Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent assessment he has made of the availability of childcare places.

Departmental officials regularly discuss sufficiency of provision with local authorities. Local authorities are not currently reporting any substantial sufficiency issues and we have not seen a substantial number of parents unable to secure a childcare place.

The key measure of sufficiency is whether the supply of available places is sufficient to meet the requirements of parents and children, and Ofsted data currently shows that the number of places offered by providers on the Early Years Register has remained broadly stable at 1.3 million places since August 2015.

According to findings from the 2021 Childcare and early years providers survey, 7 in 10 group-based providers reported having spare places in their full day provision and 49% of childminders reported having spare capacity on average across the week. Further information is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/childcare-and-early-years-providers-survey-2021.