It has been widely reported that 90% of pupils are in attendance at state-funded schools and 99.8% of those schools are open – but what has been less well reported is the rising proportion of children returning to early years settings like nurseries and childminders.
Statistics published yesterday show that young children are continuing to return to early years settings with an estimated 85% of those we would usually expect to be at nurseries, pre-schools and childminders on a typical day in attendance.
We gather data about early years providers from Local Authorities on a weekly basis. From this, we estimate 753,000 children are currently attending early years settings. While this is 58% of all children who attend early years settings at any point during term-time, many children attending early years settings do so on a part time basis so we do not expect all children to be in attendance on the day of the data collection. On a given day we expect attendance in early years settings to be around 887,000 due to the different patterns of attendance during the week.
This means that we estimate the 753,000 in attendance currently to be 85% of the usual daily level. Attendance in early years settings has risen steadily over recent weeks illustrating the demand for children to continue to benefit from the work they do and their hard work in putting in the measures needed to stay open safely.