Bubble: the babysitting platform finding volunteer child care for key workers during coronavirus

New app provides opportunities for furloughed workers to earn money while ensuring frontline workers aren't stuck without child care, Hazel Sheffield reports

Check Warner from Ada Ventures and Ari Last from Bubble, a platform that provides on-demand child care for parents (Bubble)

Not long after Kayleigh Crouch was furloughed from her job as lead co-ordinator at Wise Owls Nursery in Brighton, she received an email from Bubble, an app she uses to find local parents looking for babysitters, asking for volunteers to look after the children of key workers.

Crouch was already worrying about what her life would be like without the children at the nursery, since carers are discouraged from contacting parents outside the nursery for safeguarding reasons. “It was quite upsetting,” Crouch remembers. “My life revolves around little children so to be removed from that was very difficult for my mental health.”

The email from Bubble offered her the chance to volunteer her time and skills looking after the children of key workers. Through Bubble she was connected to an A&E doctor with two children aged two and five months who was on maternity leave. The doctor had decided to return to work early and needed child care for part of the week.

“It’s really rewarding,” Crouch says, a few weeks into the arrangement. “They live on a farm which is nice and open and I love looking after children. I was furloughed, so I don’t have the financial pressure. This is a chance for me to help where help was needed and to create somewhere safe and nurturing for children that needed it.”

Around half of the nurseries have closed completely during coronavirus, according to the National Day Nurseries Association. As many as a quarter may never reopen, due to the fatal combination of a decade of underfunding in the sector and the lack of sector-specific support from the government during lockdown. In the meantime, many key workers say they are stuck without child care and unable to work.

Ari Last, founder of Bubble, says the volunteer scheme has allowed Bubble to help families of keyworkers access child care at a time when many nurseries were forced to close. “The demand has never been higher,” he says. “Now there is so much uncertainty about nurseries reopening, people need care more than ever.”

Last founded Bubble in 2016 to provide create a cashless, on-demand platform for child care. It has evolved from a place for parents to find last-minute babysitters to a platform for working parents to access child care at any time of the day. Like other platforms including Uber and Airbnb, Bubble is not an employer, so it does not offer employment rights to its workers such as sick pay, parental leave or holiday pay.

Not all of Bubble’s 20,000 approved carers are fully trained nursery workers like Crouch. Many, however, have had their Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check, a government service that checks for information on a person’s record that may make them unsuitable for work with vulnerable groups, and all go through a rigorous recruitment process including interviews. Carers set their own rates, with Bubble applying a small platform fee, payable by the parent, for every “sit”.

Thaise Braga, a Brazilian living in London, had registered to work as babysitter on Bubble after the job she was supposed to start in a restaurant fell through because of coronavirus. She initially struggled to find work through Bubble after being approved to advertise as a babysitter on the site. So when the opportunity came up to volunteer, she saw it as a way to gain experience and meet local families. “I realised I had part of my time free and I had the energy to be doing something because I wasn’t getting a paid job, so why not volunteer?” she says.

Braga eventually found a family needing support so that a parent could keep up his hours in a local hospital. “It was amazing,” she says. “I had the time, and I realised there were so many people doing what they could to help, and I wanted to be a part of that.”

The volunteering went so well that Braga was offered paid, part-time work with the family and now works with them up to 10 hours a day, three or four days a week, for £10 an hour.

Volunteer child care has sparked concern among sector bodies and official providers who say that unregulated services threaten the long-term sustainability of registered child care provision. Liz Bayram, chief executive of the Professional Association of Childcare and Early Years, says that services that offer cheap or free child care are missing the point. “All children, but especially our youngest whose early development is a rollercoaster of new experiences and milestones in relatively short time frames, need teaching that is child focussed, well-rounded – so much more than a babysitting service,” she says.

By shifting care to voluntary and makeshift arrangements, coronavirus risks widening the early years attainment gap for children from the poorest backgrounds, according to the Sutton Trust. In a report, Sutton Trust said that the temporary closure of child care providers is having the biggest impact on children from poorer families, who benefit most from structured provision and are less likely to have a suitable home learning environment. It warns of long-term impact on children if providers are forced to close permanently or if provision is slow to recover.

Miranda Hall, a researcher at the New Economics Foundation who has been looking into the rise of child care platforms like Bubble, says that coronavirus will herald a restructuring of the child care sector. “The question is what direction that goes in,” she says. “People are saying coronavirus might mean a revaluation of the childcare sector, but there is a risk we will see a devaluation of it. As nurseries close down, there will be a gap in the market that private providers might fill using debt-fuelled expansion, while apps might meet the emergency need.”

Hall, who has been working with nannies that use Bubble and other platforms to set up a solidarity fund for child care workers facing hardship, says coronavirus may cause an acceleration of the marketisation of the child care sector: “This is extremely worrying because all of our research on child care shows that high quality care that treats workers well is more likely to be provided by small nurseries, charities and maintained providers.”

In the week after the government announced that people should return to work, Bubble saw a small uptick in people signing up and interest from employers. In March, Bubble raised £2m in a round led by Ada Ventures, to fund its expansion. It has also signed a strategic partnership with Bright Horizons, one of the biggest nursery chains in the UK, to provide corporate solutions for large companies offering child care for workers. It is now looking at expanding at a moment when parents are facing a long summer holiday with no holiday camps, school provision or grandparents to babysit.

Last, who has three children under the age of 10, says that as companies save office costs on employees working from home, the opportunity is for them to invest in child care for employees. “How can we refactor our platform to solve the child care issue for key workers and lower income families who are losing income at the same time as being asked to do more child care?” he says. “We’re trying to get through to people and say: this is what we do.”