After the mega childcare announcement in the Spring Budget yesterday, new parents, parents-to-be and prospective parents are tentatively elated. But one big question – and a key criticism from Labour – has been around the issue of supply and demand. With the government promising free childcare for children under-five by September 2025, many fear the childcare sector won’t be able to cope with the influx of kids needing nursery places.
In the most significant part of theSpring Budget; the Chancellor Jeremy Hunt announced a £4 billion plan to introduce 30 hours of free childcare for children from the age of nine months. It will be implemented in stages, to give time for the sector to prepare. Working parents of two-year-olds will get 15 hours of free care from April 2024 and children from nine months will get 15 hours of free childcare from September 2024. Under-fives will get 30 hours of free childcare from September 2025.
But in many areas, nursery places are already incredibly difficult to obtain, with some women racing to get a spot on waiting lists by registering their child before they’ve been conceived. So how will it work if hundreds of thousands more are signing their kids up once childcare becomes more affordable? We asked Education Secretary Gillian Keegan, who's in charge of rolling out the childcare reforms...
How will you make sure nurseries can cope?
‘We're going to pay more for the existing provision, increasing the rate for the three- or four-year-olds who get free childcare today, and we're going to increase the rate for two-year-olds, so there's more money in the system. [Childcare providers] can work out how they want to use that. Some of it will go into wages and salaries and retain and attract people.
‘We also have qualifications that are available, either for people who want to return to the workforce, or people who are leaving school and want to come into the profession. We have a new "T level" in this area as well as a whole host of other qualifications at various levels. I think it's a very attractive career. These are childcare professionals who are looking after our most precious people, so we need to make sure that we attract more of them. But I think pay will be an important aspect of it and the rates will be an important factor.’
Will nursery staff actually be paid more?
‘We're paying more to the providers so, logically, because they were asking for that, they could pay people. We think that they will make sure it's attractive. The thing about nursery providers is you don't have a nursery business without staff. They need to have the staff. This will be happening from September this year.'
How else will you attract more workers to the childcare sector?
'There are lots of qualifications and apprenticeships to go into childcare which we've introduced. So if people want to start working and earning straightaway, and benefiting from free childcare themselves if they if they want to, because apprenticeships mean you're working so you would also qualify for the offer, there's quite a lot of different apprenticeship routes we've been working on. The new T level in education and childcare, aimed at 16- to 18-year-olds and developed with the sector, is being rolled out across the country and is a level three qualification, equivalent to A-Levels. It includes special educational needs and other skills to support children. The apprenticeships, which we’ve been developing over the last few years, are very exciting, because that means people can get going straight away and avoid any student debt if they get to that level.
'Because we're going to pay more and we're going to professionalise the sector [give people the ability to learn and develop their careers], we are expecting that we will [be able to recruit] more people. We are working on a workforce plan, where we'll make sure everybody knows about these qualifications. A lot of the challenge in government is awareness; making sure somebody sat in a classroom right now who might fancy this as a career knows about all of the paths that are available to them. The fact that we'll make people aware, that we've got lots of options, we're paying more and professionalising through a workforce plan, will all be part of making sure we get the people we need. We know that we can't do this without people. That's the critical success factor.’