Early education and childcare can have a critical impact both on helping children to develop and in supporting parents (especially mothers) to work. But childcare can also have a significant impact on the disposable income - and, hence, living standards - of families with very young children....

With the COVID-19 lockdowns and the ongoing cost-of-living crisis, the importance of the early years system for children and their parents has been made particularly obvious over the last few years. In this report, we analyse how public spending on early childhood education and care has changed...

The last 25 years has seen a transformation in how early years education and childcare is approached in England. The establishment and subsequent expansions of a "free entitlement" to funded early education and childcare have seen early years spending quadruple over the last 25 years, and a...

Five years ago, then Prime Minister Boris Johnson made "levelling up" a central plank of the Conservative Party's bid for re-election, with a manifesto pledge to "level up every part of the UK". In 2022, the government published a thorough and ambitious White Paper setting out 12 levelling up...