Unfair childcare eligibility criteria and the ‘nerd tax’ | Letters

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 department’s own 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