Pre-school Education: Coronavirus

(asked on 19th March 2021) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, with reference to the latest guidance on Use of free early education entitlements funding during coronavirus, whether the summer and autumn early years counts will include children temporarily absent from settings as a result of sickness, self-isolation and/or parental concerns about safety.


Answered by
Vicky Ford Portrait
Vicky Ford
This question was answered on 25th March 2021

As we announced in December 2020, we intend to fund local authorities for the 2021 spring term using the January 2021 census. If attendance rises after the census is taken, we will top-up local authority figures, up to 85% of their January 2020 census level, where a local authority can provide data of increased attendance during the Spring term. On 18 March 2021, we published guidance for local authorities setting out the process for accessing the top-up for the 2021 spring term and how they will be funded for the financial year 2021-22.

Given the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on childcare attendance levels, we announced that we are temporarily varying our approach to funding the entitlements for the 2021-22 financial year, to give local authorities and providers more protection over their funding income as we go through these uncertain times. Therefore, for the 2021-22 financial year, we intend to fund all local authorities on a termly attendance count that local authorities will need to provide to the department. The general principles set out in published guidance on how to conduct the usual annual early years January census should also be applied for these termly counts, to ensure consistency with the usual approaches taken in a normal early years funding year. In that, the existing census guidance already sets out how to record children who are temporarily absent (for example, due to sickness or on holiday), or if a provider is temporarily closed.

The technical guidance to local authorities is available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/early-years-funding-spring-2021-and-financial-year-2021-to-2022.

Reticulating Splines