Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what the 2020-2021 budget headings are for the £66m increase in early years funding announced at the Spending Round 2019.

The additional £66 million to support early education entitlements in 2020-21 which was announced by my right hon. Friend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer in August 2019, provided an 8 pence an hour increase in rates for the 2-year-old entitlement and also for the vast majority of areas for 3- and 4-year-old entitlement for 2020-21 - which we subsequently announced in October 2019. It has also maintained funding rates for 2020-21 for the small number of authorities which have been protected from large drops to their funding as a result of the “loss cap”.

Details of this increased funding, broken down by individual funding stream and across local authorities, was published in December 2019 and can be found at the link below:

https://skillsfunding.service.gov.uk/single-funding-statement/latest/dedicated-schools-grant/download-funding/2020-to-2021.

This publication does not have ‘budget headings’ other than columns naming the entitlements by age group, along with columns for the Disability Access Fund (DAF) and the Early Years Pupil Premium (EYPP).

The funding allocations for local authorities are based on actual take up of the entitlement hours. Therefore, allocations for 2020-21 will be updated, first in summer 2020 using updated data from the January 2020 schools and early years censuses, and then in summer 2021 using January 2021 census data for the final allocation.

In total, the government plans to spend more than £3.6 billion to support early education entitlements in 2020-21.