Annual January statistics on children under 5 registered for government funded entitlements in England, and on providers and staff delivering them.
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Data sets: download or create tables
Data sets present comprehensive open data from which users can create their own tables using the EES table tool or download a zipped CSV file.
Description of the data sets included in this release, including information on data sources, coverage, quality and any data conventions used.
Alternatively use our data catalogue to search and filter for specific data sets from this release or our entire library, providing full data summaries, data previews and access to API data sets.
Featured tables are pre-prepared tables created from a statistical release's data sets. They provide statistics that are regularly requested by some users (such as local councils, regional government or government policy teams) and can be adapted to switch between different categories (such as different geographies, time periods or characteristics where available).
England, 2011 to 2024
England, 2024
England, 2024
England, 2024
England, 2024
England, 2024
Data sets present comprehensive open data from which users can create their own tables using the EES table tool or download a zipped CSV file.
National
Number and percentage of eligible children registered for and number of providers delivering government-funded early years provision, by age and entitlement type. National timeseries back to 2015 for the 15-hour entitlement for 2-year-olds, 2011 for the 15-hour entitlement for 3 and 4-year-olds, and 2018 for the 30-hour entitlement for 3 and 4-year-olds.
Local authority, National, Regional
Number and percentage of eligible children registered for government-funded early years provision by age.
Local authority, National, Regional
Number of children registered for and number of providers delivering government-funded early years provision by age, year group, and provider type.
Local authority, National, Regional
Number of disadvantaged children registered for government-funded early years provision, by age, disadvantage type and basis for funding.
Local authority, National, Regional
Number of children registered for government-funded early years provision by age, year group, ethnicity and SEN provision.
Local authority, National, Regional
Number of children registered for government-funded early years provision by age, year group and provider's Ofsted inspection judgement.
Local authority, National, Regional
The proportion of registrations for government-funded early years provision by age, provider type, and number of funded hours per week. Unlike for the other data files, a child who has multiple registrations across different providers is counted for each separate registration, as opposed to only at the provider where they spend the majority of their time.
National
Number of private, voluntary and independent providers delivering any amount of government-funded early years provision by age and provider type.
National
Number of staff delivering government-funded early years provision at private, voluntary, and independent providers, by highest qualification and provider type.
Local authority, National, Regional
Number of private, voluntary, and independent providers delivering government-funded early years provision with at least one accredited graduate staff member, and number of children registered at these providers, by entitlement and provider type (national only).
National
Number of children registered for government-funded early years provision by age and provider type. Underlying data for Figure 7 in the statistical commentary.
Description of the data sets included in this release, including information on data sources, coverage, quality and any data conventions used.
This document describes the data included in the January 2024 statistics release ‘Education provision: children under 5 years of age'.
This data is released under the terms of the Open Government Licence (opens in a new tab) (opens in new tab) and is intended to meet at least 3 stars for Open Data (opens in a new tab) (opens in new tab).
The methodology page should be referenced alongside this data.
These annual statistics report on government-funded early education and childcare (early years provision) entitlements for children aged 2 to 4 years in England in January (specifically the third week in January each year).
Data is collected from local authorities covering state-funded schools (including nurseries), via the spring school census (opens in new tab) and from private, voluntary and independent (PVI) providers (including childminders) via the early years census (opens in new tab). In addition, general hospital schools data is collected via the school-level annual school census (opens in new tab).
The underlying data files include national, regional, and local authority level information for the years 2018 to 2024 (and back to 2011 in the headline statistics file).
The following symbols are used in the underlying data files as follows:
c to protect confidentiality - secondary suppression may also be applied to figures to protect confidentiality
u low reliability
z data not applicable
low used when a result that is not 0 (zero) would appear as 0 (zero) due to rounding
Where any number is shown as zero, the original figure submitted was zero.
In the headline statistics file, numbers have been rounded to the nearest 100 and percentages to the nearest percentage. In data file 3, regional numbers have been rounded to the nearest 10; therefore regional numbers may not sum to national totals. In all data files (apart from the headline statistics file), percentages have been rounded to one decimal place; therefore, percentages may not sum to 100.
If you have a specific enquiry about Funded early education and childcare statistics and data:
If you have a media enquiry:
Telephone: 020 7783 8300
If you have a general enquiry about the Department for Education (DfE) or education:
Phone: 0370 000 2288
Monday to Friday from 9.30am to 5.30pm (closed on bank holidays)
Don't include personal or financial information like your National Insurance number or credit card details.