Covid Reflections

Childcare and infrastructure in 2025

Welcome to a new series on Election Confection, Covid Reflections, looking at what’s changed since the height of the pandemic, five years ago, and tracing lasting effects from that unique time. Back then, I already had a blog where I wrote about policy issues. That means that there’s a real-time catalogue of my thoughts on politics during the pandemic.

Each edition in this series will begin with my reflections in 2025, inspired by what I posted on that day in 2020, followed by a copy of my original 2020 post. I’ll do this every month. Read on to go back to the future on topics including WFH, technology, gender gaps and eating out…

To kick us off, reflections on childcare and government priorities:

These days the topic of childcare is frequently in the headlines. The government has hailed its roll-out of the first tranche of schools to receive new funding for breakfast clubs in recent weeks. It was a manifesto commitment from Labour to provide breakfast clubs in all primary schools.

But breakfast clubs are only one element of the offer of subsidised childcare. It is pre-school provision which has perhaps struggled most since the disruption of the pandemic. Long under-funded, the sector has strained to meet the demands of expansion of ‘free’ childcare – a policy enacted under the Tories, which Labour is continuing. By September, most working parents of under-5s in England will be eligible to access 30 hours of funded childcare per week, during term time. Whether the early years sector can meet demand is a different matter.

Back in 2020, I wrote (below) about childcare emerging as an afterthought when the government sought to define ‘keyworkers’, and support businesses, in the early days of the pandemic. A ‘war cabinet’ of wealthy men had to be reminded that childcare was essential for frontline workers, and that providers ought to be eligible for the business rate holiday applied elsewhere. The government went on to rectify its initial omission, but it is telling that it happened at all. What it did not do, was to properly cover nurseries’ costs, at a time when they lost income from parents in lockdown, who would normally have been paying for hours outside the 30-hours scheme.

Fast forward 5 years, and early years remains a beleaguered sector. While the current government may have pushed childcare up the agenda, it remains unclear if it is funding its ambitions adequately. Since last September, 15 funded hours of childcare have been extended to 2 year-olds, and in September 2025, a full 30 hours will be available for children from 9 months old. But ‘available’ may be a hypothetical concept. The BBC reported figures showing that only a minority of councils said they had care available in all areas – a proportion which varied from only 29% with respect to under-2’s, rising to just 51% for 3 and 4 year-olds under the 30-hours scheme.

Five years ago, furlough was announced by Rishi Sunak, to mitigate the impact of Covid on shuttered sectors of the economy. Early years was one of the more fragile sectors to emerge from this period, with finances in a fraught state, and difficulties in staff recruitment and retention.

The National Day Nurseries Association has charted nursery closures over recent years. Closures occur disproportionately in more deprived areas, where nurseries have fewer options for raising fees outside the government-funded hours. Over 400 nurseries closed in the academic years from September 2022 to September 2024, affecting over 10,000 children. By contrast, the sector needs to provide an additional 85,000 places to meet demand for ‘free’ childcare hours for children from 9 months in September 2025. At this point, government funding will make up 80% of nurseries’ income.

A recent survey found that most nurseries would not currently commit to fully expanding their provision to meet the 30-hours entitlement starting in September. A court ruling means that nurseries are now more restricted in their ability to charge for extras such as nappies, food or trips for parents using the government-funded hours. This puts additional pressure on already-stretched finances: only a third will therefore definitely extend the current 15 hours entitlement to 30 hours for all eligible 2 year olds; 77% would be raising the cost of extras, while two-thirds (68%) would be limiting funded hours. Over a quarter (28%) thought they might have to close. The reasons given for these measures were the gap between funding for places and the actual cost; and the rising costs of staffing under the government’s changes to National Insurance and minimum wage. Clearly Labour has work to do to make its aspirations for early years a reality.

Meanwhile, there’s been a lot of emphasis on housing infrastructure and planning (‘build, build, build’) as a means of delivering growth and spreading opportunity. The government may have talked more about childcare as contributor to the economy than some of its predecessors, but lack of funding remains an issue. Some Labour MPs suspect that the breakfast club roll-out is a sop to demands to tackle child poverty and reduce inequality; Covid left a legacy of increased attainment gaps, between the poorest and best-resourced children. Breakfast clubs will likely make less of a difference to these, than either after-school provision or increasing benefits. Many support lifting the 2-child benefit limit, a key contributor to child poverty, but which the government seems unlikely to scrap in light of fiscal pressures.

Parents report a widespread lack of childcare places, impeding their ability to work. At the centre of it all, young children are turning up at school, having missed out on socialising and learning during the pandemic, with indications of delay in their development. Until childcare really is seen as infrastructure, and catch-up services in schools are well-resourced, the effects of Covid will likely linger on.

Trains, planes, and…childcare (2020)

Bridges, tunnels, roads, rail, airports – don’t you just love infrastructure? All the stuff that keeps us going - our government has wanted to be seen to commit to the grand physical projects that will be a central part of the ‘levelling up’ process, and Boris Johnson has been particularly keen to promote this. But if there’s one thing the current Coronavirus crisis is showing us, it’s that behind the conventional idea of infrastructure, lies another vital world of support: the childcare and education workforce (predominantly female) that enables health workers, food distributors – and basically all of us with children - to get to work. And it is schools and nurseries that often fill the gaps experienced by the most vulnerable among us: free meals, a place of safety, for the children with the least support at home.

Imagine childcare workers’ surprise, then, to learn that the business rates holiday provided for key sectors of the labour force, was announced, at first, without including nurseries as among its beneficiaries. The Early Years Alliance (the largest representative organisation for the pre-school sector in the UK) declared itself ‘disappointed and frustrated’ at this omission - which was later reversed by Rishi Sunak. He announced that there would also be ‘zero business rates for 12 months for all private childcare providers’ in a new statement on 19^th March. Welcoming this rectification, the Early Years Alliance also pointed out that childminders would not benefit from it. This situation exposes both the diversity of the childcare sector, and a lack of immediate priority on the part of the government. There is now a scramble to support parents who still have to turn up to work in our extraordinary times – especially those on the frontline of the health service and food supplies. It is not satisfactory for childcare to be an afterthought. It may be that the initial confusion could have been allayed by greater diversity in the ‘war cabinet’ at the heart of government’s Coronavirus response. As BBC Women’s Hour discussed today, all of the ministers in this group are men, and often men who are sufficiently wealthy to afford in-home help with any childcare needs. With a more representative group at the table, the childcare and early years sector, as used by most parents, may have been better appreciated from the start.

I’ve written before about childcare as a key web of support underlying our more conventional ideas of infrastructure – childcare services support parental employment and are an important factor in enabling parents (especially fathers) to commute longer distances to work. And I’ve also written about the longstanding underfunding of the early years sector. The government has pledged to continue funding the 30 hours free childcare available to 2-4 year olds with employed parents, but this money does not cover nurseries’ costs, and without the fees for additional hours coming in from parents, it is hard to see it as a complete solution to the issues presented by temporary shutdown of the sector. Meanwhile, it was also unclear to begin with, precisely who was defined as a ‘keyworker’ in the government’s definition of occupations entitled to continuing school and early years provision. This presented a headache for providers trying to work out how to plan remaining open. There was also uncertainty around who exactly in the childcare workforce was considered a keyworker themselves. The government has now clarified that childcare workers – including childminders - are considered keyworkers, and therefore part of a vital infrastructure of support. Tell parents something they didn’t know….

*UPDATE: As I was writing, the government announced a major package of support for the workforce. All employers – including charities who figure widely in childcare provision - will be able to take advantage of this support to retain employees during closure. It will take a little time to get off the ground. However, childminders are usually self-employed and therefore will receive less generous support from government measures*

Originally published at: https://wonklifebalance.wordpress.com/2020/03/20/trains-planes-andchildcare/