• About this study
• Our findings
• Our study details

Fitting it all together

How families arrange their childcare and the influence on children's home learning

Did you know?

57% of children aged under 1 are looked after exclusively by their parents. 24% are looked after by family or friends as well. Just 19% have another source of childcare.

from : Fitting it All Together findings

About this study

A huge number of childcare initiatives have been introduced over the last decade to better provide for children and their families. The government hopes they could improve children's development, help parents in the labour market and reduce child poverty.

However, how parents use childcare will influence these effects. So this report, published in March 2009, looks at:

• How families combine different types of childcare,
• how many hours of childcare they use,
• why they use it, and
• the extent to which these packages influence the learning activities that parents do with their young children at home.

You can read the findings here.

Timeline

Potential policy impact

Evidence packages of childcare used by families will inform policy developments - different childcare packages might be associated with more or less positive child development.

Methodology

This project involved secondary analysis of data from the Childcare and Early Years Survey of Parents. This data is based on face-to-face interviews with over 7,000 parents of children aged 14 and under. Parents are randomly selected to take part from Child Benefit records to make sure that they are representative of all parents in England.

Our definition of childcare includes any time that children were not with their resident parents (or a resident parents' current partner). So, childcare includes informal childcare, such as grandparents, as well as formal childcare and early years education like nurseries and childminders. For school-age children, it also covers time at out-of-school activities.

The first survey in this series was called the Parents Demand for Childcare survey. This was first run in 1999 and was repeated in 2001. After that the survey was redesigned and became the Childcare and Early Years survey. This was run in 2004 and since then it has been run in 2007, 2008 (details) and 2009 (details).

Of interest: