A lack of detailed, publicly available data on the distribution of early years spending means it is difficult to understand how policy changes are affecting the early years. This work seeks to fill that evidence gap.

These reports will look at how the level, composition and distribution of spend has changed between 2010-2011 and 2022-2023, including:

1. trends in the level and composition of spending over time
2. analysis that is structured around the four broad areas of welfare, healthcare, children’s services and social care, and free childcare entitlement
3. disaggregation of results across children growing up in higher and lower-income families, and by beneficiary age.

We're aiming to:

• increase understanding of the level and distribution of spend on children aged under four across Scotland, England and Wales and how this is changing over time
• inform conversations and decisions around spending in the early years
• identify areas for improvement in terms of data quality and availability.

Support and interventions targeted at the early years of life are major tools that governments have for addressing poverty and increasing life chances and social mobility. However, there is a gap in publicly available data on the distribution of this spending across spending areas, age groups, and other key breakdowns. This problem is made more pressing by the fact that there have been major policy changes in recent years which significantly affect young children, but whose combined effects are obscured by the lack of clear, integrated data. 

We sought to address some of these evidence gaps in England ahead of the Westminster spending review.

Ahead of parliamentary elections in Scotland and Wales, we are seeking to address this evidence gap in Scotland and Wales.

For England, we estimated the level of public spending on children in England aged under five, assembling and combining data (and, where necessary, transparent assumptions) on welfare, healthcare, children’s services and social care, and childcare. We tracked how this has changed since 2010, and we disaggregated results across children from richer and poorer backgrounds, and by whether the beneficiaries are aged zero-to-one or two-to-four.

During this research, we examined the possibility of replicating the approach taken to the England analysis across Great Britain. We found that there were inconsistencies in the recording and categorisation of spending items across those nations and that further research would be necessary, and useful, to analyse early year spending in nations other than England. In 2025, we commissioned Alma Economics to run a similar analysis in Scotland and Wales, ahead of parliamentary elections.

Read the report: Public spending on the early years in England.