The countdown to April 2024 has begun, when the expanded entitlement to funded early education and care will be rolled-out to working families.
By September 2025, 30 hours will be available for babies aged 9 months and up – provided their parents/carers are in work.
Early education and care has the potential to benefit all children, if it is high quality. But it is particularly children who are disadvantaged by other life circumstances that stand to gain most from this provision.
Child-focused policymaking has informed previous expansions of funded hours – for instance the current entitlement to 15 hours per week for children from low-income families.
However, the focus has now shifted from children, to concentrate instead on promoting parental employment.
There are several reasons this may prove problematic. The most obvious is that children in non-working families might lose out on their places, if capacity in the early years sector does not expand in response to the extended entitlement.
The Education Select Committee highlighted that the entitlement may not be sufficiently funded, which might inhibit expansion.
Sector bodies including the Early Years Alliance and the National Day Nursery Association, alongside the Women’s Budget Group, have agreed that continued closures are a likely consequence of this underinvestment.
Less immediately obvious, but related, is the fact that a system incentivising and rewarding families’ working relies on them understanding the system and being aware of their entitlements to funded hours.
If families do not know about funded places, they won’t take them up.
There are longstanding inequalities according to area deprivation and income-level in awareness, with children from low-income families already less likely to access the existing offers at age three and four.
The Department for Education’s recent survey of parents and carers of 0-4-year-olds emphasises these inequities in knowledge and understanding.
While 9 per cent of parents/carers who earn over £45,000 are unaware of the current entitlement of working families to 30 funded hours, around a third (31 per cent) of those earning under £10,000 are unaware.
And 8 per cent of families in the least deprived areas do not know about the funding, compared to 28 per cent in the most deprived areas.
The danger is that the expansion of entitlements to 30 hours for working parents/carers may fail to reach a significant number of disadvantaged children.
In part, this is because their families are less likely to hold the knowledge necessary to make informed choices and access the funding available.
Alongside insufficiencies in provision for other groups of children, who have also been lost from current policymaking – crucially those with disabilities, who are vastly underserved – this highlights a need to monitor the impacts of the entitlements to funded hours as they expand.
It is vital to check how the roll-out transpires over the coming years: and to ensure that inequalities and disadvantages in the early years are not made worse.