Nursery World - Keep it formal

For the Daycare Trust and One Parent Families to call for an enhancement of schemes to allow relatives and informal carers to register as childcare providers, such as the registered home childcarers scheme (News, 6 November), misses two crucial points. First, there is an assumption that the care being provided is automatically good and therefore should be recognised. Grandparents, other relatives, friends and neighbours may be available to care for children for a whole host of reasons, such as being unemployed or retired - but none being that they would actually have chosen childcare as a profession.

First, there is an assumption that the care being provided is automatically good and therefore should be recognised. Grandparents, other relatives, friends and neighbours may be available to care for children for a whole host of reasons, such as being unemployed or retired - but none being that they would actually have chosen childcare as a profession.

Second, such a call supports the outdated belief that childcare is something anyone can deliver and does not require trained skills.

PANN would like this report, Informal care: Bridging the gap for families, to have looked more closely at why parents use 'informal' care and the need to bring some of that informal care into the 'formal' care sector.

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