Nursery World - Analysis: Untangling the funding

Up to 1.1bn of Government money earmarked for three- and four-year-olds has not been spent on the free entitlement, a new report claims. Catherine Gaunt tries to track down the missing millions.

Trying to untangle the mystery surrounding how millions of pounds of Government funding for the free early education entitlement could have disappeared is tricky, to say the least.

As Nursery World revealed last week, the unpublished review of free entitlement funding by the Manchester Business School has revealed a gaping hole of £1.1bn between the amount ministers claim was given to local authorities and the amount they actually spent.

The report also claims that £392m went on administering the free entitlement, with the percentage spent on overheads varying as widely as between 3 per cent and 40 per cent.

The Department for Children, Schools and Families disputes the £1.1bn figure as the discrepancy between central and local funding. The DCSF says it has been unable to reconcile it with its own funding allocations and published information on local authority expenditure.

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