Turning a mixed childcare market into a 'responsive service'

Tony Blair first declared childcare as ‘a new frontier of the welfare state’ in 2004. Twenty years later, poised for office, Labour are set to inherit an expanding free offer and a childcare market which is becoming publicly controlled – the proportion of places which are publicly funded are projected to rise to 80 per cent.

Local authorities will be responsible for distributing more funds to more providers, supporting more parents to take up the offer and ensuring there are more of the right places to meet new demand. 

But is this expansion of government funding and responsibility enough to make our often-disparate childcare services feel genuinely like a public service, equipped to serve the needs of every child and family? And are local authorities the right midwives to deliver the baby?

A critical factor is how childcare services can be better knitted together with wider state support. Childcare professionals are the daily frontline for the vast majority of families with young children, with the proportion of families using formal childcare traditionally hovering around 70 per cent and now likely to grow. 

Their close relationships with children and parents mean they are exceptionally placed to offer families timely advice and support, identifying additional needs early and help them find their way to expert or specialist help – holding them well until they get there.  But this can only happen if all professionals, irrespective of setting, are able to work as part of a wider local system.

I recently ran a small survey which highlights that a cross-section of providers and council employees see potential for local authorities to play a more proactive connecting role – harnessing their unique position at the centre of communities and services. They wanted to see this in three broad ways.

First, in taking a lead to address community-wide challenges which no single provider can fix in isolation.  A key area in this sphere was workforce recruitment and development. Not only helping a pipeline of new recruits and reducing agency costs, but providing infrastructure to enhance knowledge and skills to meet children’s increasingly complex needs.

Second, in bringing all childcare settings into the fold with wider local early preventative support. For example, having named specialist professionals attached to settings and more opportunities for jointly conducted training and assessments.  

Third, in encouraging quality providers to set up in areas of disadvantage or greatest need. Respondents highlighted the need for better coordination with council planning departments. Given Labour’s new commitment on school-based nurseries, those councils who can effectively broker new partnerships between schools and strong private or voluntary providers will be particularly well placed – there are some interesting models that show how effectively it can work.

There are some really excellent local authority early years teams already striving to work with their childcare sectors in this way. But for the majority, it will require a major pivot.  Years of tightening budgets have seen many reduced to the bare essentials of distributing funds, rudimentary sufficiency assessments and support for settings in crisis.The result is an often-fractious relationship between local government and parts of their childcare sector.And misunderstandings about where local authorities can add most value – for example, the most common thing local authority respondents in my survey thought they should do more of was business support – but not one provider wanted this.

Local authorities are the only ones who can build our mixed childcare markets into responsive and joined-up public services, and the expansion of funded entitlements is a great opportunity to re-cast relationships.  Often the debate about their role in policy circles fixates on ‘market management’.  The next government will need to think far wider than this to provide the conditions of real change.

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