School in Leighton Buzzard welcomes wraparound childcare funding
The funding promises better availability of before and after school care for children
Last updated 17th Apr 2024
Parents across Central Bedfordshire are promised increased access to flexible childcare, as before and after school childcare is set to expand from this week.
The government announced up to £1,576,000 to support delivery over the length of the programme in Central Bedfordshire alone, with the rest of the country set to benefit from similar funding from September.
Under these new plans, childcare will be made available from 8am to 6pm by 2026 nationally for parents who may need to access flexible childcare.
Wraparound childcare provisions are essential not only for parents needing support for their children outside of school hours, but also for children's personal development.
These come in the form of after school clubs, which are typically run by schools themselves or by external services.
Headteacher at Linslade Lower School in Leighton Buzzard, Hazel Farlam, welcomes the plans.
At her school, childcare is provided by an external service called Kidz Zone Club, which operates across 25 schools in the area.
She told Greatest Hits Radio: "It's actually nice for the children to have some different people in their lives."
"Teachers are very good at teaching, we obviously have structures and we have ways of doing things in the classroom, so it's nice for them to be able to come to the afterschool club and have some fun activities."
"In 2007, our provider at the time went bankrupt and so we had to look at what we were going to do next and we thought it was more of a risk to do it ourselves."
"It's really hard with school budgets being as they are and with staffing being a difficult thing to get right, and to run the afterschool club ourselves would be a very big risk and a very big gamble."
Kidz Zone Clubs provide a range of activities to engage with children, which Managing Director Scott McCafferty assures is only made possible at a high standard because of the time they are able to dedicate to organising activities and rolling them out across the schools they work with.
He said: "At our wraparound setting, our first hour we try to do an active hour, whether that's a sport or a multi-skills station like this, and we also do creative activities."
"Some schools that run their own wraparound will be brilliant at it as well, I think it's very much down to the individuals you've got working in the setting."
"The thing for us is this allows us to be specialists at this, because this is what we do, we have a lot of time we can dedicate to how we run our clubs."
The government announced the plans in a bid to support hard working families, and remove childcare as a barrier for a successful career.
Visiting Linslade Lower School, Children's Minister David Johnston said: "This £289 million is all about ensuring that wherever families live in the country, they will be able to have wraparound childcare for their primary school children."
"A big part of that is to give families 30 hours of childcare from when they're children from nine months old until they start school, but we know that the need for childcare doesn't stop when children get to school."
Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and the Bi-borough of Westminster and Kensington & Chelsea will be the first to receive funding this week, alongside Central Bedfordshire.