Our work on childcare makes a big impact

Equality and Social Justice Committee echoes calls made by the Bevan Foundation 

Summer is usually a quiet time in politics, but this year has been a little different. With a new Prime Minister at Westminster and a new First Minister in Cardiff Bay, there has been no summer lull. In the middle of all this activity it would have been easy to overlook the publication of a new report by the Senedd’s Equality and Social Justice committee: Their Future: Our Priority? Follow up inquiry into childcare provision in Wales. The report includes a number of important recommendations that echo calls made by the Foundation and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in their report from January 2024, Tackling disadvantage through childcare in Wales.

Among the recommendations that we were particularly pleased to see the committee make were:

• Calls on the Welsh Government to simplify and better integrate its early childhood
  education and care support programmes.
• Calls on the Welsh Government to ensure that it doesn’t exacerbate inequalities faced by children living in non-working households, by ensuring its early childhood education and care support schemes are open to all children, not just to those whose parents are in work. 
• Calls on the Welsh Government to expand the provision of funded childcare, including ensuring that it successfully completes its roll-out of Flying Start (Childcare) for 2-year-olds and that it develops a roadmap setting out future steps for expansion of childcare provision towards the delivery of universal childcare provision. 

In addition to these calls, we were also pleased to see the committee highlight the need for the Welsh Government to set out how it intends to spend the Barnett consequentials it will receive from increased childcare spending in England ahead of the publication of the draft budget for 2025-26. 

The Bevan Foundation will continue to work on solutions to the challenges faced by too many families when it comes to accessing childcare, in particular the challenges faced by families living in poverty, this autumn. We look forward to seeing how the Welsh Government react to the committee’s recommendations and to hear more about its plans for childcare in Wales.