Childcare advice to lift take-up

What started as an off-the-cuff conversation about the decline in access to childcare information for parents quickly evolved into an evaluation of the advice available across 15 nurseries, with plans to share the findings across the sector.

Toad Hall Nurseries Group worked with the Family and Childcare Trust (Fact) to test the benefit of providing parents with up-to-date information on the financial support for which they may be eligible.

Ruth Pimentel, chief executive of Toad Hall Nursery Group, says it launched an advice programme across the chain's 15 settings following a conversation she had with Fact about the demise in children's centres. She could see that closures of centres and cuts to the family support services they provided meant it was becoming difficult for parents to know what help they were entitled to.

"Whereas before you could potentially refer parents to children's centres to access information, with those declining I felt I needed to ensure my managers at least knew where to signpost parents to help with childcare costs," Pimentel says.

The aim of the year-long evaluation, which began in April 2015, was to test the impact of improving staff's knowledge of parents, entitlements to the various forms of childcare entitlements, and support them to pass on this knowledge to parents.

Support available includes tax-free childcare and universal credit, employer voucher schemes and free childcare entitlements for two-, three- and four-year-olds.

Fact's wider aim for the programme - funded by the Department for Education - was to test whether improved access to information led to more disadvantaged families taking up childcare places.

This is backed by findings from a recent report by think-tank CentreForum (now renamed as the Education Policy Institute), which found that disadvantaged children are likely to benefit the least from current childcare funding policies.

"We expect a two-parent family earning £19,000 per year to receive 20 per cent less childcare subsidy for a child aged three or four than a family with annual earnings of £100,000," the report states.

Accessing support

The research found the reason low-income families access less support is partly because about 85 per cent of parents do not claim the childcare element of working tax credit, despite being potentially eligible.

Fact worked with Toad Hall to support its managers to feel confident and knowledgeable to talk to parents about their eligibility for childcare support.

They provided training for managers, and some deputy managers, working across all of Toad Hall's nurseries in the South East over three workshops.

Managers were trained to identify what social and financial circumstances make families eligible for childcare support, signposting staff to key services - such as Family Information Services, Citizens Advice bureaus, and children's centres - and understanding the barriers to parents taking up help.

"We started by getting managers to gauge their understanding," Pimentel says. "That was really interesting because we learnt it was an area they tended to avoid - talking to people about how they pay for childcare was generally a no-go topic.

"Empowering them to think it's okay to talk to parents about money was a worthwhile exercise."

By the end of the evaluation, managers reported feeling more confident in their ability to refer parents to the right service.

Nurseries distributed simple leaflets to parents explaining what support was available and outlining eligibility. Information was also published on their websites, and an information session was run where parents could talk about what they should expect from childcare support.

However, the focus was not on ensuring managers knew every detail of different types of support - as in some cases the amount of financial support available depended on an individual's circumstances.

"We don't expect our staff to have all the answers and we don't want them to. They're not trained financial advisers," says Pimentel.

"But we want them to know these things are available and you need to mention them to parents just in case, because anything that's going to help is a good thing.

"It is tough for parents to know about all the different elements and where they can get help from. We couldn't possibly keep people fully up to date with it, particularly with universal credit, which is a complex calculation."

"In a lot of local authorities, that hub of information is hard for parents to access. It seems silly to send them off somewhere else when you can give them information in your nursery."

Better training needed

Pimentel says that such training should be included in nursery manager programmes as a matter of course. "The managers in nursery settings need access to support like this. The government needs to be aware that providing this information to settings is a good way to get it to parents."

But she concedes that there would need to be some thinking given to how managers could be continually updated with policy and eligibility changes.

"The notion of upskilling managers is a good way to do this - they're the ones that have the first line of contact with parents in a meaningful way," she says.

According to Pimentel, the only downside of the programme was that there was no way to measure direct benefits it had on take-up, but that if done on a bigger scale, measuring impact could be easier.

Fact aims to share the model with 500 additional nursery settings, and says that insights from the evaluation of the programme will be shared with the UK's largest nursery chain providers.