Parents, childcare providers and policy makers all want to find innovative new solutions that help families access high quality childcare that boosts children’s learning and supports parents to work, volunteer or enter training or education.

Driven by this desire, a little while back, we started working with the New Economics Foundation to look at parent-led childcare. Parent-led childcare is not for profit childcare designed and co-delivered by parents, for parents. In New Zealand and Canada, this forms a large part of the childcare market, but in the UK there are only a handful of nurseries working this way.

We set out to design a model of parent-led childcare that could work in the UK, particularly in areas that are currently poorly served by the childcare market, and where families struggle to access high quality, affordable and flexible childcare. We know that the shortfalls are particularly acute in some areas, often the most deprived areas in the UK.

We have spent the last six months gathering feedback from parents and professionals about parent-led childcare and crunching the numbers on how it could actually work. The answers from this feasibility study are promising: there is a strong appetite for this type of childcare and the operating model we have developed can work in various settings.

We have created a business planning and financial modelling tool that can be used by groups of parents and other local stakeholders to adapt our parent-led childcare model to work for their communities. The model can be adapted by the number of childcare hours delivered, the number of weeks operated per year, the number of children attending and the qualification levels of staff employed. This means that parent-led childcare can be tailored to make sure it genuinely works for local parents and their children.

The childcare setting delivering parent-led childcare could be run as a Charitable Incorporated Organisation (CIO). This gives the opportunity for parents using the service to be on the board, making decisions about how the service is run. Parents can also get involved in the day to day tasks of delivering childcare to help keep running costs low like working alongside early years professionals with children, helping out with preparing food, tidying up, providing some admin support and organising fundraising.

Many of the low income parents we spoke to saw increased involvement as the major benefit, with financial savings a secondary issue. We know that parents sometimes struggle to trust childcare services: this model brings parents into the heart of childcare, which can help parents to see first hand the benefits of childcare for their children and learn about early education and home learning.

Having done our homework, we are now looking to get started on the really exciting part: setting up pilot sites to put our learning into action. As we test our new model, we will closely monitor and evaluate the outcomes for children, parents, childcare professionals and the community more widely. This will inform the development of the model and help support further roll out over coming years.

We are seeking local delivery partners who are interested in developing a parent-led childcare site. We are particularly interested in working with organisations that have the potential to use premises for childcare, share our vision and are committed to supporting local families. If this interests you, we’d love to hear from you – please get in touch with me, Emma Ackerman, at emma@familyandchildcaretrust.org.

Learn more about parent-led childcare.