Childcare is expensive and complicated. You need to be switched on!

As a parent you have to know where your children will be and who will be caring for them, every hour of every day. This is simple if they’re either home with you all time time or at school. However what happens if you work?

You need a whole team of people to help you. If that team contains anyone other than close friends or family who won’t charge, you’re going to have to find the money to pay for childcare. You need help with this too. 

So what do you do? You try and make a list of people who can help. You try to get your kids a place at a local day nursery or after school clubs. You have all the relevant phone numbers somewhere written down either in your phone or diary. You google what help you can get to pay for it. There are so many schemes! It’s a nightmare trying to work out if you’re eligible for each scheme and then you realise because you’re claiming one form of support it alters your eligibility to the next one. It’s a mess. 

That’s why I’ve created this post and the UK-country specific guides linked at the bottom of the page. My aim is to help you by simplifying the information you’d find on your google search into an easy to understand overview. 

The vast majority of families need some help in paying for and providing childcare for their kids, especially if one or both parents are working. 

Many of the childcare schemes available in the UK have lower and upper limits on income, related to each individual parent (and not that of the whole family). This can at times appear unfair. 

What’s more, the wide variety of schemes in place in different parts of the UK can make deciphering the help available really tricky. 

Each income limit doesn’t take into account the cost of living in different parts of the UK and you may find there is local variation in what’s available.

Despite these issues, there are some great schemes available that really will help families across the UK. They allow parents to work alongside raising children and this means they can provide a better income for their family.

We’ve created guides for families in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, which you can access at the bottom of the page.  

You need childcare options and you need a plan for emergencies when your childcare arrangements fail, which they will inevitably do!

You should ask at least 3 people to be potential emergency childcare contacts for you. These could be family members eg grandparents, or friends. You could be a friend’s emergency childcare contact too.

Of course not everyone has local trusted family or friends they can ask to help. This makes your childcare plan ever more important. 

Many childminders work together to cover each other’s work loads and if yours has let you down they may be able to direct you to someone else. You can search for emergency childcare once you make an account at www.childcare.co.uk. This way you’ll be able to search local, available, checked and accredited people in a hurry.

How to structure your childcare plan

In my work for certain procedures we plan for the worst case scenario and have plans A/B/C/D in every case. We practice for the failure of each plan and know what to do in each event. This has helped me structure my approach to certain life situations too. 

If you’re working and using childcare to look after your kids, you need a Plan B, Plan C and Plan D. This is important contingency planning which can save you a lot of headaches down the line. 

Plan A is your core childcare plan, be it nursery, childminder, grandparents, yourself or otherwise. 

Plan B and Plan C are what you need to get in place now.

You can write all the numbers down on a ‘Emergency Childcare Plan’ if this helps.

Plan D is that you call work to say you can’t come in due to a childcare emegency. This is the last resort. Most employers will understand if this happens once and you explain why it happened. Many of my colleagues have been in the same situation and called in, we got on with it. It becomes an issue though it it’s a recurring theme. This is why it’s plan D.