Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if she will estimate how much of the planned £55 million supplementary funding for maintained nurseries will be spent in (a) Wolverhampton and (b) Wolverhampton North East constituency; and what steps her Department is taking to support maintained nurseries in Wolverhampton.

Supplementary funding for maintained nursery schools is allocated on a local authority basis, as is the free early years entitlements funding within the Dedicated Schools Grant. Of the £55m supplementary funding, the indicative allocation for Wolverhampton local authority is £1.04m in 2017-18.

The supplementary funding will allow local authorities, including Wolverhampton, to maintain existing levels of nursery school funding. This extra funding will provide stability for nursery schools, which make a valuable contribution to improving the lives of some of our most disadvantaged children. We have recently completed a data assurance exercise that will ensure that local authorities receive the correct amount of supplementary funding.