Pre-school Education: Finance

(asked on 2nd February 2017) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment she has made of the change in the level of funding for maintained nursery schools in (a) England and (b) Coventry in the last three years; and if she will make a statement.


Answered by
Caroline Dinenage Portrait
Caroline Dinenage
This question was answered on 7th February 2017

Local authorities have reported their planned expenditure for maintained nursery schools through annual Section 251 returns, showing how they plan to spend their funding from the Dedicated Schools Grant. The hourly rates of funding for delivering the 3 and 4 year-old entitlements in maintained nursey schools are shown below:

3 and 4 year-olds

2014-15

2015-16

2016-17

Coventry

£ 7.29

£ 7.34

£ 7.52

England

£ 7.18

£ 7.19

£ 7.80

These rates do not include other sources of funding for maintained nursery schools.

We are providing local authorities with supplementary funding of £55 million a year for their maintained nursery schools. This supplementary funding will allow local authorities to maintain their current levels of funding at least to the end of this Parliament. It will give maintained nursery schools stability during wider changes to the early years funding system whilst also allowing us the time to consult on the future of maintained nursery schools, which we will do in due course.

We have committed to conducting a data assurance exercise in March this year to verify 2016-17 levels of expenditure on maintained nursery schools which will underpin the 2017-18 maintained nursery school local authority allocations of the £55 million.

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