Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if his Department will make an assessment of the adequacy of the level of local authority early years funding rates in advance of the start of the next school year.

By 2019-20 the government will be investing £1 billion a year to increase our hourly funding rates for the free entitlements and delivery of 30 hours of free childcare. This will take the amount the government spends on early years’ education to around £6 billion by 2019-20 – the highest ever amount. These funding rates are based on our ‘Review of Childcare Costs’, which was described as “thorough and wide ranging” by the National Audit Office. This looked at both the current costs of childcare provision and the implications of future cost pressures facing the sector, including the National Living Wage.

We continue to monitor delivery costs of our early years’ entitlements and have commissioned new research to provide us with robust and detailed cost data from a representative sample of early years providers, which will be published in due course. We continue to monitor local authority funding of providers via the collection of data on their annual planned budget.