Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what changes have been made to his Department's existing data collection as a result of the commitment to review workforce data in the Early years Workforce Strategy 2017.

The following changes to our early years data collections have been implemented.

In the 2018 Survey of Childcare and Early Years Providers we have:

• Added a question about gender of the paid workforce, which was not asked in 2016.
• Improved the questions on ethnicity, by introducing more granular categories for responses and we are asking about the ethnicity of apprentices for the first time.
• Improved the wording around staff qualifications in the survey to also include relevant teaching qualifications.

The 2018 Early Years Census asks for a wider range of information on staff qualifications than in previous years, specifically level 2 and 3 staff and those with graduate qualifications (early years professional status, early years teacher status and qualified teacher status).