Nursery and pre-school managers are deciding over the next few weeks whether to stop offering places under the free entitlement to nursery education for threeand four-year-olds or stay in the scheme, which leaves some settings with losses of more than £25 per child a week.
In the run-up to the start of the summer term, early years providers will be weighing up the costs of pulling out or staying in the funded nursery education scheme when it is extended in September to 15 hours a week.
At this stage, it is unclear how many free entitlement places will be lost, but decisions to quit will be a blow to the sector on top of the recent announcement by Ofsted that the total number of childcare places in England dropped by 11,000 last autumn as the recession took its toll.
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