Ministers must do more to protect parents from the need to work anti-social hours, a new report has recommended.

With more employees working evening and weekend shifts to service the needs of the "24-7 society", childcare services need to be modernised as well, researchers from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation said on Wednesday.

After conducting research into the availability of childcare, the study found that very few childminders or nurseries take children before 7.00am and hardly any work beyond 7.00pm or at weekends.

Yet an increasing number of parents are having to work at such times as businesses open at all times to meet demand.

Nearly all the 150 early years development and childcare partnerships in England agreed there was a need to develop childcare services outside normal working hours but fewer than a third had taken action.

More needed to be done to extend childcare provision, the authors argued, but equally action was needed to protect parents from working shifts that they could not arrange supervision for their children for.

"The overriding requirement is to consider the needs of children and to help parents balance their family responsibilities with the requirements of paid work," report co-author Ann Mooney said.

"We need policies for atypical hours childcare services, but we also need to consider how employment policies and working hours should be made more 'family friendly' so that parents have less need for care at these times."

In a separate report from the National Centre for Social Research which found that around one in four families had at least one self-employed parent for whom long working hours were widespread.

"These research findings also raise the question of how far government should go in promoting a '24-7' society given the negative consequences for family life," co-author Ivana La Valle said.

"For example, less Sunday working would benefit many owners of small businesses who are parents, as well as employees with children."