The Government has claimed that the £44m increase in early years funding, which came into effect in April, is enough to cover the increase in statutory wage costs - including the extension of the national living wage to 23- and 24-year-olds.
Earlier this year, children’s minister Vicky Ford publicly stated that the Government would share details of the calculations.
In April, the Alliance filed a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to the DfE asking for the calculations underpinning the claims.
The Alliance said that the DfE rejected the request. It has subsequently filed the complaint with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) over the DfE’s refusal to publish the information.
Children and families minister Vicky Ford previously confirmed plans to publish the calculations during a public meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Children and Early Education in January.
During the meeting, she stated, ‘In terms of funding, the work that we did with Treasury when we agreed that £44m for 6p for three- and four-year-olds, the 8p for two-year-olds, we are going to share maths underpinning that. We’ve agreed to do that with the sector to show how that should more than cover the uplift in the minimum wage when that comes in in April.
‘It’s to do with the ratios ... you’re getting the increased funding for all the children and yet you have a ratio of one member of staff to x number of children but we will be passing the maths behind that on.’
Commenting, Neil Leitch, chief executive of the Alliance, said, ‘The Department for Education has been claiming for months now, including in Parliament, that the 1 per cent increase in early years funding rates that came into effect in April was more than enough to pay for the more than 2 per cent increase in national living and minimum wages. So where’s the proof? It is simply not good enough to say “We’ll prove it at some point” when these rates have been in effect for more than four months now.
‘For years, early years providers have been struggling to survive on funding rates the Government knew were inadequate. They have been left to face the huge challenges of the pandemic with wholly inadequate support.
‘As a sector, we have suffered a net loss of more than 2,000 providers over the past year. Surely the Department for Education can understand why we might find it difficult to take these latest funding claims on trust alone.
‘The Government needs to stop dragging its feet, and commit to releasing this important information without further delay.’
Asked for a response, the DfE told Nursery World it was intending to publish the document in question, and would consider any appeal made to the ICO once it received formal confirmation from them that they plan to examine this case.
Last November, the Chancellor announced £44 million for 2021-22 for local authorities to increase hourly rates paid to childcare providers for the Government’s free childcare entitlement offers.
A Department for Education spokesperson said, ‘We’ve made an unprecedented investment in childcare over the past decade, spending more than £3.5 billion in each of the past three years on our free childcare offers.
‘We have increased the hourly funding rates for all local authorities for 2021-22 by 8p an hour for the two-year-old entitlement and, for the vast majority of areas, by 6p an hour for the three - and four-year-old entitlement. This will pay for a rate increase that is higher than the costs nurseries may face from the uplift to the national living wage in April.’
In June, private official documents obtained by the Alliance, after a two-year Freedom of Information dispute, revealed that ministers at the DfE were aware in 2015 that it was severely underfunding providers of funded childcare places for three- and four-year-olds.
Documents obtained by the Alliance show that early years funding rates for 2020/21 were less than two-thirds of what officials estimated to be the true cost of ‘fully funding’ the scheme.