Children: Day Care

(asked on 1st December 2017) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment her Department has made of the uptake of funded childcare for (a) two year olds and (b) three year olds among (i) disadvantaged and (ii) non-disadvantaged households in Ashfield constituency.


Answered by
Robert Goodwill Portrait
Robert Goodwill
This question was answered on 6th December 2017

I am sorry, but the Department for Education does not hold information on take up of funded childcare for disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged households. However, the two-year-old free entitlement is specifically for disadvantaged children, and take up nationally is 71%, up 13 percentage points from 2015.

Information on take up at constituency level is not readily available and could only be obtained at disproportionate cost.

We do publish take-up data by local council. Take-up is calculated by looking at the Schools and Early Years Census data to get the number of children in a funded place. These data counts are then compared to eligible population estimates from Office for National Statistics (ONS) to calculate take up rates.

As of January 2017, take up of the two-year-old offer in Nottinghamshire is 73%. This is an increase of 5 percentage points from 2016, and 16 percentage points since 2015. The current take-up level is also above the national average of 71%.

As of January 2017, take-up of the universal three-year-old entitlement in Nottinghamshire as a whole is 100%, with no change since 2016. In 2015, take-up for three-year-olds was 93% in the most deprived decile of areas in the UK, using Department for Education and ONS data to calculate take up rates.[1]

[1] https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Entitlement-to-free-early-education-and-childcare.pdf

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