In yesterday’s Spending Round, Chancellor Sajid Javid announced a range of measure that will see funding rise in the early years.
Highlights from the Spending Round:
- The Government will continue to support families with their childcare costs. The Chancellor announced an extra £66 million in 2020-21, to increase hourly rates paid to childcare providers through the government’s free hours’ offers. Further information will be made available in due course.
- In total, this government is planning to spend more than £3.6 billion to support these offers in 2020-21. This includes 15 hours of free childcare a week for 3 and 4-year-olds and a further 15 hours a week for 3 and 4-year-olds with working parents, saving families up to £5,000 per child a year. This money also supports our offer of 15 hours a week of free childcare for disadvantaged 2-year-olds. These offers benefit around 1 million children a year.
- As part of the schools settlement, Government has also announced that £700m additional funding will be allocated in 2020-21 for high needs, which covers children and young people aged 0 to 25 with special educational needs and disabilities. The additional high needs funding will bring the total high needs budget to over £7 billion.
- Local authorities are responsible for deciding how much of their high needs funding is spent on under 5s.