One in six parents have had to change their working hours as they struggle to access nurseries, a damning survey has found.
Some 16% of 3,048 who responded to an early years group’s survey said they had cut their hours - with the average weekly hours falling from 37 to 22.
It comes despite the government offering full-time working parents 30 hours’ free childcare a week.
The Early Years Alliance (EYA), which ran the survey from July 20 to August 6, says the government’s own data shows nurseries are not being properly funded to provide the offer.
Chief executive Neil Leitch said: "This Government has repeatedly told the public it is on the side of working families, but cuts to crucial early care and education tell a different story.
"With budgets becoming ever tighter in the face of rising costs and stagnant funding, many nurseries, pre-schools and childminders have been forced to make tough decisions about the days, hours and flexibility they can offer.
"As our survey shows, this in turn is forcing parents to make their own difficult choices about their working lives.”
The survey found more than one in four parents are struggling to balance work and childcare due to difficulties accessing early years provision.
More than a third (36%) of parents in England said that they were having difficulties accessing childcare, the survey suggests.
It found 27% struggle to balance work and childcare due to difficulties accessing provision, compared with 33% of parents in deprived areas.
The survey suggests 71% do not think the Government is doing enough to support parents to access affordable childcare, while 80% in the most deprived areas feel this way.
One parent said: "I have episodes of stress and anxiety as I struggle to balance childcare needs with work and my marital relationship.
"Being less able to access informal care for prolonged periods has also put much more of a strain on us."
Another parent said: "I'm on Universal Credit that requires I pay the childcare first and claim it back, which is ridiculous, because by the time I pay for food and rent there's not even £150 left for the week."
Tulip Siddiq, shadow minister for children and early years, said: "A decade of underfunding has driven up childcare costs and reduced availability, with nearly 3,000 providers lost since the start of this year alone.
"As so often is the case under the Conservatives, it is the poorest families who are bearing the brunt of this failure.”
Department for Education officials said they were pleased the survey showed 94% of children were accessing childcare and early years education.
A government spokesperson said: “We have made an unprecedented investment in childcare over the past decade, spending more than £3.5 billion in each of the past three years on our free childcare offers. We have also announced a £44 million investment for 2021-22, to increase hourly rates paid to childcare providers for those free offers.
“We are further improving children’s outcomes through our investments into early years recovery, including the Nuffield Early Language Intervention programme, which has to date supported 60,000 four and five-year-olds to date with their language, communication and speech.”
