How Can Providing Childcare Impact Our Project Outcomes and Make a Project More Inclusive?

What is this advice about?

This advice is aimed at heritage organisations of any size or type running projects and programming with community participants.

It aims to help organisations understand the challenges that people with childcare responsibilities face in accessing opportunities for heritage engagement and how to tackle some of these through childcare provision.

What are the key points?

How do childcare responsibilities act as a barrier to heritage participation?

Heritage engagement comes in many forms, from visiting sites and places to participating in formal education or following a career in the sector.

These different types of engagement have different levels of inclusion for people with childcare responsibilities. In particular, participating in activities and projects that allow people to have a direct and in-depth engagement with heritage can often be inaccessible.

This is due to several factors:

• The cost and availability of childcare, which is magnified if there are several children and different provision needs for children of different ages
• Opportunities taking place during standard working hours during weekdays, when people with childcare responsibilities have less chance for support from friends and family
• On-site in the historic landscapes or in historic buildings can often be remote with poor transport links, making access with children difficult, especially for people relying on public transport
• Historic sites and landscapes, whether they be rural or urban, can be challenging to access and navigate safely with children due to hazards such as uneven ground surfaces, the condition of ruins or historic buildings, and containing areas where things cannot be touched that require careful and constant supervision
• Many traditional venues for heritage activities are not typically places children are allowed, such as archives, museum stores, active archaeological sites, behind the scenes or back rooms of historic buildings, or professional offices of heritage organisations
• The public-facing websites, marketing, and promotion of activities often demonstrate a lack of inclusive imagery unless it is of specific child-focused activities and locations, such as play areas or trail activities

How can we best provide childcare?

Budget appropriately

Identify a specific budget that can be used to pay for childcare provision. Look at the number of potential participants you are planning for, and then calculate a potential cost should they wish to take up childcare.

According to the Institute of Children's Activity Providers (ICAP), the average charge per child is between £8 and £10 for a session. However, this will depend on the length of your session, the age range of children, travel distance to your location, and regional variations in cost.

When developing the business case for the project or programming, reach out to providers to get some quotes to compare. Check if your organisation will require you to go through a competitive tender process or collate a specific number of quotes to compare to establish the best value option based on cost and quality.

Make sure you have a robust safeguarding policy

A policy laying out your organisation's approach to safeguarding and lines of responsibility is a key document that should be in place. This will govern how your organisation works with children and vulnerable adults, demonstrating that you have considered risks and put appropriate mitigations in place. Find out more from the Kids in Museums guide to safeguarding.

Identify an age range

After you have identified and set your budget, you should make sure that you set the age range that will both provide the most opportunities and be most relevant to potential participants to ensure you are not over-stretching your budget or capacity.

For example, if your activities run during the week in term time, you will likely mostly have participants with children under 4. If you operate at weekends or during the school holidays, there will likely be a wider range of children.

Consider your capacity carefully, and state this capacity on all promotion and marketing so it is clear there is a limited number of spaces.

Use a professional provider

Do not rely on existing staff or volunteers to take on childcare roles.

Childcare should be provided at proportional ratios by providers who are experienced and qualified to work with children of the age range you are targeting. Read more on this on the GOV.UK website

They should also have the appropriate DBS checks in place to work with children and appropriate liability insurance. This is important for safeguarding reasons and reassuring for parents and carers.

Do not charge participants

The childcare provision should be part of an opportunity, not a costed addition, as this extra financial element will act as a further barrier to many potential participants.

Do not make it contingent on receiving specific benefits

To ensure all have fair access to the opportunities, do not set benefits status as a barrier to participation.

Receiving benefits still carries a stigma. Many people face discrimination and harassment if they are perceived to be 'on benefits' and may be unwilling to sign up for opportunities even if they qualify. It reduces people to numbers rather than considering their individual circumstances, backgrounds, and identities, othering them from non-benefit recipients.

Be clear when promoting and marketing opportunities

Make it clear that you are inviting parents and carers as participants by stating on all of your promotional materials that childcare will be provided, that it will be fully DBS checked, and cost-free. Share the opportunity on your usual channels, but also seek out groups led by or representing parents and carers. A trusted community partner, such as a community hub running parent and carer sessions, health visitors, or local charities working with children and their families, is key to ensuring your message is communicated via a trusted source.

What would the impacts of providing childcare be for your participants?

Wellbeing

People taking part in activities where they can explore, learn, and meet others doing the same have impacts on their mental wellbeing including boosts to self-confidence and improvements in mood and feelings of connection. Read Historic England’s report on Cultural Heritage Capital and Wellbeing to find out more about some of these impacts.

People with childcare responsibilities can be socially isolated and find it hard to connect to their communities and places. Providing opportunities to engage with heritage through group sessions and projects can help tackle this. Read this government report, section 5.1.3 to find out more about the kinds of mental health impacts people with childcaring responsibilities face.

The impacts on mental wellbeing for participants could be something that you measure as part of your evaluation if you build this in as an identified outcome and embed evaluation of it from the start. It is important that if you establish wellbeing outcomes in your project or activity planning this is realistic and proportional and that you risk assess for potential negative impacts. Read more about this in Historic England’s report on Heritage and Social Prescribing.

Some wellbeing impacts you may identify include participants:

• Feeling more connected to their local area
• Feeling more connected to their community
• Feeling less isolated or lonely
• Feeling a stronger sense of self-worth
• Feeling valued or appreciated

Access to heritage

Although parents and carers with children are a large audience for traditional types of heritage engagement such as visiting historic places, access to more in-depth projects and programming is less accessible, meaning people are excluded from pursuing interests or taking part in activities. Providing childcare means participants can experience heritage away from their role as a carer, which can open up very different ways of experiencing heritage.

People with childcare responsibilities may also avoid specific types of heritage sites or historic places due to actual or perceived barriers, such as challenging layouts, perceived lack of facilities, or attitudes of it not “being for them”. Work that directly invites them into these spaces can help dismantle these barriers to participation.