The government’s childcare expansion is a big commitment – but fundamentally flawed
4 min read
The government recently completed the rollout of the 30-hour childcare expansion, with eligible families now able to claim support for children aged from nine months to four years
It’s the largest-ever expansion of state-funded early years provision in England and, on paper, a landmark reform. More support for families, and a big political commitment to invest in the early years. But the policy has a fundamental flaw, one that risks entrenching inequality from the very start of a child’s life.
Research has long highlighted income inequalities both in access to the original 30-hour entitlement for three- and four-year-olds, and in the recent expansion – with children in families who do not meet the work requirements unable to access this support. That covers children with parents not in stable employment, who work insecure hours, or who don’t both work enough hours to qualify.
According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), just one in five families earning under £20,000 a year will have access to the expansion, compared to 80 per cent of those with household incomes over £45,000. Recent work by children’s charity Coram found a child with working parents who is eligible for the entitlements will have received three times more government-funded support by the time they start school than a disadvantaged child who does not qualify. The very children most likely to benefit from early intervention and support are now the least likely to be receiving it.
Some may say this difference is by design, with the policy aiming to support families into work and, in turn, promoting economic growth. But decades of research shows that high-quality early education is one of the most effective levers to improve outcomes for children from poorer homes, with associated economic benefits in the longer term. That crucial time in early education can help boost children’s language development, social skills and school readiness.
If the government is serious about the opportunity mission, much more fundamental change is needed
There’s a real risk the existing policy could even contribute to a widening of the attainment gap before school starts – in stark contradiction to the government’s own opportunity mission.
How to rebalance? In the short term, widening access to targeted support for lower income children would help. Disadvantaged two-year-olds have historically been entitled to 15 free hours of early education per week, but eligibility has been eroded over time. According to the IFS, it fell from covering 40 per cent of two-year-olds in 2015 to just 25 per cent in 2022. Rewidening access to this entitlement, for example by increasing income thresholds for eligibility, would allow more children to benefit. Alternatively, government could give all two-year-olds access to at least 15 hours in an early years setting, as is the case already for three- and four-year olds. This would end the strange policy quirk, whereby some of the poorest children access the 15-hour offer, others can get the 30 hours for working families, but a third group falls through the cracks with no support.
Longer term, if the government is serious about the opportunity mission, much more fundamental change is needed. A core entitlement of early education, of at least 20 hours, should be available to all children, regardless of their parent’s employment status. Ideally this would be through greater investment into early years.
But in the current fiscal environment that’s a challenging ask, particularly given the long-term nature of the benefits of investing in the early years, and the shorter-term assessments made of potential government investments by the Office for Budget Responsibility – an issue across many areas of government spending. Without additional investment, change could also come from redistributing existing funding, giving more hours to poorer children, while introducing a sliding scale of means-tested support for additional hours of childcare needed by better-off parents. If the government wants its flagship early years policy to be a success, including for the opportunity mission, it must urgently rebalance support.
Dr Rebecca Montacute is research director at the Social Market Foundation
