On the march for proper childcare provision in October 2022 (Picture: Guy Smallman)
Parents are battling a convoluted and complicated childcare expansion scheme, which launches next week.
Half of parents surveyed by the Pregnant Then Screwed campaign group said they were facing issues with the scheme. The requirements are so strict, it’s forcing them to either delay a return to work or locking them out of it for months.
This disproportionately affects women, who take longer parental leave, are more likely to request flexible working hours and more likely to be part-time workers.
The campaign surveyed some 3,658 parents ahead of the expansion of the childcare scheme for the start of the September term.
Some 28 percent are returning to work earlier than they would have liked—and a third say that it’s influencing when they return to work.
Children are only eligible for the first academic term after they turn nine months old. That means if a baby is born in mid-September, their parents can’t access the scheme until the next term begins in January.
Many will be left unable to return to work, and without statutory maternity pay, which is only paid for a measly 39 weeks.
For other women, they face having to leave their babies before they’d like to, to access the funding. This is because parents can only apply for funding that begins in September, January and April.
Amy was forced to return to work early—by 30 September—in order to secure the funding. “We had to put Cassie’s name down for a nursery before she was even born and I have to pay from September to guarantee that space,” she said.
“I am in the final weeks of my leave so I am on statutory maternity pay and am living off savings.”
Joeli Brearley, chief executive of Pregnant Then Screwed said, “Maternity leave is a hugely sensitive and important time. Yet our research finds that the new childcare benefit is forcing many mothers to return to work before they are ready.
She said that, if women are forced to return to work early, they are more likely to ultimately leave their jobs. “No one in government appears to be looking at the holistic experiences of new families,” said Joeli.
Even once parents are back at work, and kids are in care, it’s not simple at all. The government doesn’t pay nurseries and childminders enough to cover the actual costs of delivering this care. So, institutions are forced to charge up “top up fees” and restrict places.
Jodie, mum to two children, said parents need more support to make it work. “I am having to return to work six weeks earlier than anticipated and Felix is having to start nursery a month earlier than we wanted,” she said.
“Having subsidised childcare will make a difference to us as a family, especially as we have two in paid nursery.
“But I feel the way the scheme works has forced us into making decisions we didn’t want to make.”
It is so important that people keep raising the demand for properly-funded, state-provided and high quality childcare.
Astronomically expensive childcare is pushing some women out of the workplace and back to the kitchen sink.
One survey by the Fawcett Society indicated that 250,000 mothers of children under four had been pushed out of the workplace entirely. Some 85 percent of parents surveyed said they couldn’t find flexible childcare.
The poor childcare scheme was first offered up by the Tories and Labour is now implementing it.
The government should extend childcare. But their scheme fails because it pushes the financial burden of childrearing onto individuals—when society benefits—and leaves the childcare system in the hands of profiteers.
The Abortion Rights campaign has called a protest in London on Saturday to defend reproductive rights and call for abortion to be taken out of criminal law.
The protest is in response to the annual rally of an assortment of anti-abortion organisations under the banner of ‘March for Life’.
The anti-abortion march’s slogan is “Abortion is not healthcare”. It’s a direct challenge to the views of the majority of people in Britain. Polls show that 74 percent support changing the law to enshrine a legal right to abortion.
Abortion Rights chair Kerry Abel said, “We have called our protest to represent the majority who support the access to safe and legal abortion.
“We are calling on everyone who wants to ensure that the clocks don’t go back on our rights here in the way that they have in the US to join us.”
The unprecedented rise in women being investigated and prosecuted since 2018 for allegedly illegally ending their own pregnancy has exposed Britain’s archaic laws that criminalise abortion.
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