Hard lessons - Childcare support for parents in education - 9 November 2024

Support for parents in education has been entirely overlooked in the childcare debate Of course, supporting parents to enter work or to increase their hours is a laudable policy objective: families are less likely to be in poverty, for example, the more parents in the household work.4 But improving one’s skills through education and training is also a critical way to boost living standards longer. [...] Here, we show how the probability of being in employment (blue bar) and in education (yellow bar) differs between parents and non-parents (a score of 1 indicates there is no difference, a score over 1 indicates a parent is more likely to meet the criteria than a non-parent, and a score below 1 indicates a parent is less likely to meet the criteria than a non-parent), and how that varies by age. [...] As the chart makes clear, there is a ‘parent penalty’ with respect to both employment and education that is especially acute for the youngest parents, and continues up to the ages of 35-44.5 But even more strikingly, there is a larger ‘parent penalty’ when it comes to education than employment: parents aged 25- 34-years are 89 per cent as likely to be in employment as a non-parent in the same age. [...] Lower-income parents in higher education are entitled to a Childcare Grant similar to that in Universal Credit, but not the additional free hours available to working parents One plausible reason we observe a larger ‘parent penalty’ when it comes to education than we do for employment is that with some small exceptions, student parents are not eligible for the childcare support that is designed fo. [...] In 2022/23, the average CG made to an eligible student parent was £6,300, sufficient to pay for 28 hours of childcare a week for a 3-4-year-old during term time (38 weeks of the year) or 21 hours a week if spread over the whole year.9 Figure 3 Because it is an entitlement, Childcare Grant spending increases as the number of eligible applicants goes up over time Total amount of Childcare Grant awar.