AIBU to feel annoyed about ‘free childcare’

[CoolMoose]

My 2yo has just started to receive the ‘free’ 15 hours. AIBU to feel like it’s such a joke?! He attends full time at nursery and our bill has reduced from £1600 a month to just shy of £1400 a month (£240 a month reduction). They only offer the funding stretched (you can’t just access the free childcare) and you have to pay for ‘add on’ costs. It’s £15 a day for food….a 2yo doesn’t eat that much, surely! In addition, you have to pay full fees for bank holiday closures.

I have an older child and this is definitely getting worse and worse for families even with extra government funding. When my older child was little I paid £550-600 a month for full time childcare without funding and about £150-200 a month with funding (10 years ago).

It’s a joke and yet to see a poor nursery owner , although I do pity the workers are they are paid very little . My daughter got the 30 years free on it 3 years ago and we only paid £10 a month for snacks . So someone is pocketing a lot

(Donning my tin hat here).

If people want children, they should research how much they're going to cost BEFORE actually having them.

Yes, 20-30yrs ago when I had my children, childcare fees weren't as (comparably) expensive as they are now, but salaries were much lower too. There was no such thing as free or subsidised childcare, so parents had to foot the whole bill themselves, and in many cases, where the cost of raising a child was prohibitive, the number of children had by parents would have to be limited.

So, why don't people consider the cost of raising children anymore, instead of expecting other taxpayers to subsidise them?

£15 a day for food at nursery - so much cheaper to do packed lunches. School dinners same - rip off. Do the maths. My DD is now 19 so for the last 17/18 years we've been in the child minder, nursery & school system - look for ways to do everything cheaper, don't just pay their price tag.

The Tories are liars. That's all you need to know.

. It comes at a cost. Even the regular mandatory first aid and safe training, let alone rates, electricity, water, food etc. The if you have 20 kids costing you, the provider, £30 a week, that’s £600 you are short in just one week. It’s not the provider’s fault - it’s the government for promising what it can’t deliver. At least not without losing standards or childcare facilities themselves

^

This is where government subsidies come in.

Other countries do it, why can't Britain??

@Grammarnut

We relocated to Denmark a few years back and yes, nurseries are often cheaper to pay for parents.
The cost of childcare depends on parents' income but max bill is around £400 a month.

But! Taxes are much much higher.

Are UK citizens ready to take the toll of higher taxes to fund child care?

@Skippythebutterfly

Most Danish nurseries aren't based in the woods. Few are. And to say the nurseries are excellent is a streach.
A lot of childcare in Denmark now close at 3 pm at Fridays to cut councils costs driving parents nuts because they often work 8-16. So Denmarks isn't always that great either.

You're right - nothing was easier when we were younger, we all had to 'live within our means'. If you can't afford to live the lifestyle you live then you have to make sacrifices & make do with what you've got.

My mum says things like this and I think it's clear childcare has changed vastly!

There's so much thing around us at all, all the church nurseries have long since shut down as they were financially unsustainable. Only one primary school has a nursery and it's still £300 a month for a 9-3.30 term time place, hugely oversubscribed, and leaves you scrabbling to cover the holidays as they will still be too young for any holiday clubs.

It's private nursery or no nursery.

That is disgusting! I don't think an adult eats £23 worth of food a day!

Free childcare at the church hall for toddlers? And only £3 top-up to have a morning and afternoon session at the school nursery? This didn't even exist as options for my mum 20 years ago. Also, most parents don't work 9-3. Many grandparents are a long way off before retirement age so they can't provide childcare (my DD will be 17 or 18 when her grandparents retire).

The funny thing is, if women dont have children because they cant afford childcare, there wont be enough young people in future to wipe the 'taxpayer's' bum when they are in the nuring home for one, look at what is happening in Japan and Korea with the massive low birth rate crisis. We need people to have kids for the society to keep going! So yes, the taxpayer needs to contribute if we live in a country with extortionately high costs of the said childcare.

The world has changed in 30 years.

Wages have not kept up with inflation, the vastly higher cost of housing, the increase in women’s participation in the workforce, the very high cost of childcare.

Less women are having babies at all, and those women are having fewer babies. Our birth rate is the lowest on record and decreases every year. People aren’t having kids - it’s unaffordable.

The extraordinarily prohibitively high cost of housing requires two full time wages to sustain it. The cost of a childcare place has increased above inflation, and looking at the figures shared here seems to now be about equivalent to a full time wage.

Having a child shouldn’t mean the family needs to live in grinding poverty.

At this rate our population will collapse in a generation or two.

Agree. My husband and I both have comparatively well paid jobs and live in a comparatively cheap part of the country. We have one son aged 17 and would have loved another child but we enjoy a decent standard of living (multiple holidays a year etc) and so chose to maintain that and stop at one child. Do I regret that - probably, yes, but we had to make a choice.

We know two couples who each own a couple of private nurseries and they have made a lot of money from them.

They were there between 2016 and 2020 and both are still open and running now… nearly all local primary schools also have similar. Bit of competition for the private nurseries so probably also drives down the prices there…

i think the main issue is that people with pre-schoolers tend to stick to normal working days and hence need wraparound care 8-6 whereas in my town it’s the norm for people with school age children to work flexibly to do pick ups/drop offs

What about all the teachers, nurses, carers, police etc in your town then? Not everyone has a job where you can just ‘work flexibly’ when you have a baby?

nearly all local primary schools also have similar.

Where do you live that nearly all of the local primaries have them? It’s usually only the schools in areas of high levels of socio-economic deprivation that have nurseries attached.

That's not true. In London (and most major cites) most schools have pre-school attached to them.

I live in an affluent area of west London and pre-school nursery is normal as are private nurseries

Because the government don’t and won’t pay the money needed. For years they have been working off out of date data and costings.

I was running a not for profit village preschool. Should have been a perfect job alongside bringing up my own son. Also had Ofsted outstanding 3 times in a row, and were regularly the most recommended early years setting locally. I did at least 35 hours a week during term time, plus lots of ‘unpaid’ during the holidays, all for £12,000 a year. I had a nervous breakdown and left.

I'm sorry, yes it's expensive, but the child is your responsibility, not the tax payers. You should consider before having a child if you need to change jobs, look for a childminder (generally cheaper than nursery), save so more time at home... Nursery's are more expensive now than a decade ago because staff have smaller ratios, more training and the cost of living has gone up impacting their running costs.

I just see this as the equivalent to complaining about the cost of private school. It's your child and your decision.

Children and childcare cost money. I get little or next to extra tax benefits having had no children and I don’t mind subsidising those with children but everyone knows nurseries are expensive. Partly why DB and his wife are moving to an area where childcare is half the cost of their Hackney nurseries.

This. And I know a few childminders who seem great at their jobs. Use them if you can’t afford nurseries.

My DM when I was a baby ran her own playgroup from her house first of all and then started a one o’clock club. She never mentions costs. Someone else I knew ran a local playgroup in the church hall when her DC were born/small.

I’m sorry but the continuation of the working population is a societal responsibility. How do you think the economy will continue exactly, if the general working/middle classes are finding it financially unviable to have children at all, or having to decide to stop at one child in a best case scenario? The numbers don’t work. It is not 40 years ago. One income is rarely enough, no matter what sacrifices you might make. If both parents now need to work full time then yes, subsidies should be made or we are forcing women (almost always women isn’t it) out of the workforce or forcing some families into financial hardship simply because they’ve had a child. Other European countries see the value in balancing accessible and affordable childcare with the economic benefits of both parents being able to work and raising the next generation of workers too.

However, it’s sadly very clear from this thread that many think having children should be a luxury preserved for the well off. Dangerous mindset. And where exactly do you think that will leave us in 25 years or so?

And thinking that everyone should be ok because they can simply use these magical church playgroups up and down the U.K. that run on dust and laughter, I don’t even know where to start, because you are being idiotic.