Department for Education
Reporting year 2026

Funded early education and childcare

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 guidance

Description of the data sets included in this release, including information on data sources, coverage, quality and any data conventions used.

Description

This document describes the data included in the January 2026 statistics release ‘Funded early education and childcare'.

This data is released under the terms of the Open Government Licence (opens in new tab) and is intended to meet at least 3 stars for Open Data (opens in new tab). 

The methodology page should be referenced alongside this data. 

Coverage

These annual January statistics report on children under 5 registered for government funded entitlements in England and on providers and staff delivering them. Specifically, the: 

  • the universal entitlement for all 3 and 4-year-olds;
  • the working parent entitlement for children aged 9 months to 4 years;
  • early learning for 2-year-olds (formerly known as the disadvantaged entitlement and then as the families receiving additional support entitlement).

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 2026 (and back to 2011 in the headline figures file).

File formats and conventions

Symbology

The following symbols are used in the underlying data files as follows: 

     z           data not applicable 

     x           data is unavailable for unknown or other reasons    

     c           suppressed to protect confidential information

     low      rounds to 0, but is not 0

Where any number is shown as zero, the original figure submitted was zero.

Rounding

In the headline statistics file, the numbers of children eligible for the working parent entitlement have been rounded to the nearest 1000 and the percentages of eligible children registered have been rounded to the nearest percentage. In data files 3a and 3b, national and regional numbers have been rounded to the nearest 10; therefore totals may not equal the sum of their component parts.

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Contact us

If you have a specific enquiry about Funded early education and childcare statistics and data:

Early Years Statistics Team

Email: earlyyears.statistics@education.gov.uk
Contact name: Jay Morris

Press office

If you have a media enquiry:

Telephone: 020 7783 8300

Public enquiries

If you have a general enquiry about the Department for Education (DfE) or education:

Phone: 0370 000 2288

Opening times

Monday to Friday from 9.30am to 5.30pm (closed on bank holidays)

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