Family and Childcare Trust

The Family and Childcare Trust is a leading national family charity in the field of policy, research and advocacy on childcare and family issues, with over 40 years’ experience in making things better for families.

Our vision is a society where all families are well-supported and have genuine choices about their lives. Our mission is to make the UK a better place for families, achieving positive change for children via parent-led solutions.

Our approach is to listen, innovate, advocate and support, to achieve long lasting change for all families. We focus particularly on those who face disadvantage or multiple challenges, including social exclusion, precarious work conditions and poverty. Our on-the-ground programmes and services with parents and providers inform our research and campaigning priorities. In turn, our research produces evidence and insight that informs our work with families, policy makers and providers.

We focus most of our efforts on the early years, particularly childcare and early years’ education, as research shows that this is the most critical period for ensuring children grow up to live healthy and happy lives. Childcare is part of our infrastructure, as vital as the roads and railways in enabling our country to run. It enables parents to work, raising family incomes and providing employers with a reliable workforce. High quality childcare boosts children’s development, setting them up to achieve at school and beyond. Our annual Childcare Survey is the definitive report on whether there is enough childcare and what it costs in the UK.

We work with local authorities, schools and providers of family services to support and train them to deliver government initiatives and improve their quality of provision. We run a range of parent- led programmes aimed at providing support for parents. Our research reveals new insights and helps us formulate innovative policy solutions to ensure families are supported and have genuine choice.

We are a flexible, dynamic and exciting organisation, delivering innovative approaches to improve the lives of UK families.

Our parent-led programmes

We run a range of parent-led programmes aimed at providing support for parents in the everyday but not-always-easy job of being a parent. Many of these focuses on supporting parents to build the extended support networks that other parents can take for granted.