Five tips for councils to support childminders
Professional Association for Childcare and Early Years (Pacey)
Tuesday, April 30, 2024
Childminders provide essential childcare for many families, but numbers continue to fall. How can services successfully recruit and support more childminders and help reverse the decline?
1. Make funding easily accessible. Councils can help childminders plan their business by releasing funding rates well in advance, by beingpro-active about making quality payments and ensuring payments are easily accessible. Funding should be paid monthly rather than termly and made available once a new childminder is registered. Holding back entitlement funding until a childminder’s first inspection makes it much harder for people to get a childminding business up and running. Councils should ensure their funding portal is easy to use to make the process less time consuming.
2. Support childminders to offer wraparound childcare. Childminders can play a key role in providing childcare before and after school, however there is tendency to focus on on-site provision. New guidance for schools says they should “consider practical solutions for escorting or transporting children between locations”. Where schools are unable to provide wraparound provision, they should signpost families to childminders and not just group settings.
3. Offer SEND training and support. Childminders are well-placed to support children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), but need extra training to help them understand and meet children’s needs. This can include local authority early years teams visiting childminders to provide on-site assessment and training or hosting training webinars outside normal working hours.
4. Provide clear guidance on safeguarding. Safeguarding is a key part of a childminder’s role, but research shows many worry about making referrals should they have concerns about a child’s welfare. Children’s services teams can help by providing clear information about how to report potential safeguarding issues including what happens after a referral is made.
5. Include childminders in planning and policy. Ensure childminders are included in conversations about childcare policy and provision alongside other early years providers as a matter of course and not just as an after-thought. This means all meetings or forums about early years provision should include at least one childminder who can represent the experiences and needs of childminders with childminders able to access the same training and support as group settings.
Source: Professional Association for Childcare and Early Years (Pacey)
