Announcing the funding, employment and equal opportunities minister Margaret Hodge last week told a London conference on student parents, organised by the Daycare Trust, 'Training and further education is vital. Without these new places, many parents would not be able to take on the challenge of learning new skills and broadening their horizons, and getting better jobs and pay. Priority for these places will be given to those who need help the most.'
At present student parents face particular problems accessing help with childcare costs, as they are not eligible for the childcare tax credit element of the Working Families Tax Credit. The 4m, which comes from the European Social Fund, is in addition to the 15m that the new Learning and Skills Council will receive to create childcare places over the next three years. The Learning and Skills Council took over from TECs and the Further Education Funding Council on 1 April.
Mrs Hodge told the delegates that the combined funding would 'create enough places to help around 35,000 children'.
Addressing the same conference, Anne Sofer, trustee of the Nuffield Foundation, said the charity had decided to provide grants to women students for childcare only in 1998 because it was clear that there was a 'huge gap' in provision for this group. Most current award holders are lone mothers, a group which faces above-average childcare costs, according to a study carried out by the National Centre for Social Research.
Ms Sofer said many student parents' needs would not be met by on-site childcare facilities and that a flexible approach was important. Parents often preferred informal childcare within the family, but this was not necessarily free.
She said, 'With the rate of marriage and relationship breakdown, more grandparents are being called on to support women who want to study and work and grandparents sometimes have to give up work to play this part. Increasingly, they feel it isn't fair to ask them to do this without some reimbursement.'
The majority of students applying for grants from the Nuffield Foundation hope to take up courses in teaching, nursing and social work. 'These are people we badly need in society and we are not making it easy for them. It's not just money - the system itself can appear, from the parent's point of view, to be terribly confusing, discontinuous and inflexible,' Ms Sofer said.
