Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department plans to take to determine the efficiency of the provision of free childcare funding.

The Department is developing plans to monitor the implementation of 30 hours of free childcare. We have been clear that getting the funding right is critical to successful delivery of this new entitlement and this is why we are introducing an early years national funding formula and maximising the funding that goes to providers.

We will continue to use census data collections and market surveys to monitor and evaluate the childcare market, conduct longitudinal research through the Study of Early Education and Development (SEED), and undertake our long-standing, nationally representative surveys of providers and parents. We will use these to assess the impact of the free entitlement from both providers’ and parents’ perspectives.

We will also keep under review the data underpinning the early years national funding formula.