Does increased childcare funding help mothers into work?

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Since Labor won the 2024 general election, policy focused on children in the early years—from birth to school age—and their parents has moved sharply up the political agenda. The government's most expensive early years commitment so far has been its decision to honor the previous administration's pledge to provide 30 funded hours of child care for children from 9 months old to school age whose parents are working.

This was implemented in September 2025. If parents require their children to be in child care for more than 30 hours a week (they might need over 50 hours to cover full-time employment), they pay the excess. Child care providers may also charge for services on top of the funded hours, such as meals, diapers and optional activities.

However, such charges cannot be mandatory conditions of accessing the funded hours. The £9 billion allocated to this provision represents a doubling of child care funding since 2024. The policy's central aim is to make child care more affordable for working parents and to increase mothers' employment rates.

It is also intended to support children's development and educational outcomes. We set out to explore whether increasing the funding for this system would increase mothers' employment. We compared England with South Korea, where a fairly similar arrangement has been on offer for a number of years.

In Korea, though, early childhood education and care receives significantly higher funding. It stands at 0.9% of GDP, compared with 0.5% in the U.K. Korea has offered a universal entitlement of 35 hours of funded child care weekly for children from birth to age 2 since 2012.

This was extended to children ages 3 to 5 the following year. Our study found systemic problems in both countries. Our findings suggest that the design of funding systems, and how they interact with labor market and parental leave policies, may matter more than funding levels alone.