4.2 • 2.9K Ratings
🗓️ 19 November 2025
⏱️ 58 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Childminders play a vital role in the early years of children’s lives, offering care, stability and a familiar face during those formative years. But their numbers are in sharp decline. Many are no longer able to offer places for three and four year olds, citing government funding pressures. Today, Ofsted have released new figures on how many childminders are leaving and joining the profession. Childminder Georgina Young joins Nuala McGovern to share her experience of the joys and challenges of childminding, and what the future might hold for the profession.
Saskia Reeves is the theatre, film and TV actor known for her many roles including Katherine Standish in the hit Apple TV series Slow Horses. She’s now back at the National Theatre, in a new play, End – the last in a trilogy of plays by David Eldridge - Beginning and Middle – with Clive Owen, exploring love and relationships. Saskia joins Nuala to discuss.
The Independent Commission on UK Counterterrorism has just published its report after three years. A long and detailed report, it estimates there are up to 70 UK-linked individuals, mostly women and children—most under 10 years old—believed to still be in camps or other detention centres in Iraq and Syria. Professor of Religion, Gender and Global Security, Katherine Brown, is one of the 14 commissioners. She explains why the women and children remaining in these camps is "unsustainable" and why an organised programme of return, rehabilitation, and integration is, they believe, the best long-term option for managing the risk to public safety. Frank Gardner, the BBC's Security Correspondent, joins them to discuss.
Coroners’ advice and concerns on maternal deaths in England and Wales are being ignored despite them raising repeated issues, a new study has found. Dr Georgia Richards, the founder of the Preventable Deaths Tracker at Kings College London who is on the line from New Zealand, discusses the findings.
Presenter: Nuala McGovern Producer: Kirsty Starkey
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:07.0 | Hello, I'm Emma Barnett. For most of my career, I've been on live radio, and I love it. |
| 0:13.3 | But I've always wondered, what if we'd had more time? How much deeper does the story go? |
| 0:19.2 | I remember having this very sharp thought that what you do right now, this is it. |
| 0:24.3 | This defines your life. |
| 0:26.0 | I'm ready to talk and ready to listen. |
| 0:28.3 | I'm insulted by how little the medical community is ever bothered with this. |
| 0:33.9 | Ready to talk with me, Emma Barnard, is my new podcast. |
| 0:37.0 | Listen on BBC Sounds. Hello, this is |
| 0:39.6 | Newla McGovern and you're listening to The Woman's Hour podcast. It is indeed good morning and welcome |
| 0:45.9 | to the programme. Well, new figures from Ofsted are out today showing a decrease in the number of |
| 0:51.2 | childminders in England. We're going to speak about why that is in just a moment. |
| 0:55.4 | Also today, approximately 15 to 20 women who were linked to the Islamic State Group and their 30 to 40 children |
| 1:01.5 | are being held in camps across Iraq and Syria. A review by the Independent Commission on UK counterterrorism |
| 1:08.0 | says that Britain's counterterrorism strategy is no longer keeping the |
| 1:11.7 | country safe and calls for a coherent, humane and security-conscious repatriation strategy. |
| 1:16.8 | It is an incredibly contentious issue, as you will probably know. We're going to discuss it |
| 1:21.4 | with one of the commissioners, Professor Catherine Brown, and our security correspondent, Frank Gardner. |
| 1:26.3 | And fans of slow horses, do you watch that TV hit? |
| 1:30.1 | Well, you want to stay tuned because we have Saskia Reeves in studio. |
| 1:33.4 | She's in a wonderful play called End at the Moment at the National Theatre. |
| 1:37.5 | It deals with love, heartbreak, living with the terminal diagnosis and dancing. |
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