Response to the childcare announcements in the Spring Budget 2024
In response to the Chancellor’s announcements on childcare in today’s Budget, Ellen Broomé, Managing Director of Coram Family and Childcare, said:
We welcome the Chancellor’s commitment in today’s Budget to guarantee rates being paid to providers over the next two years. We have been vocal in our concerns that the sector will struggle to meet parents’ needs because of the gap between the funding rates and the real cost of delivery.
This is a good first step but the funding is only being put in place for the next two financial years – we call on all parties to support this move and to commit to increasing funding beyond that period. This would give parents, children and employers long-term certainty for an affordable and sustainable childcare system.
The Chancellor’s announcement does not address these existing, systemic challenges -including ensuring high quality affordable childcare is available to lower income families or addressing the recruitment and retention crisis in the childcare sector.
In a fortnight, we will be publishing our annual childcare survey, and year after year this has set out the growing challenges parents have faced with ever higher costs and an increasing lack of places.
We will continue to make the case for genuine, radical reform of the childcare system, and call for a right to early education for all children regardless of parents’ or carers’ background, and bringing early years education into line with schools. This would provide a genuinely transformative start in life for all our children.
Childcare Survey 2024
View the Childcare Survey 2024Notes to Editors
For more information, please contact Emma Lamberton, Communications Manager, Coram at emma.lamberton@coram.org.uk / 0207 520 0427 / 07908 827908. For our latest research on childcare availability, costs and barriers to successful delivery of the expansion of funded childcare, see our Childcare Survey 2024.
About Coram Family and Childcare
Coram Family and Childcare works to make the UK a better place for families by bringing together what we learn from our on the ground parent-led programmes and our research to campaign for solutions that parents want and need. We focus on childcare and early years to make a difference to families’ lives now and in the long term. Before August 2018, we were known as the Family and Childcare Trust.
For more information, please visit:
- Website: coramfamilyandchildcare.org.uk
- LinkedIn: @coram-family-and-childcare
- Facebook: @CoramFamChild
About Coram
Coram is the UK’s oldest children’s charity, supporting children to have the best possible chance in life since 1739. We work as a group of specialist organisations helping more than a million children, young people, families and professionals every year.
We support children and young people from their earliest days to independence, creating a change that lasts a lifetime. We help build their confidence; we help them to develop skills; we uphold their rights, we support practitioners in the areas of fostering and adoption and we find loving adoptive families for the most vulnerable children.
We work in over 2,000 schools supporting nearly half a million children, run London’s largest Regional Adoption Agency and provide free legal advice for thousands of children and families who need it every year.
For more information, please visit:
- Website: coram.org.uk
- Twitter: @Coram
- Facebook: Coramsince1739
- Instagram: coram.uk