Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent assessment he has made of the adequacy of public funding for nurseries.

We have spent over £3.5 billion in each of the past three years on our early education entitlements and the government will continue to support families with their childcare costs.

At the Spending Review on 27 October 2021, we announced that we are investing additional funding for the early years entitlements worth £160 million in the 2022-23 financial year, £180 million in 2023-24 and £170 million in 2024-25, compared to the current year. This is for local authorities to increase hourly rates paid to childcare providers for the government’s free childcare entitlement offers and reflects cost pressures as well as anticipated changes in the number of eligible children. For 2022-23 we will increase the hourly funding rates for all local authorities by 21p an hour for the two-year-old entitlement and, for the vast majority of areas, by 17p an hour for the three- and four-year-old entitlement.

The early years national funding formula has been designed to allocate our record investment in early years entitlement funding fairly and transparently across the country. We will continue to review the data underpinning the formula.