Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how much her Department spent on the Childcare Grant for undergraduate students in each of the last five years; and how many people have (a) made a claim and (b) been eligible for support under that scheme in each of the last five years.

The information on how much the department has spent on the Childcare Grant for undergraduate students for each of the last five years and how many people have claimed this can be found in the Student Loan Company’s (SLC) ‘Student support for higher education in England 2022’ publication, which can be found in Tables 4C(i) and 4C(ii) at: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/student-support-for-higher-education-in-england-2022,. Data for the 2022/23 academic year will be available in November 2023. Data for the 2021/22 academic year is currently provisional, as it has an earlier effective date of 31 October of the relevant academic year, and will be finalised in November 2023.

In the 2019/20 academic year, Childcare Grant payments changed from being paid to new and continuing students based on estimated costs, to being paid to childcare providers directly via a third-party system, based on actual costs incurred. As a result of this change there is a break in the time series when reporting Childcare Grant amounts. Up until the 2019/20 academic year, Childcare Grant has been reported as awards based on a student’s given estimates for the year, which are then finalised a year later in the subsequent publication. From the 2019/20 academic year, actual payments will be reported as with other loan products, in a new table, Table 4C (ii).

The department and SLC do not hold information on the number of people who have been eligible for Childcare Grants over the last five years.