WHO WE ARE
Post Pandemic Childcare is building
a grassroots coalition of early years workers, parents & carers campaigning for fair pay & inclusive early years education and care
for all children and all childcare workers
We are a group of early years workers and parent campaigners concerned about the privatisation of services and the loss of small, non-profit, community and cooperative nurseries, council-run day nurseries and maintained nursery schools. We are committed to raising how the hostile environment, workers rights, and the importance of Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) provision, are ignored or sidelined in terms of demands for improved and expanded early years provision.
We are seeking to build a coalition from the grassroots – including local union groups representing early years workers and parents campaigns fighting the closure of community and public early years provision.
Our 2021 campaign included demands related to the pandemic, alongside calling for an end to the two-child cap and No Recourse to Public Funds, increases to Child Benefit, and an urgent, conditional, direct funding of childcare settings – preventing further closures of public and community nurseries and childminders, increasing local democratic accountability, ensuring real living wage, affordable accessible places, and with no profits to shareholders.
These demands were published in an open letter supported by Greenwich NEU, United Childcare Workers (UVW), Kalayaan, The Voice of Domestic Workers, the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, Nanny Solidarity Network, the New Economics Foundation, UK Women’s Budget Group, the Institute for Public Policy Research, and 15 MPs.
Background
We initially formed in the Summer of 2020 as a group of individuals who felt frustrated and let down by the government's response to childcare during the first Covid-19 lockdown. We sought to mobilise and in January 2021 the third lockdown spurred us into action.
Our open letter to the Minister for Early Years, Vicky Ford, was co-written by Nirupama Naidu and Louise O’Hare (parent campaigners, SEND Crisis, Tower Hamlets), Veronica Deutsch and Miranda Critchley (organisers, Nanny Solidarity Network), Lee Shannon (parent campaigner, National Public Day Nurseries campaign and Fight For The Five, Salford), Lucie Stephens (director, Friendly Families Nursery, Deptford). It was first publicly circulated on Friday 22 January 2021 and received over 500 signatures.
Now, we are building a longer-term grassroots movement. We believe that parents and workers are often siloed from one another in childcare campaigning and see this coalition as a way of unifying to create change for all.
Please be in touch if you'd like to be involved, share ideas, or to find out how to affiliate! PostPandemicChildcare@gmail.com
You can also read more about what we're up to, by signing up to our mailing list below or on our What We Do page.
You can find us on:
Twitter: @postpandemicch1
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