High-quality childcare and early years services help children narrow the gap between themselves and their better-off peers and help parents move into work, improving social mobility today and in the future.
Many children miss out on the high-quality childcare that can boost their outcomes in childhood and beyond and many parents in the UK are frozen out of work by the high cost and low availability of childcare.
Our campaigns and policy work brings together learning from our on-the-ground programmes and our research to advocate for policies that families want and need.
Our policy goals
A right to early education
Remove the parental work criteria from the childcare entitlements, giving all children an equal right to 30 hours per week of early education from the age of nine months until they start school.
As a starting point, we recommend the Government extends the working parent funded early education entitlements to children whose parents are in training or education, are migrants who meet the work criteria, or who are unable to work due to terminal illness.
Alongside this, the funding model should be updated to cover the trust cost of provision, including employer National Insurance contributions (NICs) and recruitment costs based on accurate assessments of turnover.
Safeguard access for disadvantaged children
Extend the duty to accept children with an education, health and care plan (EHCP), and to give priority admission to looked-after and previously looked-after children, to all registered early years settings as a condition of receiving government funding.
Simplify and streamline
Introduce a single, means-tested co-payment system for families wishing to access additional hours, with families below the poverty line paying nothing. This would replace separate funded early education entitlements, Tax-Free Childcare and the childcare element of Universal Credit.
Workforce strategy
Create a workforce strategy that addresses the issues of staff recruitment, retention and skills.
Bring the early years pupil premium in line with the primary school pupil premium
Increase the early years pupil premium to bring it in line with the primary school pupil premium, ensuring it is an effective mechanism for decreasing the attainment gap between disadvantaged children and their peers.
Government-funded free meals in early years
Introduce government-funded free meals in early years, using the same criteria as free school meals, ending the unfair age discrimination between school-age children and children under five.
Introduce sufficient and responsive SEND funding
Increase the value of early years special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) funding and create a more flexible SEND funding system, not linked to other assessments such as Disability Living Allowance (DLA) and Education Health and Care Plans (EHCPs).
Ring-fence funding for early years within the additional investment for children with SEND (announced at the Autumn Budget 2024), and the high needs block funding for early years.
Allocate separate and dedicated funding to local authorities
Allocate separate and dedicated funding to local authorities to support their role, delinked from the rate paid to providers.