Last month, as the PM’s conference speech gained momentum, so too did my phone. It buzzed with texts from parent campaign groups and childcare providers alike. They all had one question: ‘Who’s going to tell him?’ Starmer described the Government’s childcare policy as: ‘30 hours for every child…every single child equal at the starting line of their education.” That’s exactly how a Government should deliver early years policy. Unfortunately, it’s not the one we have here in England.
Falling through the net
The 30 hours of funded childcare is not a universal offer. It is available only to working parents who meet an earnings threshold, effectively locking out those who need the support the most. Analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that the poorest 30% of families get no direct benefit from the 30-hour offer, while five-sixths of government funding goes to working families who would have paid for childcare anyway and who are mainly middle to higher income earners. In a cost-of-living crisis, reducing childcare costs for any parent is welcome, but if you fall outside the system, the support might as well not exist at all.
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Research from Coram Family and Childcare finds that disadvantaged families pay far more for less. Parents who do not qualify for the 30 hours pay on average between £205 and £274 a week for the same number of hours others receive for free. This creates a childcare poverty premium in which those with the fewest resources carry the highest costs. By the time children start reception, children in those disadvantaged families have had three times less early education than the children of eligible working parents.
There are two other childcare offers for low-income families: the 15 hours for two-year-olds whose parents are on certain benefits and the Universal Credit childcare element. Neither is doing its job. Funding pressures mean that some providers favour children whose parents can buy extra hours, leaving those who on the 15-hour ‘disadvantaged offer’ with fewer places. The Office for Budget Responsibility has also found that the Universal Credit childcare mechanism has not increased parental employment as intended.
Mind the gap
And there is another gap. Parents studying or training are shut out of the 30 hours entirely. Student nurses and trainee teachers tell us they simply cannot afford to qualify for the jobs the country needs. If you want to improve your prospects or retrain, England’s childcare system looks the other way.
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We have a childcare system that supports those already in stable, secure employment, the ones that fit neatly into the labour market, not those on the edges battling to escape poverty. As one parent from Burnley told us in a focus group this year: “The system assumes you’re already winning”.
Even when families meet the criteria for government support, access is far from guaranteed. According to the New Economics Foundation, nearly half of all children under five live in a childcare desert. These deserts overlap with the most deprived parts of the country. The places where children most need early education are the least likely to have it. The private market does not open nurseries where margins are thin, even when need is high.
This unfair and unequal system is not the design of this Government, though. The expansion of the 30-hour offer was the centrepiece of Jeremy Hunt’s 2023 Spring Budget, with the bulk of delivery and cost pushed into a new parliament. As many ministers have been briefed to say over the years, if you were designing the childcare system from scratch, you would not start here. Yet this is where Labour finds itself, and the Child Poverty Strategy is a chance to set it right.
An anti-poverty childcare system
The first step must be lifting the two-child limit, but the Government cannot stop there. If families are to thrive, not simply survive, Labour needs to build an anti-poverty childcare system that supports parents who want to work or study and protects children from the long-term effects of growing up poor. Decades of evidence, including the work of James Heckman shows that high-quality early education for disadvantaged children leads to better health, social and economic outcomes, boosting earnings later in life and reducing reliance on means-tested benefits. Early years provision not only helps families avoid hardship today, but also reduces poverty across the life course.
The public understands this. In our annual Pulse Check report with More in Common, 71% of voters supported making the 30-hour offer available to all children regardless of their parents’ employment status while 60% said it would be the best way for the Government to help children get ready for school.
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For most people, this is common sense. Child poverty often begins in the earliest months and years in parental stress, in access to play and in whether a family can find and afford the childcare they need to work. That is why the Child Poverty Strategy must sit alongside the Best Start in Life mission, beginning with scrapping the two-child limit and backed by a childcare system that supports the families that need it the most.
Next year, when the PM takes the stage at party conference, I want my phone buzzing again, with a different question: “Who’s going to tell him he’s finally right?”
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