Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what estimate her Department has made of the number of children in receipt of 15 hours free childcare who will be ineligible for receipt of the further 30 hours free childcare.

The latest census data on the provision of education for children under 5 years of age shows there are approximately 1.34 million 3- and 4- year old children benefitting from funded early education places: see Table 2, https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/education-provision-children-under-5-years-of-age-january-2016.

Included in this figure are approximately 430,000 children who are in reception and other non-nursery classes; this leaves approximately 910,000 children who are currently in receipt of the 15 hour free entitlement.

We have provisionally estimated how many of these may not be eligible using data on income from the Family Resources Survey and Survey of Personal Incomes. This suggests roughly 520,000 children currently in receipt of the 15 hour free entitlement will not be eligible for the receipt for the further 15 hours of free childcare. Some of these households will not be eligible because their income will exceed the £100,000 income limit.

The additional 15 hours is an entitlement to support parents in work. Families where both parents (or the sole parent in a lone parent family) are earning the equivalent of 16 hours a week at the national minimum or living wage will be able to receive 30 hours of free childcare each week. Lower income parents who work fewer than 16 hours a week at the national minimum or living wage may be able to claim up to 85% of their childcare costs through the childcare element of Universal Credit.