Woman's Hour - Disability and maternity care, Ads in mobile games, Nursery costs, Playwright Julia Grogan

Episode Date: March 20, 2025

Disabled women in the UK face significant barriers in maternity care, with new research highlighting higher risks of stillbirth, lack of support, and negative attitudes of staff. Labour MP Marie Tidball is camplaigning for change. She joins Kylie Pentelow to describe her own experience, along with Professor Hannah Kuper, one of the researchers behind the report, who details her findings. The Advertising Standards Authority has recently banned a number of ads in mobile games which objectify women, use pornographic tropes, and feature non-consensual sexual scenarios. It's not what you expect to see popping up when playing your favourite mobile game. Kylie hears more from Jessica Tye, Regulatory Projects Manager at the ASA, who led the investigation.Nursery costs have fallen for the first time in 15 years - according to the children's charity Coram. This comes as the Government is continuing to roll out its funded childcare scheme, which will provide all eligible working parents of pre-school children with 30 hours of childcare per week from September 2025. But while some parents have seen a reduction in fees, many with children or grandchildren will be aware of the challenging costs of childcare. Are costs really falling? Can you get a nursery place? Kylie discusses the picture with BBC Education Correspondent Vanessa Clarke, Neil Leitch, Chief Executive of the Early Years Alliance, and nursery owner, Claire Kenyon.Julia Grogan's debut play Playfight was the breakout hit of last year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival. It earned five-star reviews, sell-out audiences – and even praise from Phoebe Waller Bridge, who called it ‘a blinding sucker-punch of a play’. The very funny and very frank play about three young women navigating sex, porn and friendship is now touring the UK, and Julia joins Kylie to discuss.Presented by Kylie Pentelow Producer: Louise Corley

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Hiya, I'm podcaster Audrey Akande and on Dear Daughter Stars, I'm showing a letter to my daughter about taking up space in the world. Dear Daughter Stars from the BBC World Service. Listen now by searching for Dear Daughter wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Hello, this is Kylie Pentelow and you're listening to the Women's Hour podcast. Hello and welcome to the programme coming up in the next hour, the barriers to maternity care for women with disabilities. We hear from one woman, who

also happens to be a Labour MP, who says disabled women should be able to go through pregnancy with dignity and that the NHS was unprepared for a body like hers. Also you may have heard in the news today that childcare costs in England have fallen for the first time in 15 years. But behind that headline, the picture isn't quite so simple. Some nurseries and childminders say they may have to drop out of the scheme as government funding struggles to meet rising costs. So what does that actually mean for parents who need that subsidised care to make ends meet? Let us know your thoughts. Plus today is the Spring Equinox. How are you feeling? Has the sun coming out cheered

you up? This year, as you may have just heard in the news there, it's the World Happiness Report and it was released today. One thing it looked at is how the belief in the kindness of others is closely tied to happiness. So we'd like to hear your stories of the kindness of strangers. What has someone else done that has brightened your day? You can text the programme, the number is 84844 on social media, we're at BBC Woman's Hour. You can email us through our website or you can send us a WhatsApp message or voice note. We'll also be speaking to the writer of a play that was a huge hit at the Edinburgh

Fringe and is now touring. It explores the very serious issues of the use of porn by teenage girls and also sexual violence, but it manages to make the audience laugh out loud with its rude humour. Julia Grogan will join me in the Woman's Hour studio. But first, the Advertising Standards Authority has recently banned a number of ads in mobile games which objectify women, use pornographic tropes and feature non-consensual sexual scenarios. Now it's not what you'd expect to see popping up when you're playing your favourite mobile game. So here to tell me more about this is Jessica Tai from the ASA, who's

the regulatory projects manager who led this investigation. Welcome to the programme, Jessica. Good morning. Can you just explain what these ads are and also where we're likely to come across them? Yeah, exactly. So these are ads for apps, things like gaming apps or AI chatbot apps, and they are appearing in other gaming apps, you know, gaming apps that will have a really general audience, including children, apps where there isn't any kind of adult or sexual theme and where people wouldn't expect to come across these sorts of ads.

And we know that lots of children and young people will play online quizzes in apps. And so, you know, they might be sitting at home or in their bedroom playing these games and then come across one of these ads. And that's obviously really concerning to us. And what kind of thing do the ads have in them? We saw in our piece of research, we saw eight ads that were in very clear breach of our rules because they featured things like really objectifying content, as you mentioned, pornographic tropes, and very clearly implied non-consensual scenarios. You know, one of them featured a sort of animated depiction

of a pupil and a teacher and the teacher bending over and the pupil sort of looking at them. And we were just really concerned by what we were seeing here. You know, our rules are very clear that ads mustn't feature harmful gender stereotypes and they mustn't be irresponsible. So these ads shouldn't be appearing. How was this brought to your attention? Was it complaints from users? This was triggered by a trend we observed in complaints in recent years. In the last couple of years, we've upheld against 11 ads of this nature that appeared in apps. And we were concerned by what we were seeing there. And what we wanted to do was to explore this further.

And so what we did is undertook monitoring, tech-assisted monitoring in apps to see what was the prevalence of these apps. And also a really key part of our work here was to look at what parts of the ad platforms who are serving these ads playing, you know, ultimately why are these ads appearing when it should be obvious to all of the parties involved that they are not acceptable. And I think you used avatars as well. Is that what you meant by tech-assisted monitoring? Yeah, absolutely. So we used four avatars, male and female adult profiles and male and female child profiles and sent those profiles off to play 14 different apps which rule the general audience. We'd expect children to be part of the audience of these apps and these ads tend to appear during gameplay. So the games were played

and then we captured the ads that appeared over a three month period. So that's specifically to look at whether these ads could be targeted at people who it could potentially be harmful to then, is that right? Yeah, part of it. Yes, we did want to see what was being served to the different avatars. I mean, it was a relatively small scale study, but it was it was interesting and concerning that we saw that seven of the eight ads that were in breach were served to child profiles. Now, research wasn't of sufficient scale that we could say that was statistically representative, but it does nonetheless indicate that child users of these apps, you know,

unfortunately are likely to come across some of these ads. It's worth saying that the details of some of these ads, I know you said that there were eight of them that were banned, but they are quite shocking, aren't they? If I can give a couple of examples here, a woman asleep in a chair with a hook, a knife and a saw presented to players to remove her clothing. Or another one, a woman with her arms tied to the ceiling with her bra exposed with options to tickle her breasts and buttocks. I mean, these are very shocking things that will be presented to people just simply playing a mobile game. Was this a surprise to you that these ads were there, were being used? Yeah, I mean, the ones you're quoting there are ones that we have received complaints about and upheld against in the last few years. So, yes, I mean, there does seem to be a trend that's very specific to advertising for the apps.

You know, we do receive some complaints about objectifying ads in other media, but they are not, you know, the very concerning nature I think is pretty specific to in-app ads, which is why we wanted to undertake this proactive work. And, you know, it's not just about producing a report here. We really want to use this as a launching point to work with the industry to try and reduce these appearing because it's just, it's not acceptable that anyone's coming across them, but it's particularly unacceptable if children are coming across these ads. Absolutely. You mentioned this there, but what are the rules that regulate things like this? Is it difficult to control them because this is relatively new technology that we're

working with? I mean, our rules are media neutral. These ads need to not cause serious or widespread offence. They need to not be irresponsible and they must include harmful gender stereotypes. I think one of the challenges we do see in this sector is that the non-compliant ads we've seen have all originated from games publishers based outside of the UK, so I think it's fair to say they have less awareness of our rules, although I think it should be pretty clear to them that the kinds of ads they're producing are going to be acceptable in any market really. But that's one reason why we wanted to undertake this piece of work because although it can be sometimes be problematic to engage with those individual advertisers, we also, you

know, we know that these ads are being served by specialist ad platforms who focus on in-app ads and there are less of those. So really wanted to engage with them and they, you know, to their credit have engaged really constructively with us. And I think our hope is that through this piece of work, that will mean that they undertake much greater checks on the ads that are being served and that it reduces the number that are are appearing. With that in light, do you do you feel like you have the power to control them and make sure that this isn't continuing to happen? I mean, I think

we have we have engaged really constructively with the industry here. We we do have tools available to us if advertisers continue to breach the rules. The vast majority of advertisers do cooperate with us. But if they don't, we will work with our platforms and game publishers to get them to remove the in-app ads. But I think what we wanted to do through this piece of work was engage with the industry much more broadly, because I think that's more likely to be

effective in addressing the issue than going after individual ads. Just finally then, if anyone's listening, and we know lots of our listeners will play these kind of games, lots and lots of people do, if they come across something in an app that they think is inappropriate, misogynistic or otherwise, what should they do? They can report them to us on our website, so asa.org.uk and you know, as we've shown here, this is an issue we take really seriously. They should also be able to report them in app. And we know that the game publishers don't want these appearing.

So they should be able to do that as well. So we'd really encourage them to take those steps. OK, Jessica Tai from the ASA, thank you very much for your time here on Women's Hour. Now pregnancy and birth can be a challenging experience but for disabled women the barriers to maternity care are far greater. That's according to a new report by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. It's found that disabled mothers have worse maternity care access experiences and outcomes with higher risks of complications, including a greater chance of stillbirth. Labour MP and disability rights campaigner Marie Tidball, who was born with a congenital

disability joins us now to share her own experience of navigating pregnancy and childbirth. And I'm also joined by Hannah Cooper from the National Institute for Health and Care Research. She's a professor and one of the researchers behind this report. Thank you so much for your time here on Woman's Hour. Marie, if I can start with you. When you were growing up, did you ever come across stories of disabled women navigating pregnancy and motherhood? And I wonder how that might have shaped your expectations about having children. Oh Marie, we're struggling to hear you though.

We'll just double check if your sound is working. While we're sorting that out, I'll come to you Hannah. So you're behind this report. How widespread do you think these issues are? These issues are really widespread so disability is extremely common. In the UK maybe 20% of people are disabled and maybe about half of them have a lot of difficulties in everyday activities. And we know when we look across the literature that people with disabilities have higher health care needs and worse health care access and outcomes include a higher mortality including here in the

UK. So it's a really widespread issue. Let's go back to Marie. I think we can hear you now, Maria. So if you can just let me know, we were talking, I was asking you about when you were growing up and your perception, I guess, of disabled women having children and your expectations. So the first time I ever saw a disabled woman pregnant that I remember was when I saw Alison Lapper pregnant, the sculpture that was on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. Growing up there was so little representation of disabled women's bodies and I definitely think that had a huge role in affecting my own identity

and understanding of my womanhood and that was certainly something that I struggled with as a teenager and experienced anorexia as a result of that because nowhere was there representation of bodies like mine. And it was, that led to my body breaking down and my period stopping. And actually it was that thought that one day

I might want to have a child that set me on a journey to get better from that. And so this is an issue that I've been passionate about for a very, very long time and feel a huge obligation now that I'm in parliament to highlight issues affecting women because so often discussions about women's issues and access to services, disabled women's voices are shut out of that debate. So what was your experience then when you discovered you were pregnant and then going through all the steps that everyone would go through ICU? What was it like for you? What was the response of medical professionals?

So I was really excited when I became pregnant and found out I was pregnant. I really wanted that to be celebrated. And it was really my first midwife appointment that I realised the lack of understanding on that journey. I'd explained that probably I wasn't, they weren't going to be able to find my veins because of my upper limb difference. And they rang the phlebotomy team and I was team and they were on the phone to them. I had to keep explaining that I had four shortened arms with a digit on each hand. And I realized after about the third time,

and it's funny now, but that I was in the middle of some kind of too Ronnie sketch where they thought I was saying I had four shortened arms and they were looking for the other pair of arms. And so by the end of that first session with that midwife, I decided to change and I went to another brilliant community midwife, but at each stage along that

maternity care pathway, where I expected my pregnancy to be celebrated, for there to be some level of insight about how to remove barriers that I faced in that pregnancy, that wasn't the result that I experienced. There were some brilliant professionals that tried really hard and my community midwife was one of them and tried to refer me to a consultant midwife and various other things. But the first place that I was referred to that I got a follow-up from, which she hadn't directly referred me to, was the genetic counselling service. And that was really, really upsetting

because the implication was that what I actually really wanted to talk about was whether my child was going to have the same disabilities as I would. And I was, A, convinced that that wasn't going to be the case, where it's certain my disability isn't genetic. But B, I wanted to talk about my body as a disabled woman and that intersection with my pregnancy. And that wasn't even really on their radar. And then later on that pathway, I did get a referral and saw a registrar, a male registrar obstetrician. And I said, look, I had lots of surgeries as a child. I'm really want to understand if I can give birth naturally. And he said to

me, well, you know, fully closed, can you can you open your legs? And that was how he wanted to try and work out if that was going to be possible for me to give birth. And I was kind of like, there are literally academic papers written on the surgery that was done to me as a child, the impact that that's had on my hips and pelvis, that there are x rays that exist, why are you not asking for these things and understanding that intersection between my skeletal system and how I might give birth naturally on what my birth plan

was. So it was only when I developed obstetric colostasis, which lots of people listening will be aware of makes you very itchy, is entirely unrelated to my disability, that I then happened to get to see a fantastic consultant obstetrician and he almost marched me himself to go and see the consultant midwife because he said you're going to have to have an induction tomorrow and your bilirubin levels are too high and then I got to speak to her and we talked about my birth plan and we talked about that forceps and fontus wouldn't be appropriate because of brist to my hips and so if it looked like there were going to be those sorts

of complications in birth we should have a lower threshold to caesarean and but that could have been something that was decided and discussed much, much earlier on, and it would have enabled me to have planned better for that stage of my pregnancy. I want to come to some things that happened as well after you had your daughter, but let's just bring in Hannah again. I mean, listening to Marie's story, how much does what she's saying reflect what you heard? MS. HANNAH HARTMANN Very closely. So the UK evidence shows, as

you said, that women with disabilities have worse outcomes, worse access and worse experience, including a higher rates of emergency caesareans, they're less likely to breastfeed because they don't get that kind of support. And really tragically 50% or higher risk of the baby dying stillbirth or postnatally. Why do you think this hasn't been something that's a priority then, that maternity care for disabled women isn't something that's been addressed? I think for something like this to be addressed you need two things. So you need a champion, and clearly, Marie's coming forward to do that.

But also, you need evidence, which is why we were inspired to write this report, to show what is happening in the UK at the moment for disabled women and also for the guidance, whether this is reflected in NHS practice at the moment. And your research also found that most studies on maternal health and disability are focused on mental health. Why do you think that is?

I think the kind of technical reasons about that, that it can be quite difficult to get measures of disability from electronic health records, but it's much easier to get diagnosis of specific mental health conditions like schizophrenia or bipolar. And so that's why there's a greater focus on those conditions. And Marie, you've said in the past, I was reading that there were some people who thought that women with disabilities shouldn't be having children. I mean certainly that is not something that was said to me directly but I'm aware that other disabled women have experienced that in some of the conversations that I've had. I think this goes back to Hannah's point

about research, I think social attitudes towards that, we need much more research on those sorts of things and understand whether those, that sort of culture is seeping into the way and the kind of total inability to think about disabled women in these scenarios and understand how their disability might intersect with their pregnancy. But it was really clear to me that even the really, really good professionals that I met on my healthcare journey when I was pregnant

and then post-birth, just hadn't thought about these things before. You know, Hannah talked about breastfeeding then. When I gave birth to my little one, I had a fabulous midwife support worker who taught me how to feed lying down the night she was born. But then the specialist breastfeeding support worker who was on the ward during the daytime couldn't show me a feeding position that would enable me to feed sitting

upright. And my stomach muscles have been sliced through with the caesarean and no one had understood that that would massively affect my mobility because I use my core muscles much more than everybody else does and to be able to be ambulent and to move around and they just didn't have any ideas the same with the occupational therapy team who I spoke to couldn't advise me on ways that would make carry my baby easier and the kind of slings that I would be able to clip in given my upper body limb difference or other kinds of methods and feeding positions. And it was only thanks to a really wonderful woman who worked for a local breastfeeding charity that she came to my house and spent a couple of hours with me trying out different feeding positions. And we discovered this,

the koala feeding position where the baby sits upright on your knee and which is quite uncommon to use for tiny babies but that worked really really well for me and that was how I was able to leave the house and go out and meet with friends and introduce them to my baby and I wouldn't have been able to have done that but I was still left not being able to carry my baby down the flight of stairs from the flat where we lived at that time on my own and had to become hugely reliant on my mum to come out with me. And that's someone who at the time I was a cabinet member in the local council, I was an academic, you know, I had that social capital, I had that experience of advocating for other disabled people over many, many years.

And I was left really dependent on others in a way that I hadn't been since being a child. And there was just a real lack of imagination from some of those, you know, in terms of health visitors and also occupational therapy teams to work out what that they could give me. And having done research subsequently, there is some brilliant accessible clothing out there, Magneti Baby Grows for babies, which, you know, I think any parent who wakes up very early in the morning would be very grateful to use something which doesn't require very fiddly poppers, but also slings that could be adapted and enabled me to have breastfed my baby. Because bottle feeding wasn't an option for me, that was even more fiddly and it was really difficult. And because some of the other tasks of mothering,

like changing nappies at that point in my recovery from the caesarean were also really challenging like breastfeeding was an important way for me to bond with my baby and it was thanks to a phenomenal phenomenal other community midwife who because she was losing weight and I wasn't producing enough milk because of the cesarean, the blood loss that I'd had in that. And she came and showed me a technique using electric breast pumps to make sure that was up in my milk supply. But it was her perseverance, not because that was done by standard, that I was then able to build up enough of a milk supply to feed my baby, which I did until she was three in the end as it happened. That was a wonderful, very special experience. But lots, lots more needs to be done so that professionals all the way along that route work out how to make

reasonable adjustments for disabled people who are disabled women during maternity, post-birth and in that post-natal period when you're first at home. So Hannah, listening to Marie there, from your research, do you think it comes down to simply lack of training for NHS staff? I think that's definitely a component of it. So what we say is that healthcare services including maternity services need to expect people with disabilities, they need to respect them and they need to connect them. So part of that is about training healthcare workers to have the positive attitudes around disability but also the knowledge and skills to give quality of care. But it's also that the facilities, the equipment need to be accessible, not just physically accessible, but in terms of things like communication.

But there also needs to be this connection. I think Marie talks about that a little bit. So how do you make sure that throughout the journey, whether it's maternity care or other healthcare, people with disabilities are connected through so that they get all of the care that they need? Marie, you've been speaking to policymakers because it's important now to move on, isn't it, and to see what needs to change. So what specific changes are you calling for?

So we're calling for the establishment of a UK committee, which very much includes disabled women at the forefront, to ensure that we build up a specialist knowledge base on what inclusive maternity care and inclusive maternity care pathways looks like for disabled women so that we can work with that builder specialism and expertise that then can form the basis of training both for the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and Royal College of Midwives in particular, but for the other healthcare professionals that disabled women would work with along their maternity journey.

And crucially, as Hannah's report discovered of the 30 NICE guidelines, there were no specialist guidelines on inclusive maternity care for disabled women and even in the other standard guidelines on maternity care at each of the stages there was nothing specific on disability. So we're also calling for a nice guideline about this so that that can really help underpin professional knowledge and

clinical expertise. But I've been hugely grateful for the support of the health team in government who have reached out to me and have been very much in discussion with me. We've got a real opportunity with our 10-year plan that's come out the DASzi review which will have a strand on women's health and I would very much like to see this as a really core tenet of that piece of work too. We haven't got much time but I do want to reflect that in Tuesday's debate on welfare reform you asked a question. In terms of disability maternity, are you confident that women with high risk pregnancy will be supported? I know you are in support

of the reform bill. So I very much believe that growth means inclusive growth and so all of the measures that we put in place must ensure that they include the social model of disability, which at the forefront removes barriers for disabled people. I welcome the £1 billion work programme to get more disabled people back into work. I want to see disabled people fulfilling their potential. In terms of the impact of the other aspects of that green paper, the other aspects of that green paper, I'd urge people to make sure that they take part of the consultation. We don't know a great deal of detail about the measure that you mentioned, but I will certainly be engaging with the department on this. I've spent my career looking at the impact of government policymaking on the intersection of protected characteristics.

I will be looking extremely closely on this bearing in mind the impact on disabled women and that interaction with maternity and look forward to working with the department to move that forward. And you know in terms of getting people back to work, as you said, that is a priority, but how do you protect those whose lives could potentially be made worse by these potential reforms? I always believe that disabled people's voices should be at the heart of policy making, and this consultation process is a 12-week consultation process. making and this consultation process is a 12-week consultation process and I will be speaking as I do regularly to all sorts of disabled people and most

importantly to my constituents to understand from their lived experience their perception of of those impacts and I will be feeding that back to government as they would expect me to do, because that's been my area of expertise for over a decade and a half. I think what's crucial, and that was my question at the start of the week in response to the statement, is having a sector by sector employment strategy, which works out how we remove the barriers to employment along the employment pathway for disabled people to close the absolutely pitiful employment gap of 29% and the 17% pay gap that has built up under 14 years of the Conservatives now facing disabled people.

Okay, yeah, Marie Tidball and Professor Hannah Cooper thank you so much for your time. Now we should just say that the Department of Health and Social Care have got in touch with a statement on this they said no one should face pressure about their pregnancy choices based on their disability and too many women including those with disabilities are not receiving the safe, personalised and compassionate maternity care they deserve. Through our plan for change, this government is determined to change that. They go on to say this starts with listening to women and families to learn lessons, improve care and

ensure mistakes are not repeated. We will support trusts to make rapid improvements and we will work closely with NHS England to train thousands more midwives to support all women through their pregnancy and beyond. What do Bridgerton actor Adjoa Ando, Nature presenter Rae Wynn Grant and TikTok sensation Mama Siebs all have in common? They're all guests on Dear Daughter's Stars from the BBC World Service. I'm Namulanta Kombo. And for the new series of Dear Daughter, I'm welcoming an all-star lineup to share stories of parenting in the spotlight. Listen now by searching for Dear Daughter wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

Now, I hope it's a lovely day where you are today. The sun is certainly shining here in London. And as we were saying, the World Happiness Report is out today and found that the kindness of others was more closely tied to happiness than previously thought. So we've been asking for your stories of where a stranger's kindness has helped to brighten your day.

We have a lot of comments coming in, so I'm just going to read a couple of them now. This one here from Julia who says, my son is grown up with a family of his own, but when he was a small child, something happened that I will never forget. We were getting on a crowded tube and somehow, I don't know how, my son managed to get on the train as the doors closed, leaving me on the platform. This is my worst nightmare. My memory goes blank at this point, Julia says, but I must have alerted the staff who contacted the next station. I got on the next train and arrived to find my son enthroned in a battered armchair on the platform. A member of London Underground staff, an elderly man, was gently talking to him.

My son was perfectly happy. And when I burst into tears, he asked why I was crying. I've never forgotten that lovely man who took care of my son with such tenderness." How lovely is that? And this one here says, I was in a cafe, tired due to my then baby son having colic and breastfeeding him in a cafe. An older lady kept glancing over and I was so worried that she was unhappy. Yet as she went to leave the cafe she walked over and she put her hand on my shoulder and said, well done, you're doing so well. Smiled and

checked whether I needed a drink. I burst into tears and always remember her kindness at a time when I was a nervous new mum. Now I see a breast, if I see a breastfeeding mum on her own, I try to check if they need a drink and let them know that they're doing great. Isn't that lovely? Thanks so much for your comments and keep them coming in on 84844. Okay, let's move on now. You may have heard in the news today that nursery costs have fallen for the first time in 15 years. That's according to the Charity Quorum. Well, this comes as the government is continuing to roll out its funded childcare scheme, which will provide all eligible working parents of preschool children, not only three and four year olds as currently, with 30 hours of childcare

per week from September of 2025. But while some parents have seen a reduction in fees, many of you with children or grandchildren will be aware of the challenging costs of childcare with some calling it a second mortgage. So are costs really falling? Can you get a nursery place? So we'll take a look at the full picture and to discuss it, I'm joined by Vanessa Clark, who's BBC Education correspondent, Neil Leach, Chief Executive of Early Years Alliance and Claire Kenyon, a nursery owner. Welcome to you all. Vanessa, if I can start with you, can you just describe what the current picture is here? Yeah, well today's survey is quite interesting because, you know, it's for many years we've

had a familiar trend of nursery and childminder costs creeping up. Last year there were well over £15,000. But in England this year year the cost for one and two year olds has fallen as the government scheme rolls out which you know gives extra help to working parents and they're given hours which they can use that are paid for by the government. The aim is to get parents back to work and help with the costs and in response to today's report the Education Secretary said you know it's working there's more to come as the hours eligible families receive will double in September but if you look at the costs in Scotland, Wales and for three and four year olds in England

where parents have been receiving help for some years prices have risen and in England where you see a bit of a drop you this is good news for some parents but you know it's not all plain sailing. Nurseries and child minders are struggling and really the government are very reliant on the private sector to give these government funded places to parents and from September they'll be paying for 80% of the childcare in England so you know it's very important that that rate they are paying is right. Neil if I can bring you in here, as I said, you're the chief executive of the largest

early years membership organisation in England. So what are your members saying to you about this? Well, I think they agree that on the surface for parents, this sounds like a great idea, but if you don't have the substance behind it, and if it coincides with a sector that is really, really struggling, and as Vanessa has just alluded to, basically, if the government is not adequately funding the hours, how long will this last? And we've got more and more members telling us that they will either close their doors or they will restrict the number of hours that's available under the government scheme. That's not success. That is just basically sort of growing with the tide, nothing more.

So what could that mean then? Is it nurseries closing down in worst case? Yeah, without a doubt it will be nurseries closing. I mean, if I could just say as well as representing 14,000 preschools, nurseries and childminders in England, we also operate 39 settings ourselves exclusively in areas of deprivation. This time five years ago ago we had 132. We've just had a whopping national insurance increase added to our wage bill without any compensation with the Treasury openly accepting that they have

not funded it. How do they expect us to make up the difference? It's either put up fees or close your doors. Let's bring in Claire here. You're a nursery owner Claire. Can you just tell us the the impact that this is having on your nursery? I think one of the things that isn't being talked about is that a nursery like mine for example, I have a nursery in a big Georgian house, it has a big garden. I have another nursery which is based in a big walled garden. I have graduates, I'm led by Montessori teachers, I have a master's degree in early childhood. So a setting like mine will get paid exactly the same rate by the government to a nursery who is renting a room in a village hall, doesn't

have any business rates, might not have as highly qualified staff as me, and we are being now told that we cannot charge for extra quality. But the fact is that the government is not paying us the rate for high quality. It advertises it to parents as free childcare, but actually it's telling us it wants high quality early years education. And that's a huge, huge difference between those two things.

Parents, my parents, are really happy to pay a little bit extra, but we are being told we're not allowed to charge. So what does this mean in practice? In practice, I think, well, in practice, actually, the earlier sector have had enough. We are all gathering, we're all rebelling actually, there's a huge rebellion going on. I think the government takes advantage of the fact that we are mostly nice people who think about children and families, so they have really taken advantage of that. I think there's a perception that we are kind of all sort of babysitters that sit around and do not very much and play with

children all day and that's what we're paid for and it's a kind of misogynistic societal view of a very feminized role. So I think we've all had enough, a group is forming, we are taking legal action, we're pushing back. I think we've all had enough. A group is forming, we are taking legal action, we're pushing back. I think what we all want is for the government to pay the amount to the parents into their tax-free childcare account so that the parents can spend the money as they want in the setting that is best for them. Neil, we know that nursery places aren't easy to come by. You know, I've seen, I've got friends who are in this situation, they've got a long, long waiting list to get a place.

I myself looked at a nursery when I was 27 weeks pregnant and I was told I was leaving it late. I thought I was being very prepared. Could this, could this lead to even more issues with people being able to get child care and and and we know that in some areas That there just isn't child care available. I think it's inevitable I mean we have to say we ourselves run 39 nurses not a single one of those nurseries Basically as at full capacity predominantly because we cannot recruit and we cannot retain Educators into the sector. So the reality is if you

inadequately fund the sector, we will not progress, we will not invest, there will be a shortage of places. And I would also suggest this, those places are most likely to occur in areas of deprivation or rural areas where I have to say Pre-election the government argued that every single child should have the right to care and education Claire's point there is about the fact that we are not glorified babysitters. We create citizens of the future use the word earlier When you're referring to happiness, that's absolutely incredibly important at this point in time You know, I'm tired of waking up in the morning and, dare I say, looking at the PPC news and reading and hearing some of the dismal things that are occurring. The only way you change that, and anybody who knows anything about child development will tell you, you change it in

the early years. That's where you invest. You don't play games which basically are just about creating an infrastructure that allows predominantly mums to go back to work. We wouldn't talk about it in this way if we've been talking about six-year-old children in schools. It would be about their education and development. That's the investment, that's the attention, that's the status that we should be applying to early years. Claire, who do you think will be the ones who potentially will lose out here? Ultimately, at the moment I actually do give away some completely free sessions to children who are disadvantaged in some way or parents having a challenging time. We can usually

tell, we know our families well, we know who these are, and we generally give a few spaces away for free. And it's those children who are going to be, you know, they're not gonna have access to settings like mine. I'm not gonna be able to afford to do it. I actually probably, and certainly in one of my settings, I could withdraw from the funding tomorrow

and it wouldn't really affect, you know, my numbers might drop a bit, but you know, the parents are all very successful, professional, you know, some of them aren't even eligible for the funding anyway. But those children who come to that setting who can't afford it, if they, without any funding, they're the ones that are going to be affected if I put if I just pull out the funding. Mm-hmm. They won't be able to afford it. And do you mean in terms of because as you were saying it's not just about babysitting, it's about the education as well and that's important for children who may come from deprived areas to make sure that they're getting.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean we're talking about, you know, everyone says talking about levelling up, what the government is doing now is levelling down because it will be a race to the bottom. If settings like mine pull out or close, we're going to be only accessible to wealthier parents and the gap will get bigger. Let's just bring in Vanessa, our BBC education correspondent for a moment. You've been listening there Vanessa to a lot of these points which I'm sure you've heard before, you know, when you've been researching this topic. What has the government had to say in response to these issues? Well, Brigid Phillips and the Education

Secretary is very clear that early years is her priority. She has two main aims. One is this helping working parents and the other is all about, you know, stopping that gap and letting early years children develop, have a good level of development before they go to school so it is very much her priority but by her own estimates and the government's own own estimates this September 70,000 extra spaces and 35,000 extra staff will be needed to make this to make this effectively work as parents try and increase their nursery hours and if you look at Ofsted's figures they've done a map which shows you know the childcare deserts across the country and there are some places where there is very good

access for parents but there are others where there is a decline in access to childcare and the government is hoping to open more nurseries and schools to tackle that. So you know if you look at the figures overall, the number of nursery spaces are actually growing at the moment, about 20,000 this year. So they're hoping that will improve. But I think we're just going to see a picture across the country that varies. So, as she said, as Bridget Phillips said before, parents just won't get their first option.

They're going to perhaps have to travel further. But I think September will be a real pinch point as parents are given more free hours to see how exactly this is all going to work out. Yeah, Clare, I just, and Neil, I want to end with a final thought from you. If we start with Clare, what do you want to change? What key thing could change this so that things improve? Means tested subsidy paid into the tax-free childcare account. There already exists those those tax-free childcare accounts. This is what they do in Australia. It's means tested so more of the money could go and be focused on children who need more, you know, parents who need more help. It could be tapered off. I mean, I just don't understand why that's not what we're doing. I really don't. Neil, what do you think about that?

I agree with the Secretary of State that every child deserves the right to care and education and there should be no restrictions whatsoever that allows every child. There is nothing in these current plans that allow children of non-working parents to have care and education in an early years setting. So for me it isn't about dividing up, it's about ensuring that every child come back to the school position. We wouldn't be talking about means testing for example children at six or seven years of age. Everybody deserves the right to education, adequately funded and I would say this it's not with the Secretary of State or with the Minister of Early Education, their intention to me seems absolutely fine. Treasury hold

the purse strings, Treasury know they're underfunding the sector, fund it adequately. Okay, Nell Leach, Chief Executive of the Early Years Alliance, Claire Kenyon, nursery owner and Vanessa Clark, our education correspondent. Thank you very much. I'm sure this is a topic that we will be returning to because it of course affects so many people. Now I've been asking for your stories about your moments of kindness, kindness of strangers that helped to brighten your day, increase your happiness. We've had so many comments on this. I'm going to try to get to as many as I can. This one here says, many years ago, a friend of mine was working in a ski resort after his A levels.

One day he got the unthinkable news that his father had been killed in a car accident. He was clearly devastated and left immediately to fly home, but he was in a total blur. He caught a train thinking he was heading to Geneva, but he was in a total blur. He caught a train thinking he was heading to Geneva, but he was going in the wrong direction. Crying on the train, a stranger came up to him and asked what was wrong. After explaining, the stranger got off the train with my friend at the next stop, took him all the way to the airport, two hours away, and bought him a flight home. This person says when I despair at humanity I think of this wonderful compassionate man. How wonderful.

And this one here says in July of 2016 I was being walked down to the anaesthetic room to have part of my kidney removed. The theatre nurse who walked me down told me she would stay beside me and hold my hand throughout the operation. I have never forgotten how much her kindness and encouragement helped me through a difficult moment. I never got to thank her. She was the epitome of what we understand to be a caring professional." Wouldn't it be lovely if that person was listening right now and heard those thanks? Now there are more than 3,000 shows at the Edinburgh Fringe each year, so it's always pretty extraordinary when there's one that everyone seems to be talking about. Last year, it was Playfight by my next guest, writer Julia Grogan. It's very rude, very

funny and also a very powerful exploration of sexual violence. An unlikely combination which we will explore. It earned five star reviews, had sell-out audiences and even praise from actress Phoebe Waller-Bridge who called it a blinding sucker punch of a play and Playfights is now touring the UK. Julia's here to tell me all about it. Welcome Julia. I went to see Playfights earlier in the week in Bristol, and I have to say that Phoebe Waller-Bridge is usually right. She was right. She's right about everything.

It was that blinding sucker punch. It is very intense and extremely thought provoking. Can you just tell us what the play's about and what inspired it? Yeah, totally. So the play is about three friends who are all growing up, we see them around the base of an oak tree, and they grow up from the age of 15 to 24. And it's the three women and they're trying to navigate sort of love and friendship against a backdrop of rising violence in mainstream pornography and violence against women altogether. So the play is automatically kind of looking at really dark themes.

And but something that I really wanted to capture and why it has a kind of plosive element to it is that, you know, these women are powerful and they're their own agents and they have agency and they're trying to model things together and get through a pretty tough environment for young women. So it is funny and yeah, that's something that I was really keen to make sure came across. But the play, yeah, it came, I started writing it in 2019 and I'd read about the death of Grace Mullane, who was a British backpacker who was in New Zealand. And she was strangled to death by her Tinder date and later buried in a forest by him. And he was in court claiming that this was a sex game that had gone wrong.

And I'd never written a play before, but I was working behind the bar at the Royal Court Theatre and was surrounded by sort of creatives and they just opened up applications for their new playwriting course. And I thought I'm, I'm so, I was so deeply furious about reading this article and it had really re-triggered a lot of traumatic experiences that I think I'd had when I was growing up as a young woman and particularly that of my friends when it surrounded issues around sex. And it ignited something in me. So I sat down and sort of wrote the first ten pages of the play which have pretty much remained

untouched and submitted it into the course and managed to get a place and then went on to finish writing Playfight. That's incredible and the fact that it was your first play and something so complex to write about as well. Yeah, I think it was, it is complex and I made sure that I had the kind of right team around me. I wrote to a barrister called Susan Edwards who has been heavily involved in trying to make sure that this sex game gone wrong defense isn't actually a thing anymore and I met up with her and we went for a cup of tea and we sat outside the sort of inns of court and up at the top of the Strand and at the time I was thinking I want to write a play that is

looking at the legality surrounding how it's possible for a man to get manslaughter for strangling a man to get manslaughter, for strangling a woman to death if he claims that it was during sex. But what we ended up talking about was, well, the being young and like our relationship to sex and friendship and love and that beautiful thing of how confident we are when we're teenagers and how misguided we are in the hands of an education system that isn't really talking about sex in a way that is really necessary right now. I think there's so much dangerous content out there. On the main homepage of any pornography sites, any young person has easy access to. You're automatically seeing

videos of a woman being strangled and pretty hard as well. But ultimately, my experience of growing up around those things, you're not really thinking of it in terms of the context of it in society. You're experiencing it through friends kind of cocking up at the school disco and like your own fumblings with your first time. But now that I'm a little bit older, yeah, the mission with Playfight is to try and get people talking about like how are we socializing men when it comes to sex. I should just say that Baroness Burton's independent pornography review has made a series of recommendations to government including porn that depicts choking and other forms of violence against

women and girls should be banned. You mentioned that the three girls, young women, you know, 15 to 24, Keira, who's absolute force of nature, whenever she appears, you know, she is really in your face. She's desperate to have sex with as many men as possible before sixth form. Zainab, a lot more measured, figuring out her own sexuality. And then Lucy, who goes to church, seems quite naive at the start of the play, very complex character. You mentioned pornography there. I guess I was quite surprised by how much they talk about pornography. I'm older than you. I went to school a long time ago. It wasn't something that, you know, I didn't have a mobile phone. It wasn't something that was in the, you know,

it wasn't something anyone did. But that seems to have changed. Yeah, yeah. And it's certainly when I, yeah, I mean, growing up, porn was huge, and particularly the way that my male friends spoke about their early experiences of learning about sort of how to pleasure a woman with very much through this lens of quite aggressive, dominating pornography. And what that's also teaching women is this very submissive passive position. It's not really looking at pleasure and desire in a space that is healthy, particularly for young people to be coming across. And something that we're doing alongside the play is this huge engagement program where we're working really closely with Kindred, who we're making workshops where they're going to go into schools and try and start opening up dialogues surrounding the themes of the play and creating an online platform that can be taught in schools to really try and tap into the, you know, this is a really dangerous means and pornography

is, it's a really steep increase in how much violence is seeping into it and I don't think we've caught up with that in our education and in the conversation. You mentioned humour a little earlier and it is very funny, laugh out loud funny. But I got the impression that some people who were sitting near me were almost embarrassed to laugh because it was so edgy. Why was it important for you to make it funny? I think, well as a writer and as a human I am, I will always try and find the laugh when I'm, when something's serious. Like me at a funeral is absolutely harrowing because I'm, I'm incapable of connecting to my deep feelings. And I think that is when there's traumatic things happening and when humans are experiencing pain it is in our nature to try and seek the lightness in it.

So a lot of my work is always, it will always have a really dark subject matter. But it's, I'm always trying to access it through humour. I think an audience, I do feel a responsibility to uplift my audience and to make it accessible. I think we're most vulnerable when we're laughing, even facially, like our mouths are open, we're vulnerable. And I think we don't have to talk about these, you know, I'm a playwright. I've got loads of questions I don't really have many answers so if I can entertain and I can give someone a really good night at the theatre and tell a story and Alongside that provoke a little chat in the bar afterwards about the themes and I've done my job. It certainly does that Julia Griggen Thank you very much. And thank you all very much for listening. That's all for today's Woman's Hour. Join us again next time.

It's a parent's nightmare. They said, oh, it's a boy. And I was holding my hands out, ready to cuddle him and they took him away. A switch at birth discovered with the gift of a home DNA test. The so-called brother that we grew up with wasn't a brother and there's someone out there, if he's still alive, is. A race against time. I don't want this woman to leave this earth not knowing what happened to her son.

The Gift from Radio 4 with me, Jenny Clemon. Listen now on BBC Sounds. What do Bridgerton actor Adjoa Ando, Nature presenter Rae-Wynn Grant, and TikTok sensation Mama Seabes all have in common? They're all guests on Dear Daughter's Stars from the BBC World Service. I'm Namulanta Kombo, and for the new series of Dear Daughter,

I'm welcoming an all-star lineup to share stories of parenting in the spotlight. Listen now by searching for Dear Daughter wherever you get your BBC podcasts.