Families: share your experiences of childcare services
Overview
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is looking into early years education and childcare services.
These are services for children from birth until they start school around the age of 4 or 5 years old. For example, it includes childminders, nurseries, pre-schools and playgroups.
Throughout this call for views, we refer to these services as 'childcare'.
We want to hear from you
We want to hear from anyone who:
- is starting to think about what childcare services you'll need in the future
- is already using childcare services or will start to use them soon
- wants to use these services but cannot
- has decided to not use these services
- has been using these services until recently
We are interested in hearing from people who are paying for these services with government support to cover the cost, with your own money, or a mix of both.
Whatever your situation, we'd like to hear your views on what is working well, challenges, and suggestions for improvement.
Your responses will help us to develop our understanding of this sector as we undertake our market study.
How we handle responses
Depending on the number of responses we get, we are likely to use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help us review them. If the CMA does make use of AI, it will say so in a future update.
We will not publish individual responses in full, but we expect to publish some views and quotes (without naming who said them), key numbers, and a summary of the broad themes arising from the responses.
As well as this call for views for families, we're inviting:
to share their views.
We're also running a consultation on the proposed scope of the CMA’s market study. Please go to the main case page if you'd like to share additional views on how the CMA should focus its work.
What we're looking at
The formal scope of our market study is England only, because funding arrangements and regulations for childcare are different in each of the four UK nations.
However, you are welcome to share your views if you live elsewhere in the UK. We would appreciate your insights and will use them to understand how things are similar or different across the nations.
Extra support
If you need help to respond, email: childcare@cma.gov.uk.
The CMA is unable to help you with any specific issues you may have about using childcare services.
If you have concerns about a specific provider, the UK Government provides more information about complaints about childcare.
Interests
- Markets