Children: Day Care

(asked on 5th December 2017) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what estimate her Department has made of the uptake of funded childcare for (a) two-year-olds and (b) three-year-olds from (i) disadvantaged and (ii) non-disadvantaged households in Lewisham Deptford constituency.


Answered by
Robert Goodwill Portrait
Robert Goodwill
This question was answered on 13th December 2017

The Department for Education (DfE) does not hold information on take-up of funded childcare for disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged households. However, the 2-year-old free entitlement is specifically for disadvantaged children, and take-up nationally is 71%, up 13 percentage points from 2015.

Information on take-up at constituency level is not readily available and could only be obtained at disproportionate cost.

Take-up rates for 2- and 3-year-olds by local authority are published in Table 5LA of the ‘Education Provision for Children Under 5 Years of Age’ Statistical First Release: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/education-provision-children-under-5-years-of-age-january-2017.

Take-up rates for 2-year-olds are calculated using the estimated number of eligible children derived from data supplied to the DfE by the Department for Work and Pensions on the number of children believed to meet the benefit and tax credit eligibility criteria. It represents the best data available on the number of eligible children in each local authority area. Take-up rates for 3-year-olds are calculated using adjusted population estimates from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

In January 2017, take-up of the 2-year-old offer in Lewisham local authority was 60%. This is a decrease of one percentage point from 2016, but an increase of 12 percentage points since 2015. The current take up level is below the national average of 71%.

In January 2017, take-up of the universal 3-year-old entitlement in Lewisham local authority was 81%, a decrease of 3 percentage points since 2016. The current take up level is below the national average of 93%.

In 2015, take-up rates for 3-year-olds was 93% in the most deprived decile of areas in the UK, using DfE and ONS data to calculate take up rates: https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Entitlement-to-free-early-education-and-childcare.pdf.

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