Childcare in the UK is expensive - eye-wateringly so. At last, thanks to many campaigners, this is making headlines in the media, and was even a focusin the Spring budgetearlier this year. This was a huge moment on our long road to funding childcare properly but - and it’s a big ‘but’ - there’s still not nearly enough recognition that the need for childcare does not stop age five.
New parents struggling with childcare often see the school years as a glorious distant ‘finish line’, after which all their childcare problems will be over. But I'm sorry to tell these parents that it gets harder, not easier, to sort out childcare once kids start school. Wraparound care is the ‘forgotten child’ of the childcare discussion, but the impact on parents is huge. Many parents can’t access after-school care, can’t make it work around their job or can’t afford it, so they are left pulling in favours left, right and centre to be able to make it all work - or even worse, forced to reduce their hours to fit around school hours as they have no other option.
At Koru Kids, we did some research recently to understand the depth of the problem. We discovered that over half of families (55%) do not have enough after-school provision in their local area, rising to 80% in some parts of the UK. As a result, 57% of parents say that the stress of juggling childcare is having a negative impact on their careers.
We heard from one parent, Carly, that her childcare situation was a ‘tapestry of chaos’. Carly and her husband work full-time hours, so getting to school for pick-up every afternoon just isn’t an option. However, after-school care hasn’t come easily either; getting a place in the after-school club was like securing Glastonbury tickets and it took over a year to finally secure a couple of spaces. Carly told us, 'You mistakenly think that there will be adequate after-school clubs, but you quickly realise that there aren’t. The system is broken.'
For more than a quarter of parents, school wrap-around care does not fit around their work patterns. This causes constant headaches given that securing after-school care often requires booking ahead.
Another parent we spoke to, Heidi, knows this only too well as her partner is an airline pilot for long-haul lights. This means he can be away for days at a time; Heidi too travels all over Europe. With neither working a 9-5 schedule, they are often left scrambling to find after-school care and feeling guilty as a result.
So what can we do about this? We need to make before and after-school care more affordable and more accessible. It needs to be easier to use existing subsidies like tax-free childcare and universal credit on local, flexible childcare, whether that be a nanny, a childminder or after-school clubs that work for their circumstances. This would make the world of difference to many families. Given the chronic shortage of before and after-school childcare, we need to develop solutions for parents to access different childcare avenues that work for them.
Our research showed how heightened these issues were for parents of children with SEN needs, with 2 in 5 parents saying their school lacks suitable after-school care.
The grim consequence of not having access to after-school care is that one parent needs to scale back their hours to make it work. Guess which parent it almost always is? There are already 1.4 million women who would like to work more hours than they do and can’t, and 870,000 women who cannot currently work at all due to the cost and availability of childcare.
I founded Koru Kids to solve this problem and we've now delivered over 2 million hours of childcare to many thousands of families. But the UK's a big place, and even as the biggest after-school childcare provider, I'm acutely aware of the massive mountain still to be climbed.
Koru Kids can't solve this problem alone. The system around us needs to change, too. The government needs to look at childcare from ages 0-11 and really understand the needs that arise for parents after nursery in the school years, too. While there have been hints of funding in this space, the timeline is long, and it will begin with trials in just 13 regions. This isn’t enough. We urgently need to reconsider the underlying structures and empower parents to be able to access more flexible childcare solutions, and to allow more different types of childcare providers to thrive. Childcare is essential infrastructure for modern living. We need to build it properly so that families everywhere can flourish.