Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment she has made of the potential financial effect on nurseries in deprived areas of her plans to increase the free childcare entitlement to 30 hours per week.

The government conducted a 6 month long review of the cost of childcare provision in 2015 - the most in depth analysis of this market we have ever had, and was described by the National Audit Office as “thorough and wide-ranging”. This assessed the costs of different types of providers across the country, including nurseries in deprived areas. The review is available online at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/review-of-childcare-costs

Based on this information we announced at the 2015 Spending Review that the government would provide £300 million per year for a significant uplift to the average funding rates paid for the 2-, 3- and 4-year-old entitlements from 2017-18. Together with the funding announced at last summer’s Budget, we will be investing over £1 billion more per year by 2019-20 to fund our commitments on the entitlements.

We will also be introducing a national funding formula for the early years so that funding is transparently and fairly matched to need and fairly distributed between different types of providers and different parts of the country. We will be consulting on detailed proposals later this year.