Pre-school Education

(asked on 1st December 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment he has made of the potential merits of giving maintained nursery schools the same status as schools by adequately covering their (a) statutory responsibilities (b) staff obligations and (c) costs.


Answered by
Vicky Ford Portrait
Vicky Ford
This question was answered on 9th December 2020

As maintained schools, maintained nursery schools (MNS) have statutory requirements placed on them, such as the need to have a head teacher, a special educational needs coordinator, and a governing body. They are also subject to administrative requirements such as the need to publish a range of policies on their websites. The cost of these are not experienced by non-school early years providers, and MNS do not have the economies of scale that many primary schools have.

The government has secured a continuation of around £60 million of supplementary funding for MNS in the 2021-22 financial year, as part of the 2020 Spending Review: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/spending-review-2020-documents. The Department for Education is considering what is required to ensure a clear, long-term picture of funding for MNS, and will say more about this soon.

The government has already confirmed that up to £23 million of supplementary funding will be provided to local authorities, to enable them to continue protecting the funding of MNS during the summer term in 2021: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/early-years-support-package-to-help-close-covid-language-gap. This provides MNS with certainty about funding for the 2020/21 academic year.

This government remains committed to the long-term funding of MNS, and any reform to the way they are funded will be accompanied by appropriate funding protections.

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