Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how much her Department provides to Lincolnshire County Council to fund an hour's care for each child in pre-school nursery care.

The Department for Education funds local authorities through the Dedicated Schools Grant for delivering the early years entitlement. In consultation with their Schools Forum, local authorities are then responsible for deciding how best to distribute this funding across their locality and they set their own local rates of funding for early years providers. The DSG allocations for three- and four-year-olds for each local authority are available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dedicated-schools-grant-dsg-2015-to-2016

The allocations table includes the Early Years Block Unit of Funding that local authorities receive from the DfE for each child. Local authorities are then responsible for funding early years providers to secure the Government-funded hours.

The Department collects funding information from all local authorities through section 251 financial returns, including information on funding for early years. To aid transparency, the early years data is published in the form of a benchmarking tool, on the rates that each local authority pays to its providers. The funding benchmarking tool is published here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/early-years-benchmarking-tool