Childcare and early years

This report looks at annual education spending in the UK.

There are important inequalities in the development of children well before they start school. By forcing nurseries to close and dramatically altering the lives of most families with young children, the pandemic may have exacerbated existing inequalities and possibly created new ones.

In this observation, we set out the key facts on how England’s childcare system is structured, how it has changed over time, and some of the pressures it faces over the course of the coming Spending Review.

Over the last two decades, Sure Start Children’s Centres (and their predecessors, Sure Start Local Programmes) have been one of the most important policy programmes in the early years in England. These centres operate as ‘one-stop shops’ for families with children under 5, bringing together a range of support including health services, parenting support programmes, and access to childcare and early education.

In our annual series of reports on education spending, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, we bring together data on education spending per student across the life cycle and provide analysis about the major issues facing different sectors.

The COVID-19 school closures forced children and parents to make unprecedented changes to their daily routines. Including the summer holidays, most children will have had a five-and-a-half-month break from physically attending school by the time they returned in September.

The closures of childcare providers to most families during the COVID-19 crisis have underlined the importance of access to childcare, both to support paid work and to help shape young children’s environment.

From today, the first 18-year-olds will be able to access Child Trust Funds (CTFs) set up over a decade ago by Tony Blair’s Labour government. When first announcing the policy, the government pointed to the fact that ‘people without assets are much more likely to have lower earnings and higher unemployment, and are less likely to start a business or enter higher education’. But how much difference might these accounts make to the finances of 18-year-olds?