Methodology

Expansion to early childcare entitlements: eligibility codes issued and validated

• Published: 20 March 2025

Codes issued

‘Codes issued’ counts the number of successful first-time applications made between:

• Spring Term = Start of September and end of December (inclusively) by parents/carers of children aged 9 months to 36 months (younger than three years old) at the 1st of January. 
• Summer Term = Start of January and end of March (inclusively) by parents/carers of children aged 9 months to 36 months (younger than three years old) at the 1st of April. 
• Autumn Term = Start of April and end of August (inclusively) by parents/carers of children aged 9 months to 36 months (younger than three years old) at the 1st of September.

In some cases, the code may have been applied for prior to the term before the code can be used. This is due to age-eligibility. For example, a code applied for in Spring will not be eligible for Summer, if the child only ages into eligibility during the Summer term. In this case, the code would be a newly issued code for Autumn. 

Whilst a code must have been applied for prior to the term beginning, it may not have been fully issued by this time due to manual processes completed in HMRC in a minority of cases. Therefore, the number of issued codes for a term may rise during that term, but the vast majority will have been issued before the term begins. 

An issued code may be newly issued, as above, or could be a continuation of an existing code for a previous term. Together, these make up all issued codes for a relevant term. The proportion of codes which are newly issued will decrease over the course of the expansion roll-out, as more children become embedded in the system. 

An application is made by a parent/carer (and partner where applicable), and successful when they have met the defined income eligibility criteria. If a parent/carer is eligible, they are given an eligibility code which they then take to their chosen childcare provider to access the offer. 

A parent/carer can start claiming their entitlement place the term after their child reaches the relevant age of eligibility or the term following the date their eligibility code was issued (whichever is later). This publication focuses on the new entitlement expansion, and so excludes children who would have turned three before the start of the term and become eligible for the existing entitlements, including the working parent additional 15 hours for three- and four-year-olds (see Provision for Under 5s publication for data on these children). 

By full rollout (September 2025) children will be eligible for the full 30 hours entitlement from the term after they turn nine months until they reach compulsory school age, the term following their fifth birthday. 

Codes validated

Childcare providers or local authorities will validate all eligibility codes via the ECS. A parent must have generated an eligibility code so it can then be validated to enable a child to access the offer.  

Local authorities and childcare providers can validate eligibility codes for childcare places throughout the term preceding the one in which the childcare place is used, or during that term in which the child takes up a place. This means that the number and percentage of eligibility codes for a particular term being validated is likely to increase over time.  

For the existing entitlements additional hours offer for three- and four-year-olds, which also relies on the eligibility checking service, typically validation of codes increases steadily through the term preceding that in which the child will receive the funded hours. For example, during the rollout of 30 hours for eligible 3- and 4-year olds in 2017, 71% of codes issued to three-year-olds at 31st August 2017 had been validated by 5th September 2017 (opens in a new tab); by 19th December 2017 (opens in a new tab) 94% of codes issued for that term had been validated.  

More information on the reasons children did not receive hours under the 30 hours offer for three- and four-year-olds is gathered via the Childcare and Early Years Survey of Parents. See table 3.10 in the additional tables.

After the cut off date which is used for the publication, codes will continue to be validated (and issued, due to HMRC approaches described above, but at a much slower rate). 

Data quality

Data was collected from HMRC’s Childcare Service and aggregated by DfE from individual parent applications. The data was subject to a number of quality checks, including: 

• Identification of the first issuance of each unique code to remove duplicates, such as when the same code has been used to reconfirm a place. 
• Dual-running postcode to ward, LA and region data matching

Data protection

The data has been handled in accordance with DfE’s data protection policy, and any personal details such as National Insurance number and names have been removed during the aggregation to protect individual identities.   

Limitations

The figures presented here are drawn from the ECS which is an administrative data system and are provided to aid transparency. The numbers of codes issued or validated does not necessarily become the number of children taking an entitlement funded place. It is possible that duplicate codes exist in the data, where a parent applies more than once for a code or where manual codes have been issued, and possible that parents obtain eligibility codes that they do not use. Whilst we take care to deal with duplicates, there may be remaining issues, such as administrative differences (e.g., mistakes in names or national insurance numbers) limiting our ability to identify these cases and report the most accurate headcount possible.  Caution is therefore advised when interpreting these figures. 

Each code has been assigned to an upper tier Local Authority (LA) area or ward on the basis of the postcode submitted to the Childcare Service and logged in the ECS. The latest ONS directory identifies postcodes in each LA. In a small number of cases codes could not be match to an LA, for example for newly built homes. It may also be the result of a typographic error (typo) in the postcode when it was submitted by the applicant. 

LA Headcount Data

For the financial year 2024-25, the department is collecting termly data about the take-up of the government-funded hours for the new early years entitlements for eligible working parents of 2-year-olds for the 2024 summer term and 9 months to 2-year-olds for the 2024 autumn term. We have now published both sets of data, across the previous two publications. 

Local authorities were required to submit data from their private, voluntary and independent (PVI) childcare settings, and the data for school-based settings was collected via the 2024 autumn term school census. For the 9 month to 2-year-old working parent entitlement, we collected data on the ‘total number of children’ and the ‘total number of entitlement hours’ taken up by children eligible for the government-funded hours in the autumn term count week in each local authority. For PVI settings, the 2024 autumn term data count week commenced on the 4th of November 2024. For school-based settings, the data was collected on the autumn term school census day on the 3rd of October 2024. Further details about the termly data collection is available at: Early years data collection for the 2024 to 2025 financial year - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) (opens in a new tab) (opens in a new tab) (opens in a new tab). 

We are publishing the data from both the PVI and school-based settings. The data includes the total number of children accessing the 9 month to 2-year-old working parent entitlement in each LA, as well as the part-time equivalents (PTEs) hours which we have calculated using the ‘number of children’ and the ‘number of hours’ taken up in the summer term (a child taking up 15 hours a week is equal to 1 PTE). The PTEs hours will be used to determine local authorities' early years dedicated school grant (DSG) funding allocations for the 9 month to 2-year-old working parents entitlement.

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Email: EY.AnalysisANDResearch@education.gov.uk
Contact name: Joe Willoughby

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