The aim of this research was to estimate how many EYPs are needed to meet the expansion of childcare hours announced by the Chancellor in March this year. We also explored existing pressures on the sector more broadly, which could make the implementation of the new entitlement challenging.

Early-years professionals (EYPs) make a difference to the lives of many children, setting them on a path to thrive cognitively and socially. Yet in settings throughout England, EYPs are stretched beyond capacity. This is partly due to significant challenges in recruiting and retaining staff at all levels.

The proposed expansion of free childcare hours to younger children is likely to increase the pressure on an already stretched workforce.

This matters because high-quality early education and care (ECEC) can have a long-term positive impact, particularly for children from socioeconomically disadvantaged households, and help to mitigate disadvantage in the early years. A prerequisite for offering high-quality EY provision is having sufficient staff.

In this project, we attempted to estimate how many EYPs will be needed to meet the increased demand that the new free ECEC entitlement will likely bring. Furthermore, we examined existing challenges in the sector, with a focus on pay and qualifications in particular.

We used existing large-scale datasets such as the UK Household Longitudinal Survey and Childcare and Early Years Survey of Parents to understand how many children will be eligible for the new entitlement, how demand for childcare hours might change in response to it, and therefore how many early years professionals may be needed.

We also examined salaries in the early-years sector using a novel dataset – Nesta’s Open Jobs Observatory – which consists of millions of job postings scraped from an online aggregator site.