Updates to guidance
Financial support for education, early years and children’s social care guidance
This guidance sets out the financial support that is available for different types of education, early years and children’s social care providers in England.
The early years section of the new guidance confirms that a private provider should only furlough employees, and therefore seek support through the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS), if they meet the following conditions:
- the employee works in an area of business where services are temporarily not required and where their salary is not covered by public funding;
- the employee would otherwise be made redundant or laid off;
- the employee is not involved in delivering provision that has already been funded (free entitlement funding);
- (where appropriate) the employee is not required to deliver provision for a child of a critical worker and/or vulnerable child; and
- the grant from the CJRS would not be duplicative to other public grants received and would not lead to financial reserves being created.
If it is difficult to distinguish whether staff are funded through free entitlement or private income for the purposes of meeting the first three conditions as listed above, then an early years provider can access the CJRS to cover up to the proportion of its paybill which could be considered to have been paid for from that provider’s private income.
This would typically be income received from ‘parent-paid’ hours, and excludes all income from the government’s free entitlements (or ‘DSG income’) for all age groups. The guidance includes an illustration of how this would work in practice.
Published 17 April
Sign up to the Foundation Years mailing list to receive these updates straight to your inbox.