COVID-19 and childcare: local impacts across England

This project will explore the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the early years education and care system in England. It will also highlight lessons for improvements at both the national and local levels, to support a sustainable, high quality system for the longer term. COVID-19 has placed unprecedented demands on the English early education and care system, potentially exacerbating longer term weaknesses in the system’s ability to consistently deliver high quality and equitable services. This study addresses five questions:

• How is the pandemic affecting children’s and parents’ needs for and access to early education and care services in different local contexts?
• How is COVID-19 changing the nature and viability of early education and care provision in different local contexts, and how are services responding?
• Has local support for early education and care services mitigated the effects of the pandemic, and how is this mediated by local labour market conditions? 
• What opportunities and weaknesses in the early education and care system are highlighted by COVID-19, and what can we learn from these about building resilience in the system?
• What should the role of local authorities be, and what tools do they need to support the early education and care system in future?

The provision of early education and care services involves the interaction of complex systems, which makes it particularly challenging to unpick the influence of the pandemic. The researchers will map the different component parts of the early education and care system and the relationships between them. This map will provide the context for exploring the challenges the system faces, and how it could be better managed and adapted to address these challenges.

In order to understand how the system currently reacts to significant shocks, the researchers will collect evidence on the diversity of local authority responses to the COVID-19 crisis within different local contexts across England. Patterns in these local variations will be combined with large scale data from before and during the pandemic to identify how changes in early education and care provision and parental employment over the pandemic period are related to local circumstances and policy reactions.

The study will also include in-depth analysis of the challenges faced by the early education and care system in 12 case study local authorities. Qualitative interviews with parents, providers, local authority early years staff and employers will provide comprehensive and in-depth understanding of the views of different stakeholders.

Workshops with national stakeholders will map the findings at a local level into the broader national context. This element of research will place the shorter-term challenges presented by COVID-19 into the context of the longer-term challenges faced by the early education and care system. It will develop options for building resilience in the system, with a focus on the role of local government. The findings from this project will highlight lessons for improvements in early education and care at both national and local levels, to support a sustainable, high quality system for the longer term. Interim findings will be available from summer 2021 and the final public report will be published in spring 2022.