Student parents suffer shortage of campus childcare
College and university nurseries are in short supply and those that do exist are often oversubscribed with long waiting lists, according to student parents.
Meet the Parents, a study carried out by the National Union of Students and launched at the House of Commons today (30 April), found that only 8 per cent of student parents who needed their college or university to provide childcare felt it fully met their requirements.
The report said that students and advisors 'generally felt that, when it did exist, college or university-based provision was oversubscribed and there were often very long waiting lists'.
The study found that some students had even dropped out of their course for a year to wait for their child to get to the top of the waiting list before enrolling again.
Childcare provision based in a college or university can be better suited to students' needs and it tends to be more affordable than private-run nurseries, said the report.
Such childcare can reduce travel time for students and it can be an easier to arrange payments between an institution and its own provider than with an external provider. The childcare staff are used to fitting around students' timetables.
Despite the obvious benefits for student parents, however, more and more universities and colleges are closing their nurseries, saying that they cannot afford to run them or that they need the space for classrooms for the 14-19 diplomas, as Nursery World has reported (News, 15 April).
Sarah Wayman, co-author of the report, and research and policy officer for student welfare at the NUS, called the closures 'really unhelpful'. She said, 'On one hand, the Government is pushing the upskilling and retraining agenda. Yet the institutions are closing their nurseries because they say they are not making a profit, and taking the opportunity away from parents to go back into education.
'These closures should be done in consultation with students and the students' union, and in many cases this is not being done.'
RECOMMENDED ACTION
The NUS Meet the Parents report makes a number of recommendations which have the full backing of the Daycare Trust, including:
- Universities and colleges should be required to collect data on the parental status of a student so funding can be properly allocated;
- Students' unions should adopt child-friendly practices, such as child-friendly areas in union buildings and activities in which parents and their children can participate;
- The higher education childcare grant should be increased to cover 100 per cent of childcare costs and extended to part-time students and to learners in further education in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The Scottish government should consider introducing a similar means-tested entitlement.
