Voices: What’s the use of free childcare if daycare centres are already full?
Free childcare? To any working mum’s ears, those have to be the two sweetest words in the English language.
The government seems to be on a sugar high about its latest family initiative, too. The education secretary Gillian Keegan has spent the day skidding around various TV and radio newsrooms, telling anyone who’ll listen about the “largest expansion of childcare in our country's history”.
From today, parents in England are entitled to 15 hours a week of free childcare for their two-year-olds. Prior to the scheme’s introduction, only working parents of three- and four-year-olds qualified for the 15-to-30 hours of childcare funded by the government.
called it a “positive and exciting moment”, while Keegan. To qualify for the new free hours, most parents must earn more than £8,670 a year, but less than £100,000.
