Thank you to the Early Years Entitlement Team, in Families and Children’s Commissioning for all their hard work and dedication.
They worked with over 400 early years providers (preschools, nurseries, childminders) each term to distribute funding to allow 2, 3 and 4-year-olds to access funded early years education.
From April, the budget swelled from £30m to £50m following the government’s introduction to fund 2 year olds of working parents.
Alongside these 2-year-olds, the team promote, identify and administer funding for disadvantaged 2-year-olds whose parents may be in receipt of government benefits or the child was previously in care, including those with ‘no recourse to public funds’.
As a county, we have the greatest uptake of this funding across its statistical and regional neighbours. Over the last two years, our uptake has been consistently above 85% with the sixteenth highest uptake of the 153 Local Authorities.
Thank you to everyone involved and for continually trying to maximise our early years uptake.