The first school-based nurseries pledged by Labour in its manifesto will open next September, with a £15 million capital funding round for up to 300 nurseries due to launch next month.
The party pledged to create 3,334 nurseries in space freed up by falling pupil numbers in primary schools, which it said would create 100,000 more childcare places.
Today, education secretary Bridget Phillipson told the Labour Party conference in Liverpool that “those extra places start opening next year.
“The first phase of our new nurseries, a high quality early education, boosting life chances for children and work choices for parents.”
From next month, primary schools will be able to bid for a share of a £15 million capital funding pot to convert empty classrooms into 300 nurseries. This works out on average at £50,000 per school.
Schools with existing nurseries will be allowed to bid to expand their provision, and these expanded nurseries will count towards the 300 target.
Funding will be allocated to successful schools in spring 2025 to “support delivery for the first cohort of places”.
Schools must demonstrate response to need
The department said schools “will need to demonstrate how their proposals will respond to need in their local area, supporting the 2025 expansion of government-funded hours of childcare and early education for working parents to 30 hours a week”.
Schools will either be able to run the nurseries themselves or contract them out to private or voluntary sector providers.
Government will “use the first phase to take learnings for future years and better understand how we can best support underserved and poorer areas”.
Schools will also be able to express interest for future phases of the programme to help assess demand in different parts of the country.
The DfE said it would “engage with the sector on the most appropriate model to extend the programme across the country in its second phase”.
Start discussions with local partners, schools told
Schools interested in bidding for the first round have been urged today to “start discussing with their local authorities, governing organisations and wider stakeholders to consider pupil place planning, local childcare sufficiency and next steps for setting up and running new or expanded nurseries”.
Guidance to support schools will be issued when the funding round launches.
Phillipson told the conference today that the early years were “my first priority”.
“You know, as I know, that if we are to build a better society for tomorrow, we must change the childhood of today and our mission to deliver opportunity for the next generation must start with our youngest children.
“So much in life depends on those crucial early years before school, when the gaps between rich and poor open up.”
‘Luck can never be enough’
She said the new Labour government “see education as so much more than what happens in the classroom.
“It is about children, and it is about their opportunities. Opportunity, not just for some of our children, but for all of our children, a vision of education centred not simply on schools or nurseries, knowledge or skills, university or college, but on our young people on their chance to achieve and thrive, to succeed and flourish.”
She also referred to her own story, having grown up in a single-parent household and relied on free school meals.
She said her story and “the luck I had: it’s not enough”.
“It can never be enough, that a system that’s supposed to serve so many, works only for a lucky few.
“It will never be enough for some of us to defy the odds to succeed, when the promise of opportunity must belong to all of us.
“We have to change the odds, so success belongs to each and every child, in every school, in every corner of our country.”
‘Never again’
Phillipson warned the “mess the Tories left behind stacked the odds against our children even further”.
Teachers “leaving classrooms not in dribs and drabs, but in their droves”, school absence “stubbornly high” and attainment for those in poverty “far too low”. She also referred to the “crisis” in SEND and care.
“Ministers who forgot that children grow up in homes and playgrounds, as well as classrooms.
“Who watched technology turn our children’s world upside-down, but whose answer was to turn back the clock.”
And she described the “defining image of the last government – schools literally crumbling round the next generation”.
“I know — we all know — the Tories love a one-word judgment. But today, I have two. Never again.”
