Expansion of Free Childcare Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department for Education
Lord Addington
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Expansion of Free Childcare
Lord Addington Excerpts(1 week, 6 days ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
We have to be careful about describing 200,000 additional children going into childcare aged two from this April as something “going disastrously wrong”. I argue that it is a huge success.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, I know from some of the information that has come to me that it has been estimated that we are 40,000 workers down on the target to implement this fully—in a sector where about half the workers are saying that they want to leave within the next 12 months due to a lack of pay and overwork. What will the Government do to square that circle?
Baroness Barran (Con)
The figure of 40,000 is the increase in the workforce that we need to achieve by September 2025. That is exactly why we are having a phased introduction to this policy. Even before we increased the rates for providers last year, there was almost a 13,000 increase in the workforce, and we have a number of initiatives to build on that.