Written evidence submitted by The Other Half

About the Other Half

The Other Half is a non partisan think tank which develops practical, workable policy in the interests of women.  This is our response to the Commons Select Committee on Education’s call for evidence on Support for Childcare and the Early Years[1]. The Other Half is currently undertaking a review of the impact on household finances of having children, including the costs of formal childcare, and this response includes findings from that ongoing work.

Call for Evidence Terms of Reference

We have responded to the following components of the call for evidence:

Our key messages:

• Childcare costs are a consequence of our current model for working parents. This model leaves limited room for parenting, and parents must use formal childcare to fill the gap.
• A clear majority of parents, particularly mothers, want to spend more time parenting and less time working.
• The incompatibility of children and paid work, and the consequent impact of children on household finances, is a serious affordability problem that prevents people from having children.
• Existing childcare support schemes have low take-up, compromising their effectiveness. Schemes are too complicated and not well understood, proscriptive in design, and do not support stay-at-home parents or informal care arrangements (e.g. by grandparents).
• Despite the hopes of government and parents, a large body of evidence shows that attending formal childcare at a young age or for many hours per week causes emotional and behavioural problems in children, with implications for their attainment in school.
• Enabling pre-school children to spend more time at home and with their family will support their readiness for school by promoting secure attachment and good emotional health.
• Government should focus on enabling the majority of parents to choose to stay home with their young children, in line with their wishes, and in the short term: make childcare support easy to understand and access.
• Education and child development objectives can be advanced through supporting parents with significantly expanded Family Hubs and other localised, targeted models of provision for disadvantaged families.

Formal childcare is a requirement of our working practices

The current UK parenting and working model is that the father’s working patterns remain unchanged by fatherhood, the mother adjusts her working to a greater or lesser extent, and formal childcare fills the gap. If both parents are to work full-time, this will require full-time care by a nursery or childminder, which at ten hours per day leaves parents with only one to two hours of waking hours with an infant each weekday.

Quality childcare of this duration will always be expensive to provide, since it requires in-person delivery with low worker to child ratios, maintenance of premises, and constant attention to the safety and nurture of the children being cared for.  The UK’s childcare workforce – the vast majority female – work long hours in physically and emotionally demanding work, for very low pay.

But parents want to spend less time at the office, and more time with their children:

• In recent polling by the think tank Onward, parents were asked what they would do for childcare if money was no object, and the most popular choice by far was “myself or my partner would stay at home instead of going to work”.[2]
• Another recent survey, by the Centre for Social Justice, found that 78% of parents said they would like to spend more time with their children, but cannot afford to.[3]
• Mothers who work part-time are less stressed and experience greater life satisfaction than mothers who balance parenting with full-time work.[4]

Despite decades of work by feminists, working parent organisations, and some employers, UK working practices do not accommodate parenting.  Mothers working full-time before their baby generally return to full-time work (44%) or part time work (29%) after maternity leave. These mothers are likely to experience career stagnation with lower chance of getting a promotion, and the increased pay that would come with it[5].   Take-up of shared parental leave is very low, at below 10% of eligible couples,[6] because it is financially unfavourable for many families, requires new mothers to give up time with their baby, and as our working culture remains hostile to fathers taking extended parental leave.  Men generally do not change their working patterns after a baby, with 90% returning to full time work.[7]  Although there is much diversity in the modern model of parenting, for parents who previously worked full-time, three years after their child is born they are probably both working, likely both full time.  Many parents[8] say they both need to work to service housing costs, but in doing so incur childcare costs which cancel out much of the additional household income.

The conflict between UK working culture and family life- and the consequent impact of having children on household finances- is a driver of the UK’s “fertility gap”- the difference between the number of children people say they want and the number they end up having.[9] In the UK, people are having fewer children than ever before- approximately 1.6 children per woman- and yet on average the number of children we desire is 2-3. A survey by the charity Pregnant then Screwed reported that of their supporters who had children, over 60% claimed that childcare costs were a key reason they would not have more, and one in four claimed it was the main reason.[10]

Changing the UK’s working model could significantly improve the affordability of having children. The biggest shift in parent-friendly working has come from the Covid pandemic work-from-home revolution, demonstrating that UK employers can embrace bold changes to working practices. Recent analysis of data from the state of California reveals a small baby boom - around a 5% increase in birth rate, the only reversal of downward trends since the 2007 recession- beginning nine months after the pandemic began and continuing afterwards, illustrating that working practices hostile to families have been holding people back from having children when they would like to.[11] 

Childcare support schemes are too complicated

The UK government runs at least eight different schemes across three different departments to help parents with childcare costs. A majority of parents are not accessing all the help they are eligible for, and many have not heard of certain schemes, with the most deprived families generally being less likely to have heard of support schemes.[12] Uptake of tax-free childcare is especially poor: only 10% of eligible families were using it in 2021, leading to an underspend of approximately £660 million per year. Two years after its launch in 2017, a poll by the website Working Mums found that under half of respondents had even heard of the scheme.[13]

A simpler system, where the value of certain benefits was collated and given to parents directly, would have the benefit of being easier to understand and more straightforward to claim, and in doing so ensure that support is directed to those who need it.

The Centre for Social Justice calculate that if the budgets for free childcare hours and tax-free childcare (including the underspend) were pooled, this would generate £3.85 billion which could then be used for a simple cash payment. This idea was popular with parents, with a majority of both Labour and Conservative-voting parents approving of the scheme.2

Support schemes are too proscriptive, and neglect parenting and informal care arrangements

Another reason for lack of uptake of support schemes is that they are too proscriptive. The two largest-value schemes (free childcare hours and tax-free childcare) both give support only via formalised Ofsted-registered childcare centres. For families who are relying on informal childcare (either a stay-at-home parent, or somebody else such as a grandparent or other relative, a nanny or babysitter) these benefits are therefore useless.

A system for supporting childcare should begin by looking at the reality of which childcare settings are used and preferred by parents, and aim to support those. Replacing benefits in the form of free or subsidised childcare with a single cash payment would therefore have a dual benefit: as well as being easier for parents to understand and apply for, this would allow families more choice in care, without any additional cost to the taxpayer. This would also allow parents to choose to spend more of their time parenting, in line with the majority of parents’ wishes.

Formal Childcare does not have the positive effects that government and parents hope it does

The childcare system is intended by government to support children’s preschool education as well as freeing up working hours for parents. It is hoped that children will be more advanced in curriculum subjects at the time they enter school as a result of attending preschool, giving them an educational boost. Despite this hope, there is a large body of evidence which points to                                measurable costs when it comes to “non-cognitive skills”- skills which aren’t on a school curriculum but are of great use to a child’s future, such as attention, motivation, social skills, and emotional regulation.[14]

When children are away from their homes and families for too many hours per day or at too young an age, this can affect their felt sense of security, with potentially harmful consequences to their ongoing emotional wellbeing and ability to form healthy attachments. Most research in this area focuses on “externalising” behaviours- aggression, disruptive or antisocial behaviours, which have obvious implications for their school experience- but “internalising” behaviours- anxiety and social withdrawal- may also be affected.[15]

Research has repeatedly found that there is a link between maternal employment in the first year of a child’s life (and a child being put in a care setting before the age of one) and an increase in later (negative) externalising behaviours.11 A relationship has also been found between attending pre-school childcare for more than thirty hours per week and later externalising behaviours.[16]

An large-scale example can be seen in the Canadian province of Quebec. Quebec instituted formal childcare for all 4-year-olds at a cost of just $5 per day in 1997, expanding the programme to 3-year-olds in 1998, 2-year-olds in 1999 and then children under 2 in 2000. This resulted in a 30% increase in the usage of formal childcare, both as a result of stay-at-home parents returning to work and a shift away from informal family and friend-based childcare.

In children exposed to this new programme, researchers have detected striking rises in externalising behaviour problems and rises in anxiety, which persisted throughout their school years.10,[17] Later research in Quebec found that boys- who generally show more externalising behaviours than girls- show greater increases due to childcare in inattention and hyperactivity scores than girls do, suggesting that universal childcare may be responsible for some of the “growing gender gap in behavioural outcomes”.[18]

Some children from disadvantaged backgrounds do better through attendance at formal childcare settings[19].  In general though, the older the child is, and the fewer the hours they attend formal childcare, the better the outcomes for the average child[20].  There is an inherent tension between supporting children’s development and facilitating the immediate return of both parents to full-time work. A childcare system designed to optimise early years education while minimising long-term emotional and behavioural costs would provide fewer hours of high quality formal care and education, beginning at a later age.

To the greatest extent possible, parents should be supported to work flexibly or part-time, enabling them to spend more time with their families for the sake of both parents’ and children’s well-being. There is much room for government to explore interventions which are targeted at disadvantaged children, and this may include formal childcare, but evidence suggests that formal childcare expansion to the whole population would not bring benefits and would, at a population level, result in negative outcomes for attainment. Targeted interventions which would be very welcome include ambitious expansion of Family Hubs.

Supporting Evidence:

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