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Individual local authority funding rates for September 2023 announced

The Department for Education has confirmed the individual local authority early years funding rates set to come into effect in England from September 2023.

These increases are the result of the £204m uplift announced in March’s Budget
to support the delivery of the existing early entitlement offers (the three- and four-year-old offers, and the disadvantaged two-year-old offer).

From September 2023, local authorities will receive a new early years supplementary grant (EYSG), which they will then use to increase the amount they pay to early years settings.
The grant will provide supplementary funding for all existing early years funding streams, including:

15 hours entitlement for disadvantaged two-year-olds]
15 hours universal entitlement for three- and four-year-olds
15 hours additional entitlement for three- and four-year-old children of eligible working families
Early Years Pupil Premium
Disability Access Fund

The rates announced are the rates that local authorities will receive, rather than the rates directly paid to frontline early years providers.

Alliance joins new coalition uniting voices of families, professionals, and charities in early years sector

The Early Years Alliance is part of a new early years-focused coalition that has been formed with the goal of challenging all political parties to “be more ambitious on early education and childcare reform in England”.

The Early Education and Childcare Coalition (EECC) has been developed by gender equality thinktank the Women’s Budget Group, and funded by the Kiawah Trust, a charitable foundation that supports initiatives to tackle educational and gender inequality.

The coalition aims to shape future policy for the sector with the benefit of insight and expertise from leading early years voices.

The EECC consists of 30 leading organisations and charities including the Early Years Alliance, as well as Save the Children, the National Children’s Bureau, UNICEF and other leading voices in the sector.

The coalition will work with all political parties to help them prioritise the early years sector at the next general election, establishing an early education and childcare system that works for all with good pay, fair conditions, and adequate funding.

Neil Leitch, CEO of the Early Years Alliance, said: “The formation of this coalition could not come at a more pivotal moment for the early years. There is no doubt that having so many voices from across the education, children’s, parenting, and business sectors come together in this way sends a hugely powerful message to the government about the vital importance of early education and care.

“As an organisation committed to fighting for sustainable, affordable and high-quality early years provision, underpinned by child-centred, evidenced-based government policy, we are incredibly pleased to be part of this important movement.”

Find out more about the Early Education and Childcare Coalition.

Planned early years changes risk widening inequalities, new report warns

Government plans to expand the early entitlement offers in England risk widening gaps in development for the most disadvantaged children, a new report from the Sutton Trust has warned.

The report – World Class, published by researchers at RAND Europe – argues that a large proportion of disadvantaged children are already locked out of extra early years education, and that this is likely to be exacerbated by plans to extend the current 30-hours offer to one- and two-year-olds from eligible working families only.

The report also warns that planned changes to staff ratios and qualification requirements are likely to reduce the quality of teaching and learning.

Based on best practice examples from around the world, the Sutton Trust is calling on the government to:

support highly-qualified staff with financial support, protected time for qualifications and training, the reinstatement of the Graduate Leader Fund (targeted to areas with higher disadvantage), and an increase in early years wages
maintain, and ideally increase, the number of staff per child in early years settings for children over two
expand the early entitlement offers to lower-income families or explore alternative models such as a sliding fee scale based on parental income
offer combined family support services, ideally to all families, but at a minimum as universal provision in the most disadvantaged areas.

Sir Peter Lampl – Founder and Chairman of the Sutton Trust and Chairman of the Education Endowment Foundation – said: “By the time disadvantaged young children start school, they are already behind their better-off peers.

“As a rich country, we should have a better education system. By drawing on best practice from around the world, we could create an early years system that sets young children on a path to a lifetime of success. Further investment is now needed to make this a reality.”

Early years changes will fail without further financial investment, Education Committee warns

A new report published today concludes that the government has “more work to do” to ensure all children, families and providers benefit from available support, says the Education Committee.

A cross-party inquiry, Support for childcare and the early years, was launched in 2022. It had a wide remit of assessing ongoing support, entitlements, and provisions, as well as the impact of COVID19 on child development and proposed changes to the sector.

The findings highlight the precarious position of many early years settings, with the committee seeing evidence of a system “straining to provide” adequate care and education due to a range of issues, including mass closures, an ongoing recruitment and retention challenge, and a significant drop in childminder numbers.

The report further acknowledged that, despite the £204m earmarked by the government for the early years sector, the amount pledged fails to address years of chronic underfunding and the difficulties posed by the current cost-of-living crisis.

In addition to those conclusions, the Education Committee outlined a series of suggestions for the government to consider moving forward, one of which was to refer to the extended early years entitlements as ‘funded’ or ‘subsidised’ to avoid misleading parents.

A range of other key suggestions were also in the report:

increase the early years entitlement subsidy for providers
streamline the system for proposed 30-hours funding entitlement
abolish business rates for nurseries
mandatory SEND training for all early years staff

Other findings were wide ranging, including closely monitoring changes to staff:child ratios and the funding of family hubs across the country.

Alliance CEO refutes claims about 30-hours funding expansion made in DfE blog

Early Years Alliance CEO Neil Leitch has criticised misleading claims made in a recent Department for Education (DfE) blog post, Free Childcare: How we are tackling the cost of childcare.

Posted on The Education Hub, the blog claims that the government is making “the biggest investment by a UK government into childcare”. It then goes on to answer key questions around the expansion of the 30-hours funding offer.

Throughout, the post refers to the funding expansion as “free childcare” and “free hours” that will make early years places “cheaper” – which many within the early years sector believe is misleading to families.

When explaining why the upcoming expansion of “free hours” will make early years places “cheaper”, the blog said: “Nurseries are not allowed to charge top-up fees when providing the free hours offers, and that won’t change as these are expanded.

“By making sure the government is properly covering the cost of providing the free places, there will be no need for nurseries to charge inflated fees for additional hours parents want to pay for.”

However, the second part of the DfE’s information has been amended to instead say: “Some providers may ask for charges in addition to the free childcare, such as meals. You can find more information the Childcare Choices website. And, of course, parents will be paying for far fewer hours in the future.” Acknowledging the blog amendment while addressing its remaining misleading elements, Neil said: “We welcome the fact that the DfE has removed the suggestion that providers have been charging ‘inflated fees’ from its blog on the extended early entitlement offer. Given that the government’s own documents show it has been knowingly underfunding the sector for decades, such a statement was both highly offensive and deeply inappropriate.

“That said, it is incredibly frustrating that the government is still referring to early years provision as ‘childcare’ and talking about how to make it ‘cheaper’ – and, despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary, continuing to claim that it is ‘free’. Modelling from the Women’s Budget Group clearly shows that, despite the recent increase in investment, there is still a significant gap between funding rates and the cost of delivering places, particularly for three- and four-year-olds.”

“That said, it is incredibly frustrating that the government is still referring to early years provision as ‘childcare’ and talking about how to make it ‘cheaper’ – and, despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary, continuing to claim that it is ‘free’. Modelling from the Women’s Budget Group clearly shows that, despite the recent increase in investment, there is still a significant gap between funding rates and the cost of delivering places, particularly for three- and four-year-olds.”

Social and emotional skills of children of all backgrounds suffered in pandemic, study finds

The pandemic has negatively impacted the socio-emotional development of children from all backgrounds, new research has found.

The study, which was undertaken by Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) and University College London’s Faculty of Education and Society, and funded by Nuffield Education, focused on identifying the effect of employment uncertainty on children’s social and emotional skills during the first year of the pandemic.

Researchers conducted retrospective parent/carer interviews in February 2021 comparing children’s current behaviour to that of a year prior, following ongoing national lockdowns and social disruption.

The study found that 47% of families reported worsening socio-emotional difficulties among their children during 2020. In the same timeframe, just 16% of families noticed an improvement in socio-emotional behaviour.

The IFS argues that the findings show that ongoing economic instability has an effect on children’s wellbeing and development.

While almost half of the families surveyed experienced growing difficulties with children’s socio-emotional behaviour, evidence also shows that some groups were more affected:

younger children (specifically, four- to seven-year-olds)
girls
children whose parents’/carers’ employment situation changed, even if they were furloughed

The study also found that less-disadvantaged children were more likely to see their social and emotional skills worsen, though these differences were not statistically significant.

Landlords urged to allow childminders to work from own homes

Childminders who live in rented housing should be allowed to run their business from home, the government has said.

Claire Coutinho, the children, families and wellbeing minister, has written to social landlords, developers, and housing associations in England to call for reforms to restrictive tenant clauses preventing childminders from running their businesses from home.

The call comes on the heels of data revealing the number of childminders in England has more than halved in the last decade, according to the Department for Education (DfE).

One reason behind this is blanket bans being placed in tenancy agreements to prevent using rented homes for business purposes.

Data collected by childminding agency Tiney highlights that one in eight childminders who failed to complete the registration process stated that restrictions in their leasehold tenancy agreement prevented them from doing so. Others found that their landlords’ mortgage agreements had their own restrictions from lenders.

The call from Coutinho to landlords follows other government proposals for childminders and the early years sector at large:

Funding rates for 15- and 30-hour entitlements increased from a national average of £5.29 to £5.62 for three- and four-year-olds and £6 to £7.95 for two-year-olds
Relaxed rules to allow up to four childminders to work together in groups and spend more time working outside of their own homes
Early years start-up grants worth up to £1,200

The government has also stated plans to consult on reducing registration times to 10 weeks and ensure that local authorities pay childminders monthly.

The government says that the aim of these proposals is “to help encourage entry into the profession and increase availability of childcare for parents”. However, Neil Leitch, chief executive of the Early Years Alliance, has warned that the plans fall far short of what is needed.

He said: “Childminders are a crucial part of the early years sector, but they continue to be underfunded, undervalued and underappreciated. Yet, rather than addressing or even acknowledging this, the government has instead wasted time and resources by putting forward changes to minor challenges that, in reality, will make a small amount of difference.”

Government publishes revised EYFS Framework

The government has published an updated version of the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) statutory framework that will come into effect on 4 September 2023.

The revised framework contains three key updates:

Confirmation that the current statutory minimum staff:child ratios in nurseries and pre-schools in England for two-year-olds will change from 1:4 to 1:5
Clarification on the flexibility around childminder ratio rules – specifically, that childminders can care for more than the current maximum of three young children, providing this number includes their own child(ren) or the siblings of children for whom they already care
Further detail around safe eating practices, stating that “adequate supervision” while children are eating means that children must be within sight and hearing of an adult

Further proposed EYFS changes, including changes to staff qualification requirements, remain under consultation and – should they be taken forward – would come into effect at a later date.