Methodology

Expansion to early childcare entitlements: Childcare Experiences Survey

• Published: 1 September 2026

1. Policy background and context

 The Government has confirmed its commitment  (opens in new tab) to deliver the expansion in funded childcare entitlements first announced by the previous government at the 2023 Spring Budget. The measures announced will expand the existing system by offering up to 30 funded hours of childcare per week over 38 weeks of the year to children aged 9 months up to 2 years whose parents meet the same income eligibility criteria as applied to the existing 30 hours entitlement for 3- and 4-year-olds.  

The policy is being delivered by the Department for Education (DfE) through a phased rollout with the new entitlement offered in full from September 2025. Spend on funded childcare entitlements is forecast to increase from £4 billion a year to £8 billion a year at the end of the rollout. 

The expanded entitlements rollout is being delivered in three phases: 

• April 2024 – 15 hours funded childcare for 2-year-olds.  
• September 2024 – 15 hours funded childcare from 9 months old up to age 3.  
• September 2025 – 30 hours funded childcare from 9 months old up to age 3. 

The purpose of this programme is to support more parents to enter the workforce or increase their existing working hours to become more economically active by improving the affordability, availability and flexibility of childcare.  

Childcare & Early Years Entitlements Evaluation  

DfE are leading the evaluation of the expansion as required by Cabinet Office and His Majesty’s Treasury.  

The policy is undergoing a comprehensive evaluation, as follows: 

• A process evaluation of the Expanded Early Years Childcare Entitlements to understand how successfully the policy has been delivered by Local Authorities (LAs) and Early Years (EY) providers, and the experience of parents.  
• An impact evaluation of the new policy on parents, children and the early years sector as well as a comprehensive value for money assessment.  
• The Childcare Experiences Survey programme of parents who have recently applied for the new childcare entitlement offer. 

Childcare Experiences Survey 

As part of this evaluation, DfE need to collect data on the experiences of parents who are taking up the new entitlement offer, including those who may have applied for a code via Childcare Choices, and the Eligibility Checking Service and then take up the offer, and those parents who may not have it validated and therefore do not take up the offer.  

Responses to the Childcare Experiences Survey will help inform how future childcare policies are delivered and findings will feed directly into evaluation of the new entitlement offer.    

For working parents who are entitled to the expanded childcare offer, five different cohorts have been tracked over two years (approximately one per term), starting in autumn 2024 with the pilot. Each cohort has received a follow-up survey approximately six months after initial contact to measure any changes in their experiences of accessing childcare and employment.  

2. Aims and objectives of the study

The Department for Education’s (DfE) Childcare Experiences Survey programme was funded by the DfE and designed and delivered internally. To follow is information on how the data was obtained, the design and delivery of the research instrument, the methodology applied and the quality and reliability of the data. 

The survey programme plan consists of five waves of initial data collection, each with a new cohort of parents who have recently applied to use the working families childcare entitlement. Subject to consent, each cohort has been invited to take part in a follow up survey approximately 6 months after the initial data collection, providing up to 10 data collections. 

Wave 1 acted as a pilot study. Waves 1, 2 and 3 were distributed during the expansion of the entitlement to 15-hours of support for parents and carers of children aged from 9 months to school age. Waves 4 and 5 were collected after the entitlement was fully expanded to 30-hours of childcare support. 

Research Aim 

The aim of the survey is to understand the views and experiences of parents who have recently applied for funded childcare for working families under the Government’s childcare entitlements expansion. Findings will feed directly into the comprehensive evaluation programme, 

Research Objectives 

1. To explore the experiences of parents using the expanded entitlements in finding suitable childcare places; to identify common issues and key differences. 
2. To explore the potential barriers to finding and using suitable childcare for families both eligible and ineligible for the new entitlements.   
3. To explore the experiences of parents applying for the expanded entitlements through Childcare Choices  (opens in new tab)(later renamed to Best Start in Life). 
4. To understand any changes in family and employment outcomes after the first six months following applying for the expanded entitlements. 
5. To understand the experiences of parents in paying fees and additional charges for childcare. 

3. Sampling

Issued sample  

DfE worked with His Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC) to access the sample data via existing legislation. For each survey conducted as part of this project, HMRC provided an extracted sample of customers who: 

• had a live Child Benefit claim (ChB); 
• had applied for working families’ childcare entitlements prior to the term starting;
• had a child claimed for aged 9 months to 2 years at the time of sampling. 

Postal addresses on ChB records were matched to data on Childcare Services to establish the base population. Given the high take-up of the Child Benefit Record (CBR), this provides high coverage of dependent children in England, although it is likely that higher-income households (those where one or both partners earn £60,000 or more per year) are not included in the sample (see ‘Limitations of the data’ for more information). The sample was shared via HMRC Secure Data Exchange Service (SDES).  

Each survey wave targets a specific cohort, requiring a new sample to be drawn for each wave. These cohorts include all in-scope parents applying for new codes in the three months prior to the cut-off points for when their child is eligible to start using the entitlement support. 

A stratified sampling approach was used in Waves 1 and 2 to ensure that all geographical regions were represented. Secure Customer Records were removed from the base population prior to sampling. The issued sample was stratified by region; the targets were based on proportion of codes issued to each region within England. To ensure a higher representation of parents in lower-income areas, a sample boost was applied in regions with a high  economic inactivity rate  (opens in new tab), particularly in the northern regions which may be experiencing a shortage of childcare. Economic inactivity was used as a proxy for deprivation, as the Index of Deprivation Affecting Children (IDACI) was considered out of date. This approach was changed in later surveys, as the achieved response rates from regions with boosted samples was higher than in non-boosted regions, so this approach was and boosting was not necessary. 

Screening process

The survey aimed to gather insights from families regarding the 15-hour and 30-hour funded childcare entitlement for working families. The survey includes a screening process which ensures that only eligible participants are included in the analysis. This involves a screening question asking participants to confirm that they have received a childcare code for at least one of their children aged 9 months to 2 years to receive funded childcare hours under the working families entitlement. Participants who select ‘no’ to this question are unable to complete the survey, 

Further analysis excludes respondents who did not finish and submitted the survey. Respondents who provided an invalid postcode were excluded from the analysis as we were unable to match the invalid postcodes to the regional data required for weighting. Postcode data was not collected in Wave 1, therefore, no regional analysis is available for this survey and all values given for that publication are unweighted. 

4. Fieldwork

Parents were contacted by letter inviting them to take part in the survey. All invitation letters gave details on how to take part in the online survey, with a link and QR code. Parents were provided with an email address that they could use to contact if they experienced any difficulties. The letter contained an access code to complete the survey which was unique to each respondent. 

The survey was conducted using a 15–20-minute online questionnaire using Qualtrics.  

Fieldwork took place between:

• October 2024 - December 2024 for Wave 1.
• March  2025– April 2025 for Wave 2. 
• June 2025 - August 2025 for Wave 3. 
• October 2025- January 2026 for Wave 4.
• March 2026 - May 2026 for Wave 5. 

If a parent had more than one child eligible for the survey, the oldest child they were claiming working families entitlement for was selected. 

At the end of the survey, respondents were asked to provide their name, email address and phone number if they consented to take part in the planned follow up survey, approximately six months later. About half of the respondents in each wave consented to this.

5. The questionnaire

Following a review of the pilot study, some changes were made to the questionnaire. These changes included:  

• Using open text response data from the pilot to create multiple choice questions, making it simpler and quicker for respondents to answer and reducing risk of personal data being submitted unwittingly.  
• Amendments to question wording to make some questions clearer. 
• Amendments to question wording to reflect relevant dates for new cohort.  
• Revised upper limits for some questions to avoid unrealistic outliers.  

Please note that where questions have changed, readers should not look to compare results from Wave 1 pilot to later surveys. This is further exacerbated by the introduction of weighted data.  

Additionally, changes to some questions were made in Wave 4 and Wave 5 following feedback from respondents and members of Government Social Research community. Major changes to the questions are outlined in the section below.

The full expansion of the entitlement from 15 to 30 hours took place in the time between Wave 3 and Wave 4. Because of that, Waves 2 and 3 of the survey should not be compared with Waves 4 and 5. 

The questionnaire covered the following topic areas: 

Parental/Family characteristics 

• Types of families (e.g. number of children, socio-economic status, location, lone/dual parented, etc.) using the expanded childcare entitlements. 
• Types of jobs parents/carers using the expanded childcare entitlements hold, and how they differ from families’ ineligible for expanded entitlements childcare.  
• Types of childcare families use (Informal, formal, or both). 

Applying for childcare  

• Motivations for parents to apply for the expanded childcare entitlements. 
• Experiences of parents of applying for support with childcare via Childcare Choice (Best Start in Life from Wave 4 onwards). 
• Reasons some parents applied for a code but did not go on to use the childcare. 

Finding and Using childcare  

• Experiences of parents in finding an appropriate place for their child.  
• How access to provision differs between different types of families. 
• How parents/carers feel about the childcare they currently use. How do they meet their needs and expectations, and whether this differs by family type.   
• What parents/carers use the time for while their children are in childcare. 

Provider fees & charges  

• What fees providers charge. What these fees cover. Whether this was by choice, e.g. additional hours. 
• What extra charges are parents paying for consumables (i.e. nappies, food, activities, etc).   
• How much a typical family pays towards childcare each week (Waves 1-4). In Wave 5, respondents were asked to indicate the frequency of payments and the amount they pay to make the question more accessible for participants who no longer had to calculate the weekly childcare costs. 
• Perception of how affordable childcare is. 

Employment  

• How parents’ intentions towards their own employment have changed from before their child was born.  
• Reasons for changing working hours (Waves 4 and 5). 
• How the expanded entitlements have affected parents’ decisions to change their working hours. 
•  Patterns of employment (Wave 5). This question was added in Wave 5 to identify the proportion of parents and carers who might work irregular patterns (such as shifts, nights, or work with no set pattern) for which formal childcare might not be accessible due to standard opening times of childcare providers. 

Family outcomes (Waves 1-3 only)

• Looking forward, what the parents’ intentions are around childcare.
• What future intentions are around employment.
• Parents’ views on the number of hours their child currently spends in childcare.  
• How parents feel about their children's wellbeing and development.   

The questions in the Family Outcomes section referred to future intentions after the full expansion of the entitlement to 30 hours planned for September 2025. These questions were no longer relevant in Waves 4 and 5 which were collected after September 2025, and were removed from the questionnaire.  

6. Data processing and analysis

The survey script ensured that the correct routing was followed throughout the questionnaire and applied range checks, which prevented invalid values from being entered.  

The full set of survey responses were downloaded from Qualtrics and imported into RStudio.  

The survey data is weighted to be as representative of eligible working families as possible, using data from the HMRC’s full records (see section 3). This ensures that the regional sample boosts are corrected for national level statistics, but regional splits are still valid. It does not however account for those higher earners (those likely earning above £60,000 who do not feature in the Child Benefit Records. This is a recognised and accepted limitation of the study. 

Some variables with multiple response options were grouped:  

• Household income (from £10k bands into £20k bands) 
• Less common employment statuses of respondent and partner before the arrival of their child and at the time of the survey were grouped into an “Other” category, which was not reported on 
• Weekly childcare hours used was grouped into ranges (except for mean/median calculations) 

The following derived variables were created: 

• The flag for whether parents look after any children with SEND: this was set to “has SEND children” if any of a parent’s children had special educational needs, a disability, or both (collectively denoted SEND).  If all of a parent’s children explicitly had no SEND, the flag was set to “no SEND children”.  Otherwise, the flag was considered unknown (including instances of “prefer not to say” for any children) and excluded from calculations involving SEND breakdowns. 
• The age of the oldest child claimed for: for the majority of parents who only claimed entitlements for 1 child, this was that child’s age.  For parents who claimed for multiple children, it was the age of the oldest.  

Some text labels were shortened for readability in tables and graphs.  A small number of inconsistent labels were fixed.   

Data tables aggregating survey results for the desired demographic breakdowns were generated in RStudio. 

7. Weighting

Summary of the weighting  

Weighting was used to ensure that the final achieved sample were geographically more representative compared with all eligible parents, correcting for the boost in some regions at sampling stage (that ensured findings could be broken down within each English region).  

The sample, which met the criteria described in Section 3, was drawn from HMRC records of parents who had applied for expanded childcare entitlements (recorded in Childcare Services data) and were in receipt of Childcare Benefits (ChB). Cases which did not have a matching address between ChB data and the latest record in Childcare Services data were filtered out of the base population. Regional weights were based on the 363,545 matched observations in the HMRC ChB and Childcare Services Data. This weighting approach reflects the population from which the survey was drawn. Final percentages and estimates are based on the base population rather than the true population of parents validating codes for the 15 and 30 hours working families' childcare entitlements and thus is a smaller subset. 

Regional margins   

Final weights were applied based on an extract provided by HMRC based on customers in both ChB and funded hours, children of target age, applications between target dates, matching current addresses only, families with deceased children removed. See Table below for an example of weighting proportions from Wave 2 of the survey.  

Table 1: HMRC data weights (Wave 2)

	Population	Population	Sample
Region	N	%	%
North East	18,484	5.1	11.8
North West	56,361	15.5	12.5
Yorkshire and The Humber	39,256	10.8	14.9
East Midlands	35,263	9.7	10.4
West Midlands	39,529	10.9	9.9
East of England	41,508	11.4	10.1
London	34,073	9.4	8.6
South East	59,293	16.3	10.6
South West	39,778	10.9	11.1
TOTAL	363,545

Limitation of weighting approach  

The data that can be legally shared from HMRC is limited to parents who have applied for expanded childcare entitlements and are in receipt of child benefits. After removing cases that did not have a matching address between ChB data and the latest record in the Childcare Services Data, the current population in which the current sample was weighted against resulted in a 33% match rate to the base ChB extract. Therefore, estimated numbers presented throughout this publication are based on the the matched population rather than the broader validated codes population. 

8. Interpreting the data

Bases 

The data tables show the total percentages that were analysed (e.g. different types of families, income groups). The total base figures include all respondents who answered each question, or all respondents who were routed to a specific question. Thus, while the base description (e.g. respondents who look after children with SEND) may be the same across several data tables, the base sizes may differ slightly due to the exclusion of cases with missing data (those who did not answer the question). 

Weighted percentages are presented throughout.  

In some tables, the column or row percentages may not add up to the total base size, such as the counts per demographic group not summing to the total number who answered the question.  This means some respondents to that question did not indicate their demographic group.  

Where a base size contains fewer than 50 respondents, particular care must be taken, as confidence intervals around these estimates will be very wide, and hence the results should be treated with some caution.  This is indicated in the footnotes below tables where it applies. 

Percentages 

Due to rounding, percentage figures may not add up to 100 per cent. This also applies to questions where more than one answer can be given (‘multi-coded’ questions). Weighted percentages are presented throughout to ensure the results reflect the population structure, particularly by region.  

Counts  

Counts have not been included in the publication as the data has been weighted to reflect the population distribution by region. For transparency, only weighted percentages are shown.  

Continuous data 

To summarise the continuous numerical data from parents’ responses to the question on weekly hours of childcare used, both median and mean values are included in the downloadable data files, but only the medians are reported here as they are less influenced by extreme values and are therefore considered a more appropriate measure of central tendency. It should be noted that ‘outlier’ values, those identified as being either impossible or suspect responses, were removed from the dataset prior to data analysis. As such, the extreme values which remain can be considered as valid responses which lie at the far ends of their respective distributions. 

9. Limitations of the data

The figures presented here are drawn from the Childcare Experiences Survey, which is a push-to-web (online) survey of parents claiming Child Benefit, who had applied for working families’ childcare entitlements between a specific time, and had a child aged 9 months to 2 years at the time of sampling. 

The survey data is weighted to be as representative of eligible working families as possible, using data from the HMRC’s full records (see section 3). This ensures that the regional sample boosts are corrected for national level statistics, but regional splits are still valid. It does not and cannot however account for those higher earners (those likely earning above £60,000 who do not feature in the Child Benefit Records. This is a recognised and accepted limitation of the study. 

Response rate 

The response rates for each wave of the survey were the following: 

• Wave 1: 17%
• Wave 2: 15%
• Wave 3: 17%
• Wave 4: 14%
• Wave 5: 13%

The response rates are broadly in line or higher than other push-to-web surveys but lower than surveys that are carried out face-to-face. The relatively low response rate means that non-response bias is more likely. The addition of data weighting from this wave may help to correct some of this bias, but is unlikely to eradicate it all.  

Non-coverage bias 

It is highly likely that some higher-income households (those where one or both partners earn £60,000 or more per year) are not included in the sample. This is because the eligibility criteria for Child Benefit changed in 2013 so that higher-income households (those where one or both partners earn £60,000 or more per year) ceased to gain financially from Child Benefit, resulting in them becoming disproportionately likely to be missing from the Child Benefit Register (CBR). Using the CBR as the sole sampling frame introduces non-coverage bias that reduces the accuracy of survey estimates to be representative of all working families eligible for this funded childcare. No equivalent data set for more affluent families exists. This is an accepted limitation of the study.  

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Email: Your.childcare@education.gov.uk
Contact name: Julia Moldawan

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