Bridget Phillipson’s proposal to extend 30 free hours of childcare to families on benefits is lunacy. Over eight years working on and off in childcare, as both a nanny and in nursery settings, I spent countless hours changing nappies and managing meltdowns, including leading the two-to-three-year-olds class of a nursery in a town made famous by Raoul Moat’s shooting spree. More often than anyone in Whitehall would care to admit, I was raising other people’s children for most of their waking week. What I saw in my time working in the nursery makes me convinced the Education Secretary’s proposal is a bad idea.
Into this mess, Phillipson proposes more free hours, for more families, delivered by a workforce that does not exist
Working parents pay eye-watering sums for full-time childcare, often thousands – or even tens of thousands – of pounds a year, while funding “free” places for others through their taxes, and rightly, targeted support for working families is necessary. Some mothers handed their children over to me in tears, knowing they had no choice but to return to work to keep their households afloat. At the same door, non-working parents dropped off their toddlers for funded hours and cheerfully described days of errands and shopping ahead. In both camps, there were excellent, loving parents, but the system unfairly forced one group to effectively subsidise the other, denying them much-desired time with their own children.
