Why We’re Called Free Childcare: The Untold Story

On the surface, our name sounds simple. After all, that’s what the government wanted to portray free childcare in the UK.

It sounds like something positive.. Something that should exist in a country that says it backs working families.

But the truth behind our name isn’t simple. FREE and CHILDCARE are two words loaded with misinformation. And it definitely isn’t as positive as it sounds.

When we say ‘free’, it’s almost guaranteed to mean poorly funded and badly executed. We know how these things are in the UK. If it’s provided by the state, it’s probably broken, or designed by ideological pen-pushers with no real-world knowledge. Transport, NHS, roads, education, infrastructure projects, energy, IT systems. Clunky, hard to use and often inadequate. Always inefficient, bureaucratic with decades of institutional incompetence behind them.

State nurseries can’t make it work and have closed all over the country. Sure Start was a multi-million pound black hole down which tax payers’ money was poured, and fabulous though it was, it was financially unsustainable.

The millions were wasted, and they all closed down, taking their state-of-the-art equipment with them.

The lack of state early years infrastructure has meant that the government has had to turn to private providers. As usual, the initial enthusiasm and almost-adequate funding of the late noughties has now reduced to around 50% of the funding needed to settings to remain sustainable. At all ages. If we pay minimum wages. So we have to charge. The large chains seem to continue (rightly), doing what they need to do to remain in business. The rest of us are bullied by some of the LAs to work in ways that will close our nurseries within weeks.

Some do close. Others sell. The rest of us lose sleep, sanity and good staff.

When we talk about ‘childcare’, we talk about a service for parents. Something to enable parents to go back to work. There’s no space in this narrative for the rights of young children. Young children don’t have a voice. They depend on us to have that for them, so when misguided and loud influencers are demanding ‘free childcare’ this comes from a place of self-entitlement that hasn’t considered the consequences for children. The provision of ECEC (Early Childhood Education and Care) as it is more respectfully known in other OECD countries SHOULD be expensive. It should be something that we spend more money on than anything else. And so that it can be affordable, it should be subsidised. It should not be provided for the lowest scraps possible which can’t pay for the qualified staff to have a genuine career in the sector. We need these people to make a real difference to children’s lives.

So why Free Childcare UK; The Untold Story

We didn’t choose the name because we believed in it; We chose it because we wanted to challenge it. Every day we see parents confused about what they should be paying, Nurseries being accused of “overcharging”, providers blamed for a system they didn’t create staff stretched, underpaid, and burnt out.

We took the name back. Instead of ignoring the phrase, we leaned into it. Because the acronym of our name spells out exactly what the government has done to the early years sector, children and parents. Quite simply, they have FCUK:TUS