Children: Day Care

(asked on 14th January 2021) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment he has made of the adequacy of childcare arrangements for key workers during the covid-19 outbreak.


Answered by
Vicky Ford Portrait
Vicky Ford
This question was answered on 19th January 2021

My right hon. Friend, the Prime Minister, announced on 4 January 2021 that early years settings remain open for all children during the national lockdown. Details can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/national-lockdown-stay-at-home. For school-aged children, schools, childminders and wraparound care remain open for vulnerable children and children of key workers.

Early years provision should continue to allow all children to attend full time or their usual timetabled hours. This includes early years registered nurseries and childminders, maintained nursery schools, as well as nursery classes in schools and other pre-reception provision on school sites. Only vulnerable children and children of critical workers should attend on-site reception classes. Early years settings remain low risk environments for children and staff. Current evidence suggests that pre-school children (0 to 5 years) are less susceptible to infection and are unlikely to be playing a driving role in transmission.

We do stay in regular contact with the early years sector, and we are closely monitoring both parental take-up of places and the capacity and responses of providers. An estimated 49,000 early years settings were open on 7 January 2021. This represents 72% of all settings, with 13% closed and 15% unknown. The percentage closed may include some providers which are open, due to differences in the ways local authorities collect data and report non-responses.

The Department for Education does not hold a central register of all wraparound provision and so does not routinely collect data on the number of providers in operation. However, ensuring sufficiency of childcare provision for critical worker parents and carers remains a government priority. This is why we have ensured that wraparound childcare providers, and other providers of out-of-school activities, can continue to remain open during the current national lockdown for the children of critical workers to support their parents or carers to work, seek work, undertake training or education, or to attend a medical appointment or address a medical need, as well as for all vulnerable children. We have also published updated guidance on ‘Protective measures for holiday and after-school clubs, and other out-of-school settings during the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak’ to support providers to continue to operate as safely as possible during the national lockdown. This guidance can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/protective-measures-for-holiday-or-after-school-clubs-and-other-out-of-school-settings-for-children-during-the-coronavirus-covid-19-outbreak/protective-measures-for-out-of-school-settings-during-the-coronavirus-covid-19-outbreak.

In addition, we are encouraging all schools to continue offering their before and after school provision to ensure parents and carers who are critical workers can continue to work, as well as to ensure vulnerable children continue to have access to this valuable provision. Schools can also continue to open up or hire out their premises for use by external wraparound providers, such as after-school or holiday clubs, to support them to do so.

Our Regional Education and Children Team, comprising education and social care staff from both the Department for Education and Ofsted, are also continuing to work closely with local authorities, and will act as a valuable source of intelligence on the sufficiency of wraparound and early years childcare places for the children of critical workers, and for vulnerable children and young people during the current national lockdown.

Reticulating Splines