The Government provide a wide range of child care support for parents returning to work:
The child care element of working tax credits provides help with child care for low and middle income working families. Parents working 16 or more hours per week can claim up to £140 per week for one child or £240 per week for two or more children.
From 2006 all parents have also been able to take tax and NIC exempt child care vouchers worth up to £55 week from their salary, if their employer is signed up to offer the scheme.
The Free Entitlement for three and four-year-olds is available to every family, whether or not they are in work. Every child is eligible for a free place for 12.5 hours per week, for 38 weeks of the year, from the term after their third birthday until they go to school. Almost 95 per cent. of three-year-olds and virtually all four-year-olds accessed at least some of their free place in 2009.
We are currently rolling out an extension to 15 hours, which will be available across the country from September 2010. And, we are building on the universal entitlement for three and four-year-olds by making early years provision for four-year-olds more generous. From autumn 2011, to make sure children have the best start to their primary education, all children will be entitled to start school in the September after their fourth birthday, or be offered 25 hours of free early learning a week.
Extended services in and around schools offer opportunities for families with school-aged children to access regular and reliable child care and enriching activities. There are currently over 17,000 extended schools (around 81 per cent. of the total) and we are working to ensure that all schools are offering services which are tailored to their community’s needs by 2010.
For those parents training in order to return to work, “Free Childcare for Training and Learning for Work”, started nationally in April 2009. It offers free child care for 50,000 low-income parents across the country and is aimed at helping families where one parent or partner is working and the other wants to learn or train. Child care support is available to single parents training for work through Jobcentre Plus and “Care to Learn” offers child care support to parents under the age of 20 who are in training.
We are also working with HMRC and the London Development Agency to test different ways to deliver support for childcare through tax credits or through supply side funding, so parents in parts of London and the South East may have extra help available to them.
It is also important that parents have access to enough information to be able to make choices about their children’s care and what will work best for them and their children as they return to work. That is why we operate a free national telephone helpline for child care, have established over 3,000 Sure Start Children’s Centres across the country, offering integrated services and information for families with children under five years old, and ensure that every local authority offers advice and information to parents of children of all ages, most commonly through Families Information Services.