You are here: How much would it cost to extend 30 hours to parents in training?
We are calling on Government to extend the 30 hours of free childcare to three and four year olds with parents in training in England. We estimate that it would cost £57 million per year to extend the offer to parents who are taking level two and three (GCSE and A level equivalent) or English as a Second Language training. This blog sets out how we have estimated this cost and the key set of assumptions we have made about how people would behave under the new system. In Scotland, all parents of three and four year olds will be entitled to additional free childcare from 2020, including those in training.
We decided to limit our model to levels two and three and English as a Second Language training only. Training below level two is generally part time and/or short term, so it would often be manageable under the existing fifteen hour entitlement. Training at levels four and above is excluded as this can be covered under the existing student finance system. Training for parents under 20 is excluded as this is already covered by the fairly generous Care to Learn Scheme (described in more detail in our briefing note). We've assumed that training courses last for only three terms of the three to five terms that children are entitled to free early education.
Our model starts with looking at how many children are eligible for the universal 15 hour childcare offer for three and four years olds, but are not currently using the 30 hour offer. Because the 30 hour entitlement has been running for less than a year, these figures are Government estimates. We then worked out how many parents these children have living with them, because some will be in single parent families and some in couple parent families.
The next assumption is the biggest one: how many parents would take up training. There's no large scale data on parents' use of training when they have young children, so we've used data from the Department for Education on the number of people aged 20 to 49 taking up level two, level three and English training per year, and assumed that parents of three and four year olds' behaviour would be the same. Of course, parents' uptake of training might be higher if they've been out of the workplace for a while and want to improve their skills, or if having children acts as a motivation to improve their qualifications. Alternatively, parents might make less use of training if they start their families after they've got the qualifications they want.
We then looked at how much childcare these families are likely to use. Again using Government's estimates, we assume that children will use 27 hours a week of their extended entitlement on average, or 12 hours of the extended entitlement after they've used the universal 15 hours, and that this costs £4.94 per hour (another estimate from the Department for Education). It's higher than the base amount local authorities get because it also includes disability and early years pupil premium payments. Finally, we've assumed that 90 per cent of parents entitled to the 30 hour entitlement would use it, as there is almost always some under-claiming of free early education entitlements.
This gives us a calculation of:
594,737 (children the right age for the 30 hour entitlement but not currently entitled)
x
1.81 (average number of parents a child under five is living with, given that 19% are in a single parent family)
x
2.6% (proportion of parents undergoing training in a year: 0.5% English as a Second Language, 1.6% level 2, 0.6% level 3)
x
456 (average hours of free early education used (12) x 38 weeks per year)
x
£4.94 (average cost of an hour of free early education)
x
90% (estimated take up)
=
£57 million per year
The Government estimate that the 30 hour entitlement costs £695 million per year above the cost of the universal 15 hour entitlement. Adding the entitlement for parents in training increases this by 8 per cent.
NB. Some of these calculations may not work exactly when re-run: we have rounded numbers in this blog, but not in our calculations.
Sources
Numbers of children not using free entitlement: Department for Education, Dedicated Schools Grant
Average cost and use of the free entitlement: correspondence from Department for Education
Average number of parents per child: Save the Children using data from the Family Resource Survey
Number of parents taking up training: Department for Education, Further Education and Skills Statistics
Population aged 20 to 49 (as denominator for above): Office for National Statistics, Mid Year Population Estimates
We are grateful to the Early Years Analysis and Research team at the Department for Education for their comments on this calculation and for providing data on the average cost of the 30 hour entitlement. Their assistance does not imply any endorsement of our calculations or recommendations.

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