Why We Need A New Approach To Supporting Childminders
Brett Wigdortz, founder of Tiney.co, shares his practical solution to supporting childminders to build a sustainable business.
When I founded Teach First almost two decades ago, the aim was to tackle the terrible shortage of teachers and leaders in the schools whose children needed them most. Today I see a similar urgent need to attract, retain and develop talent in the early years sector.
While the teaching shortage hasn’t been solved, the charity Teach First has trained more than ten thousand teachers in the last 17 years. It is now the largest recruiter of graduates and the largest teacher educator in the UK, bringing over 1600 great teachers a year into schools serving the most economically disadvantaged communities and helping them improve children’s learning and lives. Now a similar solution is needed to tackle a strikingly similar problem which has developed in the early years sector — the long term, continuing decline in the number of childminders. To try and develop that solution, I began working with some of the leading professionals in early years to better understand the problem and work out how childminding could be better for childcare professionals, parents and most importantly for children.
This is a personal mission. I know how vital the early years are. During the fifteen years I ran Teach First I visited scores of primary schools and reception classes, talked to hundreds of teachers and parents and young people and realised that far too many children are starting school not knowing the basics. Too often they didn’t know how to play and talk with others and clearly hadn’t had other foundational experiences like having books read to them. There are too many children who haven’t benefited from great early years education grounded in the EYFS framework.
At the same time, as a parent of young children myself, I struggled to find good childcare for my three children. I was lucky to find a great childminder in the end and my children had a wonderful experience. Yet, even though demand for childcare has never been higher, too many parents don’t have the resources, time and money to find what they want and what is best for their children. As I investigated the issue further, I discovered that too many childcare professionals aren’t happy with their work as childminders. The result, as many in the sector know only too well, has been a huge long-term decline in the number of childminders in the UK from 102,000 in 1996 to only 39,000 in 2019. This startling rate of decline is not slowing down. Last year 1,300 childminders left the sector after working in childminding on average for nine years, resulting in a terrible loss of expertise and experience.
As I tried to understand the issues behind these disturbing trends, I interviewed more than a hundred childminders to ask them about their experience. Time and again the same issues came up; the bureaucracy, too much paperwork and form-filling, the financial difficulties, the hidden costs of insurance, registration, the difficulty collecting payment, the lack of support and training and the loneliness of the role, not feeling part of a community. As I listened to the stories of frustration, I also heard how much childminders loved their real work of caring for and developing children, and I became more and more convinced there must be a solution to this three-sided problem. If we could create a great supportive, professional experience for childminders we could solve the problem for everyone.
So, after more research, I pulled together a group of experts across childcare, early education, technology, business and finance and together over two years we have developed the concept of Tiney. Legally, we are an Ofsted-registered Childminder Agency, but in practice we are much more. We are developing a whole new approach to providing early years childcare that addresses the frustrations of childcare professionals and parents and provides a brilliant early years education for children.
We encourage and enable childcare professionals to start new nurseries or “tiney homes” in their own homes and provide them with very high-quality support and inspirational training. Our “Home Leaders” as we call them don’t have to deal with the burden of bureaucracy, paperwork, inspections, insurance and managing finances so that they can concentrate on what they do best and love most which is delivering excellent care to their children. We believe that this can make childminding both a professionally satisfying and financially sustainable career again.
One of our principles is that if you’re not earning you shouldn’t be working. I have met far too many childminders who spend far too much of their time billing, filling in EYFS observations, planning events, organising meet ups with other childminders, sorting out insurance, accounting, and trying to find good training and support. With our simple and easy to use online platform we take all that unnecessary work away from them so they can focus on looking after the children.
Our app looks after the billing, provides regular updates for parents, helps them find our Tiney Home leaders customers, information and the training they need at no extra cost, easily connect with other childminders in ‘tiney neighbourhood’ activities and access all the services and support they need in one place. Although we do have great, easy-to-use technology, we don’t see ourselves as just a tech business rather as tech-enabled. The focus is on providing the best possible training and support to childminders and the best service to parents and so naturally these days everyone expects to access this through technology.
We are in the early days of our development and currently around 25 Tiney Home Leaders are signing up every month. We expect to have around 300 Tiney homes in London by the end of this year which will already be 1% of the total number of childminders in the UK. The feedback so far from tiney home leaders and their parents has been fantastic. If we can show that this model works in London and genuinely helps both childminders and parents navigate the challenges of childcare, then we hope to grow throughout the country in the coming years.
We believe that there are many qualified teachers, key stage workers, teaching assistants and nursery staff with great skills and experience with young children who would be attracted by the prospect of greater control over their lives and improved earning potential which is offered by becoming a Tiney home leader. From my experience, people who work in the early years sector are some of the most inspirational professionals I’ve ever met. They are shaping the future of our country and my hope is that we at Tiney can play a role in helping them in this most vital mission.
Brett’s lifelong mission is to help every child access an excellent education. He wrote the original business plan for Teach First and led the organisation for fifteen years, helping to build it into one of the UK’s leading movements to tackle education inequality and the largest graduate recruiter in the country. He is co-founder and was Deputy CEO of Teach For All, which has brought the model to over 50 countries around the world. His current focus is as co-founder and CEO of Tiney.co, a digital platform that aims to improve the quality of early years education and as the non-executive chairman of the UK’s National Citizen Service. He is also a trustee & co-founder of Teach First Israel and the UK Fair Education Alliance and on the board of Bite Back 2030 aiming to reduce youth obesity. He received an OBE for services to education in 2012.
