Counting our cost of childcare

Mouthy Money editor Edmund Greaves recounts his experiences when figuring out how to arrange childcare for his young son.

My son was born in October 2023, just old enough to take advantage of the new 15 hours free childcare provision in England.

But planning our childcare journey for him has been anything but simple.

We were super organised about childcare – but it actually didn’t help us at all.

The first thing to do was for my wife Ellyn to decide how she wanted to change her work hours – and see if her employer would be happy with this.

The good news was that they were.

Her arrangement went from five days a week, 37.5 hours, to 30 hours a week. However she would get every Wednesday off, plus every other Thursday. She was able to do this by stretching her days at each end so she’d only lose one day a week’s income. So far, so good.

She would lose four days of income a month effectively, but we were able to absorb it mostly, and the income benefit of her working (and us paying for childcare in the meantime) was marginal at best.

This meant we had to find three days of childcare a week one week, and four the next. Ellyn’s wonderful parents have stepped in to do two days a month, taking care of the Thursdays that she works.

OK. SO. Three days a week then of paid childcare.

As I said, we were being very organised about this, and made the plans in June LAST YEAR (2023), when she was just five months pregnant. Being aware of the difficulties of childcare provision, even ahead of these new schemes commencing, we decided to act quickly.

For context, this was three months after former Chancellor Jeremy Hunt announced the extension of free childcare hours to nine months of age in England, which was due to start September 2024.

 The timing of our son’s birth (and the point at which he’d qualify) couldn’t have been luckier to coincide with this.

We had decided, since both Ellyn and I had grown up in and out of the homes of childminders rather than nurseries, we were going to look down this route for our son.

We found a (notionally) great childminder, met her and looked around her home, and agreed to have her take on our son three days a week. Jobs a good ‘un so they say.

Not so fast.

Our error at this juncture was that we didn’t formalise this agreement, with a deposit or a contract.

Fast forward to March this year and the childminder gets back in touch with us to say, so sorry, she can no longer take our son on from September. It turns out that with the extension of the free childcare hours all of her existing clients had begun asking for more hours with her, in effect absorbing all her free capacity. Disaster.

At this point we were unceremoniously thrown into the helter skelter scramble for childcare places.

With choice no longer a luxury, we were forced to widen our searches to include nurseries. The first we approach – which was actually brand new and only just in the process of opening – was already oversubscribed with a waiting list. We found this time and again, most of the nurseries in our area simply had no places.

We were unaware at the time, but it turns out the area of England we live in has some of the worst per-head of child provision in the country. What a dubious honour.

Finally, we found a nice local nursery in our area with capacity to take him on. Ellyn had the good foresight to also ask them if they knew any childminders in the area with space (the ones we had found online had none). Unbelievably fortunately for us, they did in fact.

Long story short – we found enough to cover those three days a week – two with the new childminder and one at the nursery. But for a short while there it felt pretty close to disaster, and what we have now is a bit of a compromise.

The prospect of either of us having to cut back more days to juggle time with him would not have been good for our finances – indeed it would probably have been something of a nightmare.

More from Edmund Greaves on Mouthy Money

Allocating resources

The 15 hours of free childcare is, personally, a godsend for us. But no one explains that 15 hours doesn’t mean 15 hours.

When I first heard of it, to me it sounded like two days. After all, the typical office working hours are 7.5 per day. This is not how the free hours work.

15 hours is for TERM TIME only. If you want to stretch it to 51 weeks of the year, then its actually only 11 hours. For the purposes of the funding, our nursery counts 10 hours of childcare as one day.

The nursery then absorbs almost all the hours, with us getting one free hour a week from the childminder, in effect.

We’ve then set up the tax-free childcare account which pays the childminder. We put in something like £265 a month, and she gets £330 from the government. Also a great money saver for us.

In practice, this deal isn’t bad. But it has been a huge complicated and at times unnerving scramble to get right.

I can only imagine the struggles up and down the land to square this provision. The rules are barmy in many ways, particularly the one around timing mothers’ return to work and whether that entitles them to the free hours.

This is something Pregnant Then Screwed has rightly highlighted as being a particularly egregious unintended consequence of the system.

Anecdotally among our group of NCT parents we met when doing the baby training, two of the mothers are in this position where they have to cut short maternity leave just to ensure they don’t lose a whole term of free childcare hours. It is absolutely perverse.

But beyond that I return to our original issue – the childminder who ditched us.

Clearly this wasn’t done in any sort of deliberate way, she was simply provisioning her existing clients which was totally understandable.

However, this has happened because the last government hiked the amount of free provision to parents – WITHOUT FIGURING OUT HOW TO INCREASE THE SUPPLY at the same time.

We’re all aware of how difficult it is to start a family in this day and age. Birth rates are on the floor when really we need all the workers (*cough* taxpayers) we can get.

The sacrifices we make in careers, where we live, the toil of achieving home ownership and a myriad of other things conspire against us when we just want to start a family and experience the joy that brings to our lives.

Its bigger than just childcare though. Time and again we have these kinds of schemes put in front of us by government. Think of Help to Buy (and a myriad of other housing ladder schemes) as an example.

We’re constantly offered ways to ameliorate demand for something without thinking about how to increase the supply of it.

This rabbit hole extends wheezes in the NHS, the justice system, the energy market and all sorts of other areas of our lives that the government touches.

Unless we figure these problems out, it’ll never get better.

In a perfect world we’d have the money and the time not to need it, but the reality of modern life leaves us with little other option.

The good news is my son has started regular childcare, and bar some tears at the start, is loving the variety and new friends it brings.

Photo credits: Pexels