Meeting free childcare commitments ‘enormously big job’, says education minister

An education minister has warned it will be “an enormously big job” for the Government to meet its commitments on free childcare.

From Monday the Government will fund 15 hours per week of free childcare for eligible working parents whose children are between nine months and two years old – in addition to an existing offer to parents of two-year-olds and 30 hours of free childcare already offered to parents of children aged three and four.

From September 2025, the Department for Education has committed to funding 30 hours of free childcare for most working parents of children between nine months and school age, in line with commitments made by the former Conservative government.

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said early years support is her “number one priority” but the department will need to source 85,000 more childcare places by September 2025 compared with 2023 to expand its free childcare offer.

Education minister Baroness Jacqui Smith described the 2025 expansion as “an enormous increase in capacity” which will be over double the increase in places seen in the past five years.

She told Times Radio: “What we’ve had to really buckle down and do is start the detailed planning about how that’s going to be delivered. So we’ll be making more announcements, for example, about our ideas to create 3,000 more nurseries in unused primary school places.

“We’re working hard on getting the staff in that are going to be needed with our Do Something Big campaign, so that we’re encouraging more people into the labour force, better training opportunities for young people, for example, to do early years apprenticeships, to do the new T-level for early years in education.

“So we recognise that this is going to be an enormously big job.”

Lady Smith added: “What’s happening on Monday is very good news, but we’re not going to be a Government that just announces something and then assumes that it’s done. We know there’s a lot of work that needs to be done.”

Concerns have also been raised that if Government-funded hours increase, childcare providers will be forced to increase prices outside those hours, or charge parents for provisions such as food or nappies.

Lady Smith said nurseries will have to provide options for parents to provide these items rather than charging.

She told Sky News: “What we’ve been very clear about in our guidance is where providers feel that they they need to charge for food, for example, or for nappies within the Government-funded childcare hours, that has to be something that is optional, so parents need to be able to provide their own nappies or provide the lunch themselves.

“But I do take the point that there is a real challenge for early years providers in delivering this big ramping up of provision.

“It is a very good thing. It’s a very good thing for children, and it’s a very good thing for parents in terms of their work choices, but it is something where we need to continue working very hard alongside the providers, and we will do over the next year to make sure that we’ve got those 85,000 extra places and the 40,000 extra staff that will be necessary in order to enable us to get at least close to that entitlement next year.”

The Government has previously said it will aim to meet childcare targets by utilising disused primary school buildings to build more nurseries.