Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if she will increase funding to maintained nursery schools after 2017-18.

We are providing local authorities with supplementary funding of £55 million a year for at least two years in order to provide stability and maintain current funding levels for maintained nursery schools. We will work in partnership with providers, and consult the sector on what happens after this period, in due course.

The wider changes to early years funding that we are also proposing will see a fairer allocation of funding to local authorities and to different types of provider, better matched to need. This is part of our record investment in childcare – £6 billion per year by 2020.