Marion Kozak, chairwoman of Camden Childcare Strategic Partnership, tells parents about the efforts to make pre-school care affordable

Childcare has hit the headlines with the publication of Choice for Parents, the Best Start for Children: a 10-year strategy for childcare.
This national policy, published in December 2004, sets out a vision for childcare and lays down a role for local authorities. The nationwide strategy comprises ambitious measures which will have an impact on how services are delivered by councils through a partnership of departments and other agencies. By 2008 every authority will have a statutory duty to provide childcare up to the age of 14 and this will include additional free nursery education.
Camden Council has gone some way towards realising these long term goals, for example through Sure Start – a national policy of family programmes – which began in Camden in 2001 and has since become acclaimed by families. The programme initiated with funding from government but delivered by volunteers, professionals and parents has firmly established itself in the borough.
The projects aim to provide lasting improvements in the lives of children by offering parental support, training, community participation, socialisation and employment advice.
Camden’s Sure Start programmes have been strikingly successful in encouraging families to organise activities and at providing advice for children’s futures. Walking into a Sure Start centre is testimony to the benefits of providing a choice of activities, ranging from holidays to courses to become board managers. Parents have gained in self-confidence by starting as volunteers and ending as chairs of the board, or project administrators. Others are registered on taster courses or for NVQs in childcare that lead to careers as carers or childminders.
Nobody would have dreamt Sure Start would prove so popular but its success has led Camden to expand its programmes. It is including more neigbourhoods. This will build on the hub of projects in Kentish Town, Kilburn Priory, Euston and Holborn with council investment of about £800,000 in the coming financial year. In response to parents’ needs for childcare services, centres for under fives will be included within the programmes, open from 8am to 6pm as well as a scheme of creches where parents could leave their children for a couple of hours at a time. A parent from Kentish Town said: “I would use a day nursery because it would provide the company of other children and give them a break from the cramped conditions of our one-bedroom flat”
Children’s centres will continue to provide the Sure Start programmes’ health and support services as well as pathways into training and employment. A range of services in children’s centres will insert the missing part of the jigsaw in the agenda and become a major plank in the government’s 10-year strategy for childcare.
However, making childcare affordable in Camden remains a major challenge. Despite tax subsidies obtainable by parents through the childcare element of the working tax credit, which is scheduled to rise in April 2005 to a maximum of £300 per week for two children, childcare fees for remain stubbornly high and are a major obstacle to parents working or training.
Even with the more generous allowance, the proportion of income spent on childcare is high. There are schemes that supplement the government subsidy for all parents working more than 16 hours per week, but these are targeted only at groups of parents.
The Camden Childcare Support Fund, has provided a subsidy for 150 parents, a national initiative of providing an additional payment of £40 per week to lone parents in their first year of employment has recently been set up and there is some recognition from the government through the GLA pilot to find new methods of making childcare affordable. In 2004, full-time places cost on average £197 per week but some parents pay as much as £300.
A government contribution towards maintaining childcare places could ensure a stream of affordable provision. The extension of paid maternity leave for the first nine months and ultimately upto 12 months, proposed in the childcare strategy, is a welcome step. We would encourage parents to write in to the Treasury briefly describing their experience of seeking childcare and to offer their comments about childcare. Please write to: Childcare Strategy, HM Treasury, 1 Horse Guards Road, SW1P 2HQ or email Childcare.consultation@hm-treasury.gov.uk