From September 2025, all children of working parents in England will be entitled to 30 hours of free childcare over 38 weeks per year from the age of nine months until they start school. It is estimated that this extension of the existing offer for three- and four-year-olds will require an additional 78,000 new nursery places. To help meet this new additional need, the Government proposes to use spare space in primary school buildings freed up by declining pupil numbers to open new nurseries and create additional nursery places. Given that pupil numbers in primary schools in England are projected to fall by around 100,000, the numbers seem to add up nicely for this proposal.
But thinking a little deeper quickly raises some critical questions. There are around 17,000 primary schools in England, which means that pupil numbers will fall, on average, by around six per school (or around one child per classroom), which seems insufficient to consider opening a new nursery. Perhaps declining pupil numbers and spare capacity will be sufficiently concentrated in some areas and in some schools to make new nurseries feasible? But how likely is it that areas with larger declines in primary school pupil numbers will be the same as those with greatest demand for pre-school nursery places?
Using Government data, we examined where spare capacity will be situated in the country and whether this matches where demand for new places will be. We also considered whether spare capacity will be sufficient to make setting up new nurseries feasible for individual schools.
COULD SPARE SCHOOL CAPACITY MEET DEMAND FOR NURSERY PLACES?
The headline that the projected decline in pupil numbers of 100,000 would free up sufficient space for 78,000 new nursery places assumes that primary schools can flexibly move children across their seven year groups. This seems unrealistic for most schools. It is more likely that the use of spare space for nursery provision will be restricted to the youngest classes, where mixing across age groups could be feasible.
Pupil numbers in Reception classes are projected to fall by around 32,000 between 2022 and 2025. This would equate to only 41 per cent of new demand for nursery places. Adding spare capacity from Year 1 and then Year 2 raises this number to 67,000 and then 96,000 (86 per cent and 123 per cent of estimated new nursery demand respectively). While spare capacity in Reception classes could make a substantial contribution to new nursery provision, flexibility to combine spare space across multiple year groups would be required to meet it entirely.
WILL SPARE CAPACITY BE IN THE RIGHT AREAS OF THE COUNTRY?
Even if the national numbers add up, there is the question of whether spare capacity will be situated in the areas that need it the most. Geographical matching is crucial: spare school space cannot be transported to where it is needed and parents are generally unable to travel long distances for childcare.
Comparing projected spare capacity and estimated nursery demand across regions shows that matching is poor (figure 1). London is the only region in which projected spare Reception space alone could meet the estimated additional demand for nursery places (in figure 1, the red column for London is above 100 per cent). In five other regions, Reception space meets less than half of the expected nursery need, but adding spare capacity from Years 1 and 2 could meet demand. In three regions, only a small proportion of demand can be met with Reception space alone (13 per cent in the East Midlands, 25 per cent in the East of England and 32 per cent in the West Midlands). Even when capacity from Years 1 and 2 is added in these regions, total capacity still falls substantially short of meeting new nursery demand.
Comparing projected spare capacity and estimated nursery demand across local authorities shows that five per cent of LAs will have no need for additional nursery places, while Reception space alone could meet the estimated new nursery demand in 15 per cent of LAs (figure 2). However, Reception space alone could meet less than half of the new demand in just under half (49 per cent) of LAs, while just over one in ten (11 per cent) LAs are projected to have no spare capacity in Reception classes.
Source: Frontier calculations using DfE data on estimated nursery need from www.gov.uk/government/publications/early-years-places-and-workforce-need and on projected numbers of school pupils from https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/data-tables/school-capacityIf reception space could be combined with Year 1 space, half of LAs would have sufficient space to meet the new nursery demand, rising to just under two-thirds (64 per cent) if Year 2 spare capacity could be added as well. But even combining spare space across all three infant groups, 17 per cent of LAs would still not be able to meet even half the need for new places (and seven per cent would have no spare capacity at all).
This means that spare capacity in state primary schools will only be sufficient to meet new nursery demand in most areas if schools are able to combine spare spaces from declining pupil numbers across several age groups. But even this combined spare school capacity will not be enough to meet demand in some regions.
DO THE NUMBERS ADD UP FOR INDIVIDUAL SCHOOLS?
There is another challenge to the Government's proposal: would spare capacity be sufficiently concentrated within individual schools to allow them to open new nurseries?
The Government's initial proposal to create 3,334 nurseries offering a total of 100,000 childcare places assumed an average of 30 places per nursery. Nationally, the average number of spare places per school is projected to be two for Reception, four for Reception and Year 1 combined, and six when all infant classes (Reception, Year 1 and Year 2) are combined. While there is no minimum number of places a nursery has to offer, these low levels are unlikely to be viable for opening new settings and fall far short of the 30-place target.
Consistent with the spare capacity patterns shown in figure 1, the numbers of spare places per school are particularly low in the East Midlands and East of England (one spare place from Reception per school) and highest in London (four spare places from Reception per school). Only three regions have an average number of spare places above six when combining all infant classes (London has 12 per school; the North East has seven per school; and Yorkshire and the Humber has eight per school).
At the local level, no LA has ten or more spare places per school from Reception classes alone. Even combining spare space across all infant classes, less than a third (30 per cent) of LAs have an average of ten or more spare places per school.
This suggests that the policy might work better in London than in other regions and in LAs with higher numbers of spare spaces per school. But these areas are the ones which have (often substantial) excess supply of spare capacity: this could mean that demand is spread thinly across individual schools, leading to unfilled new nursery places and risks to sustainability.
This highlights how both spare capacity and demand for new places must be sufficiently concentrated at the school level to make opening new nurseries viable.
Areas with low levels of spare capacity might benefit from LA management to reconfigure school space to make opening a nursery feasible. Areas with high spare capacity relative to new nursery demand might benefit from LA management to control the numbers and geographic spacing of new school nurseries to ensure sufficient demand for each new nursery.
WHY CREATE NEW NURSERIES RATHER THAN EXPAND EXISTING ONES?
Government policy was initially focused on creating new nurseries. There are currently around 9,700 school-based nurseries, which means that the roughly 3,000 new nurseries would need to come from the remaining 7,000 state primary schools that do not currently have nursery provision.
It seems unlikely that these 7,000 schools would have sufficient spare capacity or be located in the right places to meet new nursery demand. It is also possible that these schools do not offer nursery provision because they face specific challenges to doing so.
There are good reasons to support the expansion of existing school nurseries in addition to setting up new ones. It might be easier to incorporate low levels of spare capacity into an existing nursery than to set up a new one. Combining expansion with new provision would also widen the net for matching demand with spare school capacity.
ARE THERE OTHER CONCERNS?
Putting capacity aside, there is some debate about whether primary schools are the best place for new nurseries to be situated.
Most pre-school care and early education in England is currently delivered by private and voluntary settings rather than schools. These settings deliver 78 per cent of all early years registered places, including 91 per cent of places for two-year-olds and 98 per cent for children under two. It is argued that the experience of these settings of caring for babies and children under two means they offer a more appropriate experience for very young children than school environments.
Working parents might also struggle with limited school opening times, and the fact that school settings generally only operate in term time, rather than year-round.
On the other hand, the average quality of early education is higher in school-based settings. It is also argued that better pay and conditions in the school sector could attract new staff into the early years sector, which is suffering from staff recruitment and retention problems.
CAN SPARE CAPACITY IN SCHOOLS MAKE A DIFFERENCE?
In conclusion, it is difficult to see how spare capacity in primary schools can make a substantial contribution to delivering the required new nursery places in the immediate term.
Additional approaches could be considered, including providing sufficient funding to encourage the delivery of more free childcare places in private and voluntary settings.
