Momentum, the social movement set up to support Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, is launching a children’s wing called Momentum Kids.

Momentum is organising a fringe festival, The World Transformed, alongside next week’s Labour party conference in Liverpool and Momentum Kids will launch with a creche for parents attending the event.

Momentum claims it will then spread nationwide, aiming to provide cooperatively run childcare, including breakfast clubs, for parents who want to get involved in political activity but find it hard to fit around their caring responsibilities.

The new group is also aimed at “increasing children’s involvement in Momentum and the labour movement by promoting political activity that is fun, engaging and child-friendly”.

Momentum’s leaders insist it is an open, democratic movement aimed at boosting political engagement and pursuing some of the ideas championed by Corbyn, but its critics claim it is a hard left caucus aiming to seize control of Labour using the tactics of Militant, the organisation ejected from the party in the 1980s.

Jessie Hoskin, one of Momentum Kids’ founders, said: “Women still do a disproportionate amount of caring work and this can leave them shut out of many political spaces.”

The Women’s Equality party, which campaigns for better female representation in politics, provides financial support for childcare for its candidates, to encourage more mothers to get involved.

Children’s author Alan Gibbons, who will perform at the festival, said: “We believe that children are naturally inquisitive and creative and we seek to develop that potential in the hope that a new, freer society, more responsive to human need, will fulfil their hopes, dreams and aspirations to the full.”

The World Transformed festival has been criticised by some Labour MPs for being an alternative conference or a rallying point for those who hope to “purge” the party of dissenting voices, but its backers insist that rival groups within Labour have always organised meetings and rallies on the fringes of the party’s conferences.