Foundation Years Benchmarking Tool

One of our visitors sent me a link to a handy new application on the Department for Education’s Website. It’s called the Foundation Years Benchmarking Tool and it enables parents and practitioners to view amongst other things the funding for 3 and 4 year old places (the data will be extended to include two years olds in the future) and their take-up within each local authority across England.

I believe this info has been in the public domain for some time but this is the first time it has been pooled together in a way that is easy to access.

The information is divided into 4 headings:

1)    Funding

This section shows the amount of money each local authority has spent on free early education. This is broken down into a percentage of teh Dedicated Schools Grant and by sector, enabling private and voluntary nurseries to compare their funding with nursery schools and primary schools.

2)    Quality

Highlights the percentage of early years providers in a particular local authority that received good or outstanding ratings in their last inspection.

3)    Take-up

Shows the take-up of the free places within each local authority.

4)    Child Development

Enables comparisons to be made between how well children are doing in their development at the age of 5 across England. It draws upon EYFS profile statistics.

On the face of it, it would seem that this new tool provides much more transparency over levels of funding, making it far easier to determine which local authorities are under-spending on early years education. This will hopefully empower nurseries and even parents to question local authorities about their priorities.