other early years providers.

“We can’t continue to provide that level of support indefinitely and three of the schools have proposed coming together, to achieve management efficiencies and grow services in order to be able to manage without any subsidy after two years. Unfortunately the proposals form Moss Hall Nursery School would require an ongoing subsidy and this would mean the school would be managed with a disproportionate amount of the funding available to support nursery children across the borough.”

The proposal to merge the nurseries will be discussed by the council’s children, education, libraries and safeguarding committee on October 28.