Turns out it was a £1.5bn week for early years

There had been much speculation and second-guessing and many fingers crossed.  There still are.

It has been a while since we had the luxury (or the necessity) of a three-year funding round.  A longer-term settlement is vital for so many reasons. It enables planning, enables a more settled infrastructure, and it cements genuine and real commitment to strategy and objectives.  Too often, this year, I have heard people reluctant to commit to a one-year plan, instead waiting to see if programmes will continue for longer before they pledge support.  That really does get in the way. 

• Read more: Children’s minister confirms £340m funding boost for early years not announced in Spending Review

This time last week we knew decisions had been made and the lobbying and case presentations were over.  The week began with hope and expectation, and some dread of what might be.  The papers were scanned for clues, pre-announcements and interviews analysed for what they contained and what they didn’t. And so it arrived on hump day, after all that speculation and after a turbulent political and pandemic period. Deep breath. 

Sensible heads would have expected a budget reduction, for all the reasons we know about. No reasonable person would have anticipated a tsunami of spending or even modest increases. The role of chancellor, after all, is to give and take away in equal measure it seems. It is a competitive environment, what causes were more deserving than others, what did the politicians favour? 

For early years, the week had already begun on the back foot.  Announcements had outlined national minimum wage (NMW) increases  Now we like the NMW, but it has to be paid for, and with constraints to financial models created by national funding rates, it is far from easy to do so. 

Years of lobbying had so far not shown effective in realising the funding increases sector bodies believe were required. 

 Sunak announced that EY budgets would increase by £170m by 2024/2025.  Which, it turns out, was an understated promise.

Will Quince MP the early years minister confirmed (by Twitter) that budgets will increase by £160m next year, £180m the year after and an additional £170m by 2024/2025.  That is a total of £510m.  With the stated aim of “paying providers more”.  

Thanks, we will take that half a billion, and hope not to be thought rude when we make the case for more.  And that case must disconnect falsely perceived and unequal costs of delivery and be founded upon investment and desired outcomes instead. 

Aligned to early years, is holiday activities and food (HAF). A programme of activities and nutritional food for children in receipt of free school meals (FSM) we have been working with DfE on, supporting and challenging all English LAs to deliver nationally for the first time this year.  A £220m fund for 2021/2022. Wisely, this emerging programme has been awarded three-year funding of over £200m per year. That should support HAF to extend its impact and benefits from all those advantages of long term funding I outlined earlier.  We await the details.

So that’s around a billion. The rest is made up of a range of smaller project-based announcements, some of which appear to be reaffirmations, and they include: early years training, parenting programmes, Start for Life, Family Hubs, breastfeeding support, infant and perinatal mental health, and health visitor workforce pilots.  All of that will require some unpicking.  There are unanswered questions too, what all that means for maintained nursery schools, out of school, and workforce capacity and capability.  I have my hunches. And there is a desire in the sector, and politically it seems, to root-and-branch review early years. There is so much to be done, and more to achieve.

So that was the £1.5bn early years week that was. 

James Hempsall is director of Hempsall’s Consultancy