Unfair Childcare Eligibility Criteria and the ‘Nerd Tax’
Jamie Evans questions the exclusion that means his family will not be able to claim £8,000 of support while his wife is a PhD student.
The education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, is right to order a Competition and Markets Authority review of hidden childcare charges (Report, 24 May). However, she would do well to also review her own department’s eligibility criteria for accessing 30 hours of funded childcare in the first place. One particularly egregious exclusion is that of PhD students, who miss out on approximately £8,000 of support that the majority of other working parents can access, despite earning only about £20,000 per year (if on a typical UK Research and Innovation-funded course).
This is the situation that will affect my wife and I from February next year, when our soon-to-be-born daughter will turn nine months old and my wife will need to return to the completion of her PhD (improving patient experiences of GP services).
It is obvious to anyone who knows us that we are exactly the kind of “working family” that the policy claims to support, but unfortunately we will miss out because her stipend income doesn’t meet the narrow technical definition of “income” that the Conservatives settled on when they designed the scheme. We, rather ruefully, refer to this as the government’s “nerd tax”.
The Department for Education has so far suggested to my wife that she could simply undertake 16 hours of part-time work per week to qualify, which could be a challenge on top of the 37.5 hours of PhD work that her university expects (and on top of caring for a tiny human, of course).
Without this support, quitting the PhD becomes an increasingly tempting option. That we are forced to consider this feels very wrong; the highest levels of education – and, ultimately, careers in the sciences – should be available to all with the talent, regardless of life stage or financial status. Surely this is a wrong that a Labour government would consider worth righting?
Jamie Evans
Research fellow, Personal Finance Research Centre, University of Bristol
