Childcare nurseries must open at weekends and in the evenings to cater for the demands of modern working life, according to a government-backed survey of parents.

It found growing dissatisfaction with the restricted care on offer despite billions of pounds of investment in nurseries. Almost all nurseries open from 8am until 5.30pm or 6pm, with parents being fined if they turn up late to collect their children.

Ministers immediately backed the survey’s findings and said that they expected goverment-funded nurseries to cater for parents who needed to work outside traditional office hours. They also urged privately-run nurseries to do the same.

Parents questioned for the survey said that their employment prospects were being damaged because they could apply only for jobs with traditional office hours.

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One in three people now works outside office hours, a result of the rapidly expanding service sector.

“Many parents are frustrated that they cannot find childcare tailored to their family’s particular needs,” the report said. “Examples from parents of how childcare could be made more suitable include childcare available at times to suit them including weekends and evening or night time.”

The survey also found a need for emergency childcare, especially among those who generally rely on friends and family to look after their children while they work.

“Taking a childcare place often requires signing up and paying for the whole week or term, whereas in some cases parents need a few hours of care here and there.”

The Listening to Families report, which was funded by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES), was published yesterday by the Daycare Trust at its annual conference.

Although most nurseries are run by private companies and the voluntary sector, the Government is an increasingly big player. It has set up hundreds of children’s centres and intends to have 3,500 in place by 2010, with local authorities in charge of how and where they operate.

The DfES said the government accepted the case for greater flexibility.

“Local authorities have a duty to make sure there is sufficient childcare provision in their areas and we would expect them to consider flexibility and out-of-hours provision as part of this,” she said.

“There is a diverse childcare market and the private and voluntary sector have an important role in providing what parents want and need.”

The need for more flexible childcare will be underlined to-day by new research from the Equal Opportunities Commission. It found that, despite extensive new laws and regulations, Britain still lags behind the rest of Europe when it comes to flexible work, which is offered by about 90 per cent of German and Swedish companies, but only 48 per cent of British firms.

Only a fifth of British companies offer teleworking, one of the most popular and cost-effec-tive forms of flexible working, compared with about 40 per cent in Germany, Sweden and Denmark. Teleworking allows employees to work from their homes or from their own office.

Jenny Watson, chairwoman of the commission, said pioneering employers were offering a wide range of options and, in return, were getting increased productivity and staff engagement.

“But the reality for the majority of British workers is still presenteeism and long hours. The time has now come for this innovation to spread across the workforce to reach the UK’s 29 million workers,” she said.

— Children brought up with few opportuntities to play outside are less able to grasp basic geometry and physics, David Willetts, the Shadow Education Secretary, told the Daycare Trust conference. He said that it was hard for children to make sense of geometry when they so rarely got the chance to throw a ball around, or make sense of volume when they no longer had the chance to play with sand and water. Evidence suggested that there had been a decline in the past decade in the proportion of children who understood concepts of volume at the age of seven.

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