Middle class flock to private antenatal care as cuts bite
Middle class mothers-to-be are paying for a service that is likely to be unavailable to poorer families
The flight of the middle classes to paid-for antenatal classes as free NHS services are run down threatens to exacerbate the divide between the rich and poor, according to the Royal College of Midwives.
The number of parents attending classes run by the largest private provider has nearly doubled in the past five years, at a time when the NHS service has become increasingly patchy. Yet research shows that advice and support to a woman before and shortly after pregnancy is crucial to providing the best start in life.
Janet Fyle, the Royal College of Midwives' policy adviser, said she feared that existing class inequalities between families were being built upon by a system that helped affluent families to provide the best parenting while lower socioeconomic groups missed out.
In the wake of David Cameron's pledge earlier this month following the riots to tackle families in which worklessness was endemic, Fyle added that the government should start at "the beginning".
"Antenatal classes are very important for early development. The government emphasis is on the 120,000 families they believe cause a lot of trouble in this country and you need to go back and look at the interaction at the beginning," she said.
"I am not saying that is the reason for what has happened [the riots], but if you have confident parents you have successful parents."
A survey carried out by Netmums, the parenting website, shows that 30% of first-time parents surveyed are not offered any antenatal care at all by the NHS. But Fyle added that even when free NHS antenatal classes were on offer, the distances people needed to travel put off those in the lower socioeconomic groups from attending at all.
She said: "I would have a certain mother in mind whom I would like to attend my classes and they used to attend 10 years ago. But if I am honest, I am not sure that the mothe! rs we wa nt to attend, who need help to consider and reflect on parenting, actually do attend any more."
Meanwhile, the number of parents attending paid-for antenatal classes run by the National Childbirth Trust charity, the country's largest provider, jumped from 25,000 in 2005-06 to 40,346 in 2010-2011. The charity says an estimated 11% of first births in the UK one in nine are born to a parent who attended NCT classes.
And while the average cost of a series of classes with NCT is 187, documents seen by the Observer show that nine out of 10 NTC members the vast majority of whom have paid for antenatal care and now pay up to 36 a year for continuing help and advice are within the top 50% socioeconomic groups. One in five members has a salary of more than 80,000 and their average annual income is40,000. The national average is 25,900.
Amy Maclean, from the NCT, said that she had seen the make-up of her classes become more middle class over the years as the charity's prices had increased and, while discounts were offered to the poorest families, the extra paperwork they needed to fill out often put people off. "When couples are charged, you are going to get a different demographic, and that's where we get this unfortunate reputation of being white middle-class practitioners, while in fact the majority of our practitioners yearn to work with parents who couldn't access education by payment," she said.
Fyle told the Observer that the results of a lack of investment in free NHS antenatal classes was clear to see in the labour wards. "Previously women used to have anything between four and six sessions," she said. "But when you look as a midwife at the women going into labour these days a lot are frightened.Later, mothers don't even know that is OK that their new babies cry or that they feel the baby blues. We need to look at our investment in this and whether the organisation of it is right."
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