What’s next for childcare?

Yesterday the UK Government announced the biggest ever expansion of childcare in England. With all the different challenges facing the government and public finances, it is a genuinely remarkable achievement by everyone who has worked so hard to campaign for more investment in this vital area.

And yet, for parents and carers struggling with the costs of childcare, for nurseries struggling to balance the books, and for childcare workers who deserve much higher wages, today will be no different to yesterday. All that extra money will take time to make a difference. So what’s next for childcare?

Let’s start with the good news. The days of debating whether to invest more in childcare are over. There is a cross-party consensus that childcare investment helps grow the economy, and needs to be a top priority for government. That is a big shift and MPs such as Siobhain Baillie and Bridget Phillipson deserve a lot of credit for making this happen.

Also, we know what needs to be done to make childcare work. Yesterday’s measures were amongst the first steps recommended in the brilliant report by the Institute of Public Policy Research and Sam Freedman, which sets out clearly how a Universal Childcare Guarantee would work. There are lots of complex social policy problems in this country — improving childcare is actually pretty easy to sort out.

While some of the investment will take time to make a difference, the Chancellor also announced reforms which will start to help much more quickly. Back in 2018, Save the Children’s Mums on a Mission campaign started making the case for parents who receive Universal Credit to get paid upfront rather than in arrears. First the government ignored them, then they said it was impossible, then they did it. Not all improvements require a lot more money — listening to parents means the system works better and money is spent more wisely.

Some commentators have speculated that the government’s motivations were political — they were hoping that they could announce some new money and that would make all the problems with childcare go away. I don’t think that was their motivation, but in any case it won’t work like that.

It isn’t possible just to put more money into the existing system and get better outcomes for children, for parents or for childcare providers. Nurseries have been underfunded for a long time, and have had to develop complex ways of combining funding from government and from parents. Parents will notice and I can guarantee that there is going to be a lot more campaigning on this area. So what’s needed is reform alongside investment.

For example, this means a focus on:

Quality and educational standards. Reducing the ratios of adults to children is clearly and obviously a step in the wrong direction. There needs to be a strategy for how to invest in skills development for childcare workers: high quality childcare must be about enabling every child to have the best start in life.

Flexibility. There are few things as expensive for many parents or carers with a toddler as “free hours” from a nursery. Just expanding free hours is an increasingly inefficient way of subsidising childcare costs, especially for people like shift workers. There needs to be more thought on how to make sure subsidies are much more transparent and flexible so that childcare can fit in with family life, not the other way round.

Availability. It was good to see more support for childminders, but there needs to be a lot more focus on increasing the supply of childcare provision, and particularly a big growth in nurseries linked to schools, and to multi-site not for profit providers, who have the scale to provide high standards and opportunities for workforce development. There needs to be a strategy to increase supply and to use commissioning and regulation to make sure government funding is spent effectively — there’s no point offering an entitlement to childcare if it isn’t actually available in practice.

This will require some more funding on top of what was announced yesterday, but above all it requires that money is spent wisely and effectively. It will be a great opportunity for the Labour Party to set out their own approach to childcare, and also for the UK Government (and governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) to set out further steps.

After all, getting this right isn’t just good for children and for families, it’s vital to our future national prosperity and economic success.