The Coalition of Child Care Advocates was funded by the Government of Canada (Employment and Social Development Canada) to explore the need for and provision of “flexible child care” options in British Columbia.

The objective was to develop recommendations for integrating flexibly scheduled and non-standard hours child care into BC’s emerging $10aDay child care system, in ways that prioritize and respect the needs of children, families, educators and providers.

This project is now complete. 

You can download the project report, below.

Child Care When Families Need It: 30 Recommendations for Advancing Non-standard Hours and Flexibly Scheduled $10aDay Child Care in BC
May 2025

This publication explores why – and how – to ensure all families can access child care when they need it. It focuses on making BC's 2024 "Test Operating Funding Model/OFM" work better for all types of child care (both standard and non-standard). (summary | full report)

Building on a foundation

Several Canadian researchers have recently led the way in exploring the topic of flexible and non-standard hours child care across the country. For example, the federally-funded report "Non-standard Work and Child Care in Canada: A Challenge for Parents, Policy Makers, and Child Care Provision (Lero et. al, 2021) " comprehensively assesses the current need for and provision of different types of non-standard hours care, barriers to its creation, and potential policy solutions.

Our project sought to build on this strong foundation, with a focus on the BC context. Through a provincial Environmental Scan, Literature Review, Key Informant and Stakeholder Interviews, Public Survey, and Operating Model Analysis, we:

• Further explored the need for “flexible” child care
• Identified new statistics and information related to the key findings of Lero et. al (2021)
• Proposed refined terminology and analytical methods for use in BC
• Provided an in-depth scan of related BC policy
• Provide specific recommendations for improving BC's latest child care operating funding model (to enable a wide range of specific operating models at the program level). 

The need for flexible child care

Families’ individual need for various forms of flexible child care arise for a range of reasons, including work and school schedules, commutes, and family and personal situations. We documented the range of reasons encountered during the project, and explain how meeting these needs is crucial in order for BC’s growing child care system to be equitable. We also outlined the difficulty in precisely quantifying the need at any given time, and how this difficulty might be overcome with a flexible/adaptive approach to child care operating funding.

New statistics and information

The project included a fresh Literature Review to source new statistics and information pertinent to the key findings of the foundational Lero et. al (2021) report. In short, the identified literature largely supported earlier findings. For example, newly-available data highlight/reinforce the fact that non-standard and precarious work does and will continue to exist, that flexible/non-standard hours child care remains extremely rare, and that the combination of those two facts exacerbates existing structural inequities in BC’s growing child care system.

Specifically, recent surveys and research on the scale and unequal impacts of precarious work in BC highlights the importance of flexible child care considerations:

• 37% of survey respondents had Precarious jobs and only 18% were in Secure jobs.
• Caregivers of children in Precarious jobs were four times more likely to report that lack of access to child care impacted their ability to work compared with those in Secure jobs.
• Recent immigrant parents were particularly impacted by caregiving responsibilities—60% reported that lack of access to child care negatively affected their own and/or their spouse’s ability to work (compared to 37% of non-immigrants).
• The burden of precarity falls more heavily on racialized and immigrant communities, Indigenous peoples, women and lower-income groups. 

Refined terminology

The terms “flexible” and “non-standard hours'' are broad and imprecise. To address this, Lero et al. (2021) proposes a distinction between “flexible” and “non-standard hours” where “flexible” refers to flexible scheduling (e.g. on-demand care), and where “non-standard hours” is subdivided into five categories that span time of day, week and seasonality. Building on this helpful distinction, we proposed further refinements for BC in the form of a terminological framework tailored to (a) the BC context and (b) specific child care operating models.

An in-depth BC policy scan

We completed an in-depth scan of BC child care policy focusing on how it does or does not support a variety of non-standard hours and on-demand child care services. We found that most types of non-standard hours and on-demand child care are currently allowed by legislation (with a couple of exceptions), but that public funding to support the provision of this care is often absent – due to both explicit exclusions and administrative barriers. As a result, the care that is available is largely funded by parent fees. This means the families in need of this care not only have a harder time finding it, they end up paying more, with educators who are often less qualified and/or paid less fairly than their publicly-funded peers.

Flexible funding models

Scalable operating models for non-standard hours and flexibly-scheduled care are not possible without flexible public funding models (e.g. those that pay wage premiums for non-standard hours care, pay for staff capacity to accommodate shifting demand, etc.). In short, you can’t have flexible child care without flexible public funding. We explored the specific kinds of flexibility required in public funding models to make a range of customized operating models work.

Policy recommendations

This project developed 30 recommendations that align with federal and provincial child care commitments, focus on actions the province of BC can take, and identify necessary improvements to BC’s 2024 Test OFM. “High-level” and “foundational” recommendations are aimed at strengthening BC’s entire child care system — including non‑standard hours and flexibly scheduled care — as a foundation upon which to simultaneously implement recommendations “specific to flexible child care.”

Project engagement 

This project gathered information on public perceptions and experiences related to flexible child care via four separate methods: surveys, focus groups, key informant interviews, and a provincial poll. Findings were consistent across all methods, and are summarized in the project report (see above).