Despite the government’s recent promise of an extra £66m, the funding crisis rumbles on. The sector’s collective coffers have a black hole of ten times that - £662 million - at last count. As we all know, this translates as a lack of quality, lack of affordable places and lack of access for parents.
Campaigns have been waged on this issue for several years now and had some cut through. But if the recent spending review pledge represents the latest ‘win’, it clearly doesn’t go far enough to address the damage when rates have been frozen since 2015.
We need to get parents on board, and saying ‘childcare is underfunded’ doesn’t really grab the gonads. As one practitioner said, ‘even when you tell parents about underfunding, the reply is ‘Yes I know, but we’re entitled to this, and it’ll save us a fortune, so we don’t want to pay anything extra’ and then they shop about for the cheapest deal.’
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