Susan Moreau encounters this embarrassment regularly in her job as business support officer at Bradford Metropolitan District Council. But she believes a lack of business skills is a major threat to many childcare providers' long-term viability. "The costs of delivering quality childcare is high," she says. "If providers don't see themselves as businesses, then they'll not understand costs."
Moreau argues that this hand-to-mouth approach is not sustainable and that providers must focus on generating profit - or "surpluses" as many in childcare prefer to call them - to reinvest back into the business.
A report by the National Audit Office last year revealed that only half of new childcare providers had a clear idea of how they'd continue running their business when their start-up funding ended. And it said a lack of business planning was one of the main reasons to doubt the sustainability of child-care provision. In 2003, of the 623,000 new childcare places created since the National Childcare Strategy was launched 301,000 had closed.
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