Nursery World - No-one home

An alarming drop in childminding has prompted two studies into the people who do the job, as Ann Mooney reports In the past five years the number of childminders in England has dropped by 30 per cent to 72,300. It is thought that some of this decline is due to the removal of inactive childminders from the register, but findings from two recent studies undertaken by the Thomas Coram Research Unit throw light on other reasons.

In the past five years the number of childminders in England has dropped by 30 per cent to 72,300. It is thought that some of this decline is due to the removal of inactive childminders from the register, but findings from two recent studies undertaken by the Thomas Coram Research Unit throw light on other reasons.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) sponsored the studies. The first surveyed more than 1,000 childminders, with 30 in-depth interviews, between 1999 and 2000, and looked in general at what it is like to work in the job. The second, carried out in December 2000, surveyed 205 former childminders and looked at why they had stopped childminding.

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