The £100,000 Childcare Cliff Edge: What’s Missing from the Debate?

Imagine you send your nine-month-old baby to nursery. She can’t talk. She can’t walk. She can’t tell you what happened to her today.

EVERYTHING she learns about whether the world is safe comes from the adult holding her.

So here’s the question. Who is holding her? And what are we paying them?

This week, Kemi Badenoch announced she’d scrap the £100,000 cliff edge for 30 “free” hours of childcare. Families earning six figures can now have the same deal as everyone else. Cliff-edges are always destructive, and hard work should benefit those that are contributing to society, so removing them is always a good thing. However, there’s not one word about what that deal ACTUALLY buys.

The FCUKTUS team has over 80 years of early years experience between them. Let them tell you what the funding rate actually buys.

It doesn’t pay for education, and it doesn’t pay for attachment. It doesn’t pay for a trained, settled key person who knows that child the way a child needs to be known. It doesn’t pay for pedagogy.

It pays for storage. Infant storage units, supervised by young babysitters. To be clear, that’s not what nursery staff ARE. It’s what the funding rate ASSUMES they are.

Either politicians know this and they’re ignoring it, or worse – they believe it. However, the evidence is clear, and it’s DECADES old. England’s own landmark study, EPPE, followed thousands of children for over a decade. High-quality early education gave them benefits that lasted into their teens. Low-quality provision gave them little or nothing.

More concerning, Quebec, Canada rolled out cheap, universal childcare on exactly this model: maximum hours, minimum investment. Economists followed those children for twenty years. They found worse behaviour and worse anxiety, and the harm followed them into adulthood.

Cheap childcare isn’t neutral. Done badly, it does damage.

We’re already living with the consequences. One in five children in this country now has a probable mental health disorder. CAMHS waiting lists run into years. Schools are reporting four-year-olds arriving unable to regulate, unable to separate, unable to cope.

We are building that crisis, and the foundations are being laid at nine months old, at the lowest price the Treasury can get away with.

So, who pays the difference between what the government gives and what care actually
costs?

Women do.

Almost everyone in this workforce is a woman. Many are on or near minimum wage.They’re doing the most important developmental work any society does, and the government’s rate depends on them doing it for a FRACTION of its worth.

And the women who own these settings, mostly small, mostly local, are subsidising government policy out of their own pockets. They’re forgoing their own wages and remortgaging their homes just to keep the doors open. If any other profession that was 97% men were told to deliver a state service below cost, we would call it what it is. This is exploitation, and it only works because it’s women’s work.

So, Mrs Badenoch, and every party that’s used our children as a bargaining chip: extending a broken promise to more families doesn’t fix it. It just means more children get the broken version.

Don’t tell us who qualifies.

Tell us what they qualify for. And make sure they can top up the difference.