Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what the mean annual costs are for nurseries in England by (a) nursery class childcare settings, (b) maintained nursery schools, (c) school-based providers, (d) private group-based providers, (e) voluntary group-based providers, (f) all group-based providers and (g) all nurseries.

Data collected by the 2024 survey of childcare and early years providers has been used to estimate the average unit costs of delivering childcare per child in a setting. This data can be found here: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/673b14b8fc572967fe66a92e/Providers__finances_Evidence_from_the_2023_Survey_of_Childcare_and_Early_Years_Providers.pdf.

The department no longer publishes providers’ total costs as differences between providers largely reflect differences in the average number of children that attend them and the average number of hours that they attend for.

There are limitations to the unit cost measure because of some challenges in gathering information from providers on total costs, such as the difficulty in estimating costs shared with other settings for group-based providers that are part of a chain. Furthermore, the number of hours of care provided was estimated. As a result, caution should be applied to the interpretation of the unit cost measures.