GB-London: How effectively is Early Years Pupil Premium (EYPP) being accessed and used?

In 2015, the Government introduced the EYPP to provide additional funding for disadvantaged three and four year olds including looked after children and those whose parents were claiming certain benefits such as income-based allowances or tax credits. Since then the EYPP has been aligned with more recently introduced childcare and benefit reforms. The aim of the extra funding is to help providers to support initiatives or interventions that would help narrow the gap in education attainment. Providers are responsible for identifying children who may be eligible for EYPP and virtual school heads will have oversight of this for children in the care of the local authority. Local authorities must check the eligibility through an online eligibility criteria and allocate the funding for eligible children in their area. The national rate is 53p per hour, per eligible pupil up to a maximum of 570 hours (£302.10 per year).

In January 2017, 71,620 (11%) of three year olds and 32,132 (13%) of four year olds were recorded as both eligible and claiming early years pupil premium. This excludes 4-year-olds benefitting from some funded early education in infant classes in primary schools, as they would receive the school age pupil premium. In 2019, 99,179 of three and four year olds were accessing EYPP which represents a small decrease in the numbers and proportion of children accessing this funding. We are not clear how many families are eligible but not accessing the funding.

Since the introduction of EYPP, bodies such as Early Education have produced initial guidance to support providers to identify families that would be eligible for EYPP and offered advice on how EYPP could be allocated and used by early years settings. Similarly the Education Endowment Foundation produced a toolkit that considered the effectiveness of interventions funded by EYPP funding looking at both cost and impact. A lot of this research was carried out in the early days of the EYPP being introduced but there is little subsequent research in this area.

There have been significant changes to the early years landscape since 2017, when 30 hours free childcare for 3 and 4 year old children of working parents was introduced alongside a new funding formula. We are keen to understand how EYPP is working in this new landscape, to ensure that available early years funding is supporting children as well as possible.

There are two key questions that we would like answered by this piece of research: to what extent is the EYPP reaching the children eligible for it?; and is this successfully helping to narrow the attainment gap between young children from low-income families and their peers?

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