CEY1267
Written evidence submitted by Hometime Childcare Limited
I am the Managing Director of a childcare business in the East Riding of Yorkshire. We currently run two breakfast and after-school clubs in ‘larger than average’ Primary Schools. On of the Schools has added a Nursery class (3-4 year olds) in the last year. Collectively we care for approximately 280 children ages 3-11 term time and employ 14 staff.
Funding is predominantly via the old childcare voucher system, the government tax-free childcare scheme, private payments, student childcare grants and Early Years funding (usually the extended entitlement for Parents who have 30 hours). I am amazed at how so many Parents complain about the cost of childcare but then do not access tax free childcare. We tell them about it when they join us but the take up is low. Most Parents think they aren’t entitled because they work despite us advising them of the criteria and trying to support them to use it. Even those who know they are say the application process is complicated and many seems to have problems ‘setting it up’. The system from our end isn’t perfect but a lot better than when it started and most Parents using it are able to set up regular monthly payments. It would be helpful if we could see the Parents account like we can with the old voucher system as we can them help if theres a problem, whereas with TFC we are left rather blind so to speak. I know the government have done some advertising on this but it seems to be more on social media. I find fewer people are using the original social media platforms and like facebook and twitter and our typical Parent age bracket (30-40) are no longer seeing this. Parents who sign up to the 15/30 funded hours appear to use it more, I understand they are prompted to set up tax-free childcare at the same time as applying for their funding which seems to work. We receive around £3 per hour for our School age children so the funded rate for 30 hours is better than that and we have no complaints – however I will return to this age group when I discuss staffing. The systems for claiming the 30 hours through our local authority are clunky and a bit of a faff but it works and there is plenty of support if you need help from our FISH team at East Riding of Yorkshire Council who are brilliant. Both clubs are in West Hull villages considered to be reasonably affluent. We do have some Parents using benefits from the government but these are few and tend to be our single Parents. They pay on time and appear satisfied with their entitlement, as do our Student Parents.
Early years provisions have been left ‘battered’ by the pandemic but even before we found it very difficult to recruit and retain ANY staff, never mind qualified staff. Our hours are two short shifts at the start and end of the day so require an early start and a late finish – particularly for staff who have children. We recruit from local 6th form colleges for students looking for a paid work experience type of role, most have an interest in going into teaching, childcare or social care. We ensure that their role does not interfere with their schooling allowing time off for study leave and exams. This has helped us solve some of our staffing problems and the children love having younger people working with them as well as our older staff. By far the main problem breakfast and after-school clubs have relating to staffing is with pre-school age children and I am particularly keen to talk about this.
Both villages have a need for us to include 3&4 year olds in our breakfast and after-school clubs. At one School the pre-school next door have asked us several times if we can help them and the other added a Nursery class (F1) last January and we tried to support them. Due to the OFSTED requirements for staffing this mean that we had to change our manager and recruit staff to the OFSTED ratios which means we needed to employ staff with specific early years educator qualifications which we do not have to do for compulsory school age children. This meant that staff with TA qualifications or very experience lunchtime supervisors (which in my view is the School equivalent of our job and these are the most commonly employed people in breakfast and after-school clubs) could not be employed for these children. I had an excellent Manager at the time with a TA qualification who I had to replace and I have been unable to recruit and remain sufficient ‘relevantly qualified’ staff that OFSTED say we must have so we have had to tell the School we can no longer offer the service to the Nursery children. This is a real shame as some have siblings in the School, we loved caring for these children and this will now impact on the School in terms of future intake. These children are in a Teacher led class in the School day in a School, we should be allowed to use the same judgment as we do for the School age children and make our own decision on what skills and qualifications (if any) our staff have for all of the children to enable us to offer our service to everyone in the School. Our staff have mandatory training in safeguarding, first aid and ongoing in-house and local authority training. At our other School we would like to have supported our local pre-school and offered this service but have had to say no, after our experience. None of our local Schools offer wraparound care below compulsory School age even if they have nursery classes so many of these children will remain in day nurseries when their Parents would rather than be in the School nursery. OFSTED need to understand they are creating an un-necessary barrier for these children. This wasn’t helped by Covid as many childcare staff went into retail. We were closed both lockdowns due to our landlords not wanting us to open and all of our staff were furloughed. We rented rooms in a church and a school at the time, so received no business rates relief as we didn’t pay it of auto-entitlement grants that a lot of businesses did so we could not to pay our staff above the standard furlough percentage and we did have to make redundancies. When we returned after the second lockdown (March 2021) our clubs were at around half the capacity they were before. We are still seeing many Parents using us less as many are now permanently home working so collect their children from School themselves. At one club we have recovered better but that was sadly due to several local childminders ‘giving up’ and us taking over care of their children.
We receive no support for children with SEND at all. As our children are School age the Schools get the support and not us. Those supporting the Schools tend to overlook the part we play in a SEND childs life and I work tirelessly with Parents to try to be involved in meetings regarding support. We have no funding for one-to-one children, we just have to do our best with the staff we have and even one or two children with significant problems in at a time can make this very difficult. We do our absolute best but those children should be supported in childcare as well as School. Many clubs would simply say they can’t meet their needs alongside those of the other children and the Parents would then have childcare problems.
Being located in affluent areas we see very few disadvantaged children so I am unable to offer much input in this area. Though I am the founder of a support group of owners/directors of breakfast and after-school clubs and many are in less affluent areas. They have used HAF funding to offer holiday clubs where the children also receive food which they say have been a great success. We have supported one of our schools by offering a free place to a looked after child who was collected in a taxi after school because his foster Parents had younger children at other Schools. We have also done this for a child in a local traveller community at breakfast club to improve her attendance. We are pleased to support our School with free places in these types of circumstances, it’s part of our commitment to the School community which is extremely important to us but obviously this means we are taking a child without a fee. Fortunately we are in a financial position to do this which I appreciate smaller clubs may not be.
January 2023