Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many and what proportion of childcare places for children aged between zero and two years were provided by local authority group-based providers of Ofsted-registered early years foundation stage education and care in each year since 2010.

The Ofsted Early Years Register collects data on the number of providers of childcare on domestic premises, childcare on non-domestic premises, childminders, and home childcare. It does not identify local authority run provision and it is not broken down by age.

Ofsted’s registered early years and childcare statistics contains granular data about providers registered with Ofsted, their places and inspection outcomes (where appropriate) and can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/early-years-and-childcare-statistics.

Ofsted have also recently published management information aggregating registered childcare providers and inspections and their outcomes. This can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/childcare-providers-and-inspections-management-information.

The department publishes an annual survey of childcare and early years providers. This includes school-based provision that is not required to register with Ofsted. This survey includes a category for “school, college, local authorities and 'other unclassified'” group-based providers, which includes those run by local authorities. The survey covers three broad groups of providers: group-based providers, school-based providers and childminders.

Between 2018 and 2023 in England the survey reported:

This data is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/statistics-childcare-and-early-years.

It is not possible to break the survey data down further and identify numbers of, for example, local authority run group-based providers or school run group-based providers within the other group-based providers group. The reports do not include the number of places per provider.