AIBU to think UK childcare for under-fives is fundamentally broken?

[Nottoobadreally]

To believe that under 5s childcare in England is broken. My child attends nursery 4 days a week (I have to pay for 8.5 hours a day, though she attends only 7 hours as we are locked into full days). Not sure what other parts of the UK are experiencing. My monthly bill in June is £889.48. Mostly "consumables" as we have the 30 hours funding. We are on our first holiday in 2 years for 1 week of that (no reduction). This is monthly so over £10k a year in nursery fees and so it is more than our mortgage. She doesnt wear nappies, the staffing is around 1:8.

Aibu to think the system is broken and the government should fund universal childcare until school? All local nurseries (south-east england) have similar prices as national insurance has risen for them, but funding hasn't. I'm aware the staff aren't rolling in it and even with funding at this level, staff are mostly on minimum wage.

I have older children and amounts weren't much more before the new funding. The staffing ratios at that time were so much better though. Now there's not the staffing ratio to take children to the toilet. A recent email was sent asking parents to keep their children off nursery for 1 month while potty training due to the number of accidents (yes, whilst paying over £1000 if your child attends full-time).

Yes- you're being unreasonable. You decided to have children, you should funding them.

No- yanbu- the childcare system for under 5s is broken and 30 hours free childcare is non-existant.

I support universal childcare because todays children will be paying our pensions and social care (and doing that work). Child free couples will still be relying on the next generation to support them in old age so I dont think they should be exempt from funding it

It's certainly deeply flawed but not sure completely broken. you are using 34 hrs per week at a year-round nursery (and don't be ridiculous thinking you should get money off when you are on holiday or for the 1.5hrs a day you don't use - they still have the same bills and wages to pay and they cannot sell the hours you don't want elsewhere, so you have to buy them)

The government funding is only "supposed" to be funding 22.5 hrs of that but in reality the government funding is ridiculously low per hour and cannot genuinely be expected to cover more than about 17hrs of good quality childcare - the few nurseries that can genuinely manage 30 hrs per week tend to operate term-time only with a strict 6hrs per day 9-3 and often have a subsidy in the form of rent-free council-owned premises, but most nurseries can only make ends meet by having extra charges in creative ways that get around loopholes, or they will go bust, they are not charities. If you don't like it, get a place at a nursery that only offers 30hrs pw termtime only and use a nanny for the rest of the time - that will be more expensive I promise you.

Given all this, I would expect your weekly bill to be about 50% of the real cost. Your £899pcm works out as just over £200pw and a real childcare cost of a little over £12 per hour of which you are paying half. That's a perfectly reasonable cost to pay for any professional service.

No the government should not be providing more than 30hrs. They should pay a more realistic cost for those 30hrs though.

It was pretty broken when mine went 10 years ago there was no childcare funding (if you were working) til they hit 3-4 (and it was term-time only and only kicked in the summer after they turned 3), which for one of my summer-borns meant we got about 6 months of funding total. The nursery fees were always more than our mortgage. I've no idea how other countries do it but my friends in European countries are very well supported and childcare there is seen as a good careeer. State provision is probably the only way this can happen . It's no better when they start school as we only have private wrap around care which is £25 a day and holiday clubs are insane. I worked because it meant I built up flexibility for when the kids went to school and I mostly work from home now.

Yes the problem is that they require a profit. More investment is needed into public nurseries that are attached to primary schools. These could still be as a paid for basis, but all profits to go back into the system.

Other countries manage it.

I live in Wales, in a reasonably priced location so I don't think the prices are as bad as SE England but we have no funding for free hours until 3!

My DD attends 2 days a week and it costs us approx £550 monthly (after the 20% childcare offer). She turned 3 last month but we have to wait until Sep to benefit from free hours.

£550 might not sound a lot but proportionate to local wages it's still a shit tonne 😔 Honestly it's a big factor in us sticking with one

There's been a massive trend of childcare chains being bought by private equity funds who will seek to extract profit, whether through:

• owning the buildings in separate property companies to maximise rent yields
• centralised admin & charging high fees for it
• introducing unnecessary levels of complexity like software systems to plan meals, all of which can be charged for
• developing "brands" that must be paid for by franchisees

Parents should be contributing to the costs of childcare. But the government should be:

• strongly promoting childminding as by working from home, property costs are vastly reduced

• developing a system of council owned non profit childcare provisions, ideally utilising existing underused spaces like empty classrooms in undersubscribed schools, underused parish/church halls

Unfortunately they will not do this, as they are short sighted. The current metrics of "economic growth" reward turning childcare into a profitable business sector, with jobs being created etc, and government are too stupid to see that if people don't have to spend as much on this, they will have more money to spend on something else. The high cost of childcare also acts as a deterrent to parents working more.

Totally agree

There are many scenarios in which you can say "it was your choice to have children", but this isnt one of them.

I dont recognise the scenario OP describes but maybe thats because my nursery bill is half my mortgage. And we're not charged for consumables.

Asking parents to take a month off for potty training + still pay for it is ridiculous, though.

Your choice to have kids, i didn’t work properly when mine were tiny, instead I got a job with no pay but came with a 2 bed flat, had one old banger of a car, cloth nappies, breast fed, and we got by just. I went back when they were both in school, 5 hours per day. There was 12.5 hours from age 3 when mine were tiny!

A month off nursery for toilet training?! Hard no from me. That’s a massive lazy and unreasonable response by them. Surely most people use childcare so they can work, so they have to take unpaid leave or use a lot of their annual leave?

I don’t understand the ‘I didn’t get subsidised childcare so why should you’ posts. Don’t we want life to be easier for those who come after us?

i’m sure the current system is quite inefficient and it might actually be cheaper for the government and better for parents to use a different system

there are plenty of things the government choose to pay for that I don’t really agree with but we live in a society and accept that will be the case

I know this is going off on a tangent but please don't use the word nappy when referring to adults. It's demeaning, use the word pad instead.

I've name changed for this so it isnt outing. We pay £950 a month for 4 days (including 30hrs funding) for DD2. DD1 was in nursery before the 30hrs funding changed to the younger ages so we've paid a lot over a long time. I accept it is part of my continuing to build my career - ive had a promotion during the time my DC have been little so it has been worthwhile. The nursery my kids go to also offer lovely opportunities and it has been lovely seeing the DC thrive there.

A family member of mine works in a nursery in a different part of the country, which charges less than half than what i pay. The difference? Their setting operates as a charity so all profits are reinvested and the funded rate for the county they are in entirely covers the hourly fee. So the consumables charges are very small and genuine. I think a better use of the CMA's time is looking at how many nursery chains are run with big profits extracted, excessive "administrative" salaries etc. My suspicion is that private equity is screwing the sector in the same way as it has done with care homes.

I have also seen school nurseries and I think the DfE is completely wrong to be attempting to widen this at the cost of private nurseries. No holiday clubs near us accept under 5s, so unless you have family childcare, you are completely screwed for holiday childcare. We shouldn't be cramming children into schools even earlier - its completely wrong and I fail to understand how the govt think this will end well.

For 3 days a week, 10 hours each day, we pay £7.50 a day for food and that is the only consumable fee. Suncream is provided free but nappies, wipes etc need to be sent in. Another nursery we looked at was £13.70 a day for consumables and food, again sending in nappies, wipes etc. Although the non funded hours are so expensive that if I went to work on the last 2 days of the week and paid for childcare, i would only earn an extra £50 a month take home 🙃

Oh you posted whilst I was typing but made my points in a much better way than I did! 100% agree with this ☝️

Right, but if it costs £1000 in Wales with no subsidy or £1300 in England with a subsidy, wouldn't you rather pay the Welsh price? The point is these 'free hours' haven't made any difference to parents. Parents who were paying full whack before the free hours came in saw their bills go down by a few pounds, not hundreds of pounds, when they did. There's no benefit to any free hours if the overall cost doesn't reduce. It just becomes semantics.

(I'm Scottish with primary age children - I don't have any skin in the game.)

See Cathmawr’s post above: £550 a month for 2 days a week of childcare. 4 days would be £1100, which is considerably more than the £889.48 OP is paying.

That's an absolutely reasonable attitude as long as you don't expect the generation now in childcare to be funding your state pension and NHS care when you're old.

I think they should introduce an opt out waiver for people who think like this. Get a hefty discount on the portion of your taxes that would pay for schooling and childcare....as long as you're happy to forgo your state pension and health care when you retire.

Put like that, I wonder how many people would go for it.

My DM did this when I was little. She'd childmind for one or two children. It was great because it felt like just having extra friends around and she got to earn a little extra money and her friends got affordable childcare in a home environment.

Of course, she wouldn't have been doing all the developmental observations. But she was naturally a hands on mum so lots of crafting, little walks, play time etc. She's still like that with my DC today

Couldn't see her doing that set up with today's regulations and I get it because safeguarding is worth it. But you would think there could be a middle ground.

It doesn't get easier when they start school, childcare becomes slightly cheaper (I still need to pay £1300 for five weeks of two DC at holiday club 3 days per week) but it becomes a logistical nightmare. Many DC attend our village school as it is the only one that offers wrap around in the area, so it is a battle to book your DC in. The holiday club in the nearby town that offered working hours has gone bust (with zero notice) so my DC go to one that runs 9.30-3, but with travel time rather than my usual quick dash across the village. So me and DH have both had to change our working pattern to make that work. Then there's lunch money, school trips, paying for the wrap around etc. I don't know how those on low incomes or single parents survive.

As a child I went to family day care at a ladies house I'm in Australia do they have that in the UK

Yrs there are childminders, they are just a lot more regulated now than in the past.

Years ago, I read about two shift workers (police officers I think) who looked after the others child while they were working. They got in trouble for unregulated childcare.

It absolutely IS! it involves in our circle.of friends 1 parent, usually the mum but some, like your case it's the dad, taking a hit on their career progression by reducing hours or both working every hour and still not making enough money. It's a lot of pressure on families and relationships. We have a child with (honestly in the grand scheme of things quite mild) SEN but it does add extra stress having to balance finances, feelings, needs and still have some kind of relationship ourselves. It's a lot and it was much harder when we'd 2 lots of nursery fees to pay. It's unsurprising how many families break down in those early days. Thank God we seem to have survived and youngest starts school this year.

Sorry I'm rambling but basically it's a huge pressure onf amilies already dealing with huge pressures. And there's always someone responding to say 'having children is a choice' and it absolutely is and one I'm so glad we made and that we were able to have these babies because we struggled for years to have them and our eldest almost died multiple times in babyhood. I'm so grateful for my family and even if it had been even harder I'd still be so glad we have them. But there are pressures that could be helped and I'd be delighted if those currently parenting babies, toddlers, children with health issues and additional needs etc had an easier time of it than we did.

I’m not able to claim the free hours because I earn too much.

The cost of a place is £2,350 a month this year at my nursery. £28,200 (!). It will no doubt go up by 5% in January.

I also have an older child, so my monthly nursery bill is currently over £4,000 a month - nearly £50,000 a year in total.

I will have spent around £200k on nursery fees for my two children.

I am incredibly pissed off to be excluded from the 30 free hours and tax free childcare - I pay a huge amount of tax, and to be excluded from this benefit has left me questioning what exactly I am contributing towards.

I’d be saving around £25,000 off the cost this year if I could claim support. Thats a huge sum of money - I need to earn double that to have it after tax!

Childcare would be less if UK would relax its ratios like most other European countries that have less expensive childcare. Parents have said no, though. So 🤷‍♀️