Last month, my daughter got the flu. Days bled into miserable weeks of cancelled work and missed nursery as the virus hopped from her to my husband to me; a groundhog day fever dream of Bluey, Calpol syringes and animal crackers. Financially, it was just as ruinous. Patchy earnings, alongside the nursery fees we paid despite her being unable to attend, left us at least £700 in the red – for the second time in three months (in December, three weeks of unexplained fever culminated in my daughter’s eardrum exploding; a relief for all of us).
Those calculations may look stark on the page, but working families are now being expected to swallow gargantuan losses like this on a month-to-month basis. Britain’s nursery fees are some of the most expensive in the world: a full-time place for a child under the age of two costs on average more than £14,000 a year in the UK (in London, it’s at least £19,000 a year). Average fees increased by 44% between 2010, when David Cameron took office, and 2021, while average wages have largely stagnated, if not fallen in real terms. Somehow, parents today are expected to magic up an extra salary for the luxury of being able to work. And that’s without accounting for the baseline costs of raising, feeding and clothing children.
Forcing women to plug the holes in our gaping state-care offering with unpaid labour has its consequences. The number of women aged 25 to 34 leaving work to look after family is rising at the sharpest rate for 30 years, according to ONS data. A new report by the consultancy firm PwC found the UK had slipped down the international league table for women in work by five places, citing the “motherhood penalty” as the most “significant driver of the gender gap”. Three in four mothers who pay for childcare say it no longer makes financial sense for them to work, according to Pregnant Then Screwed. “I’m just trying to keep some skin in the game,” says a friend, who, after nursery fees and rent, is barely breaking even and has had to reduce her hours.
Extortionate fees are just one part of the problem: 98% of women using childcare think the government is not doing enough to support them. Inflexible hours, a staffing and retention crisis, childcare deserts, years-long waiting lists: it’s hardly surprising that so many working women have already thrown in the towel. In October, tens of thousands of desperate parents took to the streets demanding action.
And yet, political solutions to our childcare woes have been repeatedly kicked into the long grass. The best option Liz Truss could come up with was reducing staff-to-child ratios – a wildly unpopular proposal among parents and providers alike over legitimate concerns it would undermine quality in early years settings. England already has the lowest qualification requirements for its early years workers compared to Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand and Switzerland, and pays the lowest wages, despite evidence that higher quality providers inspire more positive outcomes.
Rishi Sunak is said to be considering other cost reduction measures for parents, including adding an extra 30-hours-a-week entitlement for working parents of children aged nine months to three years, offering a smaller number of free hours for two-year-olds, and an offer of 10 free hours for disadvantaged one-year-olds.
How exactly our crumbling provision will accommodate those extra places is another question. Nursery workers are already leaving the sector in their droves. Providers squeezed by deliberate government underfunding for the best part of a decade are shutting up shop at the fastest rate in six years. Reducing costs for parents alone will just create more problems.
Any plan to tackle Britain’s broken childcare provision must first focus on repairing our ailing provision, says Joeli Brearley, founder of Pregnant Then Screwed – that means shoring up providers, improving quality and attracting more talent to the sector.
Admittedly, this would require an upfront investment of billions of pounds, a daunting sum to the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, who is reportedly “concerned about cost” as he considers what the Conservative government is prepared to stump up to fix this mess ahead of the spring budget. But a chronic lack of vision is already costing us dearly.
In the UK, 540,000 mothers have been prevented from entering paid work due to a lack of suitable childcare; 880,000 have reduced their hours at work; and 470,000 have quit their jobs, according to new figures from the Centre for Progressive Policy. Enabling mothers to work the hours they want would generate upwards of £9.4bn in additional earnings a year, it calculates, an additional economic output equivalent to 1% of UK GDP.
Elsewhere, savvy developed economies know this. In Quebec, Canada, childcare is treated as critical infrastructure, like schools or roads. Since its not-for-profit model was introduced two decades ago, costing parents around C$10 (£6) a day, 85% of Quebec women aged 26 to 44 are part of the workforce – the highest percentage in the world, according to Pierre Fortin, an economist at the University of Quebec. “The programme is paying for itself,” he said, thanks to the extra tax generated and reduction in social benefits.
In New Zealand, childcare providers with a higher proportion of qualified staff receive higher rates of funding, which drives up quality of education and staff wages, and in turn reduces costs for parents. In Japan, a similar system of incentivising higher quality care exists, alongside free childcare for three- to five-year-olds. In both countries, where workers are highly qualified, outcomes for children are overwhelmingly positive. In Australia, childcare subsidy was introduced in 2018, a means-tested benefit to help families cover the cost of childcare. A cost-benefit analysis found a return of A$2 (£1.10) for every A$1 spent on preschool education.
European neighbours such as Sweden pay their childcare workers a healthy wage, attracting a steady stream of talent to the sector. Another PwC study found that the UK would see a $177bn boost to its annual gross domestic product by increasing the female employment rate to that of Sweden.
In Germany, children have a legal right to childcare, and prices range from €70 (£62) to €150 per child a month. In France, state-funded creche places are offered to all children from two months old. Norway offers kindergarten to children between one and five, with the cost linked to your income. In Luxembourg, the government provides up to 60 hours free a week and subsidised care for all children aged between one and four. In Estonia, parents are guaranteed a nursery place for children from the age of 18 months, for a nominal cost.
What these schemes have in common is heavy state investment. Labour’s plan to finance state-funded nurseries if it wins the next election looks promising. Currently, 70% of early years providers are private businesses, leaving parents vulnerable to inconsistent quality and sudden gaps in provision if they close their doors (many have already done so).
If the harsh reality of life as a working mother doesn’t stir you; or the economic argument for investment in the early years sector isn’t persuasive enough, then what about the reams of evidence on childhood development that has shown time and time again that education in our early years dictates future outcomes. Our dismissal of early years settings as glorified holding pens where children can be supervised ignores the fact that quality childcare is really about education in the formative years, with all its transformative potential. Almost half of the attainment gap at age 16 is already in place before children start school, and a child’s development by 22 months serves as a strong predictor of educational outcomes at age 26. How can anyone argue with that?
Lucy Pasha-Robinson is a writer and commissioning editor
