Working parents have cut back on paying for childcare as the cost-of-living crisis hits.

The manager of the Magic Roundabout Nursery in Enniskillen says parents have left her service due to the cost-of-living crisis.

She said: “They are parents who were working at home, they're now going to struggle and just have the children at home while they're trying to work. That is just down to financial pressures as they just can't afford it as we've recently put our prices up.”

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Caroline says she was left without a choice but to increase her prices: “We didn't want to put prices up but we couldn't do anything about it, due to costs that we're having such as overheads, and having the national living wage going up as well.

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“Food has gone up, running our vehicles has gone up, cost of servicing our vehicles, rates went up insurance has jumped massively.”

“We do obviously think that we need support from the government, both for parents and for ourselves as providers.

“If they could come up with some sort of a package it would be good."

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She believes Northern Ireland needs a bespoke childcare strategy.

“I don't think the one in England's working and because I'm on lots of online forums and there are lots of nurseries stopping in England, so it's supposed to be free but they're not given enough to support to the nursery.

“They need to either give proper free or they need to support us in some way that you know, we can kind of keep our prices and not have to put them up and we need to be able to give our staff good wages because we're losing staff all the time to different sectors."

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