Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether his Department has made an assessment of the effect on social mobility of the closure of maintained nursery schools.

Maintained nursery schools (MNS) make a valuable contribution to improving the lives of some of our most disadvantaged children.

MNS experience costs over and above those of other early years providers. That is why we are providing local authorities with around £60 million a year in supplementary funding to enable them to protect MNS funding.

This arrangement is due to end in March 2020, and what happens after that will be determined by the next Spending Review. We are aware that the supplementary funding for MNS currently accounts for about a third of their budgets - owing to uncertainty over the exact date of the Spending Review, we are considering how best to handle transitional arrangements for a number of areas, including MNS.

This government has an ambition to halve the proportion of children who finish reception year without the early communication and reading skills they need to thrive. To support this we are investing over £100 million in our social mobility programme. This includes £20 million in high quality, evidence-based training and professional development for pre-reception early years staff in disadvantaged areas; £26 million in a network of English hubs; and £10 million to understand ‘what works’ in partnership with the Education Endowment Foundation.

This ambitious work is underpinned by our early education entitlements - where we are making record investment. This includes the entitlement to up to 15 hours of free early education for disadvantaged 2-year-olds. Since its introduction in 2013, over 700,000 2-year-olds have benefited and take-up has risen and is now 72%.