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Pre-school Education: Disadvantaged

Answer

We will be spending around £6 billion on childcare support in 2019-20 – a record amount. That includes funding for our free early education entitlements, on which we plan to spend around £3.5 billion this year alone.

The government’s Early Years National Funding Formula allocates funding to local authorities for the purpose of delivering our early years entitlements. Our new formula was introduced in April 2017 following extensive consultation and it includes an additional needs factor to weight funding according to disadvantage.

To accompany the government response to the consultation, we published an Equalities Impact Assessment looking into the effects of the formula on specific groups. Both documents may be found at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/early-years-funding-changes-to-funding-for-3-and-4-year-olds.

We also require local authority funding formulas, which allocate funding to providers, to have a mandatory deprivation supplement.

The government recognises the need to keep the evidence base on costs up to date. We continue to monitor the provider market closely through a range of regular and one-off research projects which provide insight into various aspects of the provider market.

Secondary information

Type

Written question

Reference

211361

Session

2017-19

Subjects

Disadvantaged Finance Pre-school education

Link

View this Written question on www.parliament.uk