Childcare Development and Sustainability Service: consultation on recommissioning

We'd like to hear from parents and carers, organisations that develop and support childcare, childcare providers and the general public to help shape any final decisions.

What is the Childcare Development and Sustainability Service?

The overall aim of the Childcare Development and Sustainability Service is to support families, children and young people by making sure they can access high quality, sustainable and affordable childcare. It does this by providing support to childcare settings, across the following priority areas:

• sufficiency: developing new childcare provision where it is needed
• quality: ensuring childcare is of a high quality, supporting children’s needs and development
• inclusion: ensuring childcare represents the areas it serves, and is accessible for all
• sustainability: helping childcare settings be viable and able to stay open

The service also helps us fulfil the council’s statutory childcare duties, including the duty to ensure there's enough childcare available across Bristol for working parents of children aged 0 to 14, or up to 18 for children with a disability.

How is the Childcare Development and Sustainability Service currently delivered?

Under current arrangements, a single provider has had a contract with the council to deliver the CDSS since January 2022. This current arrangement was the subject of a public consultation in 2021, and feedback to the consultation in 2021 was supportive of continuing to commission an outside organisation to provide this support, citing the expertise of childcare that the organisation brought. Challenges of costs for parents and carers to access childcare, as well as national funding levels for providers were highlighted areas of particular concern.

What are we proposing?

The current CDSS contract ends in December 2025 and we are proposing to commission a similar service for 27 months, with the option to extend for a further 2 years.

Following initial engagement with parent carers, inclusion will be an even greater focus of this new service, including efforts to make childcare more accessible to parent carers in receipt of Universal Credit, and increasing the training to settings on supporting neurodiversity.

The current contract has a value of £305,000 per year. Whilst there will be no reduction in this budget, we are proposing to redirect some of this to enhance Bristol’s wider childcare offer - through continuing support for parent carers getting help through the Access to Childcare Fund, and enhancing Bristol City Council’s training offer to childcare settings – with the remaining £250,000 used for support to childcare settings through the CDSS contract.

We propose 4 priorities of the CDSS commissioning strategy which we invite your feedback on:

• Priority 1: Childcare Sufficiency
• Priority 2: Childcare Quality
• Priority 3: Inclusive Childcare
• Priority 4: Childcare Sustainability

We'll also propose our procurement recommendations in this consultation.