Thank you, Mr Speaker—I will clear my throat. Maintained nursery schools support some of our most disadvantaged children, and they do experience higher costs than other providers. We will therefore be providing local authorities with supplementary funding of about £60 million a year after 2020.

We are providing supplementary funding of around £60 million a year to enable local authorities to protect maintained nursery school (MNS) funding until 2019-20. It is for local authorities to set the rates paid to maintained nursery schools. This supplementary funding provides MNS with stability whilst we develop a long-term solution for them. An important part of this will be understanding the value for money that they offer, and new research will report on this later in the year.

MNS also benefit from our increased hourly rates paid to local authorities to deliver the 15 hour free entitlement for disadvantaged two-year-olds. From April 2017, all local authorities saw 7% increases in their funding rates for two-year-olds.

Future funding decisions after 2019-20 will be set at the next spending review.