Childcare and parental employment: the views of migrant women

The Bevan Foundation has supported people with experience of migration to contribute their views on childcare to the Equality and Social Justice Committee’s inquiry. 

Childcare is a subject of concern to people across Wales, including people with experience of migration.  People that the Bevan Foundation is working with were keen to make their voices heard in the current Equality and Social Justice Committee’s inquiry into childcare. They have submitted the evidence in the attached report.

The groups are:

• South Riverside Community Development Centre (SRCDC)
• Together Creating Communities (TCC)
• Communidade Da Lingua Portuguesa Wrexham (CLPW)

The response is based on the views of 22 women with lived experience of migration in Wales: 13 in Cardiff and 9 in Wrexham. These views were shared during a series of four group discussions as well as through written and oral responses to a questionnaire which was translated into three community languages – Portuguese, Somali, and Arabic.  The response highlights that as well as the general problems of affordability, parents from migrant communities faced challenges finding multi-cultural and multi-lingual provision.  

Recommendations include:

• Simplifying the application process for the Childcare Offer and have a tick-box option for language or IT support.
• Extending the eligibility criteria for the Childcare Offer to include students and people in training.
• Ensuring that a wide variety of childcare provision is funded under the Childcare Offer, so that the needs of all children and families can be met.
• Increasing advertising of rights and access to childcare so that families do not have to rely on word of mouth or misinformation.
• Expanding the provision of employer based on-site childcare – there should be an expectation that if there is a certain number of people working at a place, then the employer should provide childcare.
• Increasing the salary for childcare workers and stop using zero-hour contracts. Childcare is a responsible, skilled, and essential job and this should be reflected in the salary.
• Childcare Training Providers should place more value on people’s skills than English / Welsh language ability. They should allow people who do not yet speak English / Welsh to register on the training courses and offer English classes as part of the course.
• Childcare Training and Initial Teacher Training should include / strengthen education on how to support children from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Once qualified, staff should be expected and enabled to attend further training to continue to ‘upskill’ – and these courses should be available in different languages.
• The opening hours of childcare centres / providers should be increased so that they can cater for those with early morning / late night / weekend shifts, as well as bank holidays.

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