IMPORTANT: Early Years Funding – Forecast Review

Posted on 6 November 2026 in News and updates

The Early Years Funding team are continually reviewing the claims, and payment processes for the Early Years Entitlement Funding.

We are a small team with over 700 funded childcare providers and a budget that now exceeds £100 million. We process headcount and amendment data for 17,000 children each term, along with monthly forecast payments, and headcount and amendment payments.

We know how important cash flow is for our childcare providers and want to ensure payments are processed promptly and accurately. Each term we see discrepancies with over forecasting, and this results in confusion and financial concerns when funding is recovered after the headcount or amendment task with reductions in the monthly forecast payments.

We have therefore been reviewing the way that we process the early years funding forecast each term and are proposing to make changes to this process from spring term 2027. This will require the issuing of a new forecast task in the autumn term to collect hours for children for the spring funding period (1 January – 31 March).

This process will be applicable to all funded childcare providers, so we will be running some online sessions to explain the new process in more detail. We don’t have capacity to discuss this individually with providers on the helpdesk so please can we ask that you join one of the online sessions.

Online sessions will be held as follows:

As part of these sessions, we will also be discussing payment schedules, working entitlement codes and autumn amendment. Please click on one of the links above to join a session.