Best Practice

Five tips for councils to support childminders

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?
Childminders can play a key role in providing childcare before and after school. Picture: Africa Studio/Adobe Stock
Childminders can play a key role in providing childcare before and after school. Picture: Africa Studio/Adobe Stock

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.

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