This report by Coram Family and Childcare explores the current provision of wraparound childcare (before and after school childcare). It finds that local authorities are facing significant challenges in providing wrapraround childcare that meets parents' needs due to funding pressures, challenges with recruiting staff and issues with mapping supply and demand.
Local authorities are facing significant challenges with increased demand for services and lack of funding, with an identified funding gap of £4 billion over the next two years. Alongside existing challenges in the childcare sector, making sure there is sufficient wraparound provision available is a challenge for some local areas, and understanding the availability of provision, particularly unregistered provision, can be challenging for already overstretched local authority teams.
This is reflected in the findings of the report, which found that against the backdrop of greater volatility in the wraparound childcare market since the pandemic, sector experts were consistently seeing shortages in the availability of wraparound care. This is in line with findings from CFC’s most recent Childcare Survey, published in March 2023, which found that only a quarter of local authorities had sufficient provision for parents working full time with children aged 5-11.
Conversely, parents reported that wraparound provision was not always flexible enough to reflect their working lives. They felt providers could be too rigid around needing to book sessions so far in advance that they couldn’t always guarantee a spot, and the hours could be too limited. Parents working atypical hours, those who had long commutes and single parents also reported difficulty in finding wraparound childcare to match their needs. Sector experts noted that the government’s focus on term-time childcare only was a missed opportunity and that unless holiday childcare was factored in, the intervention was unlikely to achieve its aim of supporting parents to work.
The research also found that children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) were particularly poorly served. One parent observed from her own experience that “parents with children with additional needs are excluded from wraparound childcare”.