Category - Early Years

Primary schools are being closed, merged and shrunk as councils across England respond to falling numbers of pupils due to the falling birth rate as well as family upheaval triggered by rising costs, Brexit and Covid...

A Department for Education uplift of early years funding rates worth £400m will “fall short” of what providers need to deliver the government’s planned expansion of the funded childcare offer, sector leaders have said...

Poorer families are more likely to be unable to access childcare provision as deprived local authorities are most likely to be struggling to deliver high levels of provision, according to research from the New Economic...

Free childcare! Thirty hours a week from nine months until primary school was the eye-catcher in the chancellor’s spring budget. Was this, finally, Scandinavian-quality nurseries? No, sadly. Read the full article on...

A Department for Education uplift of early years funding rates worth £400m will “fall short” of what providers need to deliver the government’s planned expansion of the funded childcare offer, sector leaders have said...

The government is to invest £400m in its plans to expand free childcare for working parents in England from April. The Department for Education (DfE) has also announced an increase in funding rates for nursery places...

An expected mass exodus of early years workers could undermine government plans to expand funded childcare hours, new research warns.
Read the full article on this link to Children & Young People Now

About a quarter of a million mothers with young children have left their jobs due to childcare pressures, research by an equal rights charity suggests
Read the full article on this link to BBC

The proportion of disadvantaged two-year-olds eligible for a funded childcare place has plummeted over the last seven years, analysis has found. The analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) shows only a...