Politics at play: Why is nursery still so expensive?
The Story
The Times
3.9 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 3 April 2024
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The government says their much anticipated childcare reform, offering two-year-olds 15 hours a week of free childcare, is hitting targets. But parents and providers say the scheme’s rollout has been chaotic. Today, we go to a pre-school to find out what the reality looks like.
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Guests:
- Rachel Mortimer, Assistant Money Editor, The Times and The Sunday Times.
- Josephine Godbold, owner and director, Sunny Kids Pre-Schools.
Special thanks to Desiree Chantarasak, and the children and teachers at Sunny Kids.
Host: Manveen Rana.
Clips: UK Parliament, BBC Breakfast.
Further listening: Childcare is a mess. Who will tidy it up?
Get in touch: thestory@thetimes.co.uk
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hmm, school reunion. What am I doing? Getting these people together after all these years? |
| 0:04.8 | The last time we shared a room, there was leg warmers and rar skirts involved. |
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| 0:48.9 | Today, marketing communication, not for distribution in EU countries. The value of investments can fall as well as rise. in From the Times and the Sunday Times, this is the story. |
| 1:07.0 | I'm Manveen Rana. No. Hi, Desiess. It's Sam. This is one of our producers Sam and her sister in |
| 1:25.0 | or Deziri. How can I help? I just wanted to give you a call as I was |
| 1:31.5 | thinking about a conversation that we had a few weeks ago when you were just |
| 1:36.4 | telling me about trying to find a nursery for your son what that's been like. Do you remember that? Yeah, oh yeah, it was a very |
| 1:47.7 | traumatic experience and a very |
| 1:55.0 | a very confusing journey not so much with finding the nursery but with the process in the new scheme that's coming in |
| 1:59.0 | You're listening in to the sort of conversation that's taking place all over the country. |
| 2:05.3 | For years now people have been raising the alarm that child care is in crisis. |
| 2:11.3 | And last year even the government seemed to cotton on as they introduced a new |
| 2:16.2 | scheme promising 15 hours of free child care a week to some parents of two-year-olds. |
| 2:24.0 | That was brilliant news and so applied through the government scheme but there were no dates on the |
| 2:32.0 | emails. We didn't know when we needed to budget for because he would have had to pay the full amount until April. |
... |
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